Raising the Eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies: An Album Amicorum in His Honour 9781841712772, 9781407353494

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface: Instinctively Radical
Introduction
The maiden disputes. Saint Catharine in Amsterdam
Animals in Art: Resisting a Culture of the Anthropocentric
Crown Steeples and Crowns Imperial
Hunter-Gatherer Mythic Thought and European Cave Art
Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture
Art history and evolution from Henri Focillon to Stephen Jay Gould
Science, Darwin and Art History
Pictures and Words
The Roman imperial cult and the question of power
A Question of Language: Raphael, Michelangelo and the Art of Architectural Imitation
Luxuria and Decorum: changing values in public and private life
Contemplating Chimera in Medieval Imagination: St Anselm’s Crypt at Canterbury
Materializing Power: Cardinal Ippolito D’Este in 1540
The Origins of Art
Tiepolo: Ambiguity and Imprecision
The Notion of Secretum in Renaissance Bologna: Toward a Sociology of Secrecy in Italian Culture
The Asymmetry of Sanctity
‘Kunstgeographie’, or the Problem of Characterising the Art of a Region
Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600
Fibre and Line: from Spin to Span
Artifacts and Freedom
Milan and Troy in 1510
Archaeologies of art: contributions to World Art Studies
Du Cerceau and Hollywood
World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime?
Bearer of a Slightly Different Meaning: The Pilaster as Feminine Presence
Finding Filarete: the Two Versions of the libro architettonico
Unintended Consequences of Tourism: Kang Youwei’s Italian Journey (1904) and Sterling Clark’s Chinese Expedition (1908)
Vignettes

Citation preview

BAR  S996  2001   GOLDEN (Ed)   RAISING THE EYEBROW: JOHN ONIANS AND WORLD ART STUDIES

Raising the Eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies An Album Amicorum in His Honour

Edited by

Lauren Golden

BAR International Series 996 B A R

2001

Raising the Eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies An Album Amicorum in His Honour Edited by

Lauren Golden

BAR International Series 996 2001

ISBN 9781841712772 paperback ISBN 9781407353494 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781841712772 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BAR

PUBLISHING

Contents

Foreword Martin Kemp

v

Introduction Lauren Golden

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

The maiden disputes. Saint Catharine in Amsterdam Elisabeth de Bièvre

11

Animals in Art: Resisting a Culture of the Anthropocentric Helen Boorman

17

Crown Steeples and Crowns Imperial Ian Campbell

25

Hunter-Gatherer Mythic Thought and European Cave Art Desmond Collins

35

Observations On Alberti’s Attitude To Late Medieval Architecture Paul Davies

43

Art history and evolution from Henri Focillon to Stephen Jay Gould Eric Fernie

67

Science, Darwin and Art History Lauren Golden

79

Pictures and Words E. H. Gombrich

91

The Roman imperial cult and the question of power Richard Gordon

107

A Question of Language Raphael, Michelangelo and the Art of Architectural Imitation David Hemsoll

123

Luxuria and Decorum : changing values in public and private life Martin Henig

133

Contemplating Chimera in Medieval Imagination: St Anselm’s Crypt at Canterbury T. A. Heslop

153

Materializing Power Cardinal Ippolito D’Este in 1540 Mary Hollingsworth

169

The Origins of Art Paul Jordan

175

Tiepolo: Ambiguity and Imprecision Nigel Llewellyn

183

The Notion of Secretum in Renaissance Bologna: Toward a Sociology of Secrecy in Italian Culture Elena de Luca

189

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

The Asymmetry of Sanctity John Mitchell

209

'Kunstgeographie', or the Problem of Characterising the Art of a Region Stefan Muthesius

223

Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600 Rodney Palmer

229

Fibre and Line: from Spin to Span Victoria Parry

255

Artifacts and Freedom Marty Powers

265

Milan and Troy in 1510 Richard Schofield

279

Archaeologies of art: contributions to World Art Studies Robin Skeates

289

Du Cerceau and Hollywood David Thomson

301

World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime? Wilfried van Damme

309

Bearer of a Slightly Different Meaning: The Pilaster as Feminine Presence John Varriano

321

Finding Filarete: the two libro archittetonico Valentina Vulpi

329

Unintended Consequences of Tourism: Kang Youwei’s Italian Journey (1904) and Sterling Clark’s Chinese Expedition (1908) Cao Yiqiang

341

Vignettes

353

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Acknowledgements This Album Amicorum has been a conspiracy of grand proportions. It has involved the silence of over thirty of John’s colleagues, friends and loved ones for over four years. For their secrecy I am deeply grateful. One person in particular, Elisabeth de Bièvre, I endeavoured to keep out of the plot for as long as possible but, two years ago I was forced to reveal all as I needed information from her that only she could provide. How Elisabeth kept quiet all this time in such close proximity to John, I will never know. Since then I have drawn upon her expertise in all areas and without her patient assistance this Festschrift would not have been feasible. There were others along the way who were invaluable. At the outset I confided in Sandy Helsop of my plan and he gave me advise on who to approach regarding contributions, sponsorship and publication. Eric Fernie provided assistance in arranging the use of the Courtauld Gallery for the Festschrift celebration and presentation of the ‘Album’ to John. John Mitchell, inspired by John’s lecture ‘I wonder…’ that employed Darwin’s research of the expression of wonder and amazement, raised eyebrows and an open mouth common to humans and animals, suggested for the title of the ‘Album’ part of a line from a poem of Priapus: ‘subducti supercillii’. Later, the indomitable, Martin Henig tracked down the text (Priapia. Poems for a Phallic god, no.49) in the stacks of the Ashmolean. This revealed that the context of the line was that one should not take offence at sexual depiction and description, a prudery revealed by the expression of shock by the raising of the eyebrow. As John has had an interest in this particular facial expression, biology, the relationship between the body, sex and art and, constantly raises the eyebrow of others with his ideas, this phrase seemed highly appropriate. It must be stated that Martin Henig has been unfailing throughout in his support and advice. The enthusiasm of David Davison, BAR, for this ‘Album’ was most encouraging and sustained me as I edited and compiled the volume. A special thanks must also be made to the Norwich School of Art & Design who eased some last minute finances of the enterprise. However, this dream of mine would not have been possible without the visionary sponsorship of Michael Conforti, Director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, WIlliamstown, Massachusetts, for both the Festschrift presentation and the ‘Album’. His generous response to a request from an unknown person, only recommended by her admiration of John, is unfathomable and the sign of great philanthropy. I shall forever be indebted to him. Lastly, my thanks extends to the contributors, who were all excited by the Festschrift. Each one of them had enormous commitments before my request for papers, but, nevertheless, made time in their busy schedules for John. The testament to their affection for him lies within these pages confirming that this publication is a true Album Amicorum.

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Preface Instinctively Radical Martin Kemp In the autumn of 1963 an oddly disparate band of post-graduates assembled in the old premises of the Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square to study for the now defunct Academic Diploma (since inflated into the more literally magisterial MA). The Diploma was, I recall, formulated largely as a “conversion course”, that is to say as a way of taking students trained in other disciplines and educating them in the strange ways of the history of art. All of us were already converted in one sense, since we would not have been embarking on what was still regarded as an out-of-the-way academic subject. Some, like John, came from backgrounds in the Classics, from which the conversion seemed more a matter of extension than rupture. Others, like myself as a former student of science, arrived from other cultures, having traversed their individual roads to Damascus. Amongst those arriving to study matters Renaissance and architectural (with John Shearman, Andrew Martindale, Michael Hirst and Peter Murray), I can, even with a fallible memory, recall some names and faces… James Austin, Charles Avery, Raymond Hobbs, John Newman, Alasdair Smith … There were, of course, others incomprehensibly studying other less seminal periods and subjects. Whatever happened to “Desperate Dan”, an ample Modernist with bristling red beard who was Michael Hirst’s Michelangelo student in the Special Subject, and what was his real name? Both in the nerve-wracking seminars and in the graceless Portakabin that served as a student common room in the garden of Adam’s masterpiece (a space permeated with the dull aroma of powdered coffee and crumbly biscuits), it was obvious that John was seriously smart. Certainly much smarter than me. Properly educated. Knowing the classics, and in their original languages, no less. He also seemed a good deal posher, though he never knowingly asserted whatever superiority his background may have enjoyed over mine. We all rapidly learnt (both the smart and not so smart) that we could never hope to embark on a debate with John harbouring any expectation that we would emerge on the winning side. This applied even when we sensed that we might still be right at the end. John’s quickness of mind and debating skills – and his propensity to find our unformed views funny – left us with that post-debate sense that we could have made a better first of stating our case. Only once, years later when I was called in by the University of East Anglia to sit on the committee to determine if John should be awarded the chair he so self-evidently merited, did I feel that I was able to make any headway against John’s argumentative prowess. And only then it became possible courtesy of the formality of an interview. I don’t expect the experience to be repeated. At the end of our two years of conversion, some of us went directly into employment via the Anthony Blunt placement agency, typically dispatched as missionaries to benighted provinces in need of the civilising influence of the “Courtauld products”. I went to Canada. John, being rightly recognised as clever and inventive, was taken as a doctoral student by E.H. Gombrich at the Warburg Institute, which we knew to be a really serious place because of its Latin inscriptions, style-less architecture and plethora of Germanic accents. In our subsequent careers, largely passed in institutions separated by more than 500 miles, we essentially bumped into each other in odd places, not least in America, where John’s brand of sparky radicalism was enthusiastically received. My closest look at him in action was when he was founding Art History, the now seminal periodical launched by the nervous Association of Art Historians in 1978. It is his original vision that shapes Art History today. He was determined that it should be innovative and wide-ranging, reflecting cultural territories way beyond the narrow fare then available in most British departments of Art History. His desire to embrace early and non-Western cultures was not motivated politically by any fashionable doctrine of cultural inclusiveness but by a deep conviction that the visual cultures of diverse societies were of the highest interest for their differences and not least for what they revealed about shared human motivations at the most fundamental level. He was also determined that the range of voices would be wider than that heard in the well-established art periodicals. His interest was in the efficacy of the voice, not in whether he agreed with it. One of the articles in the second issue of Art History, in which Lisa Tickner illustrated works featuring female genitalia, including an image by Lynda Benglis of her own naked body sporting a sizeable latex penis, might seem relatively unexceptionable now, but was sufficiently tough fare in those days to result in the resignation from the Editorial Board of one of our former teachers at the Courtauld. Conceiving the intellectual shape and adventure of Art History was one thing; giving it reality was very much another. It was here that John’s powers of persuasion came into their own. The unwieldy Executive of the

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Association was cajoled into unreserved support. The publisher’s commercial anxieties were calmed by John’s confidence and buoyant commitment. And authors were actually pinned down to deadlines, in the more relaxed era before the big stick of Research Assessment exercises could be wielded. Rapidly, adventurous scholars wanted to feature in the new vehicle, particularly from the USA, where newer currents were not always finding sympathetic outlets. Europe and countries further afield were cultivated, not least through the recruitment of members for the International Advisory Board, with varying degrees of success. What remains of importance, is that John succeeded in establishing Art History in the minds of the community as somewhere that was not tied to a particular kind of history of art, however defined. His policy as founding editor of Art History was, to use a metaphor close to John’s heart, a microcosm of his intellectual convictions. These are not easy to summarise without doing violence to their range and variousness. But at the heart of his researches and teaching, is an underlying conviction that the production of images – “Art” if you will – is an organically integral part of human existence. Studying art is not justified with elegant platitudes about its role in a civilised society or its educationally elevating character. In a way, art for John is a profoundly pre-civilised instinct that comes to be contained in civilised vessels of widely differing designs. The making of art is seen as a given propensity in the constitution of human beings, as evolved over the centuries in the Darwinian process. This idea has come to be overtly expressed in his “Natural History of Art”, but it was implicit from the beginning. His doctoral studies on the classical orders, ostensibly promising an austere exposition of the classical vocabulary, a dry philology and grammar of good and bad language, instead revealed that the orders were replete with inherent meanings. The meanings of such columns as the stockily masculine Doric and slimly feminine Corinthian resided in more than set convention, and in more than legend – the “Corinthian Maid” and such-like. They paraded the very anatomy of buildings as individualistic bodies, made in parallel to the body of the human beings, the body of the earth and the body of the cosmos – all perceived as much through a kind of somatic intuition as through intellectual analysis. Architectural metaphors are not mere figures of language but symptoms of an ancient reciprocity between our minds and our perceptions of bodies and spaces for bodies. John already sensed how things look when they are the products of human design matters at a depth beyond mere decoration and even beyond any conventional aesthetic impulse. In this the physicality of the artefact is crucial. His special compound of intellectual austerity and untrammelled delight in materially plastic forms, lead him particularly into the worlds of sculpture and architecture. It is here that the manual interventions of humans on the stuff of the world are at their most direct and uncompromising. Stone and bronze, the one granular and shaped by harsh subtraction, the other sensuously gleaming and ductile, are the raw materials of John’s preferred discourse. As he wrote in his Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome, “It was natural for those who lived in Greece and the Greek Islands to think of themselves as made of stone” – rather than the mere clay from which the rest of us are modelled. John’s writings exude a powerful sense of identity with the masters of stone and bronze who provided our enduring sense of the cultures of Antiquity and Renaissance Florence. In the same book, when he formulates the visual questions asked by the Greeks, he is also underlining some of his own fundamental lines of enquiry. The passage is worth quoting in full: The sense of affinity between man’s body and the physical world around him also explains the extraordinary parallelism between the theories of physics and medicine. The Greeks’ tendency to think about both the world and their bodies in the same terms that they thought about man-made products lead them to ask different questions about them from those asked in other cultures. What interested them was less, “Who made it?”, than “Of what is it made, what are the inherent properties of that material and what is its configuration?”. Nor were they easily satisfied by the answers. Like the craftsman who asks such a question of his rival, they did not rest until they had got hard answers corresponding to their needs. As far as questions about the world were concerned the answer that proved most satisfactory from their point of view was that it was made up of four substances with which craftsmen worked daily, earth, air, fire and water. Similar questions about the human body received similar answers. Like the Greeks, John was not easily satisfied by stock answers. When he looked at the “Renaissance” architecture of Brunelleschi in Florence – and John’s art history involves genuine looking of a hard kind – he was prepared to say what was apparent but generally went unsaid. That is to say, none of Brunelleschi’s buildings, in whole or in part, actually look Roman. His radical answer was to say that they really could not be considered as founded on the imitation of Roman architecture but that they spoke the language of the Tuscan revival – refining a style drawn from the “Tuscan Romanesque” of the Baptistery and S. Miniato al Monte. John’s thesis had the invigorating effect of a cold shower. New questions brought new observations into view, and allowed the re-invigoration of Gombrich’s earlier insight that the architectural vocabulary of the early vi

Renaissance in Florence was intricately linked with the debates about Latin and the Italian volgare. I think that John and I have now reached a consensus about what Brunelleschi was doing, namely that he was refining the Tuscan language of architecture according to “the lessons of the ancients”. But I can hear John’s voice in the background, saying, “Wait a minute….”. Traditionally, a base in the classical tradition has meant that other cultures tended to be regarded patronisingly, as the fit subjects of ethnography and anthropology. For John, the visual products of all races and ages, and even the communicative abilities of chimpanzees, are integral parts of the continuous spectrum covered by the “Natural History of Art”. Again, John’s own formulation does the job better than any paraphrase: Our brains and bodies are essentially those of a family of animals who for at least three million years have thrived because of a unique biology. This links polychrome binocular vision and soft-tipped seperable fingers through a brain capable of both storing much visually learned information about foods, predators and individual relatives, friends and enemies, and of facilitating the development of behaviours appropriate to each. Tool making, art making, and speech are likely to have begun as spin-offs associated with the development of other behaviours. Probably only the propensities for tool making and speech have offered such clear advantages as to be genetically selective in Homo sapiens. That for art making – like that for art use – is likely to be a marginal adaptation which significantly affects behaviour only in particular physical environments and social contexts. Even then it may be as much pathological as socially adaptive. Within a natural history the many forms of art making and art use can be studied as behaviours interesting in their own right, behaviours that need to be understood in terms of their causes and effects before ever they are discussed in terms of their social function or political, moral and aesthetic values. This is as big an agenda as anyone can formulate for the study of the visual products of man (and our primate relatives). If I were using this passage as a text for a debate with John, the only serious doubt I entertain would serve to strengthen rather than weaken his agenda. I am inclined to see the propensity for image making as genetically selective, or at least as integral to genetically selective characteristics, since it consists of the concrete realisation of a power of imaginative visualisation that is utterly complementary to tool making and language. It seems to me, and I think to Lauren Golden our editor, that image making is both a part of our faculty of invention and a fundamental part of our ability to construct new meanings in and for the world. I am sure that John will forgive me for initiating a debate in a laudatory vehicle which is normally reserved for paraphrase and consent. It is part of the importance of what he stands for that he is opening doors on to debates of such wide-ranging complexity that no-one can hold all the main answers. Above all, he reminds us of the researchers’, writers’ and teachers’ true mission, that is the need to be radical in both asking and answering questions, and above all for the historian of visual things to be instinctively radical in every act of looking.

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Introduction Lauren Golden Antiquity. Taking further degree courses at the Courtauld and the Warburg Institutes, John came under the influences of Anthony Blunt and E.H. Gombrich. The former admitted him to the Courtauld, as John writes “to study the methods of art history in the hope that one day they might be used to subvert the then-current approaches to Greek and Roman art.” John did go on to do just that with his book Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age: The Greek World View 350-50 BC (commissioned by that famous ‘World Art’ pair, John Fleming and Hugh Honour and published in 1979) and with Bearers of Meaning, (partly the fruit of his doctoral dissertation, ‘Style and Decorum in Sixteenth-Century Italian Architecture’ (London University, 1968), first published in 1988. Most recently, Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome published in 2000, explores the relationship of Greek, Roman and early Christian art to the environments - the physical, social, cultural and the psychological - which produced them. One review of this book encapsulates the avant-garde nature of his approach, describing it as “no ordinary art book”, that “will not (yet) be of direct relevance to school syllabuses - or many university courses - but such a ‘holistic’ approach is surely the way forward in the study of the ancient world.”

Writing this introduction to John Onians’ ‘Album’ in 2001 is a daunting task. At the same time I have no doubt that there will be other introductions to other Festschrifts as it seems that some of his best work may be yet to come. Martin Henig, in his paper, invents the term ‘Oniansian’, which could well in future years be whispered among the stacks of the Warburg Institute and celebrated in Dionysiac fashion. One of the influences on John’s pioneering questioning and biological approach to the arts lies with his father Richard Broxton Onians whose book, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, first published in 1939, provoked as much discussion as John’s work does today. John began his own intellectual sojourn, as he would state himself, through failure; failing some of his ‘O’ levels (although only 14 years old), most notably Ancient Greek (subsequently passed) and repeating this situation for some of his ‘A’ Levels. Given his success we can all take heart from his educational experiences. He went on to read Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where David Oates introduced him to the idea that the Near Eastern predecessors of the Greeks achieved in various areas far more than the Greeks themselves. This was the beginning of his thinking in terms of world-wide contexts and comparisons, even in relation to the hallowed territory of

John’s subversion did not stop at Antiquity but moved on to that other hallowed ground, the Renaissance. His paper,

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies new - neither was Charles Darwin’s theory for the idea of ‘evolution’ that explained the workings of the natural world - John has provided a theory, which can practically further our understanding of human creativity and art. A ‘natural history of art’, which “will only be continuing what should be a canonical tradition” has to include the marvellous new understandings of the workings of the human genome and brain. The application of this theory is reflected in “‘Alberti and the neuropsychology of style’, Leon Battista Alberti e il Quattrocento” (Studi in Onore di Cecil Grayson e Ernst Gombrich, 2001) and most recently in the paper ‘The biological and geographical bases of cultural borders. The case of the earliest European prehistoric art’ (Borders in Art. Revisting Kunstgeograhie, 2000). Here, he states the importance of considering the relationship between “our biological nature”, which embraces the emotions of fear, pleasure, sex and the effects of our surroundings on the types of art produced. His case is made for prehistory where “the differences in art…can still be best understood as a neuropsychologically ‘natural’ consequence of the difference in ecology.”

‘Alberti and ΦΙΛΑΡЕΤН’ (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1971), ingeniously gave full recognition to the scholarly importance of Filarete’s treatise, but also highlighted how this work demonstrates the significance of the culture of Ancient Greece for the first half of the fifteenth-century. The paper inaugurates the ‘Oniansian’ canon of the Orders, their design and employment argued as relating to human behaviour and appetites, a theme later more fully explored in ‘Filarete and the ‘qualità’: Architectural and Social’ (Arte Lombarda, 1973). John continued such an alternative approach to traditional art history in other challenging papers. ‘The Last Judgement of Renaissance Architecture’ (Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, 1980), addressed the established belief of a ‘classical’ revival in the architecture of the Renaissance with “the recognition of Rome not as a civilization to be imitated but as a city doomed, like Babylon, for its corruption”, a belief that provides the basis for a more complex context and interpretation behind the employment of the ‘Orders’. ‘Brunelleschi: Humanist or Nationalist’, (Art History, 1982) threw down the gauntlet at the traditional interpretation that Florentine architecture was primarily due to a revival of the antique. Here, he proposed a closer source than the dim and distant classical world: medieval Tuscan architecture and language - the Tuscan volgare.

Major influences on the development of his contribution to art history include his appointment to the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of East Anglia in 1971 and, later his move with the school to the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts. Designed by Norman Foster to house the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection and the School, it exposed John to a collection that exhibited in one space art from all over the world. The opening of The Sainsbury Research Centre for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas in 1988 exposed more continents to the School. As if in response, he has throughout his time at UEA brought the world to Norwich and later proposed, with the support of his much-beloved mentor, the late Professor Andrew Martindale, changing the name of the School from Fine Art & Music to the School of World Art Studies. Already, with the encouragement of Andrew Martindale, John had founded Art History, in 1978. The introductory paper, ‘The Origins of Art’ co-written with Desmond Collins, demonstrates biological and neuroscientific research, employing ‘pattern recognition’, environmental survival conditions and ‘sexual habits’ of Paleolithic humans. These factors were argued as crucial in the appearance of representational art. This all-embracing perspective on human creativity led to the establishment of the weekly World Art Research Seminars, where invited speakers of all disciplines, from home and abroad, inspired staff and students to heated and creative debates. He also instigated the temporary appointments of lecturers on Persia, India, China and Japan and travelled the world raising funds for further appointments of specialists in art and culture outside Europe. The result of one of these appointments was the creation of the Sainsbury Institute for Studies in Japanese Art and Culture, funded by Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, which is based in Norwich and affiliated with UEA. The international profile of the School was equally raised by John organising two conferences: ‘The Nature of Chinese Painting’ in 1994 and ‘The Nature of the Masterpiece in Japan and Europe’ in

John’s interests led him to consider other areas of influence for the visual arts, most notably in ‘On how to Listen to High Renaissance Architecture’ (Art History, 1984), where he explores the development of musical theory and polyphony in the Renaissance and their relationship to architectural design. He enabled us to hear melodies of architecture. Thus, by considering the role of the senses in a subject that hitherto was foremost cerebral his biological approach to the arts was foreshadowed. Subsequently, John turned to the theories of Charles Darwin that bore fruit in his paper “‘I wonder…’ A short history of amazement” for the volume, Sight and Insight. Essays on art and culture in honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85 (1994), which he edited. In his article John applied Darwin’s theories of physiognomic expression in man and animals to cultural representations of wonder. Ultimately this research inspired the title of the ‘Album’: Raising the eyebrow. This biological interest and research became more pronounced and was outlined in ‘World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art’ (The Art Bulletin, 1996). Here, he proposes an approach to art that considers creativity as a behaviour of Homo sapiens sapiens. He distinguishes no separation of body and brain as inferences on such behaviour and argues that, therefore, the art-producing habit of Homo sapiens is, fundamentally, a worldwide phenomenon reflecting the combined biological, physiological, neurological and cerebral nature of the human species and its interaction with the environment. This results in a ‘natural history of art’ that could included besides the artlike activities of humans those of animals. As the paper points out, such an approach to art is not new and can be found, for example, in the writings of Pliny. Therefore, although his idea is not 2

Introduction

work, Bearers of Meaning, he writes that “I have walked and talked the length of this colonnade. Much of the life in this book is hers.” All those that know John and Elisabeth are aware of the extent of her intellectual contribution in not only keeping John on his toes but keeping his eyebrow raised.

1997. Most recently, in August 2000, John directed the Summer Institute in World Art Studies (Getty Grant Program), which brought together scholars from all over the world, particularly Central and Eastern Europe but also from Africa, India, China and the Americas. The participants representing the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and art history, discussed and developed the theory of art as a worldwide phenomenon from prehistory to the present. In a true ‘Oniansian’ manner it challenged many assumptions and provoked even more questions. Many years earlier he had started to encourage scholars to explore a World Art Studies approach through the World Art Studies Fellowships at UEA, funded by the Getty Grant Program. The Getty also funded a World Art Librarian who has during the last three years travelled over the world to make contact with art connected institutions and people and, to collect books, catalogues, pamphlets and other ephemera donated by curators and educators. It has become a library that facilitates a worldwide perspective on visual culture, from the local to the global.

John can be said to be a veritable Socrates, always asking questions and by doing so intriguing and fascinating some and annoying others. The Socratic dialogue has been his approach to learning, the success of which is testified by the papers in this volume. Van Damme’s paper, in particular, demonstrates the inspiration that John is renowned for, which tolerates no dogmatism, thus decoupling the scholar from the shackles of tradition. In describing his vision for creating the visiting fellowships at the Clark Art Institute, John stated that he wanted scholars to, ‘have the chance to live like real human beings and to feel challenged take off their clothes.’ It seems to me that what he meant was that he wanted these ‘humans’ to have the chance to revisit their body and brain, not just live in the mind and that this would liberate them intellectually to think afresh from a new perspective, which the normal academic world and everyday survival could not provide. This vision was in many ways facilitated by the beautiful natural environment of the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where, for a while, all could be their true primate selves!

John’s international contacts were developed during visiting lectureships all over the world: North America, the Netherlands, Germany, France, India, China and Japan among others. He has always welcomed the insights and hypotheses of those he met on his travels, from all walks of life. As well as being a much sought-after advisor on many committees, both national and international, he has most recently become coryphaeus to the University of Leiden for the creation of a World Art Study programme. During Autumn, 2001 - he advised the oldest art school in the United States, the Pennsylvanian Academy of Art, Philadelphia.

One of the most significant aspects to this collection of papers, is that nobody around the time of the initial letter of 1997 inviting contributions to the ‘Album’, knew who else was participating - in fact the contributors did not know who were their fellow writers until the invitations went out in August 2001. It seems to me that this in itself says something remarkable about the esteem in which John Onians is held. Further, what is in some ways unexpected, is that although contributors were not asked to write on a specific theme, other than to consider John as an ‘ideas man’, is that all the papers are united in a common approach, one of provocation: re-examinations of the traditional contexts and interpretations of art and culture. That John is indeed the embodiment of the agent provocateur in the academic realm should have prepared me for this hidden theme.

Outside of Norwich, many venues have played an important role in John’s pioneering efforts to create and develop World Art Studies: the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington; the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica and the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin. However, perhaps the most intellectually liberating location and period was the two years he spent at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, from 1997 to 1999 as a Head of Research and Academic Programs. Here, John’s task was to develop a program that would create the opportunity for visiting scholars to have the freedom to rethink and reassess their ideas, activities and find inspiration as much in the Clark Library and Collection as in the intellectual community of Staff and Fellows. The conferences held there, including his own, ‘Compression vs Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art’ (2000), brought scholars from all over the world. This project, dear to John’s own heart, created an atmosphere and centre for the arts that was clearly forward thinking.

* Elisabeth de Bièvre, as the first of the contributors, shows up this hidden theme. In ‘The maiden disputes’, she explores the general thesis that mythological figures are assigned particular qualities according to where and when they are evoked. It is demonstrated that these characteristics are not socially or biologically predictable but, are formed by a combination of circumstances. The case study of St. Catharine of Alexandria in Amsterdam proves the point. If the heroine appeals to the fourteenthcentury citizens through associations of a pragmatic kind, during the reformist sixteenth-century she inspires because of her intellectual properties. It is emphasized that visual

However, it must be said that the influence of John’s lifelong love, Elisabeth de Bièvre is of paramount importance, which John himself freely acknowledges. In his seminal 3

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies where the intimate human relationship with the natural environment and the hunter-gathering way of life promoted an “indefinable link between all major elements in their cosmos”. Here we can grasp a cognitive origin for the chimeras of Heslop’s paper that lies in the therianthropic prehistoric mind.

material can deliver insights into distant cultures which no written document can provide. Elisabeth de Bièvre was educated in the Netherlands, France and Italy with a Ph.D. from London University and has taught freelance at several universities, the longest and most consistently in the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia. With several publications to her name, the latest in the first art history journal in China, she now likes to describe her professional status as scholar at large.

Desmond Collins read Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge and has lectured on archaeology and prehistory and has published many works on prehistory, most recently, A Brief History of Mankind (2001). He co-wrote ‘The Origins of Art’ with John Onians, which appeared in the first volume of Art History in 1978 that in many ways marks the beginnings of John’s biological approach to art.

Helen Boorman considers the long history of the human fascination with and cultural representation of the animal, in particular, the “pet/”animal beloved”. Boorman confronts the aesthetic taboo of the depiction of the ‘loved pet’ where humans find themselves at odds with their anthropomorphic attachments and yet at the same time promote the desire to be separate from the animal kingdom - hence the value of a relationship that involves a scientific distance, which quells the human fear of the ‘beast within’. Here, Peter Rabbit is in denial and Eyeore wisely recognizes the value of wild instinct and survival skills. Boorman is implicitly Darwinian, challenging the status and philosophy of human culture within the natural world.

Paul Davies continues provocation by proposing a radical interpretation of Alberti as somewhat a medievalist hitherto advocated as a “single-minded classicist”. His methodology is truly ‘Oniansian’ in that Davies refuses to believe what he reads, whether it be received opinion or even in the case of Alberti’s own architectural treatise. Instead, Davies scrutinizes the buildings themselves, finding an abundance of Gothic influences in Alberti’s architecture. This research provides a greater insight into Alberti’s discussion of medieval buildings in the De re aedificatoria revealing that Alberti’s desire for good construction techniques in building practice was more the order of the day than an aesthetic rejection of Gothic forms, per se. Thus, Davies examines the context more fully, providing a richer explanation of Alberti’s classical preference: Alberti wanted architecture that was built to last.

Helen Boorman attained her BA and PhD in Art History at the University of East Anglia and has been actively involved in sailing and animal care ever since. She is a Principal Lecturer and Research Co-ordinator at the Norwich School of Art & Design where she has created an MA in Material Culture.

Paul Davies has published widely including his revision of the seminal volume by H. Heydenreich, Architecture in Italy 1400-1500 and recently with David Hemsoll, Sanmicheli, which is due to appear in 2002. Currently he is involved in the cataloguing of Italian Renaissance drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor that once formed part of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s paper museum and the revision of his doctoral thesis on the centrally planned church in Renaissance Italy.

Ian Campbell demonstrates John’s insistence that prioritising actually looking at the material and ignoring traditional views is paramount to really discovering meaning and understanding. To scrutinise the details, here ‘Crown Steeples’, as Ian writes, “obscure corners” have revealed a complicated and tangled web of meanings concerning the influence of Antiquity in Scottish architecture. Ian Campbell attained his MA in Renaissance architectural theory at the University of East Anglia and a DPhil at Oxford. His involvement in research is extensive, having been at the British School in Rome, a Research Associate on the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance’ and a Leverhulme Research Fellow. He is at present a Reader in the School of Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art with the ‘Topography in the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo’ to appear in 2002.

Eric Fernie provides a revolutionary and erudite examination of the potential application of science and evolutionary theory to art and culture. both the positive and negative, the prizes and the pitfalls. Such a proposition is daring and virtually unique in the field of art history, (John Onians aside) stepping into the arena of science and the arts that hitherto has been, strangely, the prerogative of scientists, especially, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Eric Fernie has held teaching posts at the universities of the Witwatersrand, East Anglia, Edinburgh, where he was the Professor of Fine Art and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and London, where he has been Director of the Courtauld Institute since 1995. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was appointed CBE in 1995. He has

Desmond Collins explores the ethnography of mythic thought and the artistic representation of surviving huntergatherers in order to examine some of the taxing questions surrounding the ‘cave art’ of southwest France. This investigation provokes the view that the ‘mythic’ can be considered a ‘universal’ behaviour that provides a cognitive context for the interpretation of Palaeolithic art, 4

Introduction

imperial imagery and the notion of power. He suggests two ways of representing the indirect contribution made by the cult of the Roman emperors to their power. At one level, the cult naturalised the structure of socio-political inequalities sustained by the imperial system. At this level, imagery is of purely illustrative significance. But images play a central role if power is represented in terms of possibilities of action. Images can be read to convey a sense of the emperors’ limitless possibilities. Like John, Gordon examines the ambiguities afforded in reading representations of the body. At this level, power is a construction negotiated between the symbolic language of the court and the ancient viewers’ understanding of the place of the imperial system in their lives.

lectured and published widely on medieval architecture and has edited a number of volumes and contributed over fifty chapters and articles to books and refereed journals. Amongst these, An Architectural History of Norwich Cathedral and his highly germane work Art History and its Methods. Lauren Golden takes Fernie’s proposition further, by arguing that the very foundation of the discipline of art history lies in such an integration of the arts and the sciences, particularly concerning the influence of Charles Darwin. This paper fully embraces an ‘Oniansian’ approach to art. Lauren Golden has recently completed her doctorate in the School of World Art Studies & Museology at the University of East Anglia, entitled, ‘An Historical Enquiry concerning the Imagination in Philosophy, Art History and Evolutionary Theory’. She is a lecturer at the Norwich School of Art & Design. Her paper, ‘Excavating the Imagination. The Cognitive Archaeology of the Romantics’, in Outside Archaeology, is due to be published in 2001/2. She is currently writing a book entitled ‘Darwin and Art History’.

Richard Gordon was both an under- and post-graduate at Jesus, Cambridge, and was a pupil of the ancient historian Moses Finley. He and John overlapped in Classics, but he then went on to the Courtauld to study art history. He was a Research Fellow of Downing (1969-70), and was then appointed to an experimental post in Ancient Civilization in the then School of European Studies at UEA. Senior lecturer in 1981; in 1987/8 he took early retirement and now lives near Munich. His research interests include Graeco-Roman religion and magic as explored in Image and Value in the Graeco-Roman World (1996).

Ernst Gombrich, presents an argument concerning the relation of pictures and words that in a sense is a modern ut pictura poesis. This paper reveals not only an approach that considers the artist’s reaction to the environment but demonstrates an enlightening insight into John Onians’ approach and methodology to art and culture, the relationship of pictures and words - theory and practice. Although written in 1950, Gombrich addresses the issues concerning meaning in art that strikes at the very heart of the debate today, the notion of art for art’s sake as opposed to discovering the reason of why and wherefore in works of art. In other words, the art historian should not (as Gombrich himself admits to) believe everything one reads, John’s very own maxim to all his students.

David Hemsoll explores John’s argument concerning the development of the Tuscan language and its influence on architectural forms and style (‘Brunelleschi: Humanist or Nationalist’, Art History, 1982) and takes the relationship of place, language and architectural design to explore the evolution of an ‘Italian’ style, informed by the volgar lingua in contrast with the language and architectural design of Tuscany. Here, by an in depth examination of theory and practice, Hemsoll’s original proposal of a “Bembo-esque” dialogue is uncovered and revealed, throwing a new light on the architecture of the Renaissance. David Hemsoll studied History of Art as an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia and is at present a lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Birmingham. Together with Paul Davies he has recently completed an extensive monograph on the prominent sixteenth-century Veronese architect, Michele Sanmicheli, which is to be published by Cambridge University Press. He also has a longstanding interest in Renaissance art and architectural theory, and this forms the background of the essay presented here. He intends to develop some of the ideas put forward here concerning Michelangelo’s architecture in future research.

Sir Ernst Gombrich OM is widely renown for his publications on art and art history, which are legion. He revolutionized art history with his attention to the bodily senses, the psychology of perception and the science of vision, as exemplified in Art and Illusion (1960). His integration of science and art history can be observed in Symbolic Images, where he wrote that the “artist’s creativity can only unfold in a certain climate and that this has as much influence on the resulting works of art as a geographical climate has on the shape and character of vegetation.” However, as the Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition, he was “sometimes plagued by the worry whether” he “was not playing truant” from his “assignment at the Warburg Institute” (The Heritage of Apelles). It is fortunate that he did so, for his many works have thrown ‘new light’ on the classical tradition of art history.

Martin Henig provokes us to re-think the role and value of sex, license and luxury in artistic representation, providing a fantastically detailed examination of Roman and Celtic opulent and sumptuous artefacts - reflecting John’s own Epicurean tastes and tendencies. Henig’s challenge to “reject received theory” and indeed, aligned with this, the application of anachronistic moral attitude, again, finds us

Richard Gordon provokes us into re-thinking the puzzle of contexts for the interpretation and understanding of Roman 5

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Mary Hollingsworth, is a veritable Sherlock Holmes in her pursuit of unravelling the mystery of the past. Like Gombrich she addresses the importance of understanding the context and if everything can be said to be political, surely the same can now be said of economics. Hollingsworth’s rigorous examination of Ippolito d’Este’s accounts has indeed followed Flaubert’s maxim ‘God is in the details’ and, in doing so has elucidated our understanding of art and culture in a detailed account that has not hitherto been achieved. We can almost feel the cloth that Ippolito bought for his clothes and smell his perfumed gloves. In the same way that John challenges the art historian to employ science, Hollingsworth now lays down the gauntlet of economics.

concerned with the scrutinization of context and interpretation of works of art and, in particular, the assumption regarding the placing of such artefacts in the private realm. Martin Henig was a friend of John Onians at Cambridge where they jointly founded the National Trust Centre. He currently lectures on Roman Art at the University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of Wolfson College. He has been Hon. Editor of the British Archaeological Association since 1985. Among his numerous publications are Religion in Roman Britain (1984); Roman Sculpture in the Cotswold region (1993); Classical Gems (1994); The Art of Roman Britain (1995) and (with Paul Booth) Roman Oxfordshire (2000). He has edited a number of books including the Phaidon Handbook of Roman Art (1983).

Mary Hollingsworth began her career as an art historian by first attaining a BSc Management Sciences and then went on to study an MA in Art Historical Studies and her PhD ‘Attitudes to Architecture in Italy c.1500 in Italy’ at the University of East Anglia with John Onians. Among her publications are two landmark works in Italian art history, Patronage in Renaissance Italy (1994) and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy (1996). A present she is completing her book on Ippolito d’Este.

Sandy Heslop takes us deep into the hidden fantasy of the medieval mind, challenging the traditional approach to the context and interpretation of chimera sculptures. Like Gombrich, Heslop examines the theory of ut pictura poesis to explore and unravel the seemingly contradictory evidence of ‘pictures and words’ involved in the theological debate regarding the nature of imagination and its legitimacy for artistic representation. Heslop, like a master sleuth demonstrates that there are often more questions than there are clear cut answers, concluding that the historiography of human understanding of the workings of the brain and mind is essential for the context and interpretation of works of art and their meanings. This is a consideration that John Onians believes to be of immense importance to understanding the human behaviour of art.

Paul Jordan, like John, advocates the importance of considering human evolution and our primate heritage as an important context for interpreting and understanding art and culture. Providing a concise appraisal of prehistoric art and its makers, a subject fraught with discussion over context and interpretation, highlighting, like others in the ‘Album’, the importance of the imagination - the visual nature of the mind’s eye and its effect on creativity. Further, Jordan explores the prehistoric chimeras expressed in art via the imagination, thus providing the food for thought concerning the ancient heritage of not only Heslop’s paper but, also, ut pictura poesis.

Sandy Heslop feels his ability to situate himself on the threshold and to see either side simultaneously is in part due to not knowing which side of Hadrian’s Wall stood the wall of the maternity hospital in which he was born. This was reflected in his desire at school to study art, mathematics and Latin, a timetable impossibility. He then went to art school and then on to Courtauld Institute which was and is both part of the University of London and not. This liminality he describes as “embodied in the careers and personae of its then Director, Anthony Blunt, who also declared to new undergraduates that the purpose of the first-year programme was so that people could discover whether they were medievalists or not (he apparently regarded this as some kind of affliction).” Consequently, he discovered he wasn’t, and studied with John Shearman, and then he discovered he was, and studied with George Zarnecki. He then went on to become enchanted by seals and began to produce research, on the strength of which he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of East Anglia. There, as he describes, “the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts was beginning to rise from the turf to house a collection challenging even to my limited preconceptions.” Due to this collection and the changing configurations of colleagues and students, which has provided him with much learning from both over the last twenty-five years, has convinced him that everywhere and all times are thresholds from which to take a range of views.

Paul Jordan read Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge and then went into television, producing programmes about archaeology, history and science. During this time he published, Egypt, the Black Land, and The Face of the Past. More recently he has published Riddles and the Sphinx, Early Man, Neanderthal and The Atlantis Syndrome: the latter he describes as “disembowelling crackpot archaeology and all sorts”. He has also written a study of the Victorian photographer P. H. Emerson, which concentrates on his theories of seeing and picture making. Jordan describes this work as “the dearest to my heart and has found no publisher!” Nigel Llewellyn takes us deep into the problems of context and interpretation with the re-interpretation of historical narrative painting. Llewellyn by relooking demonstrates that Tiepolo’s narrative ambiguity provokes a challenge to the beholder that in many ways provides an analogy with John’s teaching method - to really look at the work of art itself. Llewellyn’s fascinating examination of Tiepolo’s creativity, importantly, via the works themselves, challenges the post-modernist notion of ‘reading’ a work 6

Introduction

Emblematica, 2002 (in publication). Her current research concerns textile materials and the history of the production and trade of silk worldwide.

of art. Here, the idea of the “supremacy of the word over the image” is lucidly denied by illustrating that the creative act is not a linear process but an imaginative visual thinking of ever-changing ‘uncertainty’ and even whimsy. Implicitly, Llewellyn advocates the art historian to think with the eyes in order to understand more fully that the purely visual has much to reveal about the intellectual process and context of the “creative moment”.

John Mitchell performs an ‘Oniansian’ trick, but instead of turning everything on its head turns us sideways in our thinking regarding the traditional context of symmetrical axial alignment and sacred spaces. For example, by considering the importance of asymmetry an answer to the taxing problem of explaining the “skewed orientation” of San Vitale within the context of the traditional longitudinal sacrality is thus provided. This thesis is an exciting alternative to the traditional consideration of the placing of the sacred and architectural design.

Nigel Llewellyn read History of Art at the University of East Anglia and then obtained and MPhil at the Warburg Institute with EH Gombrich, DS Chambers, Michael Baxandall and CB Schmitt on the Vitruvian tradition in relation to Diego de Sagredo the most important architectural theorist in Renaissance Spain, a topic which derived from John Onians’ teaching at UEA. He remained at the Warburg Institute between 1975-77 taking up a Junior Research Fellowship to work with J.B. Trapp on English Renaissance Funeral Monuments (PhD completed 1983), a project which required a great deal of field-work and which was continued as Leverhulme Research Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge 1977-78. Among his publications is, Funeral Monuments in post-Reformation England (CUP) 2000 and he is currently completing a volume concerning the history of art history and early-modern European art for the Oxford History of Art series. In 2000 he was the Director of the 30th International Congress of the History of Art, held in London and at present he occupies the dual roles of Professor in School of European Studies and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Sussex and also lives very happily with Clare, their son Jaspar and several chickens and a couple of rabbits.

John Mitchell has studied at Swathmore College, the University of Vienna and Harvard University. At present he is a lecturer in the School of World Art Studies & Museology at the University of East Anglia. He has played a critical role in the excavations at San Vincenzo, Italy and has published extensively on the archaeological findings. Among his publications are, The Basilica Of Abbot Joshua at San Vincenzo al Volturno, Monteroduni, 1996 (with R. Hodges) and he was a contributor to and the editor of England and the Continent in the Middle Ages: Studies in Memory of Andrew Martindale. Proceedings of the 1996 Harlaxton Symposium, Stamford, 2000. He describes himself as a “wonderer and an enthusiast, an aberrant antiquary, who has been chasing hares and falling into ditches since tender youth and seems set to continue on his way for some time yet.” Stefan Muthesius reports on a number of thoughts that might be seen to be moving towards John’s idea of a ‘natural history of art’, dealing with Kunstgeographie within art history. This approach includes a consideration of regional natural geography, which may transcend political or national borders. Muthesius considers important questions concerning the historiography of art history and in so doing, presents material which demonstrates that part of John’s approach to art history was previously considered origin, discussions and development of the discipline. Further, Muthesius, in examining the treatment of art values, has much in common with the issues raised by Gombrich. Significantly, Muthesius elucidates the issues of place and regional artistic developments to help with our understanding of the diversity and distribution of art and culture worldwide.

Elena de Luca explores the notion of secrecy and silence in Italian secular culture during the sixteenth-century. The various forms of silence and secrecy in literary and visual material, including the paradoxical, are here examined in relation to the marginalised role of the intellectual. This study provides an insight into the way intellectuals disguised their own secular attitude, becoming exiles, silenced and yet creating an underground resistence to the implications of the Counter-Reformation on Italian life and culture. Elena de Luca has studied History of Art at the University of Bologna and then completed her PhD at the School of World Studies and Museology, UEA in Norwich with John Onians. She collaborated for many years with the National Painting Gallery in Bologna and with the Soprintendenza ai Beni Culturali in Emilia Romagna. She is currently teaching for the Centre for Continuing Education at University of East Anglia and for the Università Primo Levi in Bologna. She has written for art journals in Italy and England and has been editor and author in various publications: Figure del Novecento, Bologna, 1988, “Riforma e Controriforma” and “Il Barocco”, in Guide Culture Italia, Milano, 1992, “Bologna Art, Life and Organisation, 1450-1950”, Macmillan Dictionary of Art, 1996, “Silent Meanings: Emblems, Lay Culture and Political Awarness in Sixteenth Century Bologna”,

Stefan Muthesius studied at the universities of Marburg, München and in London with Nikolaus Pevsner. Since 1968 he has taught in the School of World Art Studies & Museology at the University of East Anglia. His books include The English Terraced House, 1982 (Sir Banister Fletcher Prize of the Authors’ Club), Art, Architecture and Design in Poland 1966-1980 An Introduction, 1994, Tower Block. Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland, 1994 (Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians), The 7

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Postwar University. Utopianist Campus and College, 2000, Concrete and Open Skies. Architecture at the University of East Anglia 1962-2000, 2001.

edited and contributed to Selvedges - the writings and artwork of Janis Jefferies since 1980 (Norwich Gallery, 2000).

Rodney Palmer demonstrates the fruits of Muthesius’ argument through his meticulous research of the dissemination and transformation of European print culture and its effect on the indigenous design of Andean Spanish American sillerías that considers fully the regional craftsmen and iconographies, which results in quite specific individual aesthetics. Palmer explores the ‘Oniansian’ subject of the ‘Orders’ demonstrating the advantages of a World Art Studies approach for understanding more fully the specific context of design. Here, Palmer, revises the traditional interpretation of Andean iconographies and designs of the Orders as ‘misreadings’ of European sixteenth-century treatises, proposing an alternative of ‘re-readings’ that consider a purposeful and individual design process rather than just employing received ‘wisdom’ from colonial aesthetics.

Martin Powers examines the graphic structures underlying the logic of a discourse of freedom in China with references to European intellectual history. The discussion ranges across perceptual psychology, the geometry of space, and the exploitation of physical and bodily limitations for figuring models of personhood. Powers recognizes social, psychological and biological factors in the articulation of models of personal freedom and does not submit to such boundaries as body and mind or east and west. Martin Powers is the Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, as well as Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. In 1991 his, Art and Political Expression in Early China, received the Levenson Prize for the best book in pre-twentieth century Chinese Studies. He has received numerous fellowships, honours and grants among them Senior Mellon Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, the American Council of Learned Societies Award and the Inaugural Visiting Professor, Center for Chinese Studies, U.C.L.A., Chiang Ching-Kuo Award, “Concept Research System for Art and Literary Theory in China”. He was also a member of the Resident Faculty in 2000 for the Summer Institute in World Art Studies held at the School of World Art Studies & Museology, University of East Anglia. His publications are legion including among them such topics as, “Garden Rocks, Fractals and Freedom: Tao Yuanming Comes Home,” Oriental Art, (1998) and “When is a Landscape like a Body?” Landscape, Culture, and Power, ed., Yeh Xin Liu. Center for Chinese Studies, (Berkeley, 1998). His research focuses on the role of the arts in the history of human relations in China, with an emphasis on political expression, particularly the use of pictorial art in relation to: politics, poetry, personhood, social justice, cultural competition and opposition. In recent years he has begun research on constructions of “China” in early modern and modern Europe and America. He has published extensively. He has just completed a two-volume study of personal agency in ancient China entitled ‘Graphic Patterns and Social Paradigms in Classical China’ and is currently working on a book entitled, Spatial Paradigms and Political Thought in Classical China.

Rodney Palmer completed his DPhil at Sussex University with Nigel Llewellyn and at present is lecturing at the University of Leicester. His doctorate on the illustrated book in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Naples led to a two-year research fellowship at the Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici, Naples, to work on illustrations to Italian scientific books. He has published widely on Italian art of 1600–1750 and its historiography, ‘Iconographies of Calabrian philosophy 1570-1700’, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres of 2000. In 2000 he was a Getty World Art Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia, Norwich and in 2001 he tripled the size of the World Art Library and is continuing his role as World Art Library Representative. His current research includes the examination of the reception of Italianate print imagery in Colonial Spanish America and, indeed, in Asia. At presenting he is co-editing with Thomas Frangenberg, The Rise of the Image: Essays on the History of the Illustrated Art Book, (forthcoming 2002), which includes his paper on the worldwide fortune of ‘Andrea Pozzo’s Perspectiva (Rome 1693-1700)’. Victoria Parry leads us through the many threads of the etymological and tactile relationships between the body, the brain, fibres and spinning, providing a provocative reinterpretation of the context of cultural expression. Like Ariadne she draws out each thread of these fascinating connections creating, with Metis-like clarity, order from chaos and measure from the immeasurable interweavings and implications of an approach that considers the haptic as a foundation for culture, which has much in common with a ‘natural history of art’.

Richard Schofield presents a text that throws light on the way in which Renaissance writers altered their sources. Francesco Gritti, a cousin of Cesariano, wrote a history of the Trojan Wars in 1510 based on the celebrated ‘Historia’ of Guido Delle Colonne, but alters Delle Colonne’s description of Troy by including important new elements which make the city seem more like Renaissance Milan. Curiously Gritti’s manuscript, which was mentioned specifically by Cesariano, appears to have had no effect on the way in which Cesariano himself described the port at Halicarnassos or the ideal Renaissance city. Schofield’s

Victoria Parry is a Senior Lecturer at the Norwich School of Art and Design where she is currently co-ordinating an MA in Textile Culture. Her work on textile issues includes essays for Obscure Objects of Desire (Crafts Council, 1995), Between Sense and Place (The Winchester Gallery, 1997) and The Body Politic (Crafts Council, 2000). She 8

Introduction

the sociality of life. If all the world’s a stage, it is as true today as it was for Elizabethan England and Renaissance France. Having described the ludic quality of Thomson’s paper there is too, to be found, an erudite and perceptive insight into the workings and presentation of the court of Henri II. Thomson, by exploration of the macro, in much the same way that Hollingsworth employs the micro, brings to life the sheer scale of Androuet du Cerceau’s ‘productions’, marvellously employing the analogy of Cecil Be De Mille’s set constructions for Ben Hur.

research is enlightening because it shows an author making an imaginary city somewhat like his own, not Rome or Jerusalem, the two most used as paradigms in the period. Richard Schofield started life as a classicist (like John Onians), then became an architectural historian. He worked at Nottingham from 1980 to 1997, where he was Head of Department for 13 years lecturing on Greek sculpture and architecture, 15th and 16th century Italian and 18th century English architecture. He states that the curious aspect of his academic career is that absolutely nothing ever went to plan (if there ever was a plan), and he still lurches from one thing to another according to archival discoveries made or whom he meets in the process. He would never have imagined that he would spend much time and effort studying Lombard architecture and sculpture, especially that of Amadeo, Bramante, Leonardo and Pellegrino in an England obsessed with certain periods of Italian art to the exclusion of other vast areas; or that chance meetings with five others, still friends, would have produced three books and a number of articles (Andrew Burnett, Stefano Della Torre, Janice Shell, Grazioso Sironi, Bob Tavernor); or that, to his amazement, he was invited to IUAV in Venice (1997-), where they have never heard of industrial-strength Teaching Assessment, actually provide departmental research funds and are interested in North Italian architecture before and after the CounterReformation.”

David Thomson’s doctorate of 1976 was on ‘Jacques Androuet du Cerceau. An architectural ‘vulgaristeur’ of the French Renaissance’. The questions pursued by Sir Anthony Blunt on Du Cerceau as architect proved to be a complete dead-end because Du Cerceau was an architectural fantasist and a topographer of genius. The full panorama of his work will be the first major exhibition of Paris’ new Cité d’architecture at the Palais de Chaillot in 2004. David Thomson has been a telemon for Du Cerceau for over thirty years and among his publications are, Renaissance Paris, 1984 and Renaissance Architecture. Critics, Patrons, Luxury, 1993. Wilfried van Damme, like John, rises to the challenge that the biological evolution of the human species is a significant factor for human aesthetics the world over that underpins John’s idea of a ‘natural history of art’. Van Damme acknowledges that John’s approach of “conceiving of the visual arts as worldwide activities and products of Homo sapiens” contributed to his development of ‘World Aesthetics’. In John, Van Damme having considered the role of human neurological and perceptual processes and their evolutionary origin for understanding “human aesthetic and artistic phenomena” had found a fellow compatriot and as an anthropologist, here, narrates his intellectual journey of “understanding art and aesthetics past and present.” In doing so, like John, he provides the scholar with the courage to face the antagonism that arises out of, (in the words of Scharfstein) the “fear of the unknown”.

Robin Skeates assesses archaeological approaches to ‘art’, excavating the useful and the interesting to incorporate within a World Art Studies approach, focusing on prehistory. This paper directly addresses the problems of context, interpretation and, importantly the presentation of archaeological findings. He promotes as a way forward an increased emphasis on the ‘visual’ as of major importance for understanding the long-term transformation of art and culture. Robin Skeates attained his DPhil in Archaeology at the School of Social and Cultural Anthropology, at the University of Oxford. At present he is a Lecturer in Museum Studies in the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham. He works within the related fields of material culture, museum and heritage studies, and is particularly concerned with the history of archaeological collecting, public archaeology, and the prehistoric archaeology of the central Mediterranean region. His recent publications include, Debating the Archaeological Heritage (2000); The Collecting of Origins: collectors and collections of Italian prehistory and the cultural transformation of value 1550-1999 (2000) and ‘The social dynamics of enclosure in the Neolithic of the Tavoliere, south-east Italy’, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, (2000).

Wilfried van Damme studied archaeology, art history, and cultural anthropology at the University of Ghent, and social and cultural anthropology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 1993 he obtained a PhD degree at the University of Ghent, with a dissertation that was published as Beauty in Context. Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics (1996). He was also a visiting lecturer at Summer Institute in World Art Studies held at the School of World Art Studies & Museology, University of East Anglia in 2000. Van Damme has written on the visual arts of Africa and Oceania and is involved in developing a transdisciplinary and global approach to aesthetics. He is presently Head of Research and Documentation at the Afrika Museum, in the Netherlands. John Varriano extends the ‘Oniansian’ notion of the classical orders as “bearers of meaning” to suggest that the under-theorized and much neglected pilaster might constitute a feminine presence with respect to the inherent

David Thomson pays us a timely reminder that art, creativity and even art history is a product of humans and humans are pompous as they are absurd, the art of whimsy? That in fact, art is an entertainment and is part of 9

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies cross-cultural approaches to artistic activity. Kang, like John, considered the environment, natural geography and human physiognomy to be important for understanding products of art, even down to having a bath! Like John, Kang made seemingly disparate connections between the east and the west, and advocated a ‘World Art Studies’ approach and although some of his conclusions may have been wrong, this approach was most certainly rewarding and enlightening.

manliness of the free-standing column. Considering the context and meaning of pilasters from the time of Vitruvius through the eighteenth century, the author gradually unveils a covert femininity that culminates in works of the Régence and Rococo periods in France, times when the dominant sensibility itself became feminine. As proof of his theory, Varriano recalls the neo-classical promotion of the ‘masculinity” of the column and “la guerre contre le pilastre” that accompanied the suppression of the “unnatural” influence of women in the new revolutionary ideology.

Cao Yiqiang attained his DPhil in the History of Art in 1995 at the University of Oxford. Since then he has held various posts and fellowships: Professor of Art History, Director of the Faculty of Academic Research, Editor in Chief of the New Arts since 1995, International Advisor to Art History; Specially Appointed Professor of the History of Ideas and Art at the Nanjing Normal University since 1998; Professor of Art History at the National Academy of Art in Beijing since January 2001. He was also The First Clark Fellow of the Clark Art Institute and a Fellow of the University of Michigan. Most recently was President of Section 17 for CIHA 2000 London. He has published several books and numerous essays on art and historiography in art, including Art and History (2001).

John Varriano is the Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. A specialist in Italian Baroque art, he has published extensively in his field. Among his longer studies are Roma Resurgens: Papal Medals from the Age of the Baroque (with N.T. Whitman), Italian Baroque and Rococo Architecture, and Rome, A Literary Companion. He is currently at work on a book entitled ‘Caravaggio and the Art of Realism’. Valentina Vulpi finds the traditional assessment of Filarete’s libro architettonico as an ‘architectural treatise’ too restricted. Its complex and unique narrative character acquires full appreciation only when considered as the confluence of multiple motives and aspirations mostly contingent to its author’s situation as an artist. She presents a new hypothesis on its composition and offers an explanation for the distinctive structure and unfinished state of the libro architettonico as it is known. In particular she argues that, at a fairly advanced stage of its writing, from being a tract on the theory and practice of architecture Filarete’s book became an exploration of its ideological potential. This change was specifically fashioned for the Sforza family, so that Filarete could regain his patrons’ favour. Valentina Vulpi took her first degree in Rome, at the Università ‘La Sapienza’ and then an MA with John Onians in the School of World Art Studies & Museology at the University of East Anglia. In the same School she has recently submitted her Ph.D. dissertation entitled ‘Architecture, Society and Ornament in Filarete’s libro architettonico’. She has been collaborating with the Institute of World Archeology at the University of East Anglia as translator and editor of the Italian text in Explorations in Albania 1930-1939: Archive Material Relating to Luigi Cardini, Prehistorian with the Italian Archaeological Mission, (ed. by K. Francis), due for publication in 2002. Cao Yiqiang fittingly ends the ‘Album’ with a paper that truly explores a World Art Studies subject. Further, Yiqiang’s discussion of the cultural interests of Sterling Clark and Kang Youwei parallels John’s own ideas and his role at the Clark Art Institute. Here an individual’s aesthetic reaction to experiencing art from a different culture elucidates the whole notion of context, interpretation and value of works of art and the effect of 10

The maiden disputes. Saint Catharine in Amsterdam Elisabeth de Bièvre For the sweetest master of invention

Few pre-modern women acquired fame for their skills in disputation. Catharine of Alexandria did. When some authors describe her legend as ‘one of the most preposterous of its kind’ one may well ask why she became such a popular Catholic saint and so regularly personified in the visual arts. While exemplary life-stories -whether of historical men and women or mythological heroes and heroines or of gods, goddesses and saints- can be found all over the world and all through history, the instances selected for representation and the style and technique in which they are expressed differ widely according to time and place of production. Leaving the universal phenomenon for the moment unexplained we will concentrate on these differences. Based on distinct choices they reveal particular preoccupations of either the maker or patron, or both of them as inhabitants of one and the same environment which is specific in its geography, climate and history and usually similarly specific in many of its cultural expressions. Once these preoccupations often kept on a subconscious level- are expressed in visual imagery, they deliver a priceless insight into a society’s priorities precisely because -kept subliminally- they are not formulated in words and thus not expressed in written documents.

sentenced to be broken on a spiked wheel. When the wheel could not resist her faith but ruptured in the process, allowing her to walk away unharmed, she was finally beheaded. Angels took her, body and soul, to Mount Sinai where a famous monastery developed around her shrine. Even if Catharine’s life story was born only from the feverishly romantic mind of a Greek monk living on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean3, it was based on geographical and historical observations from a particular place and time. Probably conceived during the sudden rise of Islam -a religion as ambitious in its apostolate as Christianity- its author must have been disturbed by the conflicting attitudes of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other creeds around him toward the use of religious images. He would have selected Alexandria quite consciously as the background of his narration, as this Greek-founded city had been the most active centre of the Mediterranean world for speculative philosophy and international religious debate during the first six and a half centuries of our common era. Its destruction by the Arabs in 642 could be a date seminal to the creation of the tale. Furthermore, Maxentius as the cruel pagan despot was similarly well chosen since he had been defeated by another newly converted Christian, the future emperor Constantine, at the famous battle on the Milvian bridge (Pons Mulvius), where he drowned in the Tiber. The choice of the heroine’s name, an abbreviation of the Greek Ai-katharine, meaning the All-pure (ai-katharos), provides a perfect metaphor for the ideal saint.

We will examine one event from the life of St Catharine and explore what this moment, when later represented in a particular time and place, can add to our understanding of a specific human situation. The fact that no historical evidence supports the existence of this saint is of minor relevance to the impact of her legend. Literary and visual sources about her appear rather late in the Christian calendar.1 The earliest manuscript, composed in Greek some time around 600, describes her as a learned, highborn and beautiful eighteen year old, living during the reign of Maxentius (306-312) in cosmopolitan and scholarly Alexandria, where she was newly converted to Christianity. She proceeded to openly protest against the official local religion, above all against its use of idols. Publicly confronted by fifty religious experts who argued in favour of these icons she refuted each of their claims and in so doing converted them in turn to Christianity. The emperor, abashed by this course of events, had all fifty men burned at the stake, but impressed by the maiden, asked her to marry him on condition that she would abandon her faith.2 Both propositions she declined. Neither in reality nor in myth can an emperor’s wish be opposed with impunity and she was consequently

These appealing historical and metaphorical associations had a powerful effect on subsequent generations, above all during the late middle ages in Europe when Catharine’s cult flourished in various places where people identified with particular aspects of her life and being. The combination of her debating skills and the extraordinary instrument of her passion, the spiked wheel, inspired an at first sight rather incongruous lot to select her as their patron saint. She was the special advocate for, among others, philosophers, married women, carriage-makers and millers. Her martyrdom on the wheel -in its circularity a potent symbol- and later decapitation are often shown, but most regularly she is depicted in the company of St Barbara together representing the contemplative and active sides of life. As a consequence of the promise she made in the Passio, to intercede on behalf of anybody who would invoke her name, she is often seen represented next to the enthroned Virgin. Her mystical betrothal to Christ, another much illustrated theme, was based on the slightly later Latin version in which she is presented as not only young,

1

O. Wimmer, & H. Melzer, eds., Lexicon der Namen und Heiligen, Vienna, 1988; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, Rome, 1963. A Greek edition of the Passio composed between 550-650 seems to be the first. Catharine disappeared in 1969 from the Roman Calendar. 2 The marriage proposal is not in all versions.

3

11

Probably during the period of Byzantine iconoclasm, 726-843.

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies learned and beautiful, but also very proud, considering not one suitor good enough to marry until a hermit told her about Jesus Christ as the True Bridegroom. This Latin translation of the early eighth century seems to be a direct consequence of the disputes about the use of images between the Byzantine iconoclast Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, and the Roman Popes, Gregory II and III, resulting in the earliest known visual sign of her cult around 750.4 It is less frequent that several episodes of her life are shown together and more rarely still that the brief moment of her worldly glory, when disputing with the doctors, is depicted on its own.

if so what are the reasons for this dedication? Where in Holland do we find embroider expert in the rare and exquisite technique used for the shield? Where in Holland do women have a particularly high profile and where in Holland are the religious disputes in the first forty years of the sixteenth century at their most extreme and most public? The best known and possibly the only church in Holland dedicated to St Catharine -as well as to the Virgin Mary- is the second oldest parish church in Amsterdam, known until the seventeenth century simultaneously as the Katrijne Kerk and Nieuwe Kerk, the latter name used on its own since the Reformation.7 Founded around 1410 as an almost private enterprise of the wealthy Amsterdam merchant-banker Willem Eggert, it was ‘finished about a hundred years later’, ‘in beauty rightly to be counted under the most distinguished churches of Europe’. Why should this saint have been evoked for this church’s protection? The Nieuwe Kerk was built on the west side of the river Amstel then known as the ‘Molenzijde’, or ‘Wind-mill side’, because that part of town, open to the prevalent western wind, was surrounded by wind-mills. These were at first employed to lower the ground waters of the marshy environment and later also to grind Amsterdam’s vital grain imports from the Baltic. Although it is not certain whether Eggert made his money through the grain trade, St Catharine as the patron saint of millers served that part of town extremely well. Her being the protector of philosophers may have pleased Master Eggert in particular for in scholastic but also Alexandrian tradition he founded a library as part of his church.8

Ignoring all images of St Catharine and the circumstances of their creation except the ones which show her in dispute with the doctors, we will examine two of these rare instances which on stylistic grounds can be associated with the county of Holland around 1520 or 1530. The first representation, embroidered on a priest’s choir cape, shows the maiden in front of the enthroned Maxentius encircled by a crowd of gesticulating men.5 (fig.1) The second is part of a u-shaped drawing -possibly a component of a design for an altar table-, which is divided into three episodes.6 (fig.2) In the central happening she stands next to an empty throne opposite Maxentius and the doctors, while on the left side of the drawing she faces the emperor in front of an idolatrous statue; on the right she is present at the burning of the doctors at the stake, an instance illustrated even more rarely than Catharine disputing. What can these images tell us in general about Holland in the early sixteenth century and to what environment in particular can they be connected? Who in Holland in this period would be interested to see a learned woman glorified for her talents to dispute about theological dogma, in particular about the use of religious images? The embroidery represents one of the most costly techniques of representation, and being part of an expensive priestly robe must belong to a wealthy church environment, while the drawing, if part of a design for an altar table, must have been commissioned either for a church connected to St Catharine or by a patron interested in her.

In Amsterdam too we find a climate favourable to women playing a slightly more public role than elsewhere. In fact, women had taken a prominent position in the religious life of the Molen Zijde (Nieuwe Zijde) ever since the occurrence of a miracle of the Host in 1345.9 Versions of the miraculous event differ but it is usually a woman who plays the crucial role of helping the dying man who, after receiving the last sacrament at his home, is sick and vomits the consecrated host into a bowl. The woman -sometimes called his wife, at other times his daughter- throws the entire content into the fire, but on noticing the next morning that the host has remained intact, unconsumed by the flames, realizes the significance of the moment. As Christ was immortal so was the consecrated host, which was perceived to be His Real Body, the Corpus Dei. Both civic and ecclesiastical authorities immediately certified the miracle, and the house in the Kalverstraat where the miracle took place promptly attracted pilgrims, the influx

In order to distil from these images of dispute the priorities of time and place, which stylistic analysis so far has not disclosed, we turn to explanatory circumstances for support while also observing the possible implications of the rarity of the subject and of the techniques employed. Information can be found in architectural artifacts or in urban layouts; it may be deduced from geographical data or adduced from written historical documents. Where in Holland can we find a particular cult of St Catharine of Alexandria? Are there any churches dedicated to her and

7

I. I. Pontanus, (1614), Historische Beshrijvinghe der seer wijt beroemde coopstadt Amsterdam, Amsterdam: ‘De prochie kerke vande Nieuwe Sijde is ghefondeert int jaer 1408/ ooft soo andere schrijven 1414.’ 8 This library probably went to the College established in the new Waag building after 1502 and became in 1630 part of the newly founded Athenaeum, the forerunner of Amsterdam University. 9 See for details and bibliography of Amsterdam’s miracle of the host: P. J. Margry, Amsterdam en het mirakel van het heilige sacrament, Amsterdam, 1988.

4

In the basilica of S. Lorenzo al Verano. 5 St Catharine of Alexandria in dispute with the philosophers. Embroidered shield of a choir cape, c. 1525, 53 x 49cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Illustrated in .P. Filedt Kok, W. Halsema-Kubes, W. Th. Kloek, eds., Kunst voor de beeldenstorm, ex. cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1986, cat. 26, p.139. 6 St Catharine of Alexandria, Maxentius and the philosophers, pen and brown ink on parchment, c. 1520, 81.5 x 200, Berlin, Staatlichen Museen.

12

Elisabeth de Bièvre: The maiden disputes. Saint Catharine in Amsterdam body”.12 Against the Sacramentarians Catholic orthodoxy was upheld by the dominant intellectuals in town who worked for change from within. Their most eloquent spokesman, Alardus of Amsterdam (1495-1544), glorified the dogma of transubstantiation in his Ritus edendi paschalis Agni (The rite of eating the Paschal Lamb), published by Doen Pietersz in 152313, while against him Sartorius two years later issued De sacra eucharistia.

of which only increased with the years. As little as two years later, in 1347, a chapel known as the Heilighe Stede (Holy Fireplace) was constructed and at once sanctioned by the Bishop. Soon after, around 1360, a Sacrament Guild for women led by respected Amsterdam overwiven (head women) was founded. Directly opposite the new chapel a beguinage, a large convent and a Sacramentsgasthuis (guesthouse for the Holy Sacrament pilgrims), all established in the aftermath of the miracle, testify to the active involvement of women with the religious life around the chapel on the Molen Zijde.

Almost all the sixteenth century Amsterdam men described by the early seventeenth-century city historian Pontanus14 as ‘treffelick’ (excellent) and ‘vermaerd’ (famous) were theologians, doctores who disputed hot, religious issues if not viva voce on the Dam square then certainly in print. In his Ritus edendi Alardus emphasizes the connection between divine and civic disputes by comparing the theological dissent in his own time to the Old Testament period when the ten plagues ravaged Egypt in punishment for its impiety. The small volume ends with an engraved portrait of the author surrounded by texts which elucidate his identity in close relation to the identity of his place of origin, Amsterdam. Underneath his name Alardus Amstelredamus - parallel to Erasmus Roterodamus attention is given to the special attributes of his city: it is called ‘sacrosanct’ and ‘religious’, ‘the noble emporium of the whole of Holland’. These distinctive epithets, not used for any other city in Holland, are elaborated with a text from Jeremiah (6.16) surrounding the portrait: ‘Stand in His ways: listen, look and ask about the ancient path which is the good way and walk in it and you will find a cool place for your souls.’

Before elaborating on the continued high profile of women in early sixteenth century Amsterdam we will analyse the intellectual and religious atmosphere of the community in that period in order to test whether there are signs of an unusual interest in disputation, taking into account that this is the period of the fiery beginning of the Reformation for the whole of western Europe. Amsterdam, still a rather small city of about ten thousand inhabitants but starting to grow seriously, thrived as never before. Between 1496 and 1514 the revenues for the town crane, a direct expression of the volume of goods arriving at the wharves, increased by 400 percent.10 A token of this commercial success was the construction in the middle of the Dam Square of a weigh house, the Waag (1502). Here the city government not only levied taxes on incoming goods, but also established on the first floor a college teaching bible exegesis employing Hebrew, Latin and Greek philology. With these developments came new opportunities, but also new strains. Both are apparent in the expansion of publishing. Many printers came to serve the city’s growing population and to exploit its trading position. Typical was the publisher Doen Pietersz11 who worked in Amsterdam between 1518 and 1532 and published on such diverse subjects as monetary exchange rates and tracts by rival theologians such as Erasmus and Luther. Both authors had supporters in the city where there was as much competition in the field of religion as in any.

Alardus’ device ‘to listen, look and ask for the good way’ in his ‘sacrosanct’ city can be connected with his lifelong passion to collect, edit and publish all the works of the Groninger Roelof Huusman, better known as Rodolphos Agricola Phrysius (1444-1484), who laconically locates his own Frisian birthplace as ‘near the ocean, almost at the end of the world’. Only in 1515 could Alardus bring Agricola’s main work De Inventione Dialectica15 out in print and he had to struggle until 1539 before he could see the Opera omnia published. Even then they were not complete for several manuscripts were missing, one of which is tantalisingly referred to as a chronicle of the world. Why was Alardus so fanatical about advertising Agrigola’s work, above all his De Inventione Dialectica?16 The dialectical rhetoric, which Agricola had developed and

Amsterdam was not alone in its religious divisions, but it was affected in a special and more intense manner, having for a hundred and fifty years celebrated the miracle of the Host, a subject now hotly contested. In opposition to the Catholic traditionalists, the Sacramentarians, who were particularly active in Amsterdam, raised questions about the very nature of this central act of Christian worship. Rejecting the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated Host and the possibility of its transubstantiation they interpreted the sacrament as a symbolic act. Johannes Sartorius, a native preacher and Latin and Hebrew teacher in the College in the Waag, landed up in prison for translating Christ’s words “Hoc est Corpus Meum”, not “this is” but “this signifies my

12

Sartorius wrote his De sacra eucharistia in 1515 and it was published in 1525. His ideas are parallel to those of the Hague lawyer, Cornelis Hoen, presented in his Epistula Christana Admodum, c.1520, which was quoted by Zwingli. H. Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation, New York, 1966. 13 B. de Graaf, Alardus Amstelredamus ( 1491-1544). His life and Works, Amsterdam, 1958. 14 Pontanus, 1614, 376-384: Alardus, Crocius, Sartorius etc. 15 L. Jardine, ‘Distinctive Discipline: Rudolph Agricola’s Influence on Methodical Thinking in the Humanities’, in: Rodolphus Agricola Phrysius 1444-1485, F. Akkerman, & A. J. Vanderjagt, eds., Leiden, 1988, pp.3857; P. Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Leiden, 1993. 16 De Graaf (1955).

10

L. Noordergraaf, Holland’s Welvaren?, Bergen, 1985, pp. 80-81. N. de Roever, ‘Amsterdamsche boekdrukkers en Boekverkoopers uit de zestiende eeuw (tot omstreeks 1580)’, Oud Holland, 1884, pp.68-80 & pp.170-209. 11

13

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies the papal inquisition.18 Several were prosecuted and part of the penalty compelled them to wear a red cross clearly visible on top of their outer clothes. These obligatory markings, designed to make a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, have much in common with the selection of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ religious images, the theme disputed not only between St Catharine and the doctors but also between the Byzantine Leo and the Roman Gregories and soon to explode in the iconoclast destruction in Flanders and Holland.

which had been made popular by people like Hegius, Melanchton and Erasmus, was of extreme relevance to the Amsterdam of Alardus. In successfully expanding, pragmatic Amsterdam scholastic thinking based on certainties and authoritative texts was tested by a dialectical method which tried to reach the truth by testing probabilities and by critical reasoning, rationes contra rationes. The dialectic invention, in Agricola’s terms, is the disciplined process of collecting material in order to be able to understand the object of study from all possible angles. One has to come to the truth of the matter by rational and discriminating selection, by disputation either within one’s own mind or with the mind of another. It is clearly in the invention of theoretical possible points of view that the human brain is most deeply tested to find the different roads to a theoretical truth. This is what masters of invention are about. St Catharine in third century Alexandria showed herself a mistress of invention and in that role she became a model for sixteenth century Amsterdammers, men and women alike.

In the early sixteenth century, however, Amsterdam had only just begun seriously to express its theological tastes in altar tables and prints. The decision of the painter and engraver Jacob Cornelisz (c.1472-1533) born in the nearby small community of Oostzanen, to sign himself Jacob van Amsterdam, in the same way that Alardus took the title ‘of Amsterdam’, is a mark of the city’s new confidence and pride. Jacob was as important for the city’s cultural life as Doen Pieterz, with whom he frequently collaborated. In order to fulfil the community’s growing need for imagery and display, which took such different forms as single woodcuts, book illustrations, painted choir vaults, stainedglass windows, embroidery designs, water-coloured banners, portraits and altarpieces, Jacob’s studio accommodated many collaborators and pupils. His enterprise must have been both lucrative and prestigious as can be gathered from his ownership of two houses in the Kalverstraat near the Heilighe Stede and his self-conscious self-portrait, the first of its kind known in the Netherlands.19

That the women in sixteenth century Amsterdam were not altogether in the background is demonstrated by several types of images and by many recorded events. Some of these images are connected to the cult of the miracle of the host. In almost all of them the women take a foreground position, on banners made for the annual processions or in prints and paintings.17 Most of these works are connected to the workshop of Jacob Cornelisz, the first well-known painter operating in Amsterdam. Even if these works were not designed merely to promote the women’s role in the miracle, the profile of the women’s Sacrament-guild had became more pronounced, as can be inferred not only from their slightly later, richly decorated new chapel (1555) in the Oude Kerk, but also from their 1531 revolt, the socalled vrouwenoproer. This violent protest against the city’s initiative to use the church-yard of the Heilighe Stede for the construction of a communal wool-house was an exceptional manifestation of their independent initiative. During an overnight revolt about three hundred women led by the overwiven together destroyed the newly built foundations of the profane, industrial structure. However, like St Catharine the distinguished leaders found out that they could not oppose the ruling authority with impunity. Four of them were sentenced to be banned for four years by the reformist inclined Amsterdam magistrates of the day. In order to appeal they travelled to Brussels accompanied by the brother of one of them, the learned priest from the Katrijne Kerk, to plead their case in person with the Emperor. They were allowed to return home, but had to pay a heavy fine.

Up until the 1520’s independent single portraits were altogether rare in the Netherlands. In that light Jacob Cornelisz’ self-image of 1533 has to be seen as even more remarkable. A prominently displayed cartollino with his initials publicizes proudly his identity and trademark: Jacob van Amsterdam. Cornelisz’s self-portrait is turned into an even more striking image by his son, Dirck Jacobsz, when he shows his father in the act of painting his mother.20 This double portrait demonstrates once more the relative prominence of women in Amsterdam. It is one of the first portraits in the Netherlands of a non-noble, nonpatrician woman, who though possibly active in the women’s sacrament guild nevertheless extracted her social status from being the wife and mother of painters. Turning once more to our two images of St Catharine introduced above, it seems in the light of the presented 18 I. H. van Eeghen, ‘De inquisitie in Amsterdam’, M. de Roever & B. Bakker, eds., Woelige Tijden. Amsterdam in de eeuw van de Beeldenstorm, Amsterdam, 1986, pp.73-83. Several wealthy upper-class women, such as Lysbet in de Spiegel, Duyf Duyst, and Aefgen Pieters were at various times prosecuted for their heretical behaviour, this in contrast to the overwiven, who defended the orthodox sanctity of the Heilighe Stede. 19 Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Self-portrait, 1533. Panel, 37,9 x 29,5 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, cf. Kunst voor de Beeldenstorm (1988) p.196. 20 Dirck Jacobsz, Jacob Cornelisz painting the portrait of his wife, Toledo (Ohio), Toledo Museum of Art.

While these orthodox Catholic women found themselves in trouble for expressing themselves so forthrightly, other women -some equally distinguished- involved in reformist movements displayed these interests also to their own peril after the arrival in 1525 of the official representatives of 17 Now all in Amsterdam, Historisch Museum. Illustrated in Margry, (1988).

14

Elisabeth de Bièvre: The maiden disputes. Saint Catharine in Amsterdam triptych, sculpture and stained glass windows.25 That they were not made just to increase the family prestige becomes clear when we discover that as a theologian he was one of the most active disputants in the doctrinal conflicts which, as we saw, were fiercer in Amsterdam than almost anywhere else in the Northern Netherlands.26 So what could have been more natural for him than to commission a luxurious shield with St Catharine disputing with the doctors for his choir cape, to remind himself and his congregation of the dangerous, errant paths of false reasoning.

evidence logical that we should associate them with Amsterdam. An early seventeenth century commentator describes the former glory of the Katrijne Kerk as including ‘no less than thirty-four altars, objects and decorations of the priests outstandingly beautiful and costly.’ One of these outstandingly beautiful and costly objects may have been our exquisitely embroidered shield. Although it has been convincingly argued that the style of the design is more reminiscent of work by Lucas van Leyden21, there is no obvious reason why it could not have been commissioned for and executed in Amsterdam. On the contrary there are several indications which connect the work to the Katrijne Kerk around 1525. The embroidery technique is the highly refined and expensive ‘lazur’ stitch, a method only used for important artefacts.22 Parallel lines of coloured silk23 against a background of gold thread are enriched with pearls and semi-precious stones. We know of a member of a long established Amsterdam embroiders family, Pieter Joosten, who was contracted in the 1540’s by the Walburg church’s council from Zutphen to deliver an auriphrygiate for a chasuble in the same expensive ‘lazur’ technique. He may have become known outside Amsterdam through his earlier work, such as perhaps the St Catharine disputing with the doctors for the Nieuwe Kerk in his hometown.

One of the ‘34 altars’ in the Katrijne Kerk may have been designed to display a triptych based upon our drawing, which in style is close to that of Jacob Cornelisz and his studio. Amsterdam had become infamous for its religious disputes which were considered as bad as the Old Testament plagues wreaking havoc on Egypt. The rare choice to illustrate the public execution of the arguing doctors can be understood in the light of contemporary practices of the Inquisition. Our ignorance about a finished altar-table after this design may either simply be due to its destruction during the iconoclast riots in 1566, or it may never have been painted. Amsterdam went through extreme socio-political upheavals during the 1530s and 40s and we do not know of any major religious paintings by Amsterdam painters during that period.27 When in the fifties the climate changed and Pieter Aertsen considered it a lucrative enough proposition to return from Antwerp’s sophisticated art market to his birthplace Amsterdam, he was immediately commissioned to produce an altar piece with the scenes of the Life of Mary28 for the new Lady’s Chapel in the Oude Kerk. For the high altar in the Katrijne Kerk he painted an Adoration of the Shepherds, with, on the outside shutters, a Beheading of St Catharine (1559). Only the fragment showing a ‘politically correct’ scene of the head of a shepherd with the enormous head of an ox escaped the iconoclast destruction.29 Van Mander’s description of this altar does not include any other episode from Catharine’s life.30 May we conclude herefrom that for the time being the period of open dispute was over and that the women’s voices were silenced just as Catharine had been beheaded? We would be wrong, however, to assume that the women in Amsterdam were hushed for long. We have ample evidence of their passionate intelligence and inventive eloquence up to the present day. But that story must remain untold and wait for another album amicorum.

The priest of this church, Claes Boelens den Otter, whom we have already met as the brother of one of the four bold overwiven, Katryn Boelens den Otter, was both a theological doctor and belonged to one of the most eminent and wealthy local families. Through both their father and mother, sister of the fifteen times burgomaster Andries Boelen, they had access to the highest political circles in Amsterdam. The family’s status had been strengthened by its art patronage, the most spectacular example of which was the commission of Margriet Boelen -another manifestly independent woman- to Jacob Cornelisz for a Nativity (1512) to be donated to the classy Carthusian monastery just outside the wall on the north-west side of the city.24 Paying almost double what Lucas van Leyden earned fifteen years later for his much praised Last Judgement, the recently widowed donatrix had members of her powerful family -including nephews (Andries) and nieces and grand nephews (Claes) and -nieces (Katrijn)portrayed in adoration of the infant Christ, uniquely set against a busy harbour scene reminiscent of Amsterdam. Claes, present in his Carthusian habit at the Nativity, became, as priest of the Katrijne Kerk, himself a patron of the arts, as we know from his extraordinary tomb stone and various other works in the family chapel, such as a painted

25 For illustrations see, R. Kistemaker & M. Jonker, eds., De smaak van de elite, Amsterdam, 1986, p.23. 26 See also: J. F. M. Sterck, Onder Amsterdamsche Humanisten, Hilversum, 1934. 27 Important church commissions went to Jan van Scorel, who although trained in Cornelisz’s studio, settled in Utrecht, which as an ecclesiastical city with a long art tradition, nurtured a broad demand for altar pieces. 28 Destroyed in 1566. 29 Pieter Aertsen, Fragment with shepherd and ox from the Adoration of the shepherds, c.1559, Amsterdam, Historisch Museum. 30 K. van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, etc., Haarlem, 1604.

21

J. P. Filedt Kok et al., 1986, pp.139-140. Such as the robes of the Order of the Gulden Vlies (now in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) and garments after designs by Antonio Pollaiuolo made for the cathedral of Florence in 1466 and 1479. See Filedt Kok et al., 1986, p.139. 23 Presumably containing much ‘lazur’ or lapis lazuli blue. 24 Jacob Cornelisz, Nativity, Naples, Museo Capodimonte. 22

15

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.1. Anonymous, The Disputation of St. Catharine, North Netherlandish, Early 16th Century, Embroidery, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig.2. Anonymous, Three scenes from the life of St. Catharine, North Netherlandish, Early 16th Century, pen & ink on parchment, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

16

Animals in Art: Resisting a Culture of the Anthropocentric Helen Boorman

It is possible to read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realising that they are not about human beings at all. When one encounters the name of the creature; monkey, dog, mole, - one looks up in fright and realises that one is already far away from the continent of man. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations1

In a section titled ‘Living inexpertly with animals’, which forms part of the final chapter of his account of The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker writes: People live inexpertly with animals. And if the postmodern condition does, among other things, signal a change in artists relation to animals, it may leave such works as Hockney’s recent and sincere paintings of his pet dogs, looking, in some sense or other, like an outmoded expression of that relation. The problem may in one respect lie not so much with their admitted sentimentality (‘These two dear little creatures are my friends’, writes Hockney) as with their particularity.4

In ‘Object Lessons/Object Myths’ reproduced in W.David Kingery’s Learning from Things, Joseph Corn explores the impact of personal experience, personal obsession and passion on the object of study, in this case in the field of the history of technology. He admits that his own enthusiasm for transport is driven by his love of old engines and other abandoned, obsolete machines; those discarded objects of history which formed part of his own childhood and entertain him in the present. Thus, his historical and theoretical perspective is one which resists purely objective analysis and finds more revealing insights in the subjective response. It recognises that modes of cultural production and interpretation owe as much to the innocence of enthusiasm as they do to informed knowledge. He calls this ‘ordinary looking’.2

Attempts by artists to subvert sentimentalism with irony have failed to a curious degree. Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Infinity Kisses’ (1991) nudges at a level of sexual taboo rarely touched upon by recent art practice. It is not easy to identify the point of revulsion, which arises precisely because the image/sequence is itself innocent - on the part of the cat/animal. The ‘transgression’, is delineated by the orchestration of the artist herself and the resulting posture depends upon those old faithful strategies of point of view identification. The cat looks like the instigator because the spectator adopts a voyeuristic position behind it. In fact, a cat’s kiss is derived not from an erotic or sexual impulse but by desire for the vicarious pleasures and absorption of smell and food; the desire to smell the stale breath on the human and share in the last meal eaten.

Several factors combined to encourage my own investigation into the positioning of animals, and in particular, domestic animals/pets, in culture. Firstly, such animals surround me, daily and now as I write, insisting on my attention. More generally, while many examples of contemporary art practice celebrate the documentation of the private, personal, erotic or soiled - a much gentler, yet persistent taboo continues to surround instances of the personal and intimate where they can be construed as sentimental. Tracy Emin’s unmade bed, complete with unwashed sheets and used condoms merits serious attention and ensures her celebrity status. Hockney’s Dachshund paintings persuade critics that he has finally lost direction; that he shows signs of missing Yorkshire; that he is simply becoming frail; in fact, mark the closure of a certain level of fame. The focus of the loved pet is interpreted as not only aesthetic but intellectual weakness. In his study of animals and men, Clark introduced the concept of the ‘animal beloved’: “The love of animals is often spoken of, by intellectuals, as an example of modern sentimentality.”3

What actually happens in those stills? The cat sniffs the owner. The owner, in the desire to make sexual the encounter (in the service of meaning/art) has eaten something which the cat wishes, not only to smell, but to taste in the mouth. This could, indeed, be a gratuitous and pornographic representation of the ‘pet’; a pornography of anthropomorphism. The representation of animals has attracted, and deserves serious critical attention - in part because such representation is so often the subject of art. In defining what it means to be human, and perhaps, as Steve Baker suggests, what it means to be an artist - observation of animal life, the symbolism and metaphor of the beast, is, as it has been historically, rich territory: “How men see animals is indeed as revealing about men as about animals.”5

1

Walter Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka”, in; Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (translated by Harry Zohn), Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p.122. 2 Joseph Corn, “Object Lessons/Object Myths” in; Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies, edited by David Kingery, Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington & London, 1996, pp.35-37. 33 Kenneth Clark, Animals and Men, Thames & Hudson, London, 1977, p.45.

Teaching in an art school, one is also frequently struck by the degree to which students who work with animal 4 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, p.179. 5 Clark, op. cit., p.124.

17

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies imagery (often those who have come from rural backgrounds) are required to ‘move beyond’ their chosen subject matter, to translate and transform. The depiction of the recognisable animal is apparently too unresolved, too literal, too unmediated. For many, the result is a curious erasure of the animal image beneath an abstract painterly surface which offers a suitably modernist facade. Baker notes that the animal was absent in modernism:

Baker believes that Franz Marc moved beyond his concerns with animal perception (proprioception) as he developed the language of abstraction8; but it remains that Marc’s question;”How does a horse see the world?” is not a rhetorical one. In his introduction to a study of Animal Life in Italian Painting, published in London in 1912 the author, William Norton Howe reminds us that Vasari’s contempt for the enthusiasm of a painter for animals is indicative of the level to which fascination for animals was evident throughout the Renaissance, “even sometimes to an exaggerated degree.” For the Italian painters, Howe suggests, social metaphor and anthropomorphism were not the concerns;

The Postmodern Animal’s hypothesis is that there was no modern animal, no ‘modernist animal’. Between nineteenth century animal symbolism, with its reasonably secure hold on meaning, and the postmodern animal images whose ambiguity, or irony or sheer brute presence serves to resist or to displace fixed meanings, lies modernism at its most arid...The animal is the very first thing to be ruled out of modernism’s bounds. From then onwards, it was what a picture must be understood to be ‘before being a battle horse’ which would count according to the classic modernist dictum.6

Certainly the Italians did not set out to paint animals in the spirit of Landseer. We shall not find ‘A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society’, ‘Redcap’ or ‘Dignity and Impudence’ paintings in which some phase of the life of civilised or humanised animals is the sole object of the picture.9

Researching German modernism in Berlin I was shown, by the curator of the Nierendorf Gallery, drawings and paintings by the Dada artist Hannah Hoech, long hidden, out of view in the basement. These were drawings of flowers and of her (pet) cats, produced during the same period as those much better known works which reflect her critical engagement with Weimar consumerism and, particularly, the commodification of women in their desire to participate. Clark asks:

The author traces three ‘lines of influence’ which he believes had bearing on the depiction of animals by the Italian Renaissance painters; first the Physiologus with its particular mode of analysis drawn from “a moral and highly imaginative point of view”10; secondly, the life and teachings of St Francis of Assisi and, thirdly, the ‘remembered and recovered literature and art of ancient Greek and Rome’. The latter, manifests itself in the category of scientific observation, which is perhaps the most respectable line of enquiry into the lives and behaviour of animals:

And why not cats? It is a mystery...they play a large part in literature, cats have inspired good poems, dogs bad ones, cats are also beautiful to look at. But the fact remains that since the time of ancient Egypt, the number of loving representations of cats in art is extremely small. Leonardo da Vinci’s cats are drawn with more curiosity than love.7

Consider the race of men, the scaly fish that swim in silence, the lusty herds, the creatures, the wild and the various feathered breed, those that throng the vivifying watery place, by river banks and springs and lakes. and those that flock and flutter through pathless woodlands. Take a representative of any of these diverse species and you will still find that it differs in form from any other of its kind.11

Attitudes towards animal imagery are contradictory and ambivalent. Additionally, where representation of animal life does merit historical and critical attention it is subjected to a hierarchy of species whereby certain animals, the horse, the stag, the lion, the hare. etc. (iconography) are deemed a more appropriate subject for art than, for example, the kitten or rabbit. The latter, unless depicted with ironic intention, lie perilously close to the cute, to the Victorian sensibility of anthropomorphic vulgarity. In the van Gogh museum, one painting I have never seen reproduced in scholarly accounts of the artist’s work features rabbits gambolling in a field. My own current research centres on the representation of the rabbit.

Howe acknowledges his own debt to Berenson, in stimulating research which he claims was prompted by Berenson’s comments in the Study and Criticism of Italian Art: We turn to the animals that the painters of the Renaissance habitually introduced into pictures; the horse, the ox the as and more rarely, birds. They need not long detain us because, in 8

Baker, op. cit., p.21. William Norton Howe, Animal Life in Italian Painting, George Allen & Co .Ltd, London, 1912, p.2. 10 Ibid., p.3. 11 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book II. 9

6 7

Baker, op. cit., p.20. Clark, op. cit., p.45.

18

Helen Boorman: Animals in Art: Resisting a Culture of the Anthropocentric

questions of detail, all that we have found to apply to the human figure can be made to apply, by the reader to the various animals.12

For Howe, the three influences on the considered and naturalistic portrayal of animals (that is, excluding intentionally symbolic and heraldic images) coincided with what he identified as “a general curiosity about nature and the varied manifestations of animal life which had been stimulated by the experience of the Crusades, the Levant trade, missionary expeditions and voyages of discovery. He quotes Burckhardt: “A significant proof of the widespread influence in Natural History is found in the zeal which showed itself in an early period for the collection and comparative study of plants and animals.”17

Berenson suggests that the levels of perception and analysis demanded by an investigation of the human form were of greater relevance than the observation of animal form: I must remind him (the reader) that animals were rarely petted and therefore rarely observed in the Renaissance. Vasari, for instance, goes into a fury of contempt when describing Sodoma’s devotion to pet birds and horses.13

Two main issues emerge; Howe, like Berenson before him weaves together two somewhat different methodologies. The objective, scholarly approach leads him to emphasise the importance of scientific analysis, resulting in anatomical correctness. For Berenson, the absence of petting, while depriving an artist of a fuller understanding of the chosen animal type is something to be admired, because it detaches the analytical from the personal and thus reduces the risk of sentimentality.

It is, of course, significant that Vasari is not correspondingly contemptuous of the anatomical studies produced by Leonardo. In fact, he writes with affection about Leonardo’s sensitivity towards animals and of the skill of his drawings.14 Nor does he seem to protest about the depiction of animals where they have a symbolic or allegorical function. Vasari’s contempt is reserved for any artist who actually enjoyed the company of animals and celebrated his own pets. As Howe observed:

Howe’s own reference to Landseer is significant. In the Italian paintings the animals circulate around and accompany the central human/allegorical cast. Landseer makes the animals the protagonists of the text. Clark writes:

Sodoma’s portrait of himself at Monte Olivetto, attended by badgers and ravens suggests at once his fondness for animals...Vasari has no sympathy with such things. “This animal” he contemptuously says of Sodoma “frittered away so much time with his beasts and fooleries and so neglected his work” In more than one respect he recalls Rosetti (whose friends were expected to find his wombat the nicest beast on earth).15

Landseer was, in fact a brilliant observer of animals, as we can see from his drawings. But, a mixture of sentiment and romanticism. much to the taste of his time, tended to cheapen his observations and give his work a bad name from which it is only just beginning to recover...The ultimate sentimentality is to invest animals with human characteristics and then give the paintings arch titles.18

Vasari famously describes Piero di Cosimo as an artist who “led the life of one who was less a man than a beast…”.16 Berenson’s commentary on Vasari identifies a series of interesting questions, some of which Howe feels obliged to contradict in his own text. For Howe, the primary issue is the extent to which the Italian painters demonstrate an understanding of the animal form, born from a serious approach to variety and difference. In this respect, familiarity with the animal offers more opportunities for study. Berenson alludes to this when he claims that the lack of petting limited the degree to which any true understanding of anatomical form could emerge.

Clark notes that the painting without the “arch title” ‘Dignity and Impudence’ is, as it was originally designed to be, simply a painting of ‘Dogs’. In his comments on Landseer, Howe breaks his own rules. Rather than prioritising the text as he does throughout his discussion of the Italian painters when he considers Landseer’s art he concentrates on the titles; whose meaning lies as Clark reminds, within the frame of reference of Victorian popular taste. Howe denies the extent to which the Landseer portraits suggests the kind of intimate knowledge of animal/pet which he has celebrated earlier. His confusion mirrors the contradictory attitude towards the natural world and our appropriation of it which has dominated representation of landscape and animal life since the mid nineteenth century. Clark observes that: “sentimentality, in which feelings are exaggerated and cheapened was not unknown in the eighteenth century but in the nineteenth century, with the growth of a wider public, sentimentality became rampant and naturally made itself felt in the

Howe confesses that his own perspective is one which emerges from a personal involvement with the subject. His interest is stimulated not only in the keeping of animals but also in a lifetime of sketching his own pets.

12

Howe, op. cit., Preface, vii. Ibid., pp 42-43 14 Ibid., Preface, viii. 15 Ibid., p.209. 16 Ibid., p.124. 13

17 18

19

Ibid., p.8. Clark.op. cit., p.31.

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies representation of animals.”19 The growth of sentimentality is thus not accredited to the artist/producer but the the audience/receiver.

ideal, but the creative process itself, the discharge of energy and power.21 Norris locates the figuration of the beast in texts as:

Howe’s study was produced towards the end of the first decade of the 20th century, a period in which the tension between urban and rural values had an increased impact on the visual and literary arts. Impressionism, which had celebrated suburbia and the weekend picnic had masked the extent to which a real schism had emerged between the the pastoral and the municipal; between the countryside and the town; between the natural and the cultural. The mask of romanticism slipped away, as had the wider theatre of overt allegory, in the portrayal of the natural world, as the ‘natural’ became more and more distant and the semblance of the natural correspondingly domesticated.

Narrators and protagonists reappropriating their animality amid an anthropocentric universe. These beasts are finally the masks of the human animals who create them and the textural strategies that bring them into being constitute another version of their struggle.22 Baker draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka his his analysis of the ‘becoming animal’: “The concept of becoming animal (devenir animal), which Deleuze and Guattari elaborate in their 1975 book ‘Kafka’ and then, in more detail, in the substantial 1980 volume translated as “A Thousand Plateaus”, is a particularly complex example of philosophical thought about the relation of humans and animals.”23 ‘Becoming animal’, offers a means of escape from the human through strategies that the human would not/could not have considered for him/herself.

Proclamations like the Protest of German Artists (1911) guided by Wilhelm Worringer, scorned the rural imagery that persisted outside the ranks of the avant-garde groups as they flocked to the cities. The main focus of their attack was a now relatively unknown artist, Carl Vinnen, whose paintings depicted the slow changing pace of agricultural life and the animal inhabitants (cows, horses) of the countryside. During that decade the primacy of landscape painting declined abruptly in favour of a portrayal of the modern world; the city, the zoo the shopping precinct.

Norris considers Kafka’s animal stories as “fully developed animal narrations...that explore increasingly feral ontologies and attempt to produce a virtually species specific fiction.” Leaving aside Kafka’s employment of the tiermenschen (the Cat/lamb or Odradek), we can focus of the identification of the animal/narrator itself. As Norris suggests Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk (like other late works) proposes a:

Nevertheless, expressionist painting, like that of Fauvism and Cubism, continued its fascination with the landscape, however tormented. as the individual continued to explore aspects of physical and psychological identity. This extended into animal imagery in the work of Munch and Kokoschka as the animal reflected the alienation of the artist. According to Clark, “Expressionists saw animals with a character horribly similar to men., but transcending human complexity by their single mindedness.”20 This kind of projection and identification became as familiar as the concept of the sublime, as the artist sought an appropriate metaphor for the condition of urban, dislocated man.

self-referentiality akin to abstract painting, but for philosophical, rather than formal ends which have to do with the ontology of the beast. The animal narrator enables the virtual voiding of representation from the work, the deletion of all human features and cultural references except those the narration itself will prove spurious. [Concludes]…But the result is not merely a simulacrum of animal consciousness with its necessarily anthropomorphic configuration. Instead, the narration constitutes a bestial gesture that marks the trajectory from signification to obliteration, from remembering to forgetting.24

In her fascinating study on the Beasts of the Modern Imagination, Margot Norris describes a line of opposition to the anthropocentric universe which she traces through from Darwin and Nietzsche to Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence. She identifies a philosophical and literary tradition within the modern which insists on a ‘biocentric’ mode of expression:

In his study of Kafka in Illuminations, Walter Benjamin had already identified the role of the animals in the narrative as one of forgetting: “To Kafka the world of his ancestors was as unfathomable as the world of realities was important to him; and we may be sure that, like the totem poles of primitive peoples, the world of ancestors took him

The differences between biocentric and anthropocentric art correspond to the models of animal and human desire and the oppositions they engender between creatural and cultural man...The end of biocentric art is autotelic, not the production of a representation, an artifact, an

19 20

21 Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination; Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, 1985, p.12. 22 Ibid., Introduction. 23 Baker,, op. cit., p.102. 24 Norris, op cit., pp.118-119.

Ibid., p.50. Ibid., p.32.

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Helen Boorman: Animals in Art: Resisting a Culture of the Anthropocentric

down to the animals...one can understand (then) that Kafka did not tire of picking up the forgotten from animals.”25

The choice of silence by the animal resists the human interpretation of the voice. Thus the piping and the singing of Josefine are ultimately one and the same. To distinguish between the voice of the human and that of the animal becomes, inevitably a question of intentionality, confused by the evidence that the dog or lion intentionally, if instinctively emit voices “sounds endowed with some meaning.”31 Anthropomorphism of voice/sound combines with that of image/representation in the identity of the animal personality. Josefine, the mouse singer, denies individuality and thus personality.

Representations which resist anthropomorphism offer an alternative dynamic of the relation between the animal and human, based not on similarities (as in Aristotle) but on distinction: “The animals’ putative inferiority to the human is conventionally described as a lack. a deficiency in reason, speech, soul, morality, a higher nature, while, in contrast, the human being is viewed as complete, perfect, fulfilled.”26

In Lucretius the “fish:” that swim are, more appropriately, the “voiceless swimming flocks of scaly ones.” Anthropomorphism excludes the possibility of animal naturalness; the ‘living according to nature’ which Norris identifies as the raw energy celebrated by Darwin and Nietzsche and sees as having been made manifest in the works of Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence. This is essentially characterised by violence. Texts which are concerned with the wild, the untamed, natural and non-cultural provide a useful model for locating the beast within, the otherness of the human/animal, embracing/denial pattern of the human for the animal self enters both the arena of a romanticised golden age, a harmony between beast and man, and a point of entry into the forgotten.

Josefine, the singer, is, at first, capable of narration because she is anthropomorphised and thus differentiated from the pack/ the mousefolk. If not extracted from the group in this way she becomes appropriated by the mouse folk, animalised, her story obliterated. Her voice is not heard.27 As each strategy of narration/singing fails, she becomes invisible to her audience: “Unsuccessful in modifying her song in a way that would create a noticeable difference (not singing as well as she could, cutting, restoring or deleting her grace notes, singing in ostensible pain or weakness) she stops singing altogether.”28 The temptation to humanise the character/narrator Josefine is however denied. As Norris observes the narrator cancels even the last little anthropomorphism (ie the stratagem of silence), by suggesting that:

The domestic animal continues to exist on a highly problematic plain. It is neither the beast of the imagination nor the embodiment of the natural. This is the territory where, as Clark recognises, the ‘animal beloved’ makes its home. It enters the world of representation as an invididualized presence. Baker notes that despite Rene Girard’s positive appreciation of the ambiguous status of the domesticated animal as its ‘proper role’: “the idea of the domesticated animal - and most especially the pet - as an aberrant creature, a living betrayal of its properly animal potential or trajectory, is the one that has tended to hold sway.”32

her ploy may have been no ploy, that her disappearance was not a stratagem at all but an destined instinctual act of her mouse nature. “Strange how she miscalculates, the clever one so wrongly, that one could think she doesn’t calculate at all but is merely driven on by her destiny which in our world can only be a very sad one”.29 By de-anthropomorphizing language in this way Kafka creates a potential for the emergence of what we may describe as the unappropriated beast and thereby challenges the traditional positioning of the animal as a site for negotiating the human through the ‘otherness’ of the former; specifically its lack of speech and thus, of reason. Umberto Eco has considered the ‘speech’ of animals in the middle ages in his text on Interpreting Animals. Animals in the middle ages, “said many things but mostly without knowing it. In the Bestiaries they show up as living signs of something else.”30

The three categories cited by Deleuze and Guattari are those of the pack, the state (those with “fixed symbolic meanings serve exclusively human interests” and then the lowest classification “individuated animals, family pets, sentimental Oedipal animals each with its own petty history “my cat”, “my dog”.33 Baker makes clear the degree to which the ‘pet’ comes to stand for all that the theorists despise - and thus offers further opportunities for the triumph of the anthropocentric view. The pet, anthropomorphised is believed to reveal insights into the behaviour and morality of its owner/author, specifically where it enters narrative or representation. Beatrix Potter collapses the boundaries between wild, domestic and human in her portrayal of Benjamin and Peter Rabbit, both her own pets. Her approach mirrors the

Eco points to a significant ‘nuance’ in Aristotle between the concept of ‘sound’ and ‘noise’. The emission of noises serves, in however slight a degree, to manifest something. 25

Benjamin, op cit., p.122. Norris, op cit., p.3. Ibid., p.122. 28 Ibid., p.125. 29 Ibid. 30 Umberto Eco, “Interpreting Animals”, in The Limits of Interpretation ,Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, pp.114-115. 26 27

31

Ibid., p.115. Baker, op cit., p.168. 33 Ibid. 32

21

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies ambivalence of Howe in the attempt to authenticate and make serious the depiction of the pet/’animal beloved’ on the grounds of anatomical study. Potter’s drawings reveal not only anatomical accuracy but affectionate familiarity. It is only in the narrative that the codes and activities of middleclass late Victorian Britain informs the subject. Potter’s Peter Rabbit is both the mischievous pet and transgressive child. It is the exercise of ‘natural’ animal behaviour which creates the conditions for punishment. His forays into the cabbage patch mirror the dares and guilty fears of childhood games. His name, Peter, distinguishes him from the start of the tale from the nursery cosiness of Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, his siblings. It is Peter who disregards his mother’s command not to enter the vegetable garden and Peter who has to learn that disobedience brings its own discomfort:

writings and drawings the different ‘characters’ of Benjamin Bouncer and Peter are pronounced. The lack of distance between wild and tame and the sublimation of the nature/culture relationship coincides with the appropriation of the animal within an exclusively human frame of reference. The development of individuation mirrored the theorisation of the individual in human directed philosophy. Baker asks:

I’m sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed and made him camomile tea and gave a dose of it to Peter. But Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.34

Such fear, as suggested above, is far from being the preserve of the postmodern and underpins every exploration of the representation of animal life.

what does it mean to say that post-modern artists and philosophers fear pets? It is not that they fear the creatures themselves (though they may feel contempt for them) It is close to what has been called anthropomorphobia - a feat that they ‘may be accused of uncritical sentimentality. in their depiction or discussion of animals.35

The persistence of anthropomorphobia is fundamental to the defence of the human as manifesting a higher intelligence, depending as it must upon a system of categorisation in which the human acquires meaning in relation to the beast/the animal versus the intellectual spiritual. Opposition to the desire to humanise, to sameness within otherness, coexists in a contradictory fashion with the tendency to surrender to the humanising of the beast.

In radical contrast to Kafka, the animal narration is appropriated into the trajectory of purely human behaviour. It is not only the clothes/dress and naming which humanises the character but the denial of natural instinctual behaviour as transgression; the identification of such natural behaviour with the ‘wrong’. Through domestification, ‘naturalness’ is called into question. In a domesticated space where all is provided for, the primary survival instincts (the acquisition of food and the drive for procreation) are distorted or diminished. The domesticated animal/pet demonstrates more than a betrayal of those natural instincts in the way that Berger and Deleuze and Guattari describe. Like all sensory beings, the removal of the fundamentals necessary for basic survival allows for what might be identified as the potential for neurosis (self reflection) to develop or, in the case of a less self-aware creature, such as the rabbit, new dimensions of social behaviour to emerge. The gap between living and dying offers, even in the most simplest form of knowing a possibility for interaction. Potter’s rabbits occupy a new cultural dimension. Kept and bred for food, their proximity to the family home means that they literally enter the domestic space. As the human owner habitually identifies different animals within the group, each will be associated with certain sets of characteristics which derive from the process of identification/projection. Thus the food/pet occupies the uneasy existence of the beloved/consumed. They function not only as a complex site for anthropomorphic projection - specifically the growing unease concerning family relations - but also, as Potter so beautifully documents, adopt recognisable and significantly, representable character traits/personalities of their own. In Potter’s own

Alternatively, as Norris reminds, animal life might be ‘rebiologized’ resisting appropriation. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, offers a different manifestation of ‘Rabbit’; one which, it might be argued, defends his ‘animal’ status. The author’s frequent mention of ‘all Rabbits friends and relations’ evokes a warm uncomplicated yet unsophisticated community, prolific but unspecific. There is one main tale which centres on Rabbit, ‘In which Rabbit has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings’.36 Rabbit is a character who sits relatively low on the evolutionary scale, victim and prey, a kind of little man. Rabbit, in the narrative, however sees himself as a helper and a leader. Implicitly, Rabbit is denied access to the ‘higher world’ of education/knowledge which is the privilege of Christopher Robin and thus takes on the mantle of ‘lack’ which Norris describes. What makes the characterisation interesting is the fact that the tale allows for recognition of the other virtues (animal) associated with Rabbit’s form of cleverness; - intuition, instinct and cunning. It is left to Eyeore to point out the difference between the ‘learning’ that the young Christopher Robin is involved with and the “things Rabbit knows”. 35

Baker, op cit., p.175. AA Milne, “In Which Rabbit has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings” in: The House at Pooh Corner, Methuen, 1994, pp.178-190, p.188. 36

34

Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Frederick Warne, First Edition, October, 1902.

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Helen Boorman: Animals in Art: Resisting a Culture of the Anthropocentric

The biocentric understanding of the ontological nature of the animal evolved dialectically out of its difference from the exclusively human aspects of culture, culture as the product of homo significans. While Darwin collapses the cardinal restrictions between animal and human, arguing that they exhibit intellectual, moral and cultural differences in degree only, not in kind, Hegel made the function of the ‘other’ in human desire the cornerstone of the symbolic life that marks the radical distinction between nature and culture.37 This much is certain; of all of Kafka’s creatures the animals have the greatest opportunity for reflection. Benjamin, Illuminations38

37 38

Norris, op cit., p.3. Benjamin, op cit., p.122.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

24

Crown Steeples and Crowns Imperial Ian Campbell

The towers of St Giles, Edinburgh, and of the chapel of King’s College Aberdeen are both “crowned” – it is difficult to avoid using the word – by flying buttresses, which meet in the middle to support a finial. (figs.1 & 2) Although their architectural language or form appears late Gothic, the present article argues that the resemblance of these “crown steeples” to imperial crowns means that their message or content is Renaissance.1 As such they inaugurated a fashion which persisted into the seventeenth century.

there evidence that they were executed. A gift of bells to the church in Dundee in 1495 would seem to imply that the tower was already nearing completion.5 Even such limited circumstantial evidence is lacking for St Mary’s Haddington, but from the tower’s ambitious design it appears to have been an attempt to both emulate and surpass that of St Giles.6 The steeple of King’s College, Aberdeen, was built in the same campaign as the rest of the chapel, the foundation stone of which was laid, according to its dedication inscription on the 2 April, 1500, and was complete to roof level by 1506.7 There are only four fliers, rising from diagonally-set buttresses at the corners like those of St Giles, which similarly have three pinnacles and foliate cresting. The tower parapet differs in being solid and crenellated. The fliers support an octagonal drum, with engaged Tuscan colonnettes at its angles, above which rises an open miniature eight-arched closed crown. The Tuscan columns and the form of the crown suggest they were altered during a scheme of repairs in 1634, when all but one of the original pinnacles were replaced.8 Kelly believes that the original finial would have been a spirelet more like that of St Giles.9 Fawcett speculates that the crown’s resemblance to that of the fountain in the courtyard at Linlithgow Palace, completed about 1538, may mean that the original finial was also a crown erected around the same time, but then one would need to ask why the steeple was left unfinished in 1506.10

The steeples at Edinburgh and Aberdeen are the two extant examples of a group, all either executed or planned, in the last quarter of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century on or near the eastern seaboard of Scotland. The earliest is generally regarded to be that of St Giles, the town church of pre-Reformation Edinburgh, but the precise date of the steeple’s construction is unknown. In preparation for St Giles’ successful bid to achieve collegiate status in the late 1460s, the eastern arm was raised in height during the 1450s by the addition of a clerestory, which may in turn have prompted the heightening of the existing crossing tower.2 There is record of unspecified building works in 1486, which, if connected with the belfry stage of the tower, would put it at the end of the reign of James III (r. 1460-1488).3 The crown takes the form of eight flying buttresses, four diagonally set at the corners and four in the middle of each side, all resting on corbels. Each flier is decorated with foliate cresting and trios of crocketed pinnacles, the topmost tier forming a ring around a tall central finial. The upper parts from the second tier of pinnacles were rebuilt in 1648, as can be seen from the banded pilasters and cherubs’ heads decorating the central finial.4 Between the bases of the fliers runs a parapet pierced with quatrefoils below upturned half-quatrefoils.

The tower of the town church of Linlithgow, St Michael’s, also had a four-flier crown, and a crenellated parapet, but in other respects it was distinctly different from the other Scottish steeples (fig.3). The fliers rose from square-set corner pinnacles to support something resembling a diminutive square tower parapet, with one central and four corner pinnacles. The fliers were undecorated except for single pinnacles roughly two thirds up, from which sprang a second ring of miniature fliers supporting the upper square stage. The effect is intriguing but looks decidedly rickety, which may explain why it was taken down around 1821. A bell was cast in 1490, suggesting that the tower was nearing completion, in which case its crown may predate that at Aberdeen.11 Another four-flier crown survives on the early seventeenth-century tolbooth (town hall) steeple of Glasgow, but that is too late for our purposes.12

The towers of two other town churches - St Mary’s, Haddington and St Mary’s, Dundee – show evidence that eight-armed crowns were planned eight buttresses for crowns similar to those of St Giles, but in neither case is I would like to thank Richard Fawcett, Mark Girouard, Luuk Houwen, Aonghus MacKechnie, Roger Mason, Hera Psaros and Simon Thurley, for supplying information and discussing points with me, all at very short notice and with great patience 1 The most thorough treatment of crown steeples remains W. Kelly, “Scottish crown steeples”, in A Tribute offered by the University of Aberdeen to the memory of William Kelly, LL.D, A.R.S.A, ed. W. Douglas Simpson (Aberdeen University Studies no. 125), Aberdeen, 1949, pp.3448. 2 R. Fawcett, Scottish architecture from the accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation, 1371-1560, Edinburgh, 1994, p.187f. and J Gifford, C. McWilliam & D. Walker with C. Wilson, Edinburgh (Buildings of Scotland), Harmondsworth, 1984, p.103. 3 Gifford et al. Edinburgh, p.108. See below for a revision of the accepted order of building of the steeples 4 Ibid., p.109.

5

Fawcett, Scottish architecture, p.209. Ibid., p.196f. 7 R. Fawcett, “The medieval building” in King’s College Chapel, Aberdeen, 1500-2000, ed. J. Geddes, Leeds, 2000, p.35f. 8 Fawcett, “Medieval building”, p.60. 9 Kelly, “Crown steeples”, p.46f. 10 Fawcett , “Medieval building”, pp.58-60. 11 Fawcett, Scottish architecture, p.198. 12 Kelly, “Crown steeples”, p.35. 6

25

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies There are many late Gothic examples of towers acquiring superstructures supported by flying buttresses in England, France and Flanders, but it is generally acknowledged that the probable immediate inspiration for the Scottish crown steeples was the steeple of St Nicholas, now the cathedral of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, just across the Border in English Northumberland.13 Four fliers rise from octagonal pinnacles at the corners of the square west tower to support a tall square lantern, from which rises an octagonal spirelet, flanked by four more miniature fliers springing from the lantern’s angle pinnacles. The tower parapet is crenellated and pierced. The vault inside St Nicholas’ tower is dated 1474, and it is assumed that the superstructure was built soon after.14 The church of St Mary-le-Bow, destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, had a very similar steeple, as can be seen in J.C. Visscher’s View of London of 1616.15 Stow tells us that the Bow steeple was constructed from 1478 to about 1512, and that it had five lanterns, one at each corner and one at the meeting point of the buttresses, and that the central lantern was intended to be glazed and lit at night.16 Given these construction dates it would seem to be contemporary with the Scottish steeples, and therefore is unlikely to have had much direct influence, although there is the possibility that the preceding tower of Bow Church, of about 1357, already had something similar.17 As already stated, however, the geographical and temporal proximities of St Nicholas make it the most likely antecedent of the Scottish group.

were aspiring. The question for us is whether the resemblance to a crown was indeed intentional. The answer seems to be provided unequivocally by Hector Boece, the first principal of King’s College. In his Latin Lives of the Bishops of Aberdeen, first published in 1522, Boece writes that the college chapel “Habet campanile, immensa altitudine sublatum, cui lapideus arcus instar imperialis diadematis, mirre arte fabrefactus …”, which has been translated as “[the chapel] has a bell-tower of immense height, with a stone arch in the shape of an imperial crown, built with wonderful art …”.19 By “imperial crown” Boece means the arched “closed” crown, which in the Middle Ages had been reserved for use by the Holy Roman and Byzantine emperors, while western European kings were content with “open” crowns.20 This explicit use of an imperial crown on a college named in honour of the Scottish king has been convincingly linked to a wider political and cultural context in which the Scottish parliament declared in 1469 that James III enjoyed “ful jurisdictione and free impire within his realm”.21 Such an assertion was not unique to Scotland but was part of a wider trend in the fifteenth century of states adopting the legal formula rex in regno suo est imperator (“a king in his own kingdom is emperor”), developed in Italian city states in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to defend their liberties 19

Hectoris Boetii Murthlacensium et Aberdonensium episcoporumvitae, ed, and tr. J. Moir (New Spalding Club), Aberdeen, 1894, p.95. Fawcett (Scottish Architecture, p. 163) takes Boece to mean only the crown finial rather than whole superstructure. Since then he has reverted to the more obvious interpretation: “Medieval Building”, p.58. 20 See B. Guenée, States and rulers in later medieval Europe, tr. J. Vale, Oxford, 1985, pp.75-78. On the crown of the Holy Roman emperors, see P. E. Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, vol. III (Schriften de Monumenta Germaniae historica 13/III), Stuttgart, 1956, pp.10191024. It had two arches crossing in the middle. It may be asked how can St Giles have four (i.e. eight fliers)? It is just possible that there might be some allusion to the Byzantine empire: the Byzantine crown also had two crossed arches, but Pisanello’s portrait medal of the penultimate reigning Byzantine emperor, John VIII Paleologus (r. 1423-1448), shows him wearing a hat with a tall eight-ribbed crown: S. K. Scher, The Currency of Fame: Portrait medals of the Renaissance, London, 1965, p.45. Andreas Paleologos, pretender to the Byzantine imperial title appear to have sold his rights to the French king Charles VIII. During the latter’s expedition to Italy in 1494-5, rumours abounded, especially in Rome and Naples, of his assuming the imperial title: see Scheller, “Imperial themes”, pp.42-45. William Elphinstone was in Rome to obtain permission to found King’s College during Charles VIII’s visit and Charles appointed Bérault (or Bernard) Stewart d’Aubigny, who visited and eventually died in Scotland, constable of Naples and governor of Calabria: see L Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431 –1514, Aberdeen, 1995, p.292 & p.296 and J. S. C. Bridge, History of France from the death of Louis XI, 5 vols, Oxford, 1921 & 1936, II, p.182 & p.288. Hence there would have been no shortage of information in Scotland on Charles’ interest in the Byzantine crown. 21 R. Mason, “Regnum et Imperium: Humanism and the political culture of early Renaissance Scotland” in R. Mason, Kingship and Commonweal: Political thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland, East Linton, 1998, pp.104-38, at p.130. See also R. Mason, “This realm of Scotland is an empire?: Imperial ideas and iconography in early Renaissance Scotland”, in Church, chronicle and learning in medieval and early Renaissance Scotland: Essays presented to Donald Watt on the occasion of the completion of the publication of Bower’s Scotichronicon, ed. B. E. Crawford, Edinburgh 1999, pp.73-91, at p.77.

The closest in overall conception to St Nicholas is that of Linlithgow, with its square intermediate stage like the top of a lantern, whereas the Kings’ College and St Giles examples, with fliers directly supporting a central finial, appear less spire-like and much more like crowns. This may imply that the Linlithgow steeple was the earliest in Scotland, followed by that of King’s College, still with four-fliers, which were now more decorated. King’s College then led on to St Giles, with similar fliers now eight in number, which was to have been emulated at Dundee and Haddington. One telling point in favour of this sequence is the presence of the quatrefoils and halfquatrefoils of the parapet at St Giles rather than the crenellations found at Newcastle, Linlithgow and Aberdeen, which were the norm at this date in ecclesiastical architecture in the British Isles.18 This differing treatment is much more appropriate if the intention was to resemble a real crown, and if so means that the St Giles crown is the fully-developed model towards which those of St Michael’s and King’s College

13 On general late Gothic experiments with spires and lanterns see Kelly, “Crown steeples”, p.38f. and Fawcett, “Medieval building”, pp.55-57. 14 J Grundy et al., Northumberland (Buildings of England), London, 1992, p.418. 15 J. Adair, The Pilgrims’ Way, London, 1978, p.75. 16 J Stow, A Survey of London: written in the year 1598, Stroud, 1912, p.253. 17 Grundy, Northumberland, p.418. 18 See C. Coulson, “Hierarchism in conventual crenellation”, Medieval Archaeology, 26, 1982, pp.69-100

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Ian Campbell: Crown Steeples and Crowns Imperial

against the Holy Roman emperors, and equally useful for resisting papal claims to interfere in temporal jurisdictions.22 The spread of the doctrine marks the end of the medieval notion of Christendom, in which the Holy Roman emperor and the pope, were acknowledged, at least nominally, to have some sort of suzerainty, and the beginning of an early modern Europe of independent sovereign states. Naturally enough, kings who espoused the formula wanted to mark their imperial jurisdiction with appropriate symbolism, especially the adoption of the closed crown. We cannot be certain that the Scottish crown itself acquired arches before its remodelling in 1540 for the coronation of James V’s queen, Mary of Guise.23 However, that is nothing unusual: in France Charles VIII is depicted wearing an imperial crown around 1497, but the first coronation with a real closed crown was not until that of Henry II in 1547.24

their crowns follows”, includes descriptions with accompanying drawings the seven types of crowns awarded for different types of military victory: triumphal; “obsedional” (i.e, pertaining to sieges); mural; “castrious” (pertaining to camps); naval; “oval” (pertaining to ovations); and civic.30 Certain passages echo some lines of the English poet, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, written in 1431. However, Seven deeds is more comprehensive and therefore does not depend on Lydgate but rather on a common source, which Lydgate obligingly tells us was “Agellius”, that is Aulus Gellius. During a prolonged stay in Athens in mid second century AD, Gellius, a Roman lawyer, compiled his Attic Nights, a miscellany of snippets of information on grammar, history and law, often cobbled from otherwise lost literary works. The number of extant manuscripts testifies to its fascination for the Middle Ages, and it was first printed in 1469, followed by two more editions before 1500, one reprinted twelve times.31

In Scotland the first manifestation of the imperial crown is on a silver groat of James III, issued about 1485.25 The next two are miniatures in the Book of Hours, now in Vienna, commissioned by James IV for his marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503, one showing an arched crown over the royal coat of arms and the other showing James at prayer wearing such a crown.26 Mason documents several other occurrences of the imperial crown in art and heraldry before Scotland gained its real imperial crown in1540.27 It is to matters heraldic that we must now turn for answers to the next two questions: is the use of the imperial crown truly “Renaissance” in looking back to classical antiquity, or merely in the looser sense of “early modern”? And, how did the Scots translate the crown motif into stone?

In the fifth book of the Attic Nights is a discussion of eight types of military crowns: the triumphal, siege (obsedionalis), civic, mural, camp, naval, ovation (ovalis) and olive crowns.32 Seven deeds besides changing the order and omitting the olive crown is a paraphrase rather than a translation of Gellius, sometimes misunderstanding the original, as with the “obsedional” and “castrious” crowns”, where no mention is made of sieges or camps, and sometimes adding information not in Gellius, as when it attributes the invention of the system of military crowns to one “Marquinssus Torqueus”, clearly Marcus Manlius Capitolinus or Torquatus, the Roman hero best remembered for being woken by the sacred geese on the Capitol and thereby successfully repelling an attack by the Gauls in 387 BC. The same story is found in Lydgate, implying that both he and Loutfut were relying on an intermediate source rather than directly on Gellius.33 However, that is beside the main point, which is that those interested in crowns in the fifteenth century were looking to classical antiquity to justify their use and to inform their design. It will be objected that there the imperial crown does not appear either in Gellius’ or the Seven deeds’ list. However, the description of the triumphal crown in the Seven deeds says that “The first is the croun triumphale and is giffin wnto noble men as to conquerouris that in battell of arrest, undir baner displayit, that conqueris and wynnis thair enemys and puttis thaim to the flicht. This crownn triumphale is maid of gold and in fassoun lik to the croun of ane empriour as is heir schawyn…”34 In figure 5 we indeed see an arched crown, the only discernible difference being that the arches are slightly less steep than those in figure 4. When we look at the English translation of the parallel passage in Gellius, we find no reference to emperors: “‘Triumphal’ crowns are of gold and are

Those principally concerned with redesigning the royal arms would, naturally, be heralds. One of their number, Adam Loutfut, Kintyre Pursuivant, copied most of a manuscript, British Library, Harley MS 6149, around 1494.28 It is a miscellany and includes two consecutive short items, the first entitled “The coronation of the emperor”, dealing not solely with that topic but with coronations of kings and investitures of nobles. It includes drawings of an imperial crown and of the arms of the Holy Roman emperor, with an imperial crown. (fig.4) Both show the rather tall arches typical of the actual crown worn at imperial coronations at Aachen in the fifteenth century.29 The second item, headed “The vii deeds of honour and of 22

Mason, “Regnum et imperium”, p.129f. Ibid, p.141. 24 R. Scheller, “Imperial themes in art and literature of the early French Renaissance: the period of Charles VIII, Simiolus, XII, 1981-2, pp.5-69, at p.57, fig. 22; and “Ensigns of authority: French royal symbolism in the age of Louis XI”, Simiolus, XIII, 1983, pp.75-141, at p.111. 25 Mason, “This realm”, p.77, fig. 4.1. 26 Ibid., p.81, fig. 4.4. 27 Ibid., pp.81-86. 28 L. A. J. R. Houwen, “The Seven Deeds of Honour and Their Crowns: Lydgate and a Late Fifteenth-Century Scots Chivalric Treatise”, Studies in Scottish Literature, XXVIII, 1983, pp.150-164 at pp.150-153; and The Deidis of Armorie: A heraldic treatise and bestiary, 2 vols. (Scottish Text Society), Edinburgh, 1994, I, pp.xiii & xxviii. 29 British Library, Harley MS 6149, fols 115v. - 124r.; Houwen, Deidis, I, p. xlviii. On the Aachen crown see, Scheller, “Imperial themes”, p.9. 23

30 British Library, Harley MS 6149, fols 124r. – 126r.;Houwen, “Seven deeds”, pp.157-162. 31 The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, tr. J. G. Rolfe, 3 vols, London & New York, 1927, I, pp.xii – xxiii. 32 Attic Nights, V.vi.; Rolfe tr. I, pp.391-397. 33 Houwen, “Lydgate”, p.158. 34 Ibid, p.159.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies presented to a commander in recognition of the honour of a triumph. This in common parlance is ‘gold for a crown’. This crown in ancient times was of laurel but later they began to make them of gold.”35 It is only when that we look at the Latin original that source of confusion becomes clear: “‘Triumphales’ coronae sunt aurae, quae imperatoribus ob honorem triumphi mittuntur. Id vulgo dicitur ‘aurum coronarium’. Haec antiquitus e lauru erant, post fieri ex auro coeptae.”36 Gellius is here using “imperator” in its original sense to mean a military commander, but increasingly during the Roman empire the word becomes restricted to the emperor, who was by default commander-in-chief. The only hint he gives of the crown’s appearance is to say that it was gold by his time, having originally been made from laurel. It is very easy to imagine how anyone reading Gellius in the fifteenth century would equate crowns imperial and triumphal and imagine that Roman emperors wore closed crowns, as indeed can be seen in late fifteenth century paintings portraying Augustus.37 The fact that they show Augustus still in Gothic rather than classical attire does not diminish the classical content of the paintings. By the same token, the classical references of the crown steeples of King’s College and St Giles should be recognised.38

Myres for his own use. Scrymgeour was both a macer (another Scottish heraldic officer) and, between 1529 and 1562, a royal Master of Works.42 Hence we have a direct link between heraldry and architecture in the period immediately following the erection of the crown steeples of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and Scrymgeour was in office during the period, which saw both the erection of the Linlithgow Palace fountain with its crown finial (c. 1538) and crown finials to conical roofs of James V’s tower at Holyroodhouse (1528 – 1532).43 The final point to be considered is the international legacy of the crown steeple motif. The earliest appears to have been that on the monastery church at Brou in Burgundy, built by Margaret of Austria, daughter of emperor Maximilian I, in honour of her husband, Philibert the Fair, duke of Savoy, who died in 1505. The church took from 1506 to 1532 to build in flamboyant late Gothic style. A crown imperial in stone graced the tower, but structural problems caused its removal in the seventeenth century.44 A possible source of knowledge of the Scottish crown steeples is via the workshop of Conrad Meit, which completed the tomb of Philibert in 1531, and which may have been responsible for the tomb in King’s College Chapel of William Elphinstone, its founder, around the same time.45

Heralds may also have been instrumental in realising the crown imperial architecturally. Heraldry can be seen as an applied art, heralds not only designing coats of arms but sometimes actually painting them.39 I have touched elsewhere on the possible role of heralds in the design of the temporary arches erected for the entry of Margaret Tudor into Edinburgh in 1503.40 We have no evidence that Loutfut was still active as a herald by then but certainly the commissioner of his scribal work in Harley 6149 was. William Cumming was Marchmont Herald from 1494, becoming Lyon Depute, probably in 1507, and eventually Lord Lyon King of Arms in 1512, the chief heraldic officer of Scotland, until his death in 1519.41 A copy of Harley 6149 was also later made by Sir John Scrymgeour of the

The second is at Chambord, which was built between 1519 and 1538. The centrepiece of the main block is the great staircase over which rise eight buttresses supporting a glazed lantern topped by an imperial crown, over which a second diminutive lantern again topped by a crown. Contact between the French and Scottish courts was very strong at this period, with the poet Ronsard visiting Scotland twice and James V, himself, coming to France in 1536-7 to marry Madeleine de Valois.46 Following Chambord in date is an extant crown steeple, which is closest in structural design to those in Scotland. Above the Pati des Tarongers, of the largely fifteenthcentury Palau de la Generalitat in Barcelona, towers a three-stage belfry (Fig.6). The lowest stage is unadorned masonry; the second has angle pilasters rising from corbels, framing blind pointed arches; and the third has a parapet pierced with a trellis-like design, and four corner pinnacles from which rise four fliers to support a central pinnacle. The resemblance to the basic structure of Scottish crowns is startling, although there is no evidence

35

Gellius Attic Nights, V.vi. 5-7; Rolfe tr. p.393. Ibid., p.392. See, for example, the miniature of “Augustus confirming Herod in his kingship from the workshop of Jean Fouquet, c.1470: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. nouv. acq. fr. 21013, fol. 22r. illustrated in Scheller, “Imperial themes”, p.10, fig. 1. 38 On the relationship between “triumphal” and “imperial”, see A. MacKechnie, “Stirling’s triumphal arch”, Welcome: News for Friends of Historic Scotland, September, 1991, p. 5. See also A. MacKechnie, Some French influences on the development of 16-century court architecture (In-House: Historic Scotland Research Papers, I) Edinburgh, 1992. 39 J Balfour Paul, Heraldry in relation to Scottish history and art, Edinburgh, 1900, pp.193-197, discusses heralds as painters. Simon Thurley discusses briefly the connections between Tudor craftsmen and heralds in The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460-1547, New Haven & London, 1993, p.102, including the importance of heraldic pattern books for architectural decoration. The close relationship is also exemplified in Thomas Peacham’s, The compleat gentleman, Amsterdam 1968, first published in 1622, which has consecutive chapters on drawing and painting (pp.127-129) and on heraldry (pp.130-134). 40 I. Campbell, “Edinburgh’s first triumphal arches”, in The Architecture of Scottish Cities, ed. D. Mays, East Linton, 1997, pp.26-33, at p.30. 41 Houwen, Deidis, I, pp.xxviii - xxx. 36 37

42

National Library of Scotland, Adv. mss 31.5.2; Houwen, Deidis, I, p. lxvf. On Scrymgeour see, H. M Paton (ed.), Accounts of the Masters of Work: Volume 1 1529-1615, Edinburgh, 1957, p.xxiiif. On macers, see J. Stevenson, Heraldry in Scotland, 2 vols, Glasgow, 1914, I, p.51 & II, p.422. 43 Mason, “This realm”, p.84, fig. 4.7 and Fawcett, “Medieval building”, p.58, figs. 4.17 & 4.18. 44 M. - F. Poiret, Le Monastère de Brou: le Chef d’oeuvre d’une fille d’empereur, Paris, 1994, p.86. 45 I. Campbell, “Bishop Elphinstone’s Tomb in King’s College Chapel, ed. Geddes (see n. 7 above), pp.115-129. 46 I. Campbell, “Linlithgow’s ‘Princely Palace’ and its influence in Europe”, Architectural Heritage, V, 1995, pp.1-20, at p.8.

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Ian Campbell: Crown Steeples and Crowns Imperial

that it was intended to be regarded as a crown. The belfry, which dates from 1568 was added as part of the enlargement of the Pati by Pere Ferrer in the late sixteenth century.47 Ferrer has used the by now out-moded Gothic style for his belfry, showing a rare sensitivity to context, but we know nothing of how he arrived at his solution. The next to be considered is the tower of the castle of Copenhagen, which, during 1595-6, in connection with the coronation of Christian IV, had a copper-covered spire added in the form of a cupola rising up to three crowns of diminishing size.48 These were open crowns, like the actual crown made for Christian, and also symbolising the triple crowns of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. William Shaw, Master of Works to James VI, was one of those accompanying James VI to Denmark for his marriage to Christian’s sister, Anne in 1589-90.49 So, what may appear to be merely flights of fancy of Scotland’s late Gothic masons can now seen as harbingers of the Renaissance, bearing a strongly classical meaning, and the inspiration for architects not merely in Scotland but across Europe.

47 J. Ainaud de Lesarte, El Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, 1990, p.14f; Kelly, “Crown steeples” p.37 refers to the belfry but does not give its name or exact location. 48 J Skovgard, A King’s Architecture: Christian IV and his buildings, London, 1973, p.28. 49 Campbell, “Linlithgow”, p.10. Between 1631 and 1642, much of the castle of Kronborg was rebuilt following a fire in 1629. Some of the attic dormers bear gables topped by imperial crown finials in stone: see Christian IV and Europe: the 19th Art exhibition of the Council of Europe, exh. cat., Denmark, 1988, p.473.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.1. Tower of St Giles, Edinburgh, c. 1500? (RCAHMS)

Fig.2. Kings’ College Chapel, Aberdeen, 1500 – 1506 (RCAHMS)

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Fig.3. Tower of St Michael’s Linlithgow, c. 1490? (from Walter Scott’s Provincial Antiquities of Scotland (RCAHMS))

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.4. An imperial crown, c. 1494 (British Library, Harley MS 6149, fol. 116r.)

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Ian Campbell: Crown Steeples and Crowns Imperial

Fig.5. A triumphal crown, c. 1494 (British Library, Harley MS 6149, fol. 125r.)

33

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.6. Belfry of the Palau de la Generalitat, Barcelona, late 16th century (Hera Psaros)

34

Hunter-Gatherer Mythic Thought and European Cave Art Desmond Collins

The purpose of this contribution is to examine some questions or puzzles concerning the well known ‘cave art’ of south west France. I first encountered these nearly forty years ago, when I was in regular contact with John Onians, whom we now honour in this volume. We shared a flat at this time, and we visited the caves together, often discussing the problems that they presented.

and available. Representational art was present in a significant part of the ethnographic sample. Let us first take the better four cases:- i. Australian aborigines; ii. Eskimo/Inuit; iii. Andaman islanders; iv. Malay peninsular negritos (Semang, Batek etc.). The first two, covering hundreds of local groups, exhibited a widespread occurrence of undoubted representational art; the latter two (much smaller samples) have or had no convincing case of a corpus of art, or even a single good example, to my knowledge.

In those years, I think that (in common with most workers in this field) I underestimated the extent to which huntergatherers had a completely different way of thinking, or mindset, from modern western culture. Archaeology is a poor avenue to approaching this mindset, but I intend to argue that ethnographic evidence, from hunting peoples who survived to recent times, is a much more useful and fruitful avenue.

Of the five less reliably known groups, two provided good evidence of representational art:- the subarctic American Indians (Athabascans and northern Algonkians); and the San ‘Bushmen’ of southern Africa. The remainder have or had little or no representational art:- The Fuegian Amerindians of southern Patagonia, the Congo pygmies or Twide, and the Yukaghir and other Siberian hunters. This holds true for other less satisfactory isolated groups like the Hadza of east Africa and the Tasaday and other negritos of the Philippines and Indonesia; we need not pursue here why the latter provide less reliable information.

In this paper I shall try to answer or re-frame three main questions:1. Why was the art ‘done’, or what motivations led to the creation of the art? 2. Why is it that (what seem to be) animals are the commonest representations by far in cave art, and were they the animals which were most frequently hunted? 3. Why do the relatively rare ‘anthropomorphs’ or ‘humans’ which do occur, so commonly have animal attributes (horns, tails, paws etc.)?

Art is thus very unlikely to be universal among huntergatherers, and cannot be assumed. However in the case of the palaeolithic hunters of south western France, we know already that it was present, and even abundant; (and this was not just in the Franco-Iberian area, but also in the case of small art objects in central Europe, eastern Europe and in Siberia).

The first part of this paper will concentrate on those aspects of hunter-gatherer thought or behaviour which turn out to have some direct relevance to the questions we are investigating. Wherever they can be found, the search is for universals (which are relatively rare), or for nearuniversals (which are commoner). The ethnographic sample which has been used consists of four cases or groups of cases which may be considered rather reliable, and five further groups which can be useful, but are of lesser reliability. My study of these was published primarily in Levels of Culture and Human History1 and also partly in The Evolution of Human Culture .2 Because only the outline conclusions can be presented here, further details of the methods used, and the sample and its relevance, should be sought in the books cited above. We may summarise this work by saying that a remarkable similarity was found (in many fields) across the entire sample of hunter-gatherers; and contrasting patterns were found in tribal farmers, ancient states and modern western culture. Archaeological evidence (which is generally, sadly, of less help than ethnography) provided some confirmation of these patterns, wherever it was relevant

In contrast to the apparently optional nature of art in hunter-gatherer societies, in all the better known ethnographic cases and the five less reliable cases, myths (and a pattern of mythic thought) were always present. This was closely linked to ritual; and these two (the mythoritual complex) form the core of hunter-gatherer religion. Myth seems to be a genuine universal of this culture level. In every case where hunter-gatherer art has been investigated ethnographically, it has turned out to be based on myth (that is, the sacred stories by which these societies lived). Just as the rites normally enact or re-enact mythic tales, so the art normally depicts them. Not only did all the hunter sample have myths, but all their thought was mythic, in the sense that it was imbued with mythic ideas. In so far as they had ‘practical thought’, this too was imbued with mythic notions. The answer to why this or that was done, or done in a particular way, was always to the effect that this was how the mythic ancestors had done things. This was considered a full explanation, and above all a full justification or validation, for

1

Collins, D., Levels of Culture and Human History, Clayhanger Books, 1998. 2 Collins, D., The Evolution of Human Culture, Clayhanger Books, 2000.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies everything.

The third principle is the most vague and difficult to grasp. Perhaps the best known example of it is the ‘Alcheringa’ or ‘Dreaming’ of the Australian aborigines. I have used the term ‘Pan-Cosmic Sacred Bond’. Apart from the idea that everything is part of a sacred whole, there are three other notions regularly involved here. The first is that of routine metamorphosis or interchange, which we have already met in shamanic magic. The second is the notion of the events or time of the ancestors, which is the subject of the myths. Lastly there is the idea that humans and animals (or other elements of the environment) were joined by some vague but special sacred link. These links and the events of the mythic time were used as a kind of symbol for the ‘Bond’ as a whole. The animal/human link may be termed ‘Therianthropy’; it is apparently universal among hunter-gatherers. By far the best known form of it is Totemism. In this, an individual human or a group ‘adopts’ a type of animal as a kind of brother or alter ego or protector.

Contrary to our way of thinking, there was no leisure or aesthetic sector of life, distinct from ‘work’. Nor was there even a trace of the concept of a secular sector in their activities. Everything was mediated by mythic thought of the kind to be described below. This was true not just of hunter-gatherers and the tribal farmers who succeeded them, but also (according to Henri Frankfort and his colleagues3) of all ancient states before the Hellenic Greeks and their successors. These pre-Hellenic peoples all apparently lacked a non-mythic (non-religious) outlook of any kind, and lacked the ability to depersonalise their world. An objective viewpoint is a relatively late discovery. It remains true for modern investigators, that it is almost impossible to ‘read’ the myths in European cave art; but this would equally be largely true of, say, Australian aboriginal art, for anyone with no knowledge at all of hunter-gatherer myth. We may anticipate for a moment, and note that the two most commonly occurring themes in hunter myth are firstly ‘Origins’, and secondly ‘Conflict or Trouble’ of various kinds. These themes are common in over three quarters of all mythic cycles, and would thus be expected in palaeolithic cave art.

While concepts of metamorphy and therianthropy seem to be universal, totemism is found in only a part of the sample. It is very common among the Australian aborigines, present among the Eskimo and subarctic amerindians, and possibly present in the Andaman islanders and hunters of Siberia. But it is not clearly present in the other cases.

Considerable access to hunter-gatherer mythic thought can be gained by looking at four basic principles briefly described below.4

The fourth principle is a social or socio-mythic one of egalitarianism (or more strictly quasi-egalitarianism). It need not detain us here, except in so far as it rules out not only any notion of humans being ‘superior’ to animals, plants or rocks, but more importantly it rules out any possibility of the ancestors or mythic heroes being ‘superior in status’ to humans. Thus the notion of ‘deities’ was effectively incompatible with this principle. The mythic ancestors were revered, but not in any meaningful sense worshipped.

The first of the four main principles holds that ‘everything’ (animate or inanimate) is alive in some sense, because it consists of a ‘body’ and more importantly a ‘spirit’ or soul. The latter is the owner or animator, and has a quasiautonomous existence enabling it to move about without the body. This animistic mythic principle, I have termed ‘Pan-animism’; it seems to be a genuine universal among hunter-gatherers.5 The principle accounts for the fact that all ideas and relations are personalised; neither thinking of objects nor thinking objectively is apparently found at this level.

We may briefly add two features of hunter myth, which are very typical, but contrast with later myth. First the main mythic characters (ancestors) are usually found to be wandering and foraging and hunting, much as their descendants do. Secondly the myth regularly has a pair of characters. Any number higher than two or three is rare, (and their grasp of numbers is in general minimal). Investigators of cave art have also noted the commonness of recurrent pairings such as bison/horse, bison/mammoth and ox/horse.6

The second principle (shamanic magic) follows partly from the preceding one. ‘We’ can usually only achieve anything in this world by getting the ‘co-operation’ of the ‘spirits’ in question. The person in the hunting group who is thought to have some special skill in manipulating spirits, and thus events, is the shaman. Trickery and other forms of cajoling are used. As a tenet of this principle, both the shaman and the characters in the myths are thought to metamorphose or transmigrate, as the spirit passes from one body to another (often an animal). Thus animalhuman metamorphosis is seen as normal. This broad principle is universal or near-universal in hunter-gatherers.

It is now time to attempt an answer to the first of the three questions which have occupied the attention of writers on cave art, namely the motivation behind the cave art of the ice age hunters of south west Europe. The sort of answer that hunter-gatherers of the ethnographic sample give when asked why they do the things they do, (whether it is art or ritual or whatever), is to the effect that they have always

3

Frankfort, H., et al., Before Philosophy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1949. 4 They are set out in more detail in Collins, 1998, chapters 6 and 7. 5 Collins, 1998, pp.120-6.

6 Leroi-Gourhan, A., The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe, Thames & Hudson, London, 1964, p.509.

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Desmond Collins: Hunter-Gatherer Mythic Thought and European Cave Art

hunters.

done these things, since their ancestors had instituted them. (In the rare cases where culture has changed recently, this is quickly attributed to innovation by an ancestor, and is duly considered to be validated by this knowledge.)

Let us now turn to the second of the three questions which have puzzled researchers studying Franco-Iberian cave art, namely why the main panels are full of animals (plus a few enigmatic symbols), while there are few, or usually no, obvious people. We have seen that the ‘linking’ of people with animals (and less often plants and inanimate objects) was typical of hunter-gatherers. Indeed the matter can better be stated the other way round, by saying that they did not make any clear distinction between people and animals. In the case of totemism, which may well have prevailed among hunters of south west Europe, it was normal for individuals to be seen as both (or equally) animal and human. Again and again in the myths, ancestors are called by the name of an animal, and also depicted in animal form.

If they were asked what a particular picture meant, they would no doubt tell the appropriate portion of the myth it represented. (As the Australian anthropologist Alan Thorne warned recently, this can take three days or more!) If they were questioned on whether they practised art “for art’s sake”, it is reasonably certain that this would provoke blank incomprehension, because, as we have seen, they do not think in terms of a leisure or aesthetic sector in their lives. The answer to the question, in our terms, should probably be that art is part of the mytho-ritual complex (i.e. huntergatherer religion). Some hunters are accustomed to depict their myths; others are apparently not. It is doubtful if there is a single ethnographic example of hunter art which is not related to their myth.

There is thus nothing very surprising in panels of animals being the dominant feature in a myth-based art of huntergatherers. That does not alter what we noted earlier – that to actually interpret the panels as being a particular story of a mythic event is difficult or impossible. That some of the figures appear to be speared or about to be speared (both ‘animals’, and the anthropomorphic figures at Cougnac for example) is entirely in accord with the fact that one of the two most common themes in the myth of this level is conflict or trouble. Indeed both homicide and the infliction of horrific injuries occur regularly in hunter myth. Such ‘violence’ would be the most reasonable explanation in the case of the ice age art of south western Europe. The other main theme is the ‘originating events’ which occurred in the primal ancestor-time. No doubt such origins are indicated in the panels of animals, even if the story of how something or someone was being transformed into their current form may never be clear.

We may briefly explore the question of ‘magic’ in cave art. As we have noted, magic (more especially shamanic magic) seems to be universal in hunter-gatherers and their myths. The events which they recount, of when the ancestors ‘caused’ the origins of the hunters’ world, almost invariably mention transformation by some form of magic. The idea that everyday hunting was facilitated or made possible by some sort of magic, does not seem to be common. There are reports that, among the San Bushmen, a hunt was preceded by a brief ritual in which an animal was sketched on the sand, and then speared ‘in effigy’. I have been unable to find a clear example of this kind of practice in any of the remaining ethnographic cases, which of course include the four best authenticated groups. I agree that apparently ‘speared’ animals from south west France are suggestive, but the ethnographic evidence does not indicate that such a ‘hunting magic’ was normal. This is perhaps not so surprising when one takes into account the widely evidenced fact that mytho-ritual activity among hunters is rarely specific or focussed (see below). It is usually vague, and low on discrimination or precision or concentration on specific problems. I would guess that hunting success would normally have been seen as only part of the more general aim of preserving the ancestral status quo, in which of course hunting was reasonably successful.

There is a further puzzle which has rarely been addressed. Available evidence from south west France makes it clear that during a period of more than twelve thousand years, starting more than twenty-five thousand years ago and ending near the end of the last ice age, perhaps a little more than twelve thousand years ago, reindeer was the animal which was dominantly hunted and eaten (judging by the bones found in the occupation debris). Often reindeer made up over 80% of the animals taken; (there is however some hint of a slightly less cold period – perhaps about 21 to 18 thousand years ago – when reindeer were less overwhelmingly dominant). Most authorities would accept that this ‘reindeer span’ of somewhere near fifteen thousand years was the time when the bulk of the wall art was created. Yet the surprising fact is that while horse, ox, red deer and bison are common in the wall art of this period, reindeer is noticeably rare. (Font de Gaume is unusual in having a few.)

It is tempting to see the obese, apparently pregnant, female ‘venuses’ as part of some fertility magic or ritual; (most of these are small portable statuettes, but a few occur as carvings on rock walls). While this remains possible, the fact is that hunters known ethnographically do not apparently show as much concern for fertility ritual as the tribal farmers who succeeded them. Some sort of ‘rain snake’ is found to be associated with fertility notions in a number of hunter cases, but the kind of fertility promotion found in farmers (for example in the form of sacrifices) is quite foreign to most or all ethnographically known

The problem is less perplexing if one realises that totemism (or something similar) was probably prevalent at this time. The animals depicted are likely to be totem animals associated with some individuals or groups, for 37

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies At this point we may briefly look at an alternative avenue to the hunter-gatherer mode of thought, which I have recently used.7 In this new research, I presented evidence to show that that the mythic thought of hunters has strong analogies with one of the stages of cognitive development first recognised by the Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget some seventy five years ago.8 This is the ‘PreConceptual’ sub-stage found in the cognitive development of modern children, and followed by the ‘Intuitive’ substage (which is analogous to the thought of tribal farmers). Together these make up the Pre-Operational stage of Piaget, which falls between the Sensorimotor stage and the fully ‘Operational ‘ stage.

totemic assignment is commonly derived from a totemic ancestor, of the sort who would figure in the myths and paintings of them. It is a common feature of totemism that there is a taboo on the eating of the totem animal by its totemites. During the period when one single animal provided the staple diet, it would be obvious folly to exclude it from the diet; any individual who did so would be likely to starve. Short of altering or abandoning the traditional totemic system (and primitives are very reluctant to change their traditional culture), the obvious solution would be to leave the staple animal out of the system. Rarer and more striking animals could be used as the totem animals. Provided that only a small minority of hunters used each species as a totem animal, and each species provided only a modest part of the diet, there would no longer be an insuperable problem.

Characteristic of this pre-conceptual sub-stage is what Piaget calls ‘Participation’ – “that relation which primitive thought believes to exist between two beings or two phenomena which it regards either as partially identical or as having a direct influence on one another, although there is no spatial contact, nor intelligible causal connection between them.”9 A second characteristic of this sub-stage is ‘Magic’, which Piaget defines in this context as “the use the individual believes he can make of such participation to modify reality.”10 A third characteristic of this sub-stage is Piaget’s ‘Animism’, which is essentially identical to what we have earlier described as the ‘Pan-animism’ of huntergatherers. A fourth characteristic is Piaget’s ‘Syncretism’, which is about associating things together on the slenderest of evidence, in a way which is probably emotionally satisfying, but is naïve in its lack of any ability to discriminate adequately. This is of course the essence of the pan-cosmic sacred bond we discussed above.11

We may now turn to the question of the ‘anthropomorphs’ – human or human-like figures – in cave art. There is to my knowledge no single case of a human male or female depicted as realistically as the more realistic animals in the cave wall art corpus. The face in particular is not realistically represented in the ‘anthropomorphs’. Figures regarded as human or obviously anthropomorphic in cave wall art are relatively few and inconspicuous in comparison to animal representations. To get the total near to or over one hundred, it is necessary to include numerous very sketchy, vague and dubious examples. (The inclusion of small portable art objects or statuettes would of course increase the number.) In the sample of ‘anthropomorphs’ depicted on rock walls, the better, more complete, examples regularly exhibit a combination of a basically human body form, with all kinds of distinctive animal attributes, (and sometimes what appear to be masks, which may or may not be animal). These attributes include horns, antlers, tails, hooves, paws, bovine-like muzzles, bird heads and a goat-like beard. (By contrast the penis, when shown, seems distinctively human.) But perhaps the commonest indication of animal nature is of basically human bodies in clearly animal, or quadruped, ‘crawling’ postures.

Several of the ‘therianthropic’ figures in palaeolithic art, notably three from the cave of Les Trois Frères in the Pyrenees (fig.1), have been recognised as having an astonishing resemblance to the way ethnographically known shamans of the northerly latitudes appear. Pictures of antlered shamans of the Tungus are perhaps the best known. Twentieth century scholars concerned with shamanism (such as Éliade, Lommel, Drury and Campbell) have accepted these palaeolithic engravings as unquestionably representations of shamans. The modern scholar may be inclined to say that palaeolithic engravings cannot be both mythic figures (ancestors) and shamans at the same time. This view would be quite mistaken. This is not just because such things are regularly confused and convolved by huntergatherers. It is the case in at least one ethnographically known group of hunters, that the same word was used for shamans as for mythic ancestors. This has been found for instance among the Malay peninsular negritos studied by

If we take account of the fact that ethnographically known hunters regularly think in terms of therianthropy, especially totemism, this makes the presence of animal and human features juxtaposed seem normal rather than surprising. They revere not so much a composite ‘being’, but rather the powerfully felt but indefinable link between all major elements in their cosmos, (that is to say the ‘Dreaming’ or what we have given the general name of Pan-Cosmic Sacred Bond). We must also remember that, due to both the principle of shamanic magic and the pancosmic sacred bond, the metamorphosis of spirits or ‘people’, by moving from body to body, was considered normal. Composite beings may well symbolise this idea, or the cumulative effect of several identities.

7

Collins, 2000, pp.86-88. Piaget, J., The Child’s Conception of the World, Routledge, London, 1929 (French original 1926). 9 Piaget, 1929, p.132. 10 Ibid. 11 See also, Collins, 2000, p.88. 8

38

Desmond Collins: Hunter-Gatherer Mythic Thought and European Cave Art Endicott.12 Here the Batek use the word Hala’ (or Halak) both for contemporary shamans and for mythic ancestors. When it is needed to distinguish the two, Hala’ Asal means an ancestor (literally original Hala’), while Hala’ Te means a latter day shaman (the ‘earth’ Hala’), who is seen as a Hala’ Asal who happens to be living on earth in human form now.13 We must remember that such hunters have only the vaguest notion of time, and their thought is ‘prelogical’ in routinely accepting contradictions in a cycle of myths. More generally the ancestors who lived in the ‘ancestor-time’ were often thought of as shamans, who were performing great feats of ‘origination’ (but still not yet typical creations) by using shamanic skills to transform and conjure things. Most of the anthropomorphic figures in wall art seem to be males or alternatively provide no clues as to gender. Female representations are of course common among the statuettes (‘venuses’) of the same general period, and a few overt females appear in wall art. The female figures are generally nude, and we do not find any trace of antlers or horns or other animal features. However some figures painted or smeared in clay on the walls of Pech Merle do seem to provide a strong hint of females also being considered therianthropic. Some (as in fig.2, left) are undoubtedly female humans with large pendulous breasts; however a series of them clearly resemble the outlines of similar females minus the breasts, but by a trick of ‘art and illusion’, they also closely resemble the way some bison are represented (as in fig.2, right). This has been known for a long time14, but it has never to my knowledge been pointed out that these ‘bison/women’ also fit the idea of therianthropy. A second probable example of female therianthropy in the palaeolithic comes from a much more distant region, namely Siberia. Here a series of statuettes some twenty thousand years old, from the site of Mal’ta in south central Siberia look simultaneously like birds (geese perhaps) in flight, and also resemble female statuettes from a number of regions. We noted earlier that many of the probable ‘humans’ appear as vague and sketchy, sometimes with ghost-like or owl-like faces. It is possible, even likely given the universality of the spirit idea, that these are supposed to represent ‘spirits’ on the move or outside the body. Even in recent times, ‘ghosts’ have been ‘visualised’ in some such owl-like form. This can obviously never be more than a plausible guess.

12

Endicott, K., Batek Negrito Religion, Clarendon, Oxford, 1979. Ibid., pp.129-130. For example by Giedion, S., The Eternal Present, volume I, OUP, 1963, pp.25-7. 13 14

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.1. Three figures engraved on the walls of the cave of Les Trois Frères in the Pyrenees, probably dating from 12 to 15 thousand years ago. They all show a combination of human and animal characteristics.

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Desmond Collins: Hunter-Gatherer Mythic Thought and European Cave Art

Fig.2. A Bi Bii Ci Cii D

Four images from Pech Merle (Lot, France); the scales have been altered to facilitate comparison Smeared by a finger on a clay surface, this image is clearly a female of the ‘venus’ kind. Crudely painted in red, this image (in this position) appears to be a rather schematic female as in illustration A. The same image as Bi, but rotated slightly so that it resembles the ‘bison’ of Cii and D. This image was also painted in red; it has been reversed and oriented to indicate the resemblance to the figure in A. The same image as Ci, but oriented to resemble image D; it is often thought to be a bison, with its head to the lower left, combined with the front legs. A bison, indicated by fine engraving.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

42

Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture Paul Davies

Modern studies of Italian Renaissance architecture tend, in general, to portray Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) as a radical classicist, as a man so fascinated with the buildings and writings of classical antiquity that they became for him the fount of all that was good in architecture.1 Such studies, by focussing on his passion for classical antiquity, create an image of Alberti as a man who had little interest in and even disdain for the late medieval architecture of his own day, and who was eager to replace it with an architecture founded instead on ancient Roman forms and principles.2 This picture is, as we shall see, a rather misleading one.

This image is further reinforced by his almost total exclusion of late medieval and contemporary architecture from the treatise.7 In what is a very long book about architecture, he mentions only one building erected after the collapse of the Roman Empire, St Mark’s in Venice, which is in marked contrast to the many references he makes to specific ancient Greek and Roman temples in the treatise.8 Almost as infrequent are references of a more generic kind to late medieval and contemporary architecture. Alberti’s neglect of medieval architecture in the treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent literature, where it has been interpreted as a mark of his dislike for Gothic architecture.9 And this dislike appears, at least as far as some scholars are concerned, to be confirmed by a few remarks in the treatise that cast medieval architecture in an unfavourable light. In Book VI, Chap. 1, he says, for instance, that “those who build today have been charmed by tasteless and absurd novelties rather than the best rules of the most praised works.”10 Again in Book III, Chap. 13, he argues that the strongest form of arch is semicircular and from this it has been inferred that he does not approve of other forms of arch, including Gothic pointed ones.11

It is not difficult to see how this image of Alberti came about. It was in large part created by Alberti himself, and especially by his monumental treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria (completed c.1452). In this treatise Alberti drew on the antique for everything, from its structure to its content.3 He emulated the format of Vitruvius’ De architectura by subdividing his treatise into ten books.4 He used the so-called Vitruvian triad of ‘strength, usefulness, and beauty’, the three basic qualities that all good architecture should have, as the basis for its conceptual structure in such a way that ‘strength’ and ‘usefulness’ are dealt with in the first half of the work (Books I-V) and ‘beauty’ in the second (Books VI-X).5 What is more, in terms of content, he strove throughout to promote the idea that good design in architecture has its roots in classical antiquity, and he did this principally by espousing the principles of ancient Roman architecture, by referring to celebrated Roman buildings as examples of good practice, by promoting the ancient orders as his favoured forms of support, by discussing ancient Roman building types such as theatres and amphitheatres in detail, and by repeatedly citing the opinions of Ancient Roman and Greek writers.6

Scholars have strengthened the image of Alberti as a single-minded classicist in another way too. By seeing him as the principal architectural theorist and as one of the most innovative practitioners of the early Renaissance, they have understandably tended to focus on what was new and different in his work, on what set him apart from earlier generations of architects, and not on what he inherited or borrowed from medieval architecture. This image of Alberti as a radical classicist has even received a boost from an unexpected quarter, from developments in the Brunelleschi literature. With study after study revealing that Brunelleschi was as much influenced by medieval as ancient Roman precedent,

* I would like to thank Matteo Ceriana and Susan Connell-Wallington for providing bibliographical information and Charles Robertson for making a number of stimulating observations. 1 The more general literature tends to portray Alberti in this light; see, for example, J. Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti. Universal Man of the Early Renaissance, Chicago, 1969; R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, New Haven & London, 1998; and A. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti. Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, New York, 2000. 2 The only scholar to address the issue of Alberti’s attitude to medieval architecture in any depth is C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, especially pp.57-79. 3 For the dating of the De re aedificatoria see, C. Grayson, ‘The Composition of L.B. Alberti’s “Decem libri de re edificatoria”’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 9 (1960), pp.152-61. 4 See, R. Krautheimer, ‘Alberti and Vitruvius’, in R. Krautheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art, New York & London, 1969, pp.323-32. 5 Ibid., pp.323-32. 6 For a list of ancient authors cited by Alberti in the De re aedificatoria, see, G. Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, Rome, 1971, (reprint of the edition of 1911), pp.355-6.

7

Noted by H. Burns, ‘Leon Battista Alberti’, in F. P. Fiore ed., Storia dell’architettura italiana: il Quattrocento, Milan, 1998, p.44. L. B. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, I. 8; L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol.1, pp.62-3. It is worth noting that in this passage Alberti is discussing ancient Roman expertise in construction methods and mentions St. Mark’s as though it were an antiquity rather than a medieval building. 9 See, for example, P. Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, Princeton, 1960, p.257. 10 See, L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol. 2, pp.441-3: “et qui forte per haec tempora aedificarent, novis ineptiarum deliramentis potius quam probatissimis laudatissimorum operum rationibus delectari.” The English translation used here is taken from C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, p.59. 11 L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol. 1, pp.232-40. For the interpretation that Alberti did not like pointed arches see, J. Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti. Universal Man of the Early Renaissance, Chicago, 1969, p.44. 8

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Brunelleschi’s status as the architect responsible for the revival of Ancient Roman architecture, though still intact, seems rather less elevated than it once did.12 And, as Brunelleschi’s star has declined, so Alberti’s has risen. Indeed, so far has it risen that, Howard Saalman could conclude his recent study of Brunelleschi’s architecture by remarking that ‘the truly revolutionary thinker and planner of the Early Renaissance was not Brunelleschi but Leon Battista Alberti.’13

wrong. They may well have had an influence on Alberti’s design and, in the case of the Arch of Augustus, certainly did. But these antique models have unfairly dominated the literature to the extent that the late medieval models are sometimes entirely forgotten. In fact medieval models for Alberti’s design can be found in abundance. Although the façade is in its present state incomplete, some idea of what Alberti intended can be gained from the image on the foundation medal. (fig.2) One of its most distinctive features is its tri-lobed silhouette, a feature which, though remarked upon in the various studies that have focused on the church itself, has not been taken up by the more general literature on Alberti as a topic worthy of discussion. The central gable is semicircular, or almost so, and the visual transition from the wide lower storey to the narrower upper one is made by quadrant-shaped walls. This feature has no precedents in the architecture of classical antiquity; which leaves us with the question of where this tri-lobed silhouette came from. The answer lies in the medieval architecture of Northern Italy.

The picture of Alberti as projected by the De re aedificatoria and as perpetuated by many modern scholars is, in my opinion, a rather distorted one. To see just how distorted it is we need to look first at some of his buildings and then return to review his comments in the De re aedificatoria. Alberti’s buildings and late medieval architecture The distortion is at its most extreme in the case of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (fig.1), Alberti’s first certain architectural commission, designed c.1450-53 at the request of Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, to provide the existing church of S. Francesco with an outer casing, a new roof and a domed east end.14 Of the various sources advanced for it, the more familiar ones, and the ones that have been given accorded the most discussion are those that derive from classical antiquity. The three arches of the ground storey, with the central arch noticeably larger than the outer two have reminded scholars of triumphal arches in general and the Arch of Constantine at Rome in particular.15 The fluted half-columns set to either side of an arch with roundels in the spandrels have been identified as deriving from the Arch of Augustus also in Rimini, as has the design of the impost mouldings.16 The deep roundheaded arches have been seen as inspired by the Mausoleum of Theodoric in nearby Ravenna, a building that would have had the status of an antiquity in the fifteenth century.17 It is not that these suggestions are

It was perhaps inspired by a type of late Gothic church façade that was becoming increasingly popular in Ferrara in the first half of the fifteenth century. Typical is that of S. Gregorio built at some point during the first half of the fifteenth century.18 (fig.3) Admittedly it has a gabled rather than a lobed silhouette, yet it does nevertheless incorporate a striking tri-lobed pattern in the brickwork close to the roofline, an arrangement that makes it remarkably similar to the façade of the Tempio Malatestiano. The four brick piers of the façade rise to form arches just below the cornice. The central one is usually semicircular while the outer two are quadrants. There are several other churches in the city with this sort of façade. The earliest may well be that of the Corpus Domini begun c.1415 which has a semicircular central arch and two quadrant outer arches.19 But the one that most closely resembles the Tempio Malatestiano is S. Stefano (probably c.1450) which has a semicircular central arch and rather flattened outer quadrants.

12 For Brunelleschi’s debt to medieval architecture, see especially, H. Burns, ‘Quattrocento architecture and the antique: some problems,’ in R.R. Bolgar ed., Classical Influences on European Culture, A .D. 5001500, Cambridge, 1971; H. Klotz, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Early Works and the Medieval Tradition, London, 1990 and H. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Buildings, London, 1994. 13 H. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Buildings, London, 1994, p.422. 14 The bibliography on the Tempio Malatestiano is enormous. The standard study is that of C. Ricci, Il Tempio Malatestiano, Milan & Rome, 1924; reprinted and updated by P. G. Pasini, Rimini, 1974. Of the recent contributions the most important are those of C. Hope, ‘The early history of the Tempio Malatestiano’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 55 (1992), pp.51-154; and A. Turchini, Il Tempio Malatestiano, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta e Leon Battista Alberti, Cesena, 2000. 15 See, for example, R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 3rd edition, London 1973, p.37, note 3. 16 Noted by C. Ricci, Il Tempio Malatestiano, Milan & Rome, 1924; reprinted and updated by P. G. Pasini, Rimini, 1974, p.256 & pp.265-6. Most of the subsequent literature repeats this idea. 17 Noted again by C. Ricci, Il Tempio Malatestiano, Milan & Rome, 1924; reprinted and updated by P. G. Pasini, Rimini 1974, p.281; see also, R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, New Haven & London, 1998, pp.71-2. Other antique sources for the facade have been suggested too. The upper part of the façade as shown in the medal, with its round gable and crocket-like decoration, has been linked with a representation

Even more impressive models are to be found among North Italy’s cathedrals. The grandest of these was the medieval façade of S. Maria Maggiore in Milan (begun at the latest by 1378), which was the city’s cathedral before it was replaced by the present gargantuan structure begun in the last decade of the fourteenth century.20 Although it was destroyed late in the 1480s, its appearance is recorded

on a sesterius dating from the time of the Emperor Vespasian; see, H. Lorenz, ‘Zur Architektur L. B. Albertis: die Kirchenfassaden’, Weiner Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 29 (1976), p.71. 18 See, G. Medri, Chiese di Ferrara nella cerchia antica, Bologna, 1967, pp.35-9. 19 See, T. Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara. Ercole D’Este, 1471-1505, and the Invention of a Ducal Capital, Cambridge, 1996, p.373. 20 For this building see especially, A.M. Romanini, L’architettura gotica in Lombardia, Milan 1964, vol. 1, pp.301-2.

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Paul Davies: Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture for us in various images.21 Of these the most detailed is a relief of the Madonna della Misericordia enveloping the cathedral in her protective cloak. (fig.4) Here we see a façade with a silhouette that bears a striking resemblance to Alberti’s medal scheme for the Tempio Malatestiano. It is tripartite and has quadrants over the outer bays like Alberti’s and it has an ogee-shaped gable over the central bay that is close in form to the Tempio’s semicircular gable. What is more, the skyline is decorated with crockets, an arrangement which was similar in concept and spirit to the design on the Tempio Malatestiano’s ‘foundation’ medal, even if the design of the individual decorative elements was probably rather different.22 Besides this, S. Maria Maggiore shares other features with the Tempio Malatestiano. For example, it has a lower storey that is dominated by three arches, the central one of which is taller and broader than the other two; it is raised on a tall basement; it has a single strong entablature dividing the church into two storeys; and it has roundels in the quadrants.

Other churches with this type of late Gothic façade are also to be found in Venice, as is attested by such surviving examples as S. Aponal, S. Andrea della Zirada and S. Giovanni in Bragora as well as by a handful of now lost buildings.25 S. Aponal’s three-bay façade is of the same family as that of Mantua Cathedral, but with a skyline that is more elaborate even than that of its likely model. (fig.6) The outer bays are topped with quadrants which stand beside rectilinear steps and the central section is made up of smaller quadrants, further small steps and a concave sided gable. Of the three churches considered so far this one is perhaps the least likely to have anything directly to do with Alberti’s design, despite its generic resemblance. Closer to Alberti’s design is S. Giovanni in Bragora which is topped with quadrants over the outer bays and a semicircular gable at the centre supporting a concave sided pinnacle. Closer still is S. Andrea della Zirada with its outer quadrants and unadorned semicircular gable at the centre. (fig.7)

A second late medieval façade, that of Mantua Cathedral, could also have been Alberti’s source of inspiration.23 Sadly, this façade suffered a similar fate to that of Milan Cathedral in being destroyed to make way for a later neoclassical scheme (c.1761), but its appearance is known through Domenico Morone’s painting of 1494 depicting the The Expulsion of the Bonacolsi in 1328. (fig.5) Designed and built between 1395 and 1403 by the Dalle Masegne brothers, this façade was clearly modelled on that of Milan cathedral; although five bays wide rather than three, its central three-bay section stood out, being stonefaced rather than brick. 24 Like Milan Cathedral, the façade is remarkably similar to Alberti’s scheme in that the outer bays are capped by quadrants and the central section by an ogee-shaped gable. Between the outer quadrant and the central ogee is a stepped rectilinear feature designed to support a large statue-filled tabernacle, a feature which departs from the Milanese models, and renders the Mantuan façade a little less like that of the Tempio Malatestiano.

The problem with these tri-lobed Venetian facades being considered possible models for the Tempio Malatestiano is one of date. S. Aponal is usually regarded as dating from the middle of the fifteenth-century and could conceivably postdate the Tempio Malatestiano.26 S. Giovanni in Bragora dates from 1475 or slightly later.27 And S. Andrea della Zirada, though of fourteenth-century origin, has a façade that could have been erected as part of the programme of renovations begun in 1475 and so the façade could conceivably date from that time.28 What can be said with impunity, however, is that these façades belong to a Venetian tradition that goes back rather further than the mid fifteenth century, perhaps dating at least as far back as the 1430s. In support of this contention is the observation that this tradition seems to find precedents in the multilobed facades of the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia (begun 1441) (fig.8) and above all S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (under construction in the 1430s and 1440s).29 (fig.9) These Venetian churches may well derive ultimately from the prominent example of Mantua Cathedral as its designers, the Dalle Masegne, worked extensively in

21 See, the illuminated initial from the ‘Librone musicale’ No 1 [2269] in the Archivio della Veneranda Fabbrica, Milan; illustrated in M. Mirabella Roberti, ‘Topografia e architetture anteriore al Duomo’ in M. L. Gattei Perrer ed., Il Duomo di Milano, Milan, 1969, vol. 1, p.41. See also the drawing in the ‘Liber ecclesiae majoris Mediolani’ (1387-1401) from the same archive; illustrated in E. Brivio & A. Majo, Il Duomo di Milano nella storia e nell’arte Milan, xxx), p.31. 22 Precisely what these features were meant to be like is not clear. They were most probably leaves as they are described as such - ‘fogliame’ – in a letter written by Giovanni di Alvise to Sigismondo Malatesta on 21 December 1454; see, C. Ricci, Il Tempio Malatestiano. Milan & Rome, 1924; reprinted and updated by P. G. Pasini, Rimini, 1974, p.589. 23 For this façade see, G. Paccagnini ed., Mantova le arti, Vol. 1, Il medioevo, Mantua, 1960, pp.71-86; A. Marani, ‘Una ricostruzione del Duomo di Mantova’, in Bollettino Storico Mantovano (1957), p.161. 24 For the Dalle Masegne see, W. Wolters, La scultura veneziana gotica (1300-1460). Venice, 1976, vol. 1, pp.62-75. For the influence of S. Maria Maggiore in Milan on Mantua Cathedral see, A. M. Romanini, L’architettura gotica in Lombardia, Milan, 1964, vol. 1, p.301.

25 There is very little literature on the origins of the multi-lobed Venetian church façade. One early essay which does little more than scrape the surface is E. Dyggve, ‘Il frontone ad arco e trilobato veneziano. Alcune osservazioni sulla sua origine’, in Venezia e l’Europa, Venice, 1956, pp.226-30. More useful is A. M. Romanini, ‘Apporti veneziani in Lombardia’, in Venezia e l’Europa, Venice, 1956, pp.176-80. See also the useful comments in J. McAndrew, Venetian Architecture of the Early Renaissance, Cambridge Mass., 1980, pp.237-9; he lists among the lost Venetian examples the façade of S. Giobbe, that of the Trinità on the site of S. Maria della Salute, and S. Giorgio in Alga. 26 For the history of S. Aponal see, U. Franzoi & D. di Stefano, Le chiese di Venezia, Venice 1976, p.20. 27 Ibid., p.89. 28 Ibid., pp.491-3. 29 For the dating of the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia see, W. Wolters, La scultura veneziana gotica (1300-1460), Venice, 1976, cat. 250; and W. Wolters, ‘Ipotesi su Bartolomeo Buon architetto’, in F. Valcanover & W. Wolters eds., L’architettura gotica veneziana, Venice, 2000, pp.273-9. For the dating of the Frari see, P. Paoletti, L’architettura e la scultura del Rinascimento in Venezia, Venice, 1893, vol.1, 46; and U. Franzoi & D. di Stefano, Le chiese di Venezia, Venice, 1976, p.34.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Venice and could easily have popularised the form there.30 In sum, Alberti may have drawn on either or perhaps both of these two traditions that of Ferrara and that of Lombardy and the Veneto.

found at S. Stefano in Venice (first half of the fifteenth century), at the Eremitani in Padua (c.1306) (fig.11) and at S. Fermo Maggiore (c.1314) and S. Zeno in Verona (fourteenth century).34 Given that wooden barrel vaults were largely unknown outside the Veneto, then it is highly likely that these keel vaults influenced Alberti’s design.

Ultimately Alberti decided to alter the shape of the façade, dispensing with the outer quadrants and replacing them with sloping roofs. This was a decision that he seems to have taken in 1454 as is well documented by the tiny explanatory drawing that accompanies his celebrated letter to Matteo de’ Pasti providing instructions about the façade’s design.31 Even though this decision made the link between the façade’s design and its likely models less obvious, it did not mean that Alberti was turning his back on these models entirely. In fact, as redesigned, the façade would still have retained a vestigial reference to the original tri-lobed form as Alberti intended the sloping roof to be decorated with back to back scrolls, arranged in such a manner that their silhouette appears, in approximate terms, lobed. (fig.10) This arrangement of two scrolls, set on top of the outer bay of a tripartite façade has a precedent in S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice (1440s).

Another feature of Alberti’s design for the Tempio Malatestiano that has a range of medieval precedents is that of encircling the church with deep arches and filling these arches with tombs.35 As built the church certainly has tombs along the flanks, but it may have been intended to have had tombs in the lateral arches of the façade too. Documents of 1454 do discuss the placement of a tomb in a niche on the façade, though they do not make it clear which niche they are referring to. Ricci took the documents to mean that the system of tombs on the flanks was to be carried around the corner onto the façade in such a way that the blind lateral arches of the façade would have housed tombs; Ettlinger by contrast, proposed that as only one tomb is mentioned, it was to be located in the bay above the main portal; and Hope raised the possibility that the documents were referring to a position on the inner elevation of the façade rather than the outer one.36 While this must remain an unresolved question for the moment, we should not be too quick to dismiss Ricci’s original suggestion.

If Alberti did indeed derive the Tempio Malatestiano’s silhouette from late medieval façade design, then it is reasonable to suppose that he may well have drawn on late medieval architecture for other features of his design too. At one point in 1454 he was certainly considering roofing the church with a wooden barrel vault (“volta in botte fatta di legniame”).32 He says as much in his celebrated letter of 18 November that year. The decision to do that was prompted by the need to keep the roof structure as light as possible as Alberti himself points out. What is significant here is that this form of light wooden vault was already widely employed in Venice and in churches throughout the Veneto. Known as keel vaults (carena di nave), they usually incorporated a central barrel vaulted section even if they normally had a more elaborate, complex form often tri- or multi-lobed in section, rather like the facades of so many churches in the region.33 Prime examples can be

The idea of placing tombs in arches around the exterior of churches is one that would have been known to Alberti as it was a relatively common practice in Central and Northern Italy. It would have been especially familiar to him from the example of S. Maria Novella in Florence (fig.12), a church that he would have seen on an almost daily basis between 1434 and 1443 since it was there that Pope Eugenius IV and his court had taken temporary residence to escape the rioting and political instability of carpenteri lignea veneziana nei secoli XIV e XV’, in F. Valcanover & W. Wolters eds., L’architettura gotica veneziana, Venice, 2000, pp.73-81; and C. Menichelli, M. Piana, O. Pignatelli, ‘La dendrocronologia e l’edilizia storica: primi risultati di una ricerca sugli edifici gotici veneziani’, in F. Valcanover & W. Wolters eds., L’architettura gotica veneziana, Venice, 2000, pp.83-92. 34 The dating of the wooden vault of S. Stefano in Venice is uncertain but it must postdate 1407 since in that year the church was still under construction; see, F. Apollonio, La Chiesa e il convento di S. Stefano in Venezia, Venice, 1911, pp.6-7. For the dating of the Eremitani vault see, S. Bettoni & L. Puppi, La chiesa degli Eremitani di Padova, Vicenza, 1970, pp.16-17. For the vault of S. Fermo (finished by 1314) see, A. da Lisca, Studi e ricerche originali sulla chiesa di S. Fermo Maggiore di Verona, Verona, 1909, pp.49-58. 35 Discussed by C. Ricci, Il Tempio Malatestiano, Milan & Rome, 1924; reprinted and updated by P. G. Pasini, Rimini, 1974, p.281; and noted by R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 3rd edition, London, 1973, p.38; and by A. Turchini, Il Tempio Malatestiano, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta e Leon Battista Alberti, Cesena, 2000, p.4. 36 C. Ricci, Il Tempio Malatestiano, Milan & Rome, 1924; reprinted and updated by P. G. Pasini, Rimini, 1974, pp.257-9; C. Hope, ‘The early history of the Tempio Malatestiano’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 55 (1992), pp.110-13 & pp.116-32; H. Ettlinger, ‘The sepulchre on the façade: a re-evaluation of Sigismondo Malatesta’s rebuilding of S. Francesco in Rimini’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 53 (1990), pp.133-43.

30 A. M. Romanini, ‘Apporti veneziani in Lombardia’, in Venezia e l’Europa, Venice, 1956, pp.176-80, argues that the origins of this form of façade had its roots in Venice. However, in the absence of Venetian trilobed facades that can be securely dated to the fourteenth century it is worth considering the possibility that the influence actually went in the other direction. While it is true that the ogee-topped gable of S. Marco seems to predate the Lombard façade, this facade does not have the trilobed composition which is such a distinctive characteristic of the Lombard buildings. The answer may well of course be that there was a certain amount of reciprocal influence. This whole topic requires further research. 31 See, C. Grayson, Alberti and the Tempio Malatestiano: An Autograph Letter from Leon Battista Alberti to Matteo de’ Pasti, New York, 1957. 32 Ibid., pp.17-18. 33 For the possibility of a link between this sort of wooden vault and the shape of tri- or multi-lobed facades see, J. McAndrew, Venetian Architecture of the Early Renaissance, Cambridge Mass., 1980, pp.237-9; and E. Concina, A History of Venetian Architecture, Cambridge, 1998, pp.109-12. The history and evolution of this sort of wooden vault has yet to be written. Part of the reason for this is that many of these vaults are poorly documented, making their history difficult to reconstruct. Dendrochronology has provided scholars of Venetian Gothic architecture with a tool that they have only recently begun to use. See, M. Piana, ‘La

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Paul Davies: Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture Rome.37 At this time the unfinished fourteenth-century façade had a row of tombs set into niches or ‘avelli’ arranged at ground level and this system was continued along the perimeter wall of the church’s adjacent cemetery. This practice, however, was especially common in the Veneto as can be seen, for example, at SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice and at S. Fermo Maggiore in Verona. Of all these churches one in particular resembles the composition of the Tempio Malatestiano very closely. It is the church of the Eremitani in Padua (c.1306).38 (fig.13) The arches of the façade are carried around the corner onto the flanks as they are at the Tempio Malatestiano and, what is more, the arches are all very deep, round headed and house tombs.

Cathedral, but that of course, does not mean to say that he did not know it. After all it as still standing when Alberti died in 1472. It is reasonable to conclude from these observations that Alberti, when designing the Tempio Malatestiano, was strongly influenced by the late medieval buildings he had known as a young man. Yet in this lies something of a puzzle. By the time he drew up his design for the church in the early 1450s, he had spent much of the 1430s in Florence where he would have seen the work of Brunelleschi and Michelozzo and most of the 1440s in Rome where he would have become acquainted with the architecture of classical antiquity. Thus it is reasonable to ask why he was drawn to borrow so heavily from buildings he remembered from his youth in North Eastern Italy, rather than from the revivalist architecture of Florence or the antiquities of Rome. There are several possible answers to this question. One is that he perhaps had had a longer standing interest in architecture than has generally been assumed and had, even as a very young man, taken an interest in the built environment, and this might lead to the conclusion that his architectural imagination was first formed then during the late 1410s and 1420s, long before he ever thought of designing a building. Another is that when he designed the Tempio Malatestiano he was living in Rome and there were few ancient Roman models, that he could have drawn upon to help him with the problem of how to design the façade of a church type with a nave and side chapels. In addition to the absence of antique models, he would have found in Rome few late medieval and no Renaissance churches to draw on either. The same was to some extent true of Florence. There, the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century churches of the city had facades that were left unfinished. Such was the fate of S. Croce, S. Maria Novella and also Florence Cathedral. Even the more recent Brunelleschian churches of S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito remained without facades. In short, a paucity of models may have led him to look back to the late medieval architecture of Northern Italy where there was no shortage of magnificent models to choose from. Another possible reason for his reliance on North Eastern Italian models may lie in the predilections of his patron, Sigismondo, whose close political ties with Venice, the Gonzaga and the D’Este families may have prompted him to want to visually associate himself with the architecture of that part of Italy.

These medieval models for the exterior of the Tempio Malatestiano were all buildings which Alberti could easily have known since almost all are located in North or North East Italy where he grew up.39 Although Florentine by birth, he was actually Venetian and Paduan by education and culture. From the age of four he lived with his family in Venice, and it was there, as well as in Venice’s satellite towns, that he would have encountered the tradition of building church facades with lobed silhouettes as well as that of roofing then with keel vaults. He also attended the academy of Gasparino Barzizza in Padua where he would, no doubt, have become acquainted with the church of the Eremitani.40 He also knew Ferrara well as he was on intimate terms with both Meliaduso and Lionello d’Este, members of the ruling family, and visited the city at the latest by 1438.41 There he would have seen the various churches with tri-lobed patterning in the design of their facades. He may also have visited Mantua in these early years as is suggested by the fact that he dedicated the Latin version of his treatise on painting at probably some point between 1438 and 1444 to Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and if he did he would have seen the façade of the cathedral standing next to Gianfrancesco’s palace.42 Even if he had not yet visited Mantua, he may well have heard of and perhaps even seen drawings of the recently built façade through the close ties between the Gonzaga and Malatesta: not only was there a tradition of intermarriage between the families with Gianfrancesco himself marrying a Malatesta, Paola, but there was strong political ties, too, with Carlo Malatesta, Sigismondo’s father, acting as regent for Gianfrancesco in Mantua after his father’s early death in 1407.43 The only one of the sources for which no link to Alberti can be found is Milan

When he later began to work in Florence for Giovanni Rucellai, the pattern of his borrowing from late medieval and contemporary architecture changed. His reliance on North Eastern Italian models vanished and was replaced by ideas that were much more heavily dependent on earlier Florentine architecture. In his design for the façade of S. Maria Novella (1458) he uses scrolls to unite visually the wider lower level of the façade with the narrower upper one, an idea that derived from his earlier design for the Tempio Malatestiano, but he here transforms the scrolltopped triangles of the church in Rimini into giant scrolls evidently inspired by the scrolls buttressing the

37 For the pre-Albertian appearance of the façade see, M. Dezzi Bardeschi, La facciata di Santa Maria Novella, Pisa, 1970; and R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, New Haven & London, 1998, p.103. 38 For the Eremitani in Padua see, S. Bettoni & L. Puppi, La chiesa degli Eremitani di Padova, Vicenza ,1970. 39 For Alberti’s childhood and education see, G. Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, Rome, 1971; (reprint of the edition of 1911), pp.23-64. 40 Ibid., pp.40-46. 41 Ibid., p.139 & pp.171-7. 42 Ibid., pp.387-8. 43 P.J. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal States: a Political History, Cambridge, 1974, p.124.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Brunelleschian lantern of Florence Cathedral.44 He seems to have based the pedimented silhouette of the façade - as is well known - on the Florentine Romanesque façade of S. Miniato and - as is rather less well known - he modelled the roundels that appear in the spandrels on a floor design that appears in both S. Miniato (fig.14) and the Florentine Baptistery.

Having seen that Alberti does indeed borrow from medieval architecture in designing his building, we are left with the paradox of why he seems to be so antagonistic towards medieval architecture in his treatise. The first issue that needs to be dealt with is that of why there are so few references to medieval architecture in the treatise. Alberti may well have had several reasons for ignoring late medieval architecture. To have included it would have compromised the treatise’s pioneering character as the first comprehensive tract on classical architecture since ancient times. It would also have damaged his place in history as a pioneer, a place of which he was certainly conscious, at least to judge from his comments in Della pittura about him being the first to write a theoretical study on that particular art.47 It would, in addition, have compromised one of the treatise’s probable aims, namely to act as a readable substitute for Vitruvius’ sometimes incomprehensible De architectura.48 But most of all, it would have reduced the impact of the work on its readers and perhaps even, through juxtaposition, devalued the classicism it was trying to promote. For reasons such as these Alberti seems to have decided programmatically to exclude references to late medieval architecture. It was a decision that had more to do with the needs of the treatise than with any real dislike of medieval architecture, and so it is reasonable to surmise that his neglect of late medieval architecture in the treatise may not be representative of his real views.

Gradually references to late medieval architecture wane in his work. There are fewer in his Florentine buildings than in the Tempio Malatestiano and fewer still in his Mantuan buildings. The only late medieval source suggested for the Mantuan buildings is a painting in the Baptistery in Padua which may well have inspired the design of S. Sebastiano.45 To this may be added the possibility that Alberti modelled the apses of the undercroft of S. Sebastiano (1460) with their three niches on the arrangement of St. Mark’s in Venice, a building which we know he admired.46 And to the list too may appended the likelihood that he based the design for the giant brick buttresses along the flanks of S. Andrea (fig.15), perforated at their base by a single small arch, on the similarly conceived buttresses of another of North East Italy’s great pilgrimage churches, the Santo in Padua. (fig.16) Apart from the fact that Alberti borrowed less and less from late medieval architecture as his career as an architect progressed, further patterns in his borrowing can be detected. One is that his borrowings from medieval architecture are generally not within the realm of ‘style’, that is to say style of decoration. For example, he never uses pointed arches, octagonally shafted columns or crockets. Indeed, there are virtually no individual decorative forms or mouldings in his work that can be associated with late medieval architecture. For every generalisation there are, of course, exceptions and in this case they appear in the Tempio Malatestiano, his first building, where the rope moulding that runs around the external dado is a feature that has its roots in late medieval Venetian and North East Italian architecture and where the frieze immediately above it seems to derive, with its repeated pattern, the terracotta friezes of late medieval Lombard architecture. Apart from these, however, the detailing of his buildings remains that of a thorough-going classicism. Rather than style, what Alberti seems to borrow most from medieval architecture is its compositional formulas, formulas such as the silhouettes of Tempio Malatestiano and S. Maria Novella, or the tombfilled arcading of the Tempio Malatestiano. These compositional arrangements he then transformed into a classical idiom.

It is possible, as we have just seen, to account for Alberti’s neglect of late medieval architecture in the treatise but it is less easy to explain why such comments about medieval architecture as he did include in the treatise appear to be so negative. This problem has been addressed recently by Christine Smith, who, in a perceptive analysis of Alberti’s comments on medieval architecture in the De re aedificatoria, has demonstrated that Alberti’s comments on medieval architecture have sometimes been quoted out of context and are in actual fact not quite as negative as they have generally been portrayed.49 Smith takes, for example, the discussion of the arch and observes quite rightly that Alberti does not actually condemn the pointed arch at all.50 What Alberti does say is that the semi-circular arch is strongest, from which some scholars have extrapolated, incorrectly as it happens, that Alberti disapproved of the pointed arch, considering it to be weak.51 In fact he makes no such statement, saying instead that pointed arches 47

See, L. B. Alberti, On Painting, ed. and trans., J. R. Spencer, New Haven & London, 1956, p.98. See, R. Krauthheimer, ‘Alberti and Vitruvius’, in R. Krauthheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art, New York & London 1969, pp.323-32. 49 C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, especially pp.57-79. 50 Ibid., pp.60-1. 51 For Alberti’s discussion of the arch see, L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol.1, pp.235-7. For the interpretation that Alberti did not approve of pointed arches see, J. Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti. Universal Man of the Early Renaissance, Chicago, 1969, p.4. 48

Alberti’s De re aedificatoria and late medieval architecture 44 See, L.H. Heydenreich, Architecture in Italy 1400-1500, New Haven & London, 1996, p.39; P. Williams Lehmann, ‘Alberti and antiquity: additional observations’, Art Bulletin, 70 (1988), pp.388-400 and especially, pp.394-6. 45 H. Burns, ‘The Church of San Sebastiano, Mantua’, in D. Chambers & J. Martineau, Splendours of the Gonzaga, London, 1981, pp.125-6. 46 See above, note 8.

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Paul Davies: Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture constructed.55 The reason for his dislike of modern practice, as with the bricks, has nothing to do with style, but with structural stability, with statics. A wall peppered with holes is necessarily weaker than one without holes. Building a wall in this way was for Alberti contrary to ‘reason.’

become stronger under pressure. And it hardly needs to be pointed out that Alberti’s belief that the semicircular form of arch was strongest does not in itself imply that he considered other arch forms to be intrinsically weak. What Smith also does in her analysis is point out that such negative comments as there are in the treatise were not intended by Alberti as a general condemnation of medieval styles.52 She shows that most of the criticisms have nothing to do with style at all but, rather, with building practice. All that Alberti was trying to do, she argues, is to highlight some of the weaknesses in medieval and contemporary building practices that should be avoided by architects wishing to design good buildings. Yet what Smith does not do in her essay is determine precisely what it was about medieval architecture that Alberti found unpalatable.

Both the examples just discussed are about solidity and structural stability, but there are criticisms of other sorts too. In Book VII, Chapter 5, he says: “I have also seen examples of sacred buildings, constructed not long before our time, where the entrance level is reached up several steps, and then the same number are descended to arrive at the temple pavement; I shall not say that this is a ridiculous device, but I fail to see its purpose.”56 What Alberti dislikes in this case is the fact that the design of the building places an impediment in the way of ‘ease of use’. This criticism has to do with function, with utility, and by failing to meet the criterion of ‘ease of use’ the building failed to satisfy the demands of ‘reason’ or ‘common sense’.

It is possible, however, to identify what it was that Alberti disliked if we look at a range of passages from the De re aedificatoria. In Book II, Chapter 10, Alberti discusses bricks, saying that “bricks must be thin: if they are too thick, they will not bake properly and will be liable to crack.”53 A little further on he says: “baking will so harden a brick that if it is left long enough in the oven, it will become as tough as flint; furthermore, as happens with bread, the bricks get a solid crust, either while they are baked in the oven or when they are left to dry in the open air. This is why it is better to bake them thin, so that there is more crust than crumb.”54 Alberti’s discussion of bricks reflects a full knowledge of ancient Roman brick design with its liking for thin bricks as well as of late medieval or modern brick shapes with their tendency to be much thicker. This passage could therefore be read, on the one hand, as a critique of modern practice and, on the other, as an exhortation to revive ancient forms. According to Alberti, thin bricks are stronger: not only were they less prone to cracking, they were also more durable in that their outer crust – the stronger part – was greater in proportion to the mass than was the case with thicker bricks. What Alberti is saying is that thinner bricks are better than thicker ones because they are stronger and they are stronger because they observe ‘natural law’ or ‘reason.’

Again in Book X, Chapter 17, he says that it is acceptable to correct the appearance or style of an earlier structure if it is unprepossessing: “nor should we neglect the elegance of a work. If a wall happens to be unsightly because it is too high, insert a cornice or paint on lines where appropriate to articulate the height. If the wall is too long, break it up with columns running from top to bottom, and not too frequent but rather widely spaced.”57 Here Alberti shows his readiness to correct buildings that are inelegant in some way and that do not conform to the notions of beauty which he has expressed earlier in the treatise. Thus he wants the building to be proportionate and beautiful, thus conforming to the demand of ‘natural law’, of ‘reason.’ What is clear from these examples is that Alberti judges defects in architecture in general and medieval architecture in particular according to the criteria of strength, usefulness and beauty, in other words by the Vitruvian triad of ‘firmitas’, ‘commoditas’ and ‘venustas.’ In the Vitruvian triad he has found a yardstick with which to measure quality in architecture, whatever its style. And he firmly believed that the principal means of assessing these

Alberti’s other criticisms of medieval practice that appear in the De re aedificatoria are largely similar. For example, in Book III, Chapter 12, he criticises the modern practice of leaving holes in the wall to insert scaffolding poles but approves of the ancient Roman practice of leaving projecting stone blocks on which scaffolding could be

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L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol.1, p.229; the passage is briefly discussed by C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, p.59. 56 L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol.2, p.559; the translation is taken from L. B. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, ed. and trans., J. Rykwert, N. Leach & R. Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p.199; the passage is briefly discussed by C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, p.59. 57 L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol.2, p.1001; the translation is taken from L. B. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, ed. and trans., J. Rykwert, N. Leach & R. Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p.362; the passage is briefly discussed by C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, p.59.

52 C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, p.59. 53 L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol.1, pp.146-7; the translation is taken from L. B. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, ed. and trans., J. Rykwert, N. Leach & R. Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p.51. 54 L. B. Alberti, L’architettura [De re aedificatoria], ed. G. Orlandi & P. Portoghesi, Milan, 1966, vol.1, pp.146-7; the translation is taken from L. B. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, ed. and trans., J. Rykwert, N. Leach & R. Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p.51.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies particular qualities is ‘reason.’ He makes this explicit in his letter of 1454 about the Tempio Malatestiano, where he says, in response to criticisms about of his model by Antonio Manetti, “I prefer to believe those who built the baths and the Pantheon and all those other great things than him; and reason more than any man.”58

demand Alberti had to accept what he would have regarded as a solecism in the façade’s design, namely that the outer edges of the upper part of the facade, edges that correspond with the nave walls behind, fall directly above the façade’s lateral portals. To Alberti’s way of thinking, this feature flouted ‘natural law’ and ‘reason’ insofar as a void should be placed over a void and a solid above a solid. Given that he was forced to accept this inherent ‘weakness’ in the design, Alberti tried to resolve the problem in another way, by masking the problem.63 First of all he inserted a tall attic between the lower and upper parts of the façade, an attic that had a very strong horizontal emphasis that was designed to distract the viewer’s attention away from the fact that a structural wall falls directly over an opening. Secondly, he designed a series of panels in the attic that are set at intervals where they can have no vertical relationship with any feature in the storeys below or above, and in doing this he drew attention away from the feature that he regarded as a structural impropriety. Thus what Alberti did not like about the medieval façade of S. Maria Novella was the fact that it seemed to him to eschew the principle of ‘firmitas.’

In works other than the De re aedificatoria he could be extremely enthusiastic about medieval buildings as is shown by his praise for Florence Cathedral in his Della tranquillità dell’animo.59 Here he says: “certainly this temple has in itself grace and majesty; and as I have often thought, I delight to see joined together here a charming slenderness with a robust and full solidity so that, on the one hand, each of its parts seems destined for pleasure, while on the other, one understands that its has been built for perpetuity.”60 What is interesting about this part of the description is that, Alberti praises the building’s beauty, its “grace and majesty”, and its strength, its “robust and full solidity” and the fact that it is “built for perpetuity.” Later on in the passage he says “that which I prize above all, here you listen to the voices during mass, during that which the ancients called the mysteries,” an allusion to the way in which the building functions. Thus Alberti approves of Florence Cathedral precisely because for him it comes out well when assessed in terms of the Vitruvian triad and does not contravene the dictates of ‘reason.’

Conclusion From this analysis, it is clear that Alberti did not disapprove of medieval styles as such but rather various medieval buildings practices, principally the tendency for medieval buildings to flout ‘natural law.’ For Alberti, when medieval buildings contravened this particular demand they could only be considered bad or inferior works of architecture, but when they observed it they could be given his full approval. As far as he was concerned all good buildings, including medieval ones, had to abide by the dictates of ‘natural law’ and observe the Vitruvian triad. What this means is that he, in effect, measured medieval architecture by a classical yardstick. Even though this is the case, his attitude to medieval architecture was far from wholly negative and, when need arose, he was quite prepared to borrow features from it but only if they accorded with classical precept. In the final analysis, Alberti must remain a classicist, but one that is a little less radical than before.

A late medieval building which for Alberti did contravene ‘reason’ was actually a structure which he himself was commissioned to complete, the façade of S. Maria Novella. To understand just how it did so in his eyes, it is necessary to recap briefly a little of its building history. The façade had been begun under the patronage of the Baldesi family late in the fourteenth century and the lower half of the façade was completed by them.61 It remained in this state until Giovanni Rucellai assumed the patronage rights and requested Alberti to provide a design for its completion c.1458.62 The one constraint imposed upon Giovanni Rucellai and his architect was that the Baldesi part of the façade had to remain largely intact. By adhering to this 58

See, C. Grayson, Alberti and the Tempio Malatestiano: An Autograph Letter from Leon Battista Alberti to Matteo de’ Pasti, New York, 1957, p.17. 59 Noted by C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York & Oxford, 1992, p.59. 60 L. B. Alberti, Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III, ed., C. Grayson, in Leon Battista Alberti: Opere Volgari, Bari, 1966, vol. 2, pp.107-83. In its Italian translation the work is known as Della tranquillità della animo. The translation used below is taken from C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 14001470, New York & Oxford, 1992, pp.5-6, & p.80. 61 For the history of Alberti’s scheme to complete the façade of S. Maria Novella see especially, M. Dezzi Bardeschi, La facciata di Santa Maria Novella, Pisa, 1970; F. W. Kent, ‘The making of a Renaissance patron’, in F. W. Kent et al., Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone. Vol. 2. A Florentine Patrician and his Palace, London, 1981, pp.9-95; and R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, New Haven & London, 1998, pp.99-106. 62 For the dating of the façade see, F. W. Kent et al., Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone. Vol. 2. A Florentine Patrician and his Palace, London, 1981, p.57.

63 For the argument that follows see, P. Davies & D. Hemsoll, ‘Alberti, Leon Battista’, The Dictionary of Art, ed. J.. Turner, London, 1996, vol. 1, pp.555-69.

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Paul Davies: Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture

Fig.1. Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini. View of façade and side elevation.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.2. Foundation medal showing Alberti’s project for the façade of the Tempio Malatestiano (British Museum).

Fig.3. S. Gregorio, Ferrara.

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Paul Davies: Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture

Fig.4. Relief showing the façade of S. Maria Maggiore, Milan.

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Fig.5. Detail from Domenico Morone, Expulsion of the Bonacolsi (Palazzo Ducale, Mantua) showing the medieval façade of Mantua Cathedral.

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Fig.6. S. Aponal, Venice. View of façade.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.7. S. Andrea della Zirada, Venice, View of façade.

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Paul Davies: Observations on Alberti’s Attitude to Late Medieval Architecture

Fig.8. Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia, Venice, View of façade.

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Fig.9. S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, View of façade.

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Fig.10. Reconstruction of Alberti’s modified project for the Tempio Malatestiano (after Tavernor).

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Fig.11. Church of the Eremitani, Padua. View of keel vault.

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Fig.12. S. Maria Novella, Florence, View of façade.

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Fig.13. Church of the Eremitani, Padua. View of façade.

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Fig.14. S. Miniato, Florence. Detail of floor.

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Fig.15. S. Andrea, Mantua. Buttresses on the church’s north flank.

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Fig.16. S. Antonio, Padua. Side elevation showing buttresses.

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Art history and evolution from Henri Focillon to Stephen Jay Gould Eric Fernie

Art history and evolution may at first sight appear to be very different kinds of subject, yet they share a central interest, namely the description and explanation of change in physical forms, and have been used in attempts to clarify one another in this regard. It is the purpose of this paper to assess the extent to which these attempts have succeeded and how other approaches might be explored. The body of the paper is divided into two parts, on metaphors and analyses respectively. In the first I shall examine some of the ways in which art historians and evolutionary biologists have used each other’s disciplines as sources of metaphor, an approach which has been more confusing than helpful.

Examples such as these suggest that the notion of evolution has become so much a part of our mental furniture that we easily assume its relevance even when there is no reason to do so. This is of course a good reason for avoiding it: the metaphor of evolutionary change ignores the effect of human needs and imagination, and therefore has not helped to clarify the complex cultural subject matter with which art historians have to deal. Already in 1934 Henri Focillon expressed the view that art historians too easily applied what he thought of as a scientific model to a completely different set of circumstances. Evolution, he said, with ‘its deceptive orderliness, its single-minded directness...its inability to make room for the revolutionary energy of inventors’ was inappropriate to the study of history.4

Metaphors Evolutionary theory has provided countless metaphors for disciplines in the humanities, as in Norman Davies’ ‘languages evolve by ceaseless mutation just as living organisms do’,1 while in the literature of the history of art there are innumerable instances of styles described as ‘evolving’ from one phase to another. In some cases the parallel is explicit in the extreme, as with the claim of the medievalist Pierre Heliot that an architectural style is ‘a complete organism obedient to the same laws as creatures of the flesh’.2 Taking art history as covering all objects made with a visual content, a more recent example is George Basalla’s caption to a diagram which reads: ‘The evolutionary history of the hammer, from the first crudely shaped pounding stone (1) to James Nasmyth’s gigantic steam hammer of 1842 (14)... .’3 (fig.1) All of these hammers are closely enough related to one another to justify their being considered as steps, a typology if you like, in a process which might have something in common with biological evolution. All, that is, except the last item in the sequence, namely the punch hammer, the form of which has very little beyond its purpose in common with all the previous manual types. It represents, rather, the sort of giant step which is common in cultural change but without parallel in biological evolution, even with the most violent mutation. All of these metaphors, even the less extreme examples, suffer from the over-riding differences which exist between natural forms and cultural ones.

When conversely evolutionary biologists make use of arthistorical metaphors the results (at least in one of the most celebrated cases) are no happier. I refer to the paper of 1979 by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin entitled ‘The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme’.5 Gould and Lewontin argue that the four features situated between the arches and the dome of a building like San Marco arose as it were by accident, as the most direct means of filling the spaces left over when the architect confronted the problem of placing an element with a circular base onto a square supporting structure. They make this observation in order to throw into relief the point they wish to make about those features of organisms which they believe survived not because they were adaptive, but simply because they were not maladaptive. The point in evolutionary biology is an important one, but the metaphor only succeeds in getting in the way, for two reasons. First, Gould and Lewontin used the wrong term: the features supporting the dome are not spandrels, but pendentives. Yet even after substituting the right label the metaphor does not work: pendentives do not occur accidentally as a result of the juxtaposition of the other two features, but are only one of a number of solutions, such as the squinch and the corbel. They are also, to add insult to injury, one of the most elegant solutions, both visually and intellectually, to the problem of placing a circle over a square, as they are parts of a hemisphere which has the diagonal of the basic square as its diameter.6 Ironically, had Gould and Lewontin stuck to the spandrel properly

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the numerous people who have commented on this article when it was delivered as a lecture, in particular Professor Keith Thomson, of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, who has considered the parallels discussed here from the perspective of a scientist. 1 Norman Davies, Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p.86. 2 Pierre Heliot, Du carolingien au gothique: l’evolution de la plastique murale dans l’architecture religieuse du nord-ouest de l’Europe (IXeXIIIe siècle), Paris: Imprimerie Nationale et Librairie Klincksieck, 1966, p.99. 3 George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge History of Science Series, 1988, p. 20.

4

Henri Focillon, La Vie des formes, trans C. B. Hogan & G. Kubler, The Life of Forms in Art, New York, 1989, pp.44-63. 5 Stephen Jay Gould & Ronald C. Lewontin, ‘The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist program,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, 205 (1979), pp.581-598. 6 See Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London: Penguin, 1995, pp.267-76, and Robert Mark, ‘Architecture and evolution’, American Scientist, 84/4 (July-August), 1996, pp.383-89.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies defined (as part of a wall above and between two arches), their metaphor might have worked, but their description of pendentives as secondary or accidental is wrong and, more important, the forms are a misleading parallel to the evolutionary point.

volume eight times as great to be lit. This can be achieved either by increasing the sizes of the windows, on which there are practical limits, or by increasing the surface area of the building, by the addition of extensions such as aisles, transepts and chapels.

Analyses Where the techniques of analysis of one discipline are applied to the material of the other the results are more convincing than with metaphor.

Of course there are all sorts of other reasons why larger buildings are more likely to have these features than smaller ones, including a wish to show off, a need for more altars, a desire for symbolism, and so on, but the effect which Gould’s surface-versus-volume ratio has on the available light is a criterion which has not been sufficiently explored by architectural historians.

I have selected two examples of an evolutionary biologist working on art-historical subjects, both again from the publications of Gould. The first is his ‘biological homage to Mickey Mouse’ of 1978.7 In this marvellous essay he describes the contrast between the rodent-like and quite nasty character with which Mickey began in 1928 and the loveable figure he had become by the 1950s. (fig.2) He points out that this transformation parallels the physical changes between childhood and adulthood in humans, but going in reverse from adulthood to childhood. In relation to the rest of their bodies children have larger eyes, a larger head and a larger cranium than adults do; between the 1930s and the 1950s Mickey’s eyes increased from 27 to 42 per cent of his head, his head from 43 to 45 per cent of his body, and his cranium from 71 to 95 per cent of his profile. (fig.3) These changes accompany his rise to the status of a national symbol, and are, not surprisingly, characteristics likely to make us feel warmly disposed and protective towards him.

These studies of Mickey Mouse and size-to-window ratios are useful contributions in anyone’s terms. Can the history of art reciprocate? I think that the discipline may have something to contribute, if only by providing an area of relevant subject matter. It requires a digression, however, as it is a contribution to one of the most fraught areas of evolutionary theory, namely the extent to which evolutionary processes are non-random or random. There are and have traditionally been two views of evolution. In the more widely held one the process is seen as one of inexorable change from lower to higher and simple to complex, according to predetermined rules such as might explain the formation of a star: that is, nonrandom and implying an inner mechanism directing change, which tends to make it (at least according to its opponents) the more comforting model.

This analysis is convincing and highly revealing, and leaves a tantalising question: since the artists and patrons (or perhaps we should say illustrators and managers) at Disney Studios are very unlikely to have orchestrated such gradual change over several decades, what was the mechanism which produced and managed it? Gould does not have an answer and I have none to offer either, except to say that it must lie in the realms of psychology, and that the question is also exactly what would be asked if the subject were a biological one.

In the other, random, model, which is closer to Darwin’s original hypothesis, species do not arise predictably via a set of rules, but by sequences of events with multiple possible outcomes, so that the biological world is a product of the accidents of history, with all the consequences of that status. Gould has illustrated this historical character of the random model via the 530 million year-old Burgess Shale organisms in British Columbia. He argues that the great majority of the species represented in the Shale produced no descendants in the evolutionary line. In Gould’s memorable words, if the tape of life were to be rerun then a completely different set of organisms could result.9 If, for instance, Pikaia gracilens, the single vertebrate at the site (fig.6), had not been one of the few species to survive, then there might have been no reptiles and no mammals, let alone primates and Homo sapiens, in later ages.

The second analysis forms a part of Gould’s essay of 1977 entitled ‘Size and Shape’.8 The basis of the essay is the fact that surface increases by the square of a length while volume increases by the cube, so that, for example, a length of 2 feet gives an area of 4 square feet and a volume of 8 cubic feet, while twice the starting length, 4 feet, gives equivalent figures of 16 square feet and 64 cubic feet. Gould examines the effects of this huge rate of increase on the physiques of animals of different sizes, and then applies the same rule to medieval churches with very similar results. (figs.4 & 5) Small churches need windows of a particular size, or surface area, in order to provide sufficient light. A building twice the size will have a

He also notes that organisms do not become progressively more diverse as they succeed one another through time. The standard diagram of the non-random, directional model resembles a bush with the earliest and simplest organisms at the root and the more complex forms fanning out towards the top, the width of the bush representing the steadily and apparently inexorably increasing number and

7 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘A biological homage to Mickey Mouse’, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin, 1990, pp.81-91, Essay 9, 1978. 8 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Size and Shape’, Ever Since Darwin, London: Penguin, 1977, pp.171-8, Essay 21.

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Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990, p.322.

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variety of different phyla, or groups of species, in existence at any one time. The Burgess Shale fauna indicate that the number of invertebrate phyla in existence at that time was much greater than 100 million years later. The new ‘bush’ therefore bulges out with a great increase in the number of groups of species before narrowing again afterwards.10 (fig.7)

been assumed to be...Above all, it is highly active, driven by an internal feedback mechanism that searches in a very discriminating manner for the best route to optimal performance, not because it possesses an inherent drive towards any predestined goal, but simply by virtue of its inherent non-linear mechanism which gives the appearance of goal-directedness’.13

Thus, to paraphrase, in the non-random, directional model changes are obedient to a set of rules, including the move from simple to complex; in the random model changes are neither progressive nor inevitable, and the system is therefore unpredictable. One might have thought that the battle between these two views had been settled in favour of the random one, but in fact the fault-line still runs through almost all of evolutionary theory. Against Gould’s new bush it is possible to note that almost all life did proceed from simple to complex, both in general and in specific lines, that modern animals are arguably more complex than Cretaceous animals, and a Pikaia. And against his radical contingency and the new tape of history it is possible to note the almost universal occurrence of convergence, even between very different species.11 The following two examples illustrate the problems associated with this divide. They concern early forms of life on the one hand, and language on the other, chosen because one lies at the root of biological development and the other at the root of cultural development.

Some of the apparent oddities in this last quotation may be due to problems with the translation from the original German. One must also beware, in analysing these sentences, of falling into what Dennett has called the trap of the greedy reductionist,14 and finally one must acknowledge that recent work on complex adaptive systems may offer a way out of the problem (with neither of which I am competent to deal). But even with these two provisos it remains the case that Eigen sees the evolutionary process as driven by more than chance, as having a form of direction, however difficult he finds it to state in exactly which way this is so. Thus he quotes Sol Spiegelman as saying ‘nucleic acids invented human beings in order to be able to reproduce themselves even on the Moon’.15 While said in jest this none the less wryly encapsulates the problem. Turning to language, modern linguistics is Chomskian linguistics, according to which we are hard-wired for language, leaving nurture to determine only which language. One might therefore have thought that Chomsky would see our language ability as an adaptive feature to be explained by the normal random evolutionary mechanisms, but he denies that it can be attributed to natural selection. He has offered no alternative explanation, but scholars such as Dennett who have tried to extract one from him have concluded that he ‘prefers to think of the genes getting their message from some intrinsic, ahistorical, nonenvironmental source of organisation -- ‘physics’, we may call it’; and even that he may prefer it to remain a mystery.16

Manfred Eigen, in his fundamental text Steps Towards Life, of 1996, provides, as one would expect, a clear statement in support of the random character of the origins of life 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, as indicated in the following three quotations: 1. ‘Life is not an inherent property of matter’. 2. We seek to ‘discover the principles according to which life could begin. This is a challenge addressed to the physicist...How life did begin, however, can probably only be understood by appeal to historical evidence’. 3. ‘the fundamental mutation step is purely random, or statistical, in nature. So there is no magical or prophetic force at work that steers the development of the mutant spectrum, but just the purely physical “weight of numbers”’.12

Chomsky has given no reason for his preferences, though one can speculate from his political writings that they spring from a visceral distrust of sociobiology and other attempts to classify people in terms of their ability to survive. That is, in denying natural selection a role in the explanation of language, Chomsky also denies it a role in the explanation of culture.

Contrast, however, these other two quotations from the same book: ‘The genes found today cannot have arisen randomly, as it were by the throw of a dice. There must exist a process of optimization that works towards functional efficiency. Even if there are several routes towards optimal efficiency, mere trial and error cannot be one of them...’; and ‘The demon with the special ability to transform fluctuations into information is not just some passive molecular “rectifier” -- he is a part of the mechanism of selection. Selection does not work blindly, and neither is it the blind sieve that, since Darwin, it has

In this confrontation Chomsky has on his side the argument we have already met, to the effect that not every feature of every organism is adaptive: some new features will continue in an organism simply because they are not maladaptive (Gould and Lewontin’s ‘spandrels’). As has been frequently pointed out, when the ability to count was 13

Eigen, Steps Toward Life, pp.11, 123. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, pp.220-1, 386-96. 15 Eigen, Steps Toward Life, p.124. 16 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.395; note that ‘ahistorical’; see also, Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct, New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1994, ch. 2, for an adaptationist critique of Chomsky’s view. 14

10

Gould, Wonderful Life, pp.215-6 & figs 3.71/2. See, for example, Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, pp.301-8. Manfred Eigen, Steps Toward Life: a Perspective on Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp.3, 3, 25. 11 12

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies first acquired there cannot have been anything adaptive about the ability to calculate square roots and juggle algebraic equations, nor with the acquisition of the ability to identify symbolic imagery can there have been anything adaptive about an ability to appreciate, still less make, the Panathenaic frieze or the Sistine Ceiling. Thus in the final analysis Chomsky is making an important if muffled point about the problematic relationship between biological evolution on the one hand and culture on the other.

throws into relief the fact that the forms change regardless of all these other considerations.18 Further, I must also acknowledge that of course numerous things are happening between the points which I have illustrated, that some sequences move from complex to simple, that there are different things going on in literature and the other arts, and that one can argue that the Giotto is the most ‘complex’ of the three paintings. Yet I would hold that it is not the most complex in its forms and that there is no equating of complex with ‘better’ or ‘more sophisticated’, and if ‘simple/complex’ is felt to be a misleading pair then let us find whatever terms are necessary to describe the phenomenon and its stages, and therefore what is predictable, restricting oneself to the measurable fact that the outlines of the later Chinese bowls are much more broken than those of the earlier ones, as are the outlines of the figures in the Veronese in comparison with those of the Giotto. It needs to be stressed that none of these descriptions relies on or is intended to refer to any concept of increasing naturalism.

I hope that these examples have established the uncertainty which exists about the divide between non-random and random explanations of evolutionary processes. We are now in a better position to ask what the study of the visual arts might have to contribute to clarifying this divide. One phenomenon which appears to have potential is the tendency for imagery in certain kinds of societies to develop from simple to more elaborate or varied despite being expressed in widely differing styles. That is, forms appear to change according to certain patterns which repeat themselves and which can therefore be predicted. I am referring to sequences which take us in some sense back to the nursery, to the cycles of formal values described by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and Johannes Winckelmann (1717-68), exemplified by, for example, the Apollo of Tenea in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich, the Apoxyomenos, known from a Roman copy in the Vatican, and the Gaul and his dead wife in the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, of the sixth, fourth and third centuries BC respectively, for the Greek sequence, and by the Last Suppers of Giotto in Padua, Leonardo in Milan and Veronese, also in Milan, of 1305, 1495-7, and 1560-80 respectively. The same sorts of changes can be demonstrated outside the classical canon in the façades of the cathedrals of Chartres and Amiens and that of StMaclou in Rouen, of the c.1140, c.1220, and the fifteenth century respectively, in Indian temples such as those at Badami and Bhubaneswar of the sixth and eleventh centuries AD,17 and in Chinese bronze bowls of the tenth and sixth centuries BC. (figs.8-11)

If the phenomenon exists, how do we explain it, especially if evolution is not supposed to be predictable? Here are four suggestions, moving from the least to the most defensible: 1. The inner mechanism. Vasari’s model of the past, with periods succeeding one another like the stages of a human life, from birth to maturity to decline and death, and Hegel’s Zeitgeist in which the ages of history progress towards a goal, depend on an inner mechanism. There is no evidence for either. 2. The specific intention. Turning to more materialist and nominalist explanations, the most straightforward is that artists and patrons devised the pattern and made a series of specific decisions to apply and develop it. This might just be conceivable in a situation restricted in time and place, Athens in the fifth century BC or Florence in the fifteenth AD for example, but it becomes more difficult if not impossible to accept over three or four centuries, as with the period from the archaic kouros to the Laocoon or from Giotto to Tiepolo (as it was difficult with the Disney studios even over only twenty-five years). But even in the most restricted sphere one cannot seriously accept that artists would submit to the discipline of following a sequence of styles laid down by patrons, like actors in a play. The idea may sound unworthy of consideration, but it is relevant to note that a similar premise lies at the core of Erwin Panofsky’s celebrated Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism.19 Panofsky argues that the architects of northern France in the century between 1140 and 1240 followed the three stages of scholastic argument, sic, non, respondeo dicendum, despite the fact that the parallel

In very broad terms these patterns appear to be at their clearest in societies which can be described as occurring after the Neolithic, early agricultural stages of human history, and before the industrial. Also interesting is the most obvious exception to this rule, namely the art of pharaonic Egypt, where it is the lack of change over one or even two millennia which needs explaining. If it can be agreed that there are shared patterns in these sequences, even if only for the sake of the argument, then the next thing I have to do is to admit to the crude character of my comments and the sequences of illustrations, ignoring as they do questions of medium, context, material, cost, intention, reception, etc. Yet this very crudity can be seen as a virtue in that it underlines or

18

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, London: Penguin, 1998, p.193, refers to technical and cultural evolution. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Latrobe: Arch Abbey Press, 1961.

17

Pierre Rambach & Vitold de Goldish, The Golden Age of Indian Art: Vth – Xiiith Century, London, Thames & Hudson, 1955, Plates 29/30 & 60.

19

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Western culture to India and beyond. I do not pretend to have arrived at an explanation of the phenomenon, but I am sure this should prove a fruitful line of exploration.

requires that architects producing sic solutions in the early part of the period resist the temptation to move on to subsequent stages before they are ‘due’. 3. Skill and the material. Next is the development of a skill enabling greater freedom in the use of the material. This however will not work as an explanation because the changes in form apply equally to works in very different materials: for example the Riace bronzes appear to have reached exactly the same stage of formal development as statues in stone, such as the Doryphoros (assuming they are of the same date). Thus neither the forms nor their development can be attributed directly to the character of the material of which they are made, or to skill with which that is worked. 4. The psychology of maintained satisfaction. A more fruitful approach is offered by psychology, namely that each successive generation requires something richer, or at least different to satisfy its taste to the same extent. What appears complex to one generation may appear simple to the next (as with the progression of car designs). Yet, again, one is struck by the consistency of change over centuries in so many different traditions, and the question poses itself: what makes the psychological pressures so consistent in such varied societies? To sum up, the first explanation, the inner mechanism, or Chomsky’s mystery, lacks evidence. The second, that the sequence is planned, is a psychological impossibility, and the third, skill, fails the test because of consistency across media. The fourth, psychological, explanation, is more plausible, but the consistency of the pattern over long periods of time leaves a lingering doubt that there may be some mechanism in operation at an unspecified level. In other words, are the examples so varied in type as to establish the independence of the pattern from human intention, and are we therefore back with an ‘internal mechanism’? In these terms the escape clauses of Eigen and Chomsky may be seen to have a more general validity. Conclusion On the evidence available, metaphors exchanged between fields ought to be treated with extreme caution, while analyses which cross disciplines can prove productive. This may be because metaphors involve the use of the techniques of another discipline, while analyses are based on the application of a technique from one’s own discipline, which is by definition going to be better known to the researcher. If metaphors are to be helpful, and we do love using them, they would be better directed at prompting questions rather than attempting to provide or clarify answers. Analyses on the other hand can result in pure gain, as with Gould’s studies of Mickey Mouse and the effects of size on form, or they can be used to fly a kite as I have tried to do here. On the relevance of complexification in visual imagery to evolutionary theory, there is it seems to me a clear need to explore the reasons for the similarities (and the differences) between modes of change of visual imagery in different societies, from 71

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.1. The evolutionary history of the hammer (Basalla, 1988, fig. 1.4). From Walter Hough, ’Synoptic Series of Objects in the United States National Museum illustrating the History of Inventions’. Proceedings of the United States National Museum, 60 (Washington, D.C., 1922), art. 9, p. 2, pl. 16.

Fig.2. The evolution of Mickey Mouse over fifty years. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

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Eric Fernie: Art history and evolution from Henri Focillon to Stephen Jay Gould

Fig.3. Graph of the evolution of Mickey Mouse. From THE PANDA’S THUMB, More Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould. Copyright © 1980 by Stephen Jay Gould. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Fig.4. Galileo’s illustration of the relationship between size and shape (Gould, 1977, p. 172).

Fig.5. The great range of designs among medieval churches attributed partly to size (Gould, 1977, p. 176). From A. W. Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture after the Conquest (1934). © by permission of Oxford University Press.

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Eric Fernie: Art history and evolution from Henri Focillon to Stephen Jay Gould

Fig.6. Pikaia gracilens (Gould, 1990, 5.8, p. 322; drawn by Marianne Collins).

Fig.7. Top: ‘standard’ evolutionary tree illustrating increasing diversity. Bottom: evolutionary tree with varying degrees of diversity (Gould, 1990, 1.17 p.46)

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Fig.8. Bronze ding (food container), Western Zhou, reign of King Xiao, 10thc BC. By kind permission of the Shanghai Museum. (Chen Peifen, Ancient Chinese Bronzes in the Shanghai Museum (London: Scala Books, 1995), pp. 21-2 and Pl. 43).

Fig.9. Bronze ding with ladle, from Xiasi, China, 6thc BC. Collected by and reproduced by kind permission of the Henan Provincial Museum, Zhenghou. (Jessica Rawson, ed., Mysteries of Ancient China: New Discoveries from the Early Dynasties (London: The British Museum, 1996), pp. 125-6 and pl. 58).

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Eric Fernie: Art history and evolution from Henri Focillon to Stephen Jay Gould

Fig.10. Bronze hu (wine container), Early Western Zhou period, 11thc BC. By kind permission of the Shanghai Museum. (Chen Peifen, Ancient Chinese Bronzes in the Shanghai Museum (London: Scala Books, 1995), pp. 18-19 and Pl. 30).

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Fig.11. Bronze hu (wine vessel), from Xinzheng, Henan Province, China, 6thc BC. Reproduced by kind permission of the Palace Museum, Beijing. (Jessica Rawson, ed., Mysteries of Ancient China: New Discoveries from the Early Dynasties (London: The British Museum, 1996), p. 130 and pl. 60).

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Science, Darwin and Art History Lauren Golden

Introduction This paper explores science and its integration with imagination and creativity in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century and how this contributed toward the development of art history as a discipline. The implication of their writings is that there is much to be gained from the application of the biological sciences to art and, from the mid-nineteenth-century onward, the theories of Charles Darwin. The developments in science excited these writers and they attempted to understand the workings of the brain and mind and their relation to the creative act. While in the light of modern science, many of their ideas and theories have proved incorrect they endeavoured to employ the scientific knowledge of the time.

Recent writers on the arts are reluctant to consider a biological approach to art despite the amazing scientific advancement in our understanding of the evolution of the human being (especially since 1953, the year in which Crick and Watson discovered the DNA molecule3), even down to the level of the individual gene. It, thus, seems quite ironic that the origin of the discipline is found in those very writers who incorporated biology and science in their methodology. Generally, the refusal to consider biology is based on the prevailing misconception of Darwin’s theory as determinist and reductionist. In fact, it is the reverse. The beauty of Darwin’s theory is that anything can happen. Homo sapiens sapiens is here by chance and that chance has produced a creature with extraordinary capabilities and one of the most important is the imagination. The cognitive neuroscientist, S.M. Kosslyn states, “one of the reasons I find imagery an exciting topic is that it is likely to be one of the higher cognitive functions that will be firmly rooted in the brain.”4 Imagery is the ultimate subject of art historians and, therefore, so too is science.

The philosophies and aesthetics of writers of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-centuries, Hegel, Kant, Schiller and Herbart are clearly important and are discussed by Michael Podro in The Critical Historians of Art.1 While the inclusion of these writers in the historiography of art history is not new, the omission from Podro’s account of the influence on the aesthetics of this period from biology and science and the absence of any mention of Darwin needs to be redressed. Podro is not alone in omitting Darwin2 and, this is strange, for anyone who has examined German philosophy and aesthetics of this period, cannot have failed to notice the influence of the biological sciences in general and, in particular, those of Charles Darwin.

The Biological Foundation of Art History The influence of Natural Philosophy on the arts was crucial for the subsequent development of the discipline of art history.5 Previously, writings on art consisted mainly of an account of ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’, forming a 3

However, and perhaps more important, is the effect of the misapplication of Darwin’s ‘Natural Selection’ on social thinking as advocated by Herbert Spencer, which ultimately led to racist theories and to Hitler’s attempt to produce a ‘superior’ Aryan race. Therefore, there is much ‘fear’ associated with a biological approach to art concerning this issue. It is not possible here to examine the effect of late nineteenthcentury and early-twentieth century ‘Social Darwinism’ on the Humanities, but there is now a form of McCarthy-like hysteria concerning a biological approach to art, especially as Crick and Watson’s discovery, for some, seemed to confirm a deterministic biology, which was to be avoided at all costs. On Social Darwinism, see, Hofstadter, R., “The Vogue of Spencer”, in Appleman, P., ed., Darwin. A Norton Critical Edition, New York & London, 1979, pp.389-399; Gould, S. J., The Mismeasure of Man, Harmondsworth, 1997, pp.367-390; Dinosaur in a Haystack, Harmondsworth, 1996, pp.315-317; Ever Since Darwin, Harmondsworth, 1991, pp.34-38. Interestingly, Panofsky, in Three Decades of Art History in the United States, first published in 1952, discusses, no doubt as a response to the McCarthy trials at the time, the negative effect of the suppression of alternative points of academic research that do not conform to the ‘norm’. See, Panofsky, E., “Three Decades of Art History in the United States”, in Meaning in the Visual Arts, Harmondsworth, 1987, pp.368-395, pp.394-395. 4 Kosslyn, S. M., Image and Brain, Cambridge MA., 1994, p.1. 5 Eric Fernie, rightly, points out, the influence on art history of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-centuries of the new approach to the ‘ordering of knowledge’ and the materialism and inductive reasoning of Empiricism. See, Fernie, 1995, pp.12-13. Although, Fernie does discuss the importance of German Idealism, and particularly the influence of Hegel, it seems to me that Natural Philosophy, with its integration of biology and creativity, is of fundamental importance as a facilitator for the transition of a scientific approach to the arts. See, Fernie, 1995, pp.1315.

1

Podro, 1983, p.xxi. 2 Rather than list those who do not consider evolution and Darwin, it is far more useful to list those that do. See, Munro, T., Evolution in the Arts and Other Theories of Culture, New York, (no publication date, c.1950); Mallgrave, H., & Ikonomov, E., eds., Empathy, Form and Space. Problems in German Aesthetics 1873 - 1893, The Getty Centre Publication Programmes, CA., 1994, Introduction, pp.1-85 & passim; Mallgrave, H., & Hermann, W., Gottfried Semper. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, Cambridge, 1989; Steadman, P., The evolution of designs. Biological analogy in architecture and the applied arts, Cambridge, 1979; Gelernter, M., Sources of Architectural Form. A critical history of Western design theory, Manchester & New York, 1995, pp.180-182, pp.198-200 & pp.266-278. Gelernter only slightly considers the biological and scientific considerations. See also, Fernie, E., Art History and Its Methods, London, 1995, pp.336-337. Fernie, includes ‘Evolution’ in his ‘Glossary of Concepts’ and considers the use of the word to be generally employed to explain stylistic change and the idea of ‘progress’ from the simple to the complex. However, this does not mean that its use by art historians in the eighteenth-and particularly nineteenthcentury were not influenced by biological science or evolutionary theory. Mostly, the use of ‘evolution’ at this time, in terms of progress, is a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution, which, is still prevalent today. Fernie comments that “Riegl attacked the application of evolutionism to the history of art”, but this does not mean that he was not affected by the theory. See, ibid. Further, the use of ‘evolution’ is not employed by these earlier writers as just a metaphor, though indeed it is used in that way too. Evolution is used as a system in order to understand creativity and art forms. Fernie is also absolutely forward thinking in his inclusion and comments of ‘Geography’ in the glossary indicating the usefulness of considering such an approach to art history. See, Fernie, 1995, pp.340-342.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies into an organic whole.14 Included in this approach to creativity and genius, is the perception of imagination as an unconscious instinctive function that reflects nature’s properties of living growth with its never-ending power of synthesis and creation.15

cyclic history of the rise and fall of good and bad art in terms of achievements of ‘beauty’ through naturalism, illusion and the mysterious quality of genius.6 Conversely, Natural Philosophy utilised biological research and terminology that greatly influenced the discussion and language of philosophies of creativity, art and aesthetics.7

This philosophy, in conjunction with the clamour of the taxonomic systems of the natural scientists of the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century, became the background for a positivistic approach,16 resulting in a plethora of publications that integrated biology with the discussion of form and function in theories of art and design.17 The art historian, Gottfried Semper was to echo this idea with his concept of ‘Urformen’ (prototypical forms)18 found in art and architecture.19 These were to explain the motives for the origin of the first abodes, which were composed of the “four elements of architecture: the hearth, the roof, the enclosure and the mound.”20

In the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century the notion that creativity and art are ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ endowments that cannot be learned was certainly prevalent8 but, the developing culture of natural science permeated the discussion and gave way to the idea of an ‘innate’ or ‘instinctual’ ability for creativity and genius, resulting in biological analogies that also included those of animal behaviour.9 Although such analogies can be traced to Aristotle,10 the predominant comparison was between the growth of the vegetable world and artistic creativity.11 Goethe, both a biologist and a philosopher of art, is a prime example.12

The concept of ‘evolution’, was not new (Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin had already explored this idea21) but, in terms of its use in writings on art, from the 1840s it become more apparent, especially as Darwin’s views on evolution were circulated among his fellow scientists long before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, which was the fruit of over thirty years of research and rumination.22 Although establishing direct influences from Darwin’s theory of evolution on writings on art during the nineteenth century is shadowy and requires more research, there is evidence of influence of a scientific and ‘evolutionary’ character.23 It is significant that The Origin of Species virtually sold out on the first day of publication and was immediately followed by a

Such biological and organic analogies were attractive not only for Natural Philosophers but also to the Romantics because they expressed a living unfolding concept - an evolution - of Nature and Man that created a sense of an organic whole. The employment of analogies of biological growth hints at a solution to the ‘mystery’ underlying the idea of a ‘natural’ origin and explanation for creativity and art.13 According to this theory, creativity and genius are an unconscious growth, like the organic world, the result of natural, not artificial laws, their separate parts being united

6

Fernie, 1995, pp.10-11, pp.26-28, pp.45-46, pp.58-61 & p.70; Munro, op.cit., p.27. There is not the space here to discuss the place of J. J. Winckelmann in the historiography of the history of art. Although, Winckelmann certainly is a ‘father of art history’ in terms of employing an approach that considered art as a ‘culture’, as opposed to the work of ‘individuals’, his notion of the rise and fall of the manifestation of ‘ideal’ beauty in art is restrictive for the purposes here but, nevertheless, he integrated a psychobiological response by employing metaphors of growth and decay in nature in his writings on art. Further, Winckelman’s system was very much in the Enlightenment mould, whereby his theoretical model could explain logically the rise and fall of the art of antiquity. See, Kleinbauer, W. E., Modern Perspectives in Western Art History, Toronto, 1989, pp.24-25; Kruft, H-W., A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, London & New York, 1994, pp.187-193; Fernie, 1995, pp.68-71; Haskell, F., History and Its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past, New Haven & London, 1995, pp.218-226; Potts, A., Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the origins of art history, New Haven & London, 1994, pp.11-46, pp.50-51 & pp.156-164. 7 For evidence, concerning the philosophy of art, see, Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Oxford, 1971, p.12, p.38, p.167, pp.192-193 & p.218. 8 On this, see for example, Abrams, 1971, pp.193-217. 9 Abrams, 1971, pp.197-198. 10 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 639b 15-640a 30; Physics, 198b 8-200b 5; Metaphysics, 1032a 7-1032b 25 & 1034a 9-1034b 5; Poetics, 1450b 71451a 6. See also, Steadman, 1979, pp.9-10. 11 Abrams, 1971, pp.198-213 & pp.220-225. Analogies of ‘Nature’, in terms of maturity and decay, had been previously applied to productions of art, by Vasari. See, Fernie, 1995, p.11 & p.23. However, the difference at this point is the development of a particularly scientific language and approach that is employed in the discussion of creativity and art. 12 Abrams, 1971, pp.206-207. 13 This is particularly evident in the writings of Thomas Carlyle. See, Abrams, 1971, pp.216-217. See also, ibid., pp.203 ff.

14

Ibid., pp.174-175, pp.205-206 & pp.220-223. Ibid., p.175, p.210, p.215 & p.220. 16 Olin explicitly agrees with this proposition and states that “scientific methodology”, was seen “as a solution to humanistic and social concerns.” See, Olin, M., Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, Pennsylvania, 1993, p.4. 17 For example, see, Steadman, 1979, pp.19-21, pp.28-29, pp.41-48 & passim; Munro., op.cit., pp.44-59 & pp.106-176; Appleman, P., “Postscript: Darwin among the Moralists”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.551571, p.548. 18 Semper, G., “Science, Industry and Art”, (1852), in Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, pp.130-167, p.136. See also, Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, p.30. 19 Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, p.23; Podro, 1983, pp.52-55. 20 Semper, G., “The Four Elements of Architecture”, [1851], in Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, pp.74-129, pp.102. 21 The works of Erasmus Darwin explore the concept of ‘evolution’ from the primeval soup to human achievements. See, Darwin, E., Zoonomia, London, 1794-6; The Botanic Garden, London, 1789-91. His later work, published posthumously and elevated the role of imagination in human cognition and creativity, was, The Temple of Nature, London, 1803. 22 White, M., & Gribben, J., Darwin. A Life in Science, London, 1996, p.106, pp.141-143, p.147, p.182, p.187, pp.188-195 & p.210. 23 Steadman has exhaustively covered these influences on theorists of art and architecture, particularly Cuvier’s influence on Violet-le-Duc. See, Steadman, 1979, passim & pp.45-46 & pp.60-64, respectively. Of particular note is Hyppolite Taine’s specific application of natural selection to the arts. See, Munro., op.cit., pp.106-108; Kleinbauer, 1989, pp.18-24. On literature, see, Oldroyd, D. R., Darwinian Impacts. An Introduction to the Darwinian revolution, Milton Keynes, 1980, pp.51-52 & pp.309-329. 15

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Lauren Golden: Science, Darwin and Art History reprint.24 Since the reception of the ‘Origin’ was so controversial,25 it seems likely that many academics made a point of reading the work.

object with the circumstances of its origin and the conditions and circumstances of its development.”33 Semper even produced a scientific formula to explain how ‘style’ is produced: Y = F (x y z etc), where (Y) = the work of art, which is determined by the constant (F) = ‘types’ and (x y z etc ) are variable factors which are 1) materials; 2) regional, ethnological, climatic, religious and political conditions; 3) personal influences, i.e., exercised by the artist or his patron. 34

A generally evolutionary approach is certainly apparent in the theories of Semper. His conceptual model of the Urmotif was biological, in terms of its systematic classification26 and, his son, Hans, said that his father’s thinking was “only one step away from Darwin’s line of reasoning” - hence ‘evolutionary’.27 The influence of Cuvier’s ‘Comparative Method’ on Semper, in the 1850’s, including its evolutionary aspect,28 is explicit in a passage from Semper’s November lecture of 1853, at Marlborough House.29 Semper explores the potential for understanding art and architecture by the application of a biological methodology:

Semper did not see his ‘types’ as fixed and inflexible, and he stated that, “most of the Products of Art and Industry were of a mixed character and are related to more than one of the above given four families.”35 Again, here, the biological analogy is conspicuous in that inherent in Semper’s language is the creation of a new species from existing genera.36 The parallel with Darwin’s idea of species adaptation -‘descent with modification’37- is discernible, and Semper did indeed read The Origin of Species, which he considered to be very similar to his own theory of stylistic development.38

We see the same skeleton repeating itself continuously, but with innumerable varieties, modified by gradual development of the individuals and by the conditions of existence which they had to fulfil…A method, analogous to that Cuvier followed, applied to art, and especially to architecture would at least contribute towards getting a clear insight over its whole province and perhaps form the basis of a doctrine of style and a sort of topic or method… .30

Analogies with the world of nature that evokes the language of scientific investigation can be observed in Jacob Burckhardt’s Reflections on History39 (1872). Firstly, he describes “the three great powers, State, Religion and Culture”, as having “continuous and gradual interaction” where “the whole process of history” is part of the “general ferment of all the rest of life.” Second, Burckhardt is quite clear that in his approach, “we shall confine ourselves to observation” in opposition to “the philosophy of history”40 and further, in a sentence that echoes Darwin’s ‘Struggle for Existence’,41 he states that: “We, however, shall start out from the one point accessible to us, the one eternal centre of all things - man, suffering, striving, doing, as he was and ever shall be. Hence our study will, in a certain sense be pathological in kind.”42

Semper’s theory held that stylistic developments could be traced to an original technique and, that such origins were still apparent in later forms and styles.31 He also considered that materials and physical climate played a part in the origin and subsequent development of form and style,32 where ‘style’ is thus, “the conformity of an art 24

White & Gribben, 1996, p.211. Ibid., pp.219-241; Oldroyd, 1980, pp.193-202; Lowenberg, B. J., “The Mosaic of Darwinian Thought”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.211-219; Dewey, J., “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy ”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.305-314, pp.305-306 & p.310; White, A. D., “The Final Effort of Theology”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.362-367; Appleman, P., “Darwin among the Moralists”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.529-551. In terms of the spread and communication of Darwin’s theory abroad, it should be noted that Ernst Haeckel was a great supporter of Darwin, and Darwin received many awards and honours from other countries. See, White & Gribben, 1996, pp.231-232; Oldroyd, 1980, p.274. 26 Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, pp.30-33. 27 Cited in Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, p.30 from Gottfried Semper: Ein Bild seines Lebens und Wirkens, Berlin, 1880, p.4. Further, whilst walking in the Jardin des Plantes, Semper is reported to have cited a quotation from Seneca as having anticipated Darwin. See, Harvey, L., “Semper’s Theory of Evolution in Architectural Ornament”, in Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects, N. S., 1, 1885, pp.29-54, p.29. 28 Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, pp.30-32. 29 Semper, G., “Architecture and Civilization”, in Kleine Schriften, eds., Semper, M. & H., Berlin and Stuttgart, 1884, pp.351-68. 30 Cited in Steadman, 1979, p.67 from Semper, Kleine Schriften, 1884, pp.259-91. Reproduced in Ettlinger, L. D., “On Science, Industry and Art: Some Theories of Gottfried Semper”, in Architectural Review, 1964, 136, pp.57-60, p.58. See also, Hermann, W., Gottfried Semper. In Search of Architecture, Cambridge, MA., & London, 1984, pp.xv-xvi. 31 Steadman, 1979, pp.115-116; Podro, 1983, pp.46-47; Hermann, 1984, pp.17-18; Olin, 1993, p.43. 32 Semper, G., Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, Braunschweig, 1852; Ettlinger, 1964, pp.57-60, pp.57-60; Steadman, 1979, pp.64-65. 25

Burckhardt wants to treat the subject of history from a unifying perspective, where the individual country should be investigated by comparing it with the rest of the world. 33

Cited in Steadman, 1979, p.64, from Semper, Kleine Schriften, 1884, ‘Uber Baustile’, pp.395-426, p.402. 34 Cited in, Kruft, 1994, p.313, from Semper, Kleine Schriften, 1884, p. 267 ff. See also, Steadman, 1979, pp.64-65. 35 Cited in Podro, 1983, p.54 from Semper, G, Practical Art in Metals, with a more comprehensive plan for a museum and classification of objects, 1854, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS. 86, ff.64. 36 Kruft specifically states that Semper was working with scientific methodology, especially that of Cuvier’s classification of the animal kingdom. See, Kruft, 1994, pp.313-314. 37 Darwin, C., The Origin of Species, Harmondsworth, 1997, reprint of the First Edition, Murray, London, 1859, pp.167-170, p.454, & pp.457-458. 38 Ettlinger, 1964, pp.57-60, pp.57-60, p.58; Steadman, 1979, p.73; Kleinbauer, 1989, p.20. However, later, Semper did not feel that Darwin’s theory could be applied to abrupt changes in architectural styles. See, Semper, G., “On Architectural Styles”, [1869], in Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, pp.264-84, p.268. 39 Burckhardt, J., “Reflections on History” [1872], in Fernie, 1995, pp.87102. 40 Ibid., 1995, p.87. 41 Darwin, [1859], 1997, pp.114-129 & pp.442. 42 Burckhardt, J., “Reflections on History” [1872], in Fernie, 1995, p.88.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies There is a strong implication of an objective ‘natural science’ approach to history, and his language seems to reflect this: “It may be that a calmer consideration from a greater distance may yield a first hint of the true nature of life on earth, and, fortunately for us, ancient history has preserved a few records in which we can closely follow growth, bloom and decay in outstanding historical events and in intellectual and economic conditions in every direction.”43 He seems to advocate the employment of a unifying system for history in much the same way that the natural scientists developed classificatory systems for the natural world: “The truest study of our national history will be that which considers our own country in parallels and in relation to world history and its laws, as part of a great whole.”44

Burkhardt’s account of the powerful cities and states of Renaissance Italy emphasizes the struggles between them, where “in their commercial dealings they shrank from no measures, however extreme, which might damage their competitors; they held their weaker neighbours in a condition of helplessness… .”52 Much of this first chapter presents a seemingly never-ending state of war in the Renaissance. Significantly, Darwin also used the state of war to describe the workings of the natural world, his language permeated with ‘destruction’, ‘enemies’, ‘battle’, ‘victors’ and ‘victory’.53 The Origin of Species described at great length the ‘struggle for existence’ and competition among the differing species.54 This account then spawned the whole of notion of nature as ruthless and violent.55 For example, Darwin writes:

In his earlier and perhaps and most famous work, The Civilization of The Renaissance in Italy,45 published just one year after the ‘Origin’ in 1860, the application of “categories” that are represented by his chapter divisions, in order to provide an “intelligible” exposition,46 has the flavour of scientific organization. He investigates the basis of Renaissance art through the ‘systems’ of State47 (which in many ways is an account of the violent ‘struggle for existence’48), while the next category explores ‘The Development of the Individual’.49 Here, it is possible to find an analogy with the evolutionary principle of the effect of the environment on species adaptation. Even more intriguing is that the next category, ‘The Revival of Antiquity’50 evokes the idea of biological inheritance and the emergence of a new species of art and culture - the Renaissance. ‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’ explores, one could say, the adaptation of this species to a different environment. The last two categories, of ‘Society and Festivals’ and ‘Morality and Religion’51 could be perceived as examining human behaviour in the same manner as Darwin’s analysis of animal behaviour.

As the individuals of the same species come in all respects into the closest competition with each other, the struggle will generally be most severe between them…The slightest advantage in one being, at any age, during any season, over those with which it comes into competition, or better adaptation in however slight a degree to the surrounding physical conditions, will turn the balance.56 In terms of scientific influence, on one page alone, in ‘The Development of the Individual’, employs a wealth of biological imagery. He comments on the “unfolding treasures of human nature”; that “people were forced to know all the inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent”57, and he describes wealth and culture as “display and rivalry”.58 All of this could almost be ‘lifted’ directly from Darwin’s writings on sexual selection.59 The biological analogies continue in ‘The Revival of Antiquity’, where he describes how the ‘inheritance’ that was apparent in the Carolingian and Romanesque periods,60 produced a “new birth”61 - a ‘species’ - when, “the general condition of the country was favourable to this transformation.”62 He almost describes Darwin’s theory of

43

Ibid., p.91. Ibid., p.91. 45 Burckhardt, J., The Civilization of The Renaissance in Italy, [1860], trans., Middlemore, S. G. C., Oxford & London, 1945. 46 Ibid., p.1. 47 Ibid., pp.2-80, esp. p.33. 48 At one point Burckhardt states that: “Each individual protested inwardly against despotism but was rather disposed to make tolerable or profitable terms with it, than to combine with others for its destruction.” Ibid., p.39. This point is made by Darwin, see, Darwin, [1859], 1997, p.115. While there is not the space to discuss the further implications of Burckhardt’s statement and its similarities with reciprocal altruism and ‘Game Theory’ as important for an organism’s survival, but it should be mentioned. Briefly, the basic notion of these theories is the behaviour of ‘tit for tat’, where in order to ensure help at some future point, help or support is given, even at the cost to the individual, in the belief that such help will be reciprocated when needed, thus ensuring survival. See, Ridley, The Origin of Virtue, Harmondsworth, 1997, pp.66-84; Cronin, H., The Ant and the Peacock, Cambridge, 1993, pp.253-291; Gribbin, J. &. M., Being Human, London, 1993, pp.300-305; Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype. The Long Reach of the Gene, Oxford, 1990, p.57 & pp.120132. 49 Burckhardt, [1860], 1945 pp.81-103. 50 Ibid., pp.104-170. 51 Ibid., pp.217-260 & pp.261-341, respectively. 44

52

Burckhardt, [1860], 1945 p.39. Darwin, [1859], 1997, p.122, p.124, pp.126-127, p.129, p.134, pp.136137, p.170, p.438, p.442, & p.459. 54 Ibid., p.68, pp.114-129, also, esp. p.126, pp.136-137, p.152, p.154, pp.167-168, p.204, pp.441-445 & passim. 55 Cronin, 1993, pp.267-274. 56 Darwin, [1859], 1997, p.442. 57 Darwin comments on this idea, see, Darwin, [1859], 1997, p.109. 58 Burckhardt, [1860], 1945 p.82. For other examples of Darwinian influence, see, ibid., p.84 & pp.98-99. 59 Darwin, [1859], 1997, pp.136-138, esp., p.137. 60 Burckhardt, [1860], 1945 p.105. 61 Ibid., p.106. 62 Ibid., p.107. For other examples of Darwinian influence, see, ibid., p.120, p.164, p.178, p.187, pp.190-191, p.195 & pp.213-214. Burckhardt’s discussion of the competition between the ‘nobles’ and the middle classes reads almost as a Darwinian interpretation of the competition between species and that of sexual selection, especially when he comments that, “the combat in the lists, and especially the difficult and perilous tilting with the lance, offered a favourable opportunity for the display of strength, skill, and courage, which no one, whatever might be his origin, would willingly neglect in an age which laid such stress on 53

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Lauren Golden: Science, Darwin and Art History ‘descent with modification’.63 The similarity with Darwin is marked: “The mere fact of many species of the same genus inhabiting any country, shows there is something in the organic or inorganic conditions of that country favourable to the genius”,64 and further, “where many species of a genus have been formed through variation, circumstances have been favourable for variation… .”65

controversially and explicitly applied his theory to humankind in The Descent of Man. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Morelli should apply an approach and analysis of art that was informed by science and was systematic, examining and prioritizing the material and form of the artistic production.70 Morelli describes such an approach as “art morphology”, and even says of his approach that its, “matter-of-fact way of identifying works of art by the help of such external signs [it] savoured more of an anatomist.”71

That Burkhardt could have applied the principles of biology to human culture and behaviour is not that extraordinary when one considers that Darwin, throughout the ‘Origin’, employed ambiguous terms such as ‘organic beings’, ‘individuals’ and ‘inhabitants’ when expounding his theory on the natural world, making analogies with the human sphere, particularly concerning the struggle for existence.66 For example:

Morelli highlights the negative consequences of the prevalent reluctance to assign to art anything other than the quality of the sublime, and notes how the very idea of art appears to be undermined when examined and scrutinized with such a rigorous system: The same objections are raised here…against the study of form and technique - that is against analytical research…I know persons, by no means deficient in intelligence or culture, who consider that understanding a subject means degrading it, and are as violently opposed to the study of form and technique in works of art as are priests, for the most part, to physical science.72

For as all the inhabitants of each country are struggling together with nicely balanced forces, extremely slight modifications in the structure of habits of one inhabitant would often give it an advantage over others; and still further modifications of the same kind would still further increase the advantage. No country can be named in which all the native inhabitants are now so perfectly adapted to each other and to the physical conditions under which they live, that none of them could anyhow be improved… .67

Morelli goes on to criticize what is now considered an important aspect of art history, both for authentication and for the understanding of the cultural and economic influences on art: documentation.73 In terms of an evolutionary approach to art and, one in which the environmental conditions are applied to an understanding of the forms and development of art, Morelli comments that, “we must go to the works of art themselves, and, what is more, to the country itself, tread the same soil and breathe the same air, where they were produced and developed”74 and, on applying the scientific system to some supposed paintings of Raphael, finds them to “have not a trace of Raphael”, and is thus convinced of the usefulness of the scientific method.75

The eighteenth-and nineteenth-century applied a system to the natural world that transformed the wonder and observation of nature into biology. Darwin provided biology with an explanation of its techniques and methods of production.68 The new science of biology had been ‘in the air’,69 so to speak, for nearly two hundred years, and by the time that Giovanni Morelli wrote his Italian Painters (1890), The Origin of Species had been republished and circulated for over thirty years. In 1871 Darwin personal merit.” See, respectively, ibid., pp.215-223 & pp.221-222. See further, ibid., pp.223-224. 63 Darwin, [1859], 1997, p.167. 64 Ibid., p.109. 65 Ibid., p.110. See also, ibid., p.118-119, pp.121-122, pp.131-132, p.152, pp.344-396 & pp.440-441. Concerning Burckhardt’s similarity with Darwin regarding the development and survival of Antiquity that is reborn in the Renaissance, see, esp. last para., p.113. For other examples of Darwinian language, see, ibid., p.49, p.53, p.57. 66 For example see, Darwin, [1859], 1997, pp.115-116, pp.132-133, pp.142-143, p.147, p.149, pp.152-154, pp.157-159, pp.169-170 & passim. On Darwin’s subtext to human reference, see, Beer, “’The Face of Nature’: Anthropomorphic Elements in the Language of The Origin of Species”, Jordanova, L., ed., Languages of Nature. Critical Essays on Science and Literature, London, 1986, pp.212-243, esp., pp.221-224, p.227 & pp.240-243. 67 Darwin, [1859], 1997, p.132. 68 For an excellent overview of Darwin’s mechanism, i.e., ‘Natural Selection’, see, Young, R. M., Darwin’s Metaphor, Cambridge, 1985, pp.79-125. 69 For a brief account of the development of biology up to 1859, see, Millhauser, M., “In the Air”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.27-31. Oldroyd uses Hegel’s idea of the ‘Zeitgeist’ to comment on this situation. See, Oldroyd, 1980, pp.345-349. Further, on the development of biology and ideas of evolution, see, Glass, B., Owsei, T., & Straus Jr, W. L., Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, Baltimore, 1959.

Darwin further influenced aesthetics and the understanding of the emotional power of art with the publication in 1872 of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Here, he argued that the form and expressions of emotions, which had practical survival value had an origin in the physiological functions of the body. Therefore, the pleasure associated with the human aesthetic response 70 Fernie, 1995, pp.104-105; Appleman, P., “Darwin among the Moralists”, in Appleman, 1979, p.532. 71 Morelli, G., “Italian Painters”, [1890], in Fernie, 1995, pp.106-115, p.108 & p.113, respectively. 72 Ibid., p.110. 73 Ibid., pp.109-113. 74 Ibid., p.110. For such an approach to art see, Onians, J., “The biological basis of Renaissance aesthetics”, in eds., Ames-Lewis, F., & Rogers, M., The Renaissance idea of beauty, Aldershot, 1998, pp.2-27; “The biological and geographical bases of cultural borders: the case of the earliest Palaeolithic art”, in ed., Murawska-Muthesius, K., Borders in Art; Revisiting Kunstgeographie, Warsaw, 2000, pp.27-33. 75 Morelli, [1890], 1995, p.115.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies could be related to animal biology and behaviour. The Romantics’ philosophy that Man was part of Nature, and their insistence that the stimulation of feelings were crucial for creativity, art and spiritual enlightenment, were now not just supported by biological knowledge, but even described by the unifying theory of the evolution of human behaviour.76 Darwin writes:

work is that he approached the study of human emotion, for so long shunned in the name of reason and science, from a biological basis, thus acknowledging the close integration between the body, brain and mind. This was to have a fundamental effect on writings on art and aesthetics, resulting eventually in an emotional biology of aesthetics. The idea of a biology-based emotional aesthetic found its fullest form in the concept of ‘Empathy’ - Einfülhung (feeling ‘oneself’ into), a term first used by Robert Vischer in Über das optische Formgefühl (1873).81 Here, Vischer proposed the most extraordinary and radical argument for a biological aesthetic, which after a significant immediate impact became disregarded until recently.82 Vischer proposed that human physiology was directly responsible for the emotional and aesthetic response.83 His primary example was the way visual experience involves in the first stage, unconscious nerve vibrations, followed by conscious focus and then the imagination: “We will have to assume that every mental act is brought about and is at the same time reflected in certain vibrations and - who knows what neural modifications, in such a way that the latter represents its image, that is to say, they produce a symbolic picture inside the organism.”84

We see also the influence of habit in all the emotions and sensations which are called exciting; for they have assumed this character from having habitually led to energetic action; and action affects, in an indirect manner, the respiratory and circulatory system; and the latter reacts on the brain. Whenever these emotions or sensations are even slightly felt by us, though they may not at the time lead to any exertion, our whole system is nevertheless disturbed through force of habit and association.77 Although Darwin does not discuss the value of specific expressions of emotion for the communication of information,78 it is quite clear that for such communication, expressions of emotion are important: “the force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the face and body…every true or inherited movement of expression seems to have had some natural and independent origin. But once acquired, such movements may be voluntary and consciously employed as a means of communication.”79

Significantly, Vischer’s first examination of the imagination concerns the process of vision. He describes this primary vision as “simple seeing” that progresses to “scanning”.85 Thus, the “the eye wanders” and all that is observed is assembled to move from “Being” to the unity of “Become”.86 This process is a description of the ability of the imagination to manipulate imagery and cognize. Related to this process is the body, which has clues within regarding “the genesis of our feeling for symbolic form.”87 Touching is essential for the symbolic process. He specifically states that “we should not disregard the fact that this invariably entails not only skin and nerve functions but also muscle movements”,88 which creates an empathetic response, which results in an aesthetic preference.89 Thus, imagination is of crucial importance to empathy and the symbolic and aesthetic response. Vischer emphasizes emphatically that this is an act of visual cognition involving both the body and the brain:

In conclusion, he comments: “We have also seen that expression in itself, or the language of the emotions, as it has sometimes been called, is certainly of importance for the welfare of mankind.”80 The significance of Darwin’s 76 Darwin, C., The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals,[first published 1872], 3rd edition with Introduction, Afterword and Commentaries by Eckman, P., London, 1998, p.19, pp.25-26 & pp.195-233; Randall, Jr., J. H., “The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.314-325, p.320 & p.324; Appleman, P., “Darwin: On Changing the Mind”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.529-551, p.357; “Darwin among the Moralists”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.551-571, pp.546-547. 77 Darwin, [1872], 1998, p.346. See also, ibid., p.34 & pp.69-87. Darwin’s theory is truly astounding in terms of being ahead of his time. It is only recently that neuroscience has taken up the importance of feelings and emotions for cognition. See, Damasio, A. R., Descartes’ Error. Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, London, 1996; LeDoux, J., The Emotional Brain, London, 1999. 78 Darwin mostly confines himself to observing expression in relation to emotion, not what such an expression is communicating to another. There are some comments on communication values. See, Darwin, [1872], 1998, pp.99-108, p120, p.136, p.244, p.252, p.273-274, p.309, p.351 & p.359. Eckman suggests that Darwin did not focus on the communication of information through expressions due to the creationists’ belief that “expressions had been given to man by his creator to communicate intimate feelings” and that Darwin could more effectively oppose this argument by concerning himself with the argument that expressions of emotion were not unique to humans. See, ibid., Introduction, p.xxxiv. On this debate see also, ibid., pp.xxv-xxvii & pp.xxxiii-xxxiv. For Darwin’s disagreement with the creationist argument, see, ibid., pp.8-9, pp.17-18 & p.3.35. Also, on this subject see, Cronin, 1993, pp.74-75. 79 Darwin, [1872], 1998, p.351. 80 Ibid., p.360.

81 Wind, E., Art and Anarchy, New York, 1965, p.150. See, Vischer, R., “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics”, [1878], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, pp.89-123, p.91. ‘Empathy’ has its origins in the eighteenth century philosophical writings on ‘sympathy’ and ‘sensibility’. There is not the space here to explore this, but for an excellent summary, see, Engell, 1981, pp.143-171. 82 Appleman commented in 1969 that, “Explicit adaptations of evolutionary notions into the practice and study of the arts were characteristic of the late nineteenth century, but have been far less so of the twentieth.” See, Appleman, P., “Darwin: On Changing the Mind”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.529-551, p.548. John Onians has applied an explicit biological and evolutionary approach to art. See, above, fn.74. 83 Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, Introduction, pp.1-85, p.22. 84 Vischer, R., “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics”, [1878], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, pp.89-123, p.90. 85 Vischer, [1878], 1994,, pp.93-94. 86 Ibid., p.94. 87 Ibid., p.93. 88 Ibid., p.94-95. 89 Ibid., pp.97-99.

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Imagination is an act by which we mentally stimulate something that previously existed as a vague content of our sensations as sensuous, concrete form…That this activity also essentially involves the central nervous system is evident from the unity of body and mind. The brain itself functions on many levels.90

Vischer extends his scheme to include all the sensations and feelings of the body and introduces the notion of kinesthesia: At the same time I became aware of the allimportant distinction between sensory and kinesthetic stimuli. I placed this distinction at the head of my basic scheme, from which I distinguished between a sensory “immediate feeling” and a kinesthetic “responsive feeling” analogously, between a sensory and kinesthetic empathy.98

Vischer describes feelings and emotions as part of an “unquenchable impulse to gratify ourselves, to preserve ourselves, and to enhance our own strength spurs us on, and our well-being and mood depend upon a favourable outcome.”91 The similarity with Darwin’s ‘Survival of the Fittest’ is evident and, further, Vischer refers to humans as a ‘species’.92 Also, Vischer’s biological approach to feeling and emotion, perhaps, demonstrates an influence from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published only the year before Vischer’s ‘Sense of Form’, in 1872. Essentially, Vischer’s argument is that the anthropomorphic projection into phenomena is facilitated by a kinesthetic response and by the unification of the subject and object by imagination,93 which has evolutionary origins: “Sensation is the most primitive impulse of life and out of it evolve the more distinct acts of the imagination, volition, and cognition, and thus constitutes the most primitive form of universal coherence.”94 In terms of objects that produce pleasure, for Vischer, there is a direct correlation between the form of the object and human physiology95: “The natural phenomenon accords with the related vibrations, stimulates them, strengthens and confirms them, and with that the emotional state reflects itself in them.”96 Vischer explains that these reactions are caused by basic forms inherent to natural phenomena:

He laments the lack of physiological knowledge available but believes his scheme to be valid. He states that, “We stand here before a ‘mystery that has to be explained by physiology in conjunction with psychology.”99 Vischer’s ‘mystery’ has to a great extent been revealed by neuroscience.100 The ‘Modern Synthesis’101 In his consideration of art and art history, Alois Riegl represents the crossover from the nineteenth-to the twentieth-century. The pivot for Riegl’s is the notion of the universal law of “Kunstwollen (will to art/form), an independent, unpredictable but collective determination that fixed every changing style.”102 It embodies the ‘spirit of the times’ is opposed to the anti-materialist theory of Semper.103 In many other ways Riegl is intensely ‘materialistic’. He acknowledges that it is the materials, tools and techniques available in conjunction with a tradition of form that ‘determine style’, and this, along with Kunstwollen, is a universal condition for art and design. Riegl’s aim - and in this he is close to both Semper and Darwin - was to reveal the “higher universal laws that all works of art uniformly

The various dimensions in lines and planes, the differences in their movements…have symbolic effect. The vertical elevates; the horizontal broadens; the curve moves more energetically than the straight line: reminding us of the way in which the course of inner life alternately tends away from and toward given points in laws.97

98

Vischer, [1878], 1994, pp.89-123, p.92. Vischer’s notion of kinesthesia and visual ‘scanning’ was also taken up by Adolf Hildebrand. See Hildebrand, A., “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts”, [1893], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, pp.227-79, esp. pp.229-37. Empathy was explored in the seminal work by Wilhelm Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, in 1908. 99 Vischer, [1878], 1994, p.92. See also, ibid., p.93. 100 Particularly the work of Damasio, 1996 and LeDoux, 1999. 101 The ‘Modern Synthesis’ (also referred to as ‘neo-Darwinism) is the term related to the discovery of Mendelian genetics and DNA by Crick & Watson that led to the discovery that genetics was the answer to Darwin’s problem of how ‘Natural Selection’ actually worked in the body. See, Huxley, J., “Evolution: The Modern Synthesis”, in Appleman, 1979, pp.245-265; Maynard Smith, J., The Theory of Evolution, Harmondsworth, 1969, p.13 & pp.42-61; Dawkins, R., The Blind Watchmaker, Harmondsworth, 1988, pp.238-239; Cronin, 1993, pp.5659; Plotkin, H., Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge, Harmondsworth, 1995, pp.34-43. 102 Rykwert, J., “Gottfried Semper: Architect and Historian”, in Mallgrave & Hermann, 1989, pp.vii-xviii, p.vii. See also on Kunstwollen, Riegl, A., “Late Roman Art Industry” [1901], in Fernie, 1995, pp.120-126. See also, Fernie, 1995, pp.116-117. 103 Riegl, [1901], 1995, pp.122-123; Fernie, 1995, pp.116-117; Iverson, M., Alois Riegl. Art History and Theory, Cambridge, MA., & London, 1993, p.6; Rykwert, 1989, p.xviii.

90

Ibid., p.99. Ibid., p.103. 92 Ibid., p.103. 93 Ibid., pp.103-109. 94 Ibid., p.109. 95 Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, Introduction, pp.22-23. 96 Vischer, [1878], 1994, pp.89-123, p.90. 97 Ibid., p.90. It is important to point out that Vischer’s theory concerning the response to lines and visual preference now have neuroscientific support. See Hubel, D. H., & Wiesel, T. N., “Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex”, in Journal of Physiology, 160, 1962, p.106; Gregory, R., Eye and Brain. The Psychology of Seeing, London, 1977, pp.44-48; 1997, pp.208-212; The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford & New York, 1987, pp.313-315. John Onians has applied Hubel and Weisel's research to Renaissance aesthetics. See, Onians, “‘Alberti and the neuropsychology of style’, Leon Battista Alberti e il Quattrocento”, in Studi in Onore di Cecil Grayson e Ernst Gombrich, Florence, 2001, pp.239-250. 91

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies obey without question.”104 Further, the similarity with Darwin continues, in that his theory did not examine periods of art in isolation but, sought to discover a mechanism of the evolution and development of art and design that could be applied world-wide - the principle of Weltanschauung105: “We must no longer concentrate on individual works of art or on individual species of art, but on the elements with whose clearer analysis and understanding a true unifying copingstone of the theoretical structure of art history will be built.”106

This similarity to the theory of evolution, where the form of the genus is still present in the subsequent new species (through inheritance), is demonstrated by Riegl’s approach to artistic production in different periods. For example, his identification of Baroque elements in Roman monuments.112 Importantly, the ‘progressive’ aspect of Riegl’s theory is not a progression that leads to perfection so often the misinterpretation of evolution. For Riegl, as for Darwin, progression to a new species of art form or style is based on chance adaptation. It is the response of Kunstwollen to inherited forms and the conditions of existence that produces a new species - ‘style’.

No doubt influenced by the taxonomic displays of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, Riegl, as curator of the Austrian Museum of Fine Arts, applied a systematic approach that considered art as a world-wide phenomenon where: “the close relationship between on the one hand, the recognition of the historical conditions of the origin and evolution of art and, on the other, the purposeful creation of art, the attempt was made from the beginning to attain a complete historical overview of the techniques and decoration of textile products of all stylistic periods for which monuments survive.”107

Although Riegl was essentially anti-materialistic, the influence of scientific and evolutionary methodology is conspicuous in his approach to explaining the development of ornamental design via the connections between motifs and their adherence to ‘laws’ of symmetry and rhythm in nature.113 This seems to be part of his concept of Kunstwollen,114 as it is the symmetry and rhythm that are ultimately derived from nature that are depicted symbolically.115 Thus, it is the symbolic analogy with, not direct representation of, nature that can be examined with a scientific methodology to explain the development of ornament. For example, Riegl, in ‘Stilfragen’, states that the stylised acanthus “did not originate in immediate reproduction of a natural model, but in consequence of a fully artistic developmental process in the history of ornament”116 because artists, “merely took up, in reference to plant ornamentation, the types handed down to them by their predecessors, elaborated them in turn according to their own artistic judgement, and handed them down to their successors.”117 Again, we perceive Darwin’s ‘descent with modification’ and, the creative function of imagination.

There seems to be much in this passage that relates to Darwin’s theory. Besides the reference to the conditions of existence, the ‘purposeful creation of art’ is almost analogous to the genetic condition of the organism to survive and reproduce. Riegl’s surviving techniques and textiles as monuments for different periods are comparable to speciation, where those species that became extinct are evident in fossil specimens. This biological approach is also apparent in Riegl’s notion of ‘Universal Laws’108, which includes the notion of a ‘progression’ of art through history,109 where it is “possible to recognize the seeds and buds of new life even in works of the very Late Antiquity among signs of death and decay.”110 This phrasing has much similarity with Darwin’s ‘descent with modification’, and survival by adaptation and can be observed elsewhere.111

Riegl also employs an evolutionary model for the development of geometric ornament as originating in sculpture. He argues that abstract forms in art and design are a later development because they are based on outline, and therefore abstraction, which is evidence of an advanced cognitive ability.118 From a modern perspective, this development should be reversed, but Riegl formulated his theory before the discovery of cave paintings and the availability of scientific dating techniques, such as carbon dating and, more importantly, twentieth-century paleaoanthropology. Riegl’s argument is based on the

104 Cited in Iverson, 1993, p.5 from Riegl, A., Historiche Grammatik der bildenden Künste, eds., Swoboda, K. M., & Pächt, O., Graz, 1966, p.210. 105 Riegl, [1901], 1995, p.122. See also, Kleinbauer, 1989, p.95; Olin, 1993, pp.130-131. 106 Cited in Iverson, 1993, p.5 from Riegl, 1966, p.210. 107 Cited in Olin, 1993, p.30 from Riegl, A., “Neue Erwerbungen für die Textilsammlung des Österreichischen Museums in Jahre 1885”, in Mitteilingen des k. k. Österreichischen Museums für Kunst und Industrie, 20, 1885, pp.546-547. 108 Riegl, [1901], 1995, p.120. 109 Ibid., p.116, p.121 & pp.123-124. 110 Ibid.6, p.121. 111 Fernie identifies a problem with Riegl’s universal laws: “How, for example, are the special laws of a period differentiated from the universal laws of art and, even more important, how are the laws of one period displaced by those of the next?” See, Fernie, 1995, p.116. However, if the Darwinian model is applied to Riegl’s universal laws what you have is an interpretation where these ‘universal laws’, and those of a particular period, represent the genus and species, respectively. Hence one can make sense of Fernie’s summary of Riegl: “One of these laws is that art always progresses, with neither regression nor pause”; ibid. Olin describes Riegl’s approach as an “evolutionary progression”. See, Olin, 1993, pp.69-70.

112 Olin, 1993, pp.35-37. The influence of Jacob Burckhardt on Riegl is important. Burckhardt had approached the art of the Renaissance with the view that the art of this period was a continuation, not just imitation, resulting in an individual and new development of artistic production. See, Riegl, [1901], 1995, pp.120-126, p.121. See, further, Olin, 1993, pp.31-32. 113 Olin, 1993, pp.82-97. 114 Ibid., pp.98-99 & pp.130-132. 115 Ibid., pp.82-83. 116 Cited in Olin, 1993, p.83 from Riegl, A., Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik, Berlin, 1893, pp.214-215. 117 Cited in Olin, 1993, p.83 from Riegl, ibid., p.338. 118 Riegl, ibid., pp.15-23. See, Olin, 1993, pp.69-73.

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Lauren Golden: Science, Darwin and Art History view that as the outline does not exist in nature,119 the employment of outline represents the freeing of the mind and a step toward the symbolic treatment of form.120

organs.125 Wölfflin perceived ‘empathy’ not so much as a physiological response, but as physiological experience of emotions.126 As he states, “physical forms posses a character only because we ourselves posses a body”127 and this produces an anthropomorphic projection: “Forms become meaningful to us only because we recognize in them the expression of a sentient soul. Instinctively we animate each object. This is a primeval instinct in man.”128

However, this proposition now seems flawed. There is outline in nature, evident in shadow and in the shapes of leaves, etc., and the tracks of animals, all of which were of extreme visual importance for human survival in the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Therefore, the likely development is reversed - that of simple outline to threedimensional sculpture. Thus, the whole concept of abstraction, which facilitates geometric pattern, results from a sophisticated form of cognition that has an origin much earlier than the undated, but obviously ancient, decorated bone artefacts that Riegl employed as evidence for his theory.

Compared to Vischer, Wölfflin employs a much more intense biological approach to aesthetics, in that the aesthetic response is not just a kinesthesia that only concerns the form of the human body and organs, i.e., the spherical shape of the eye equals a pleasure in spherical forms, but considers the complete physiological experience of the body. For example, of the rhythm of breathing or the effect of gravity, where “as human beings with a body…we have carried loads and experience pressure and counterpressure, we have collapsed to the ground when we no longer had the strength to resist the downward pull of our own bodies, and that is why we can appreciate the noble serenity of a column and understand the tendency of all matter to spread formlessly on the ground.”129

Later, in his emphasis on the universal as opposed to the subjective understanding of art and design, Riegl turned for support to the physiology of the body. In this sense he was continuing the earlier theories on the importance of feelings for aesthetic appreciation, but he harnesses the idea of physiological response with a scientific emphasis on kinesthesis.121 He argued that art was validated by its ability to correlate to sensory experience. By considering perception as biological, and therefore uniform, an objectivity to the use of forms and the development of ‘style’ could be provided.122 Kunstwollen, then, represents this objective biological kinesthetic response: “But the artistic purpose (Kunstzweck) is: the sensory appearance of the work as such…should please…Man wants to see the work of nature in a specific form and colour, and constructs the work of art, intended for an external, practical purpose, from raw material and by means of a technique, in such a way that these correspond best to his Kunstwollen.”123 What is essentially being proposed here is a biological approach to art that involves the collaboration of the body and brain, such that Kunstwollen stands for an a priori aesthetic that, therefore, could have an origin in human evolution.

Thus, Wölfflin was employing a biological approach to aesthetics and art that considered the psychological as an emotional response within physiological development and, it is the unconscious psychological process he describes that enables the transference of human qualities to inanimate objects via an act of imagination.130 The influence of the development of psychology as a scientific discipline, in the late nineteenth century, reflects an early form of neuroscience, and as such, introduced a more scientific approach to art and art history, regarding the processes of the mind.131 The empathetic response was an unconscious anthropomorphism, a process related directly to the bodily and emotional response: “Our own bodily organisation is the form through which we apprehend

A turning point for a biological approach to art history is represented by the work of Heinrich Wölfflin. His doctoral dissertation, the Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture (1886), reflects a synthesis of previous theories but it also provides a fulcrum, not only for his future work, but for the discipline of art history. Although he takes issue with the ideas of kinesthesia and empathy,124 Wölfflin was well grounded in psychology and had a detailed understanding of the physiological functions of

125 Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, Introduction, p.41, pp.42-43 & pp.4651. The influence of Wilhelm Dilthey on Wölfflin was substantial. See, ibid. 126 Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, Introduction, p.42. 127 Wölfflin, [1886], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, p.151. 128 Ibid., p.152. 129 Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, Introduction, p.42. 129 Wölfflin, [1886], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, p.151. See also, ibid., p.160. On breathing and aesthetics, see, ibid., p.163. pp.169-170 & pp.173-174. 130 Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, Introduction, p.42. 130 Wölfflin, [1886], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, pp.152-157 & passim, esp., pp.168-170. 131 There is not the space here to discuss this aspect of art historical writings, but it was of fundamental importance for an increasing scientific consideration of the mental processes of the human mind. However, the influence of Darwin for the development of psychology is significant, especially that of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which was particularly influential on Sigmund Freud. See, Oldroyd, 1980, pp.282-295. Obviously, the importance of Freud (1856-1939), particularly his exploration of the unconscious mind - the Id - and his examination of the relationships between human nature and culture - Weltanschauung needs to be affirmed, but is too large a subject to be considered here.

119

Olin, 1993, p.69; Iverson, 1993, p.55. Iverson, 1993, p.55; Riegl, 1893, p.2. 121 Olin, 1993, p.134. 122 Ibid., pp.134-137. 123 Cited in Olin, 1993, p.149 from Riegl, A., Geschichte der altchristlichen Kunst, 1903, Nachlafs, Carton 10, folder 2, p.3. See also, Olin, 1993, pp.148-153. 124 Wölfflin, H., “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture”, [1886], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, pp.149-190, pp.150-154. 120

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies everything physical.”132 Further, the aesthetic response is connected to a liberation from the constraint of the body, which elicits pleasure, yet at the same time reflects the entelechy of self-organization over matter.133 It is here, that, (although it is a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory as one of ‘progress’) we find further Darwinian influence: “Within formally correct, that is, viable architecture an evolution is possible, which we are not totally unjustified in comparing with the evolution of organic life forms. Progress in both realms takes place similarly: an evolution from dull, poorly articulated forms to the most finely developed system of differentiated parts.”134 Wölfflin believed that the structure and workings of the human body and mind create aesthetic preference and, most importantly, that the imagination was essential for this condition, the key for the human behaviour of creativity and art, whereby, “an organic understanding of the history of forms will be possible only when we know what threads our imagination is bound to human nature.”135

“progressive conquest of reality”, but rather, “each case is based on a different visual schema.”143 A Darwinian influence can be observed when he states that art and “the variation in its appearance” is not to do with content and subject matter but, “the fact that the expressional organism did not always remain the same”144 and, he virtually lifts a passage from The Origin of Species: Even within a period, the historian will never be able to reckon with a uniformly progressive element. Peoples and generations diverge. In one case the development is slower, in another quicker. It happens that the developments which have begun are broken off and only later resumed, or the tendencies branch…In the old form, the new is already contained just as, beside the withering leaves, the bud of the new already exists.145 (Wölfflin) Natural selection also leads to divergence of character…From the first growth of the tree, many a limb has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of various size may represent those whole orders, families and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known only to us from having been found in a fossil state…As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out…and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.146 (Darwin)

This body-based psychology laid the ground for assessing periods of form and style in art history, from the individual to the collective expression. It also provided the basis for the theory that he developed more fully in The Principles of Art History (1915) with his five pairs of concepts,136 where the “imaginative beholding” is the key to understanding “historical transformations” in art.137 These “modes of imagination”138 he perceived as being universal stages that affect style,139 which develop in a somewhat conspicuously evolutionary manner: “And the further question of how far old products of vision are carried each time into a new phase of style, how a permanent development is comingled with special developments, can only be elucidated by detailed examination.”140 From this comment we can perceive the idea of the original genus and of the differing species of ‘imaginative beholding’ that evolve by chance adaptation to the environment: “Doubtless certain forms of beholding pre-exist as possibilities; whether and how they come to development depends on outward circumstances.”141 Wölfflin is quite clear that style is not the product “merely of a homogeneous process of increasing perfection”142 or the

The application of a taxonomic and evolutionary methodology seems implicit in Wölfflin’s explanation of the different ‘types’ (species) of “imagination [that] constantly appear side by side…Grünewald is a different type from Dürer, although they are contemporaries…these two types reunite in a common style, i.e. we at once recognise the elements which unite the two representatives of a generation.”147 In discussing his categories of the ‘painterly’ and the ‘linear’, he makes clear that they are manifestations of different ‘imaginative beholdings’ that can be collected together as different species that have developed from genera. Even though at first glance they appear to be from a different ‘family’, there is an obvious ‘kinship’148 where, “individuals fall into larger groups.”149 In comparing Bernini and Terborch, Wölfflin states: “And

132 Wölfflin, [1886], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, pp.157-58. See also, Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, Introduction, p.43. 133 Wölfflin, [1886], in Mallgrave & Ikonomov, 1994, pp.160-161. 134 Ibid., p.161. See also, ibid., pp.171-172. 135 Ibid., p.184. 136 Wölfflin, H., Principles of Art History, trans., Hottinger, M. D., New York, 1950, pp.14-16. 137 Ibid., p.vii. 138 Ibid., p.vii. 139 Ibid., p.vii & p.230. See also, Kleinbauer, 1989, p.154. 140 Wölfflin, 1950, p.viii. 141 Ibid., p.230. 142 It is important to point out that Wölfflin now applies what appears to be a corrected understanding of evolutionary theory in comparison with his doctoral thesis, that is not a progression to perfection, but a system that is a chance adaptation of a species to the environment that ensures survival and reproduction and, therefore, the creation of a new species. This correct understanding of evolutionary theory significantly affected his approach to art history in the Principles of Art History, where “every form lives on, begetting, and every style calls to a new one.” See, ibid.,

p.230. In many ways this is summed up by his famous comment that, “In each new crystal form, however, a new facet of the content of the world comes to light.” See, ibid., p.231. 143 Ibid., p.13. 144 (My italics). Ibid., p.226. 145 (My italics) Wölfflin, H., “Principles of Art History”, [1915], in Fernie, 1995, pp.135-151, p.147 & p.149. The similarity with Darwin is striking in the use of ‘diverge’, ‘branch’ and ‘bud’. However, the correspondence with Darwin is almost identical. Differences between the two are: Darwin uses ‘decayed’, ‘fresh’, ‘fossil state’ and ‘ramifications’ where Wölfflin uses ‘withered’, ‘new’, ‘old form’ and ‘tendencies’. 146 Darwin, [1859], 1997, pp.170-172. 147 Wölfflin, 1950, pp.232-233 & p.235. 148 Ibid., pp.6-13. On ‘linear’ and ‘painterly’ see also, Podro, 1983, pp.118-119. 149 Wölfflin, 1950, p.6.

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yet, if we were to lay drawings by the two masters side by side and compare the general features of technique, we should have to admit there is a perfect kinship.”150

Panofsky’s interpretation of what Kant meant by this, in many ways, sums up the writings of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-centuries regarding what it is to be a human being, that is, the possession of cognizance, from which it is not only impossible to escape the biological nature and consequences of the body but, further, that scientific knowledge of the body is what facilitates humanitas, which for Panofsky emphasized: “Man’s proud and tragic consciousness of self-approved and self-imposed principles, contrasting with his utter subjection to illness, decay and all that is implied in the word ‘mortality’.”161 In terms of a biological approach to art, it is significant that he begins with the eighteenth-century philosopher, Kant, whose works entailed significant study of the human mind and, particularly, the parallel between the workings of the mind and the natural world. Although Panofsky relates that the medieval period did not separate the sciences from the humanities,162 the eighteenth-and early nineteenthcentury had, in many ways, revived the integration of the sciences and humanities and this may be implicitly recognized by his opening with a passage on Kant.163 These first few pages appear to be preparing the way for a call for a reintegration of the sciences and humanities, particularly in terms of methodology. Such a reintegration may be implied in his consideration that human products are a ‘record’. By taking a neutral premise, he can then proffer the idea that the humanist and scientist are alike as the methodologies of both include observation and analysis of the ‘record’,164 where, “the results have to be classified and coordinated into a system that ‘makes sense’.”165 That the art historian should employ science is clear from his comment that: “It is just as inevitable for the humanities to think and express themselves in terms of ‘influences’, ‘lines of evolution’, etc., as it is for the natural sciences to think and to express themselves in terms of mathematical equations.”166 He then emphasizes the similarity between the humanist and the scientist, in that both begin with observation and move to analysis167:

However, Wölfflin considers that the biological analogy of “bud, bloom, decay, plays a secondary and misleading part”, because each period or style is a “totally different art”151 - “a different species.”152 Further, in terms of a species adapted to the environment, Wölfflin clearly applies this theory in terms of a “national type of imagination” that is based on “national physiognomies”.153 However, he never really explains how physiognomies affect style, except empathetically154 and, never really expands his argument to include the influence of the environment, whether geological, physical, economic or political. In many respects, this is the weak point of his argument, but in terms of a biological approach to art, that considers art in relation to the human and the environment, it remains the most promising. In the ‘Principles’, he comments that, in terms of German art, “the painterly mode of feeling seems to lie in the very soil”155 and further, when discussing the painterly inclination of Germanic art, he comments that, “rustling woods mean more to the imagination than the self-sufficing tectonic structure.”156 However, he does not elaborate or explain what may create a national characteristic, even when discussing landscape painting!157 He never elucidates, either psychologically or culturally, other than saying that “there are peculiarities of national imagination which remain constant throughout change.”158 Erwin Panofsky, in many respects, extends Wölfflin’s idea of the ‘national characteristic’ to include all of humanity. In The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline (1940)159 he examines the concept of ‘humanity’ itself. Although this paper is very much a precursor to studying, specifically, the arts of the Renaissance, there is much to be found that implies a biological approach to art history in general. Interestingly, the opening passage concerns Immanuel Kant nine days before his death. Kant, although very ill, refuses to sit down until his visitor had done so, explaining his behaviour thus, “Das Gefühl für Humanität hat mich noch nicht verlassen.”160

The scientist, dealing as he does with natural phenomena, can at once proceed to analyse them. The humanist, dealing as he does with human actions, has to engage in a mental process of a synthetic and subjective character: he has mentally to re-enact the actions and to re-create the creations.168

150

Ibid., pp.11-12. Ibid., pp.13-14. Ibid., p.17. 153 Ibid., pp.9-13 & p.235. 154 In The Principles of Art History, as far as I can tell from an English translation, Wölfflin never uses the term ‘empathy’. 155 Wölfflin, 1950, p.67. 156 Ibid., p.235. 157 Ibid., pp.143-148 & pp.175-178. 158 Ibid., p.106. 159 Panofsky, E., “History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline”, in Meaning in the Visual Arts, Harmondsworth, 1987, pp.23-50. 160 “The sense of humanity has not yet left me.” Cited in, Panofsky, 1987, p.23 from Wasianski, E. A. C., Immanuel Kant in seinen lezten Lebensjahren (Ueber Immanuel Kant, 1804, Vol. III), reprinted in Immanuel Kant Sein Leben in Darstellungen von Zeitgenossen, Deutsche Bibliothek, Berlin, 1912, p.298. 151 152

161

Panofsky, 1987, pp.23-50, p.23. Ibid., p.27. 163 Regarding this idea and, in particular, the influence of Kant, Panofsky states that, “Every historical concept is obviously based on categories of space and time.” This language is identical to Kant and, as such, it seems impossible not to consider an especial influence from Kant. See, ibid., p.29 & ff. There are further examples in his description of the mental act as ‘synthetic’ and ‘intuitive’ and his emphasis on the subjective nature of the aesthetic apprehension. See, ibid., pp.37-38. Further, Panofsky specifically refers to Kant. See, ibid., p.46. 164 Ibid., p.28. 165 Ibid., p.30. 166 Panofsky, 1987, pp.23-50, p.49, fn.19. 167 Ibid., pp.28-30. 168 Ibid., pp.37-38. 162

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies world picture of people.”181 His ‘national characteristic’ finds possible explanation in theories of the role of the environment in the mental development of the human individual. Within such a framework, the environment should be extended to include the very real affect of geological formations, climate and, more generally landscape, with the natural being important, if not essential for the body and brain formation of an aesthetic preference.182

This process is considered an “intuitive aesthetic recreation”169 that is inherently a subjective act, and he asks: “How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its very objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?”170 The answer is that the art historian is aware of the subjective aesthetic response and, by employing ‘archaeological research’ will then correct the “subjective feeling for content”, and then the “aesthetic perception as such will change accordingly, and will more and more adapt itself to the original ‘intention’ of the works.”171

The influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution has been truly monumental on almost every sphere of human knowledge. However, in terms of the most extraordinary human quality, creativity, the application of Darwin to the arts is so absent that the silence is deafening. Marx said that in order to have a future you have to have a knowledge of your past. For art historians, the past involves the origin of art history, which in many ways was born in and around the time of Darwin and, his theories were incorporated into the budding discipline. Like Darwin’s bush, the study of the biological aspect of creativity appears to have branched off: away from art history. Far from being extinct, it is slowly but surely being addressed by those researching and writing in the biological sciences. If art historians are not careful they are in danger of becoming extinct - the victims of the arriving meteor of neuroscience.

What is implicitly being discussed here is the imagination, which is described by Panofsky as the “mental process of a synthetic and subjective character”, where one has “mentally to re-enact the actions and to re-create the creation.”172 This is essential for the analytic process regarding the ‘material’173 examined by the art historian. What he proposes is the union of the “rational archaeological analysis”174 and the “intuitive aesthetic recreation”175 that “are interconnected so as to form, again, what we have called an ‘organic situation’.”176 These two processes as interlinked: “In reality the two processes do not succeed each other, they interpenetrate; not only does the re-creative synthesis serve as a basis for the archaeological investigation, the archaeological investigation in turn serves as a basis for the re-creative process: both mutually qualify and rectify one another.”177 Panofsky was, in a sense, moving toward fulfilling Hegel’s rallying cry: “Therefore, the science of art is a much more pressing need in our day, than in times in which art, simply as art, was enough to furnish a full satisfaction.”178 For Panofsky, the sciences and the humanities “demand each other” in their joint enterprise of “the discovery (or in a larger historical perspective) of both the world and man.”179

It is clear that the imagination is of paramount importance for understanding human creativity and the consideration of the imagination as a basis, as opposed to a construct of the mind needs to be re-addressed. Therefore, the application of the biological, neurological and cognitive sciences to role of the visual and of mental imagery in human creativity and art should be embraced by art historians today as it was by the founders of art history.

Conclusion Wölfflin observed that: “The historian has to reckon with the stages of the imagination. And this involves the ‘history of the mind’.”180 The way forward with his challenge is to employ all the scientific information we have at our fingertips that was not available for Wölfflin or his predecessors. This would naturally lead to a “whole

169

Ibid., pp.38-39. Ibid., p.39. Ibid., p.41. 172 Ibid., pp.37-38. 173 Ibid., p.38. 174 Ibid., p.38. 175 Ibid., p.39. 176 Ibid., p.39. The ‘organic situation’ is the consideration that as one cannot separate the limbs from the body, so the same applies to the approach to ‘material’, in that you cannot separate the documents from the monument, and likewise in natural science, between phenomena and instruments. See, ibid., pp.32-33. 177 Ibid., pp.39-40. 178 Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans., Bosanquet, B., London, 1886, Introduction, I, p.20. 179 Panofsky, 1987, pp.23-50, p.49. 180 Wölfflin, 1950, p.vii. 170 171

181

Ibid., p.258. For such an approach to Art History, see, Fernie, E., Art-Historical Theory and English Romanesque Architecture, An Inaugural Lecture given by the Director of the Courtauld Institute, February 20, 1996; “St Vincent at Cardona and the Mediterranean Dimension of First Romanesque Architecture”, in eds., Buckton, D., & Heslop, T. A., Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture presented to Peter Lasko, Gloucestershire, 1994, pp.24-35; “The Church of St Magnus, Egilsay”, in ed., Crawford, B. E., St Magnus Cathedral and Orkney’s Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Aberdeen University Press, 1988, pp.140-161; Bièvre de, E., “The Alchemy of Wind and Water: Amsterdam 1200-1700”, in CIHA 2000 (In publication). 182

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Pictures and Words E. H. Gombrich

Inaugural lecture, Slade Professor of Art, Oxford, 19501 All lectures on art, after all, may be described precisely this - pictures and words - though mixed in different proportions, and so you will expect me to be a little more specific. Of course, you will have guessed what I really had in mind. I want to draw your attention to that fearful problem of the relation of words to pictures - or rather of their relevance. For are not the best words about pictures those that remain unsaid? I expect you know the noble saying of Schopenhauer who advised us to deal with a work of art as we would deal with a Prince - that is to wait till we are spoken to. It is an excellent advice, but it does not always work. One of the reasons, I fear, is that our education sadly neglected its princely language. All our training and learning is predominantly through words. The more intellectual our education, the more we do feed on a diet of printer’s ink. And so pictures too often remain mute to us simply because they are painted and not printed and because we have not learned to see. We need words as intermediaries not so much to teach us any secret of art but simply to make us look, to devote more than a glance to those medleys of tones and shapes we call pictures.

lies a woman with a broken lute, signifying harmony, which is incompatible with the discord of war; there is also a MOTHER with her babe in her arms, denoting that fecundity, generation and charity are trampled underfoot by war, which corrupts and destroys all things. In addition there is an architect, lying with his instrument in his hand, to show that what is built for the commodity and ornament of a city is laid in ruins and overthrown by the violence of arms. I believe, if I remember right, that you will also find on the ground, beneath the feet of MARS, a book and some drawings on paper, to show that he tramples on literature and the other arts. There is also, I believe, a bundle of arrows with the cord which bound them together undone, they, when bound together, being the emblem of CONCORD, and I also painted, lying beside them, the caduceus and the olive, the symbol of peace. That lugubrious MATRON clad in black and with her veil torn, despoiled of her jewels and every other ornament, is unhappy EUROPE, afflicted for so many years by rapine, outrage and misery, which, as they are so harmful to all, need not be specified. Her attribute is that GLOBE held by a PUTTO genius and surmounted by a cross which denotes the Christian orb. That is all I can tell you… . 2

This may be a rash thing to say but I hope I can more or less prove it to you. This is a famous picture by Rubens in the Palazzo Pitti. (fig.1) It happens to be one of the few pictures by a famous master of which a description from the pen of that master has been preserved and I am now going to read it to you though it contains nothing but a simple enumeration of what the picture represents. It is, in fact, because of this very simplicity that I have chosen it for my demonstration purpose. The description occurs in a letter by Rubens to an agent who had commissioned the picture for the Duke of Tuscany and who was anxious to know exactly what the subject was. It was written in 1638, towards the end of Rubens' life.

I hope that this example has convinced you of what I might call the pedagogical value of verbal description. We are all inclined to sweep our eyes across a picture just to take in the general impression. The pedagogical value of words is often simply that they slow down the motion of our eyes and force them to rest for a moment on the spot that is mentioned. This is no small matter. In fact, it is so important a discipline that I would advise any of you who really want to deepen their acquaintance with pictures to adopt this technique of description as a method of practice, just as one practices music, for instance. You need not always do it with a pen in hand but the pen slows you down and that in itself is an advantage. For the same reason it may sometimes be useful and illuminating if a lecturer thus takes stock of the inventory of a picture and points to each figure one by one. But this pedagogical usefulness of words in front of a picture should not lure us into the complacent belief that they necessarily add to our knowledge of understanding. And it is here, of course, that the problem of pictures and words becomes really interesting. At the same time we have to walk warily.

The principle figure is Mars who, leaving open the Temple of Janus (which it was a Roman custom to keep closed in times of Peace) advances with his shield and his bloodstained sword, threatening the nations with great devastation and paying little heed to VENUS his lady, who strives with caresses and embraces to restrain him, she being accompanied by her Cupids and Lovegods. On the other side, MARS is drawn on by the Fury ALECTO, holding a torch in her hand. Nearby are monsters representing Pestilence and Famine, the inseparable companions of war; On the ground ----------------------------------------------------------

All writing on art, as I said, consists after all on pictures

1

Ladies and Gentlemen, I think I owe you first of all an explanation of the rather cryptic title I have chosen for this first lecture I have the great honor to give at this place.

2 Ruth S. Magurn, The Letters of P. P. Rubens, Cambridge, MA., 1955, No.242, pp.408-9.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies and words and all the problems of method with which we are afflicted could somehow be subsumed under this head. A catalogue of these problems would help you little. I hope that the opportunity will arise sometime to arrange discussions on them the morning after my lecture. Today I shall be quite content when I can make you aware of the existence of these difficulties and thus turn you into more critical readers of writings on art. For it is really in these two things that I see the main function of University teaching of this kind - we must try to make you use your eyes and your critical faculty. This is at any rate how I should like you to listen to me - as a speaker in a debate which has gone on for centuries and to which, one day, you also wish to contribute.

this picture in words this is not primarily due to the fact that art has some ineffable mystery but that the idea that any individual thing could be so ‘translated’ rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of language. Language, after all, deals primarily with universals or concepts, words denoted classes of things and qualities, and this is lucky, for if it were not so any language would have to contain an infinite number of words. It is simply due to this structure of language that any particular things will always slip through the meshes of its net. In this sense, any pebble you pick up or any dime in your pocket is as ineffable a mystery as this masterpiece by Rubens. Every description must be selective. In daily life this selection is made automatically by the function. In the case of the dime we are usually only interested in what it can buy, and we do not look or describe the exact shade of colour that it has. But what are the qualities we should pick out for selection in front of a picture? To some the answer seems clear. We must select that feature that makes it precious to us and leave out the rest. This, of course, is the critic’s answer as it was formulated by the great nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater. The aim of aesthetic criticism, he wrote, was to ask “What is this song or picture…to me? What effect does it produce on me?” The critic, in other words, uses his own mind as an instrument of selection and detection of qualities he wants to single out. He turns from a study of the object in front of him to a scrutiny of his own response.

The first problem, then, as I see it, arises not so much from the nature of art as from the nature of language. It is by no means a new discovery, in fact, it was known, for instance, to Leonardo da Vinci who exulted over it in his famous Paragone, the comparison of painting with the other arts. It is here that he says to the poet: Your pen will be worn out ere it has described what the painter with his skill places immediately before your eyes. Your tongues will be paralysed by thirst, your body exhausted by fatigue and hunger before you have finished to describe in words what the painter shows you in a single instant.3

But in a way this only shifts the problem without solving it. For let us imagine that we have stood in front of the original in the Pitti for a long while, that we have peered into our mind and analysed our own reactions that we have savoured it to the full and let it melt on our palate - does this bring us nearer to a solution of the problem how to communicate our response to colour, shape and movement in another medium, in words? There is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in the sonnets to Orpheus in which the poet asks the warm and silent maidens to dance him the taste of the orange. It is a beautiful poem and when you come to think of it, the demand is hardly more perplexing that the request would be to describe the taste of the orange in words. Once more the real underlying problem has as much to do with the nature of speech as that of art. For as a matter of fact your plight would be very similar to that of Rilke’s maidens. You may know perfectly well how this picture affects you but as you grope for the precise word you might find that there is none.

You see, when I asked you to take a pen and describe pictures for yourself, I really sent you to a dreadful fate. For Leonardo’s statement means that a real as distinct from a pedagogic description is impossible; it could never end. Obviously, he is right. Wherever you might want to begin to describe this picture - be it at the marble column with its veins or at the drapery - it is clear that you could go on piling words upon words without ever exhausting a single square inch. If our notion of an ideal description should ever have been a kind of complete inventory, one, that is to say, that would allow us to reconstruct the picture exactly if it were ever lost, the answer is clearly that words cannot do this. It is a trivial observation but one with rather important consequences. All our troubles really start from here. The relation of words to pictures can never be symmetrical, as it were. There is no hope of establishing any kind of complete correspondence, a two-way traffic which would allow us to reverse the process, of translating pictures into words and back again into pictures without loss.

Now, frankly, I do not think that this should drive you to despair. The whole idea of the mot just, after all, presupposes a magic universe in which words are not only conventional counters but really charged with meaning as with a potent force. Just as the magician who pronounces the right compelling spell can produce the effect so the writer of critic who finds the words of power can conjure up the precise shade of meaning.

Now it has often been said by practising artists that all talk on art is pretty futile for what can be translated into words is not art and what is art cannot be translated into words. Much as I sympathize with such a vigorous opinion, I think it is important to stress that the primary reason for this has really nothing to do with art at all. If we cannot describe 3

Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, ed., A. Phillip McMahon, Princeton, 1956, 36.

Now I am not going to tell you that there are no mots just. 92

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Greeks, is rather underdeveloped.

Anybody who has ever had the privilege of listening to a critic telling of his impressions or of reading the books of such masters of language as, say, Winckelmann or Pater, knows that the words or image can sometimes illuminate. For there is a magic in language - we call it poetry. Somewhere in the crucible of the poetic mind the miracle of transformation does take place and colours and flavours are transmuted into words and rhythms. It rests on a very real experience. In the depths of our consciousness all sensations seem indeed to merge and to become interchangeable. Colours strike us as sounds, sounds have a colour, shapes assume a physiognomy, physiognomies a flavour. In this living centre of our experience where images are born from the seeds of dreams and dreams from metaphors, we seem to find an escape from the logical structure of language. We may find it quite natural to say that the Rubens is like a trumpet call or like a thunderstorm. Perhaps, we even discover that to us it is the exact equivalent of a certain fanfare in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or of a thunderstorm we once experienced in Timbuktu. But we do well to remember that any such analogy is private.

In Britain there is an organization called the British Colour Council, which tries, among other things, to remedy this deficiency. It turned out, for instance, that few people mean the same thing when they speak, say, of colours of varying intensity, saturation, brightness or luminosity. The Colour Council wants to achieve some agreed conventional meaning for these and similar terms so that people writing on colours can avoid ambiguities without going into long explanations. It will not surprise you that the initiative for such a standardisation of terminology did not come from art critics but from the technicians in the industry. I have mentioned this case because the description of colour provides quite a good example of the problems involved in the scientific description of qualities. What the scientist does, if I understand the matter correctly, is that he tries to approach the procedure to that with which he can best cope, the measurement of quantities. Where qualities cannot be reduced to quantities such as wavelength and so on, he tries at least to construct a graduated scale of even progression, for instance a colour table arranged according to the spectrum, against which each shade he wants to describe can be matched so that at least it can be said with assurance that its tone must lie within this and that fixed point.

The images which crowd the pages of most writings on art tell us a lot about the writer’s mind - and if that mind is worth knowing we have much to be thankful for. The great examples of imaginative criticism, Winckelmann’s prose hymn to the Torso of the Belvedere or Pater’s homage to the Mona Lisa are poetry in their own right. To expect to learn anything from these pages about the Torso or the Giaconda would be as uncivilised as to read the Ode to the Nightingale for its ornithological information. But here lies the rub. There is a curious and even tragic discrepancy between the conscientious critic’s ceaseless search for the precise shade that hits exactly the right chord and the vagueness of his meaning to others. It is strange how often these fastidious phrases of criticism could be transferred from one work to another without seeming less appropriate. The thunderstorm and the fanfare might do service for almost any picture of some violence, from Rubens to Turner, from Dürer perhaps to Klee. It would be invidious to pick out a real example in public but if you try it at home behind closed doors you may come to discover how trivial the rationale of comparison often remains. When Rilke’s girls danced the taste of orange it was, I am sure, a beautiful sight - but not the most perceptive outsiders could have known it was not the taste of the plum they danced.

There have been attempts, as you may know, to imitate this scientific procedure somehow in the discussion of pictures, attempts, that is, to isolate some quality which would allow us to arrange pictures according to some agreed scale - for instance, whether they are more or less faithful imitations of nature, more or less stylized, more or less orderly in arrangement and so on. Some of the best minds of art historians have spent a lifetime trying to work out such categories which would allow us to group and classify pictures according to some such standard of comparison. You can imagine that for certain purposes such terminological conventions prove as time-saving and useful tool as these of the Colour Council. But you will not be surprised that they also have their dangers when handled mechanically. There is always a temptation to believe that what we have at last learned to describe or classify is really the one thing that matters, the essence of the work. Thus the use or neglect of perspective devices are relatively easy to discern and describe with the result that art was almost identified with the representation or creation of space. Degrees of symmetry or asymmetry can also be easily described and labelled and so our selective descriptions usually fasten on them. As long as these comparisons are used as a pedagogic device, to bring out different possibilities of representation or arrangement they are surely immensely useful for they may draw attention to features which are otherwise easily overlooked. But I think once in a while we should ask ourselves how far these selective description of individual pictures in terms of shapes and lines adds to our knowledge, but this is another of my worries.

So here we are back at the problem of addressing the understanding, of talking some intelligible sense about shades, tones and shapes which seem to slip through the mesh of language as soon as we approach them. What can we do? We can, of course, try to improve our terminology. The language of everyday life, as you know, is fairly unevenly developed. We have many more terms for certain classes of experience than for others. Thanks to geometry and perhaps crystallography we have a good many words for different shapes, while our colour terminology, though not as crude as that of the ancient 93

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies In his book, Die Klassische Kunst - a really epoch-making work when it came out half a century ago - Wölfflin discussed Raphael’s Madonna del Cardellino. (fig.2):

hold the very unoriginal view that the more we know about a picture and the context in which it was meant to stand, the more chance we have to understand it. I believe this is the view, perhaps the only methodological view to which the Warburg Institute is committed, that research Institute of London University to which I belong. Its founder, the great historian of the Renaissance, Aby Warburg, once put it that his device was ‘Das Wort zum Bild’, to join the word to the picture, not our word, that is, but rather the text or document, which illuminates it. I know that this device is open to misunderstanding and that there is a school of thought which believes that if a little learning is a dangerous thing, more learning - at least in matters of art may be even more dangerous. All the texts and documents, all the historical, biographical or sociological facts which the historian may manage to unearth cannot touch the work of art itself. Indeed, they cannot, but therein lies their strength. They simply provide the setting, the context, and let the work of art speak for itself. Of course, the context may become important in all arts, but the degree in which it matters surely varies.

It is a composition on the pattern of the equilateral triangle. The contours are drawn with a delicacy otherwise unknown in Florentine art and the masses are balanced against each other on the most sensitive of scales. Why does the Virgin’s cloak slip from her shoulder? It is to prepare the bulging outline where the book protrudes, so that the line seems to glide down in an even rhythm.4 I am sure you all remember similar passages in books and talks on art appreciation. They usually sound rather impressive. But what is their status? There is not really a triangle here, least of all an equilateral one. What is more, the very idea of reducing the outline of the group to such a crude geometrical figure destroys in a sway that sensitive rhythm of the contour that is to be praised. But it is when I hear the word ‘because’ that I prick up my ears. Why does the Virgin’s cloak slip? Because “it is to prepare us” etc. It is not often possible to disprove this kind of statement but in this case it happens to be easy. For Raphael was find of this way of draping the cloak and he often used it also when there was no protruding cloak. You find it in several of the drawings. (fig.3) He was also fond of the motif of the ‘book’, but he did not always balance it with a bulge. (fig.4)

I want to give you some of the reasons why I think that on the whole a picture is more directly dependent on such contextual factors than, say, a poem or a symphony. One of these reasons has to do with logic, the other with aesthetics. The logical one concerns the nature of the visual image. This is, to me at least, a fascinating subject but one which has hardly been sufficiently investigated. For us here it may be sufficient to say that a picture, unaided by words or by any context, is much more ambiguous than we usually realise. It does not tell us its meaning. We must infer it through outside aids. We are not usually much bothered by this because traditions of types and of usage are so well established that we find our way through these ambiguities without even noticing them. The Rubens you have just seen was not a snapshot of some weird incident but an allegory, the Raphael Madonna not a portrait of a mother with child nor an illustration of how to hold babies, but the Holy Virgin, and so on. The context that establishes the meaning is to a large extent given to us. But as soon as we are confronted with a somewhat unusual image where these aids let us down we find that we are really at sea.

Now I know perfectly well that it must sound like hairsplitting to devote so much time to what is after all a minute slip in a great book but I choose it because I think it illustrates what seems to me the main weakness of this type of formal analysis. It is that it is always made post factum, as it were. First Wölfflin had the experience of balance and harmony - had he been a critic of Pater’s he would have tried to convey it through some musical analogy. But as his aim was scientific he tried to account for it by pointing to some demonstrable correspondence of forms. But who can doubt that if Raphael had draped the Madonna differently he would have talked with even greater justification of the lovely unbroken line that led from her neck to the tip of the book? The familiar saying that pictures cannot be translated into words remains true on several levels. Or perhaps we should say that there can never be a total interpretation of any picture; if it ever aimed at this, formal analysis would fail as surely as the critic’s introspective methods.

You may know Dürer’s print called The Knight, Death and the Devil.5 (fig.5) Ruskin, the great Victorian critic, wrote: This plate has usually been interpreted as the victory of human patience over death and sin. But I believe later critics are right in supposing it to be Dürer’s often mentioned Nemesis and that the patience and the victory are meant to be Death’s and the Fiends’ not the riders’.

This sounds a rather negative result and you may well wonder why I am ever talking or writing about art if I do not believe we can say anything relevant. But I do. And it remains for me in the short time at my disposal to indicate what I think is the use of words in relation to pictures. I can put it very briefly. It is to impart knowledge. For if I doubt whether words are very relevant to pictures except as pointers I have no doubt whatever that statements are. I 4

Actually these critics were mistaken. We now know that 5

I have subsequently discussed this print in greater detail in, Charles Singleton, ed., Interpretation, Theory and Practice, Baltimore, 1969, “The evidence of images”, II.

Wölfflin, H., Die Klassische Kunst, 2nd ed., Munich, 1901, p.79.

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Nemesis was the name of another print. But this only underlies the importance of outside aid. An historical theory changed the character of the print for Ruskin. In a way the ambiguity has not yet been resolved. For the image represents a simple juxtaposition of figures: A knight, or rather a horseman, for whom Dürer used an old study of a landsknecht, and the two apparitions. We may see him as the undaunted knight who knows no fear of death or hell and as a symbol of such daredevilry the print was actually dear to National Socialist propaganda. It was Göring’s bookplate and Goebbels invoked the picture of the fearless knight when he wanted to whip up German resistance. But of course Ruskin’s second reading is not contradicted by the picture either. In fact, one may well ask whether the idea that the knight disregards death and the devil is at all what Dürer could have had in mind as a good Christian. Should he not rather think of them all the time? Is not the image meant as a memento mori et diaboli all the more poignant because the knight’s armour is of no avail against them? Perhaps both these interpretations go too far, perhaps Dürer meant the man in armour to represent the equus Christianus on his perilous journey and leave the issue in the balance. But what matters to us is that the image alone will never tell us. Not even the expression on the knight’s face. On the contrary. You will find that the expression changes from proud defiance to wickedness according to the interpretation you adopt.

art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched…just as it left the painter’s studio… . He calls it the masterpiece of Vermeer, quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer: The expression is wonderful, expression indeed is the most marvellous quality of this unique picture…In no other picture of the great master of Delft do we find such sentiment…a sentiment so nobly expressed through the medium of the highest art… . Bredius’ enthusiasm was catching. He himself not only urged that the picture must be preserved for the nation but even advanced part of the enormous purchase sum of 200,000 pounds. It went to the Beuymans Museum of Rotterdam. A German critic wrote that when it was exhibited the crowds, which flocked to the room where it was, fell silent as a chapel. The picture was discussed and praised in all subsequent books on Vermeer and though it is now said that there were dissentient voices they certainly did not appear in print. I suppose I ought to add that I never saw the painting but that I certainly adopted Bredius’ opinion.

We must search for a wider context in the texts of the time to solve the dilemma, if indeed we can ever solve it. And one more thing: If the figures would but move we would soon see the outcome of the context. Thus, while the lack of syntax, as it were, the way in which the visual symbols are linked, puts the image at a disadvantage vis à vis the verbal statement, the absence of the time element deprives it of that development which gives meaning to music.

You may know what followed. During the war a number of similar but much cruder paintings turned up on the market and one of them was bought by Göring. After the war the dealer who had sold it was arrested as a collaborator and since the name of a certain painter Hans van Meegeren was found among he files he, too, was arrested, though actually he had nothing to do with that particular deal. In prison Van Meegeren lost his temper and boasted to the authorities that it was he who had painted the famous Vermeer at Beuymans. He was at first not believed but he produced convincing proof, not only by painting a work of similar character under supervision but, by telling exactly what old canvas he had used for the forgery and what traces of an old picture an x-ray would therefore reveal. A well-known monograph on Vermeer had to come out in what malicious people called a second and greatly reduced erudite edition.

The second aesthetic reason for the importance of the context in the visual arts I should like to demonstrate briefly by means of a slightly more frivolous example which has, however, its serious side. I mean the cause celèbre of the world of art, the Van Meegeren forgeries.6 I call it frivolous mainly because the public shows great interest in it, but frankly I think the public is right and that the art experts who disparage this interest as mere sensation-mongering are not. If art history and aesthetics have nothing to learn from such resounding failure, when could they ever learn?

Now we all enjoy the deflation of experts - but what has this story to do with pictures and words? I think it does because you often hear the argument that aesthetically it should not make any difference whether the painting is by Vermeer or by Van Meegeren. If it is a great aesthetic achievement when labelled Vermeer, it should remain so when labelled Van Meegeren - that was, of course, also how the forger argued. When I said that knowledge of the context is relevant, not only logically for the establishment of meanings but also aesthetically for the assessment of value, I meant that in my opinion this argument, however plausible, is not valid. I think on the contrary that the simple verbal statement: this painting is by Van Meegeren, the attribution in other words, does transform the picture in

The facts are these: This painting of Christ and the Disciples in Emmaus (fig.6) was published in the Burlington Magazine in 1937 by the greatest authority on Dutch art then living, the late Professor Bredius, who had the discovery of several great paintings by Vermeer to his credit. He wrote: It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of 6

Cf. P. Coremans, Van Meegeren’s faked Vermeers and de Hoghs, London, 1949.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies have been an utmost exertion of religious fervour for the restrained and manly Vermeer was the deliberate damping of his sentimentalism by Van Meegeren in the interest of deception. Once you change the frame of reference the whole aesthetic value changes - which may be summed up in the Latin proverb ‘Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem’.

front of us by changing the historical context. Just imagine for a moment the absurd eventuality that both Bredius and Van Meegeren would be proved wrong, that some sensational but irrefutable document would turn up which would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the painting was, in fact, painted by Giotto in the fourteenth century. It simply would be the greatest miracle known, for not only would such a discovery transform the picture itself, but at a blow the whole of Giotto’s art. What seemed a matter of style and inner compulsion would turn out to have been a matter of deliberate choice. We would see that Giotto usually rejected the naturalism and sentiment of the picture by an act of free decision, much as, say, a modern artist does, and this proof would transform the aesthetic function of its forms. But however absurd such a mental experiment may be, it is, of course, only a magnified parody of what actually happened when the painting was attributed to Vermeer.

For consider yet for a moment the implications of Van Meegeren’s masterstroke. For some time there had been vague talk among art historians that the realism of Vermeer might be explained by his acquaintance with Caravaggio. Van Meegeren supplied the longed for evidence and this was indeed the bait by which he hooked us. The composition of the Disciples recalls that of several Caravaggios. I show you here one from the Royal Collection, though he may have combined several models. (fig.7) Now, if Vermeer had really performed such a transformation of Caravaggio’s composition, if the evidence that he knew and studied these violent pictures were genuine, it would mean that it was from these that he distilled the deliberate calm and restraint of the Disciples. Clearly, such a renunciation of loud effects, such an act of choice would mean a great deal, it would throw light on the artist’s whole outlook and would perhaps have been as impressive and expressive as, say, the late Rembrandt’s deliberate renunciation of external dramatics. But if it was Van Meegeren who merely adapted a Caravaggio composition to please the experts - the relationship is merely expressive of his slickness.

The initial mistake of Bredius was one of historical scholarship. Once you granted this premise the conclusion, that this painting revealed quite a new aspect of Vermeer, that it was unique in the seventeenth century and all that, was perfectly correct. If Vermeer, the painter of calm, serene genre scenes had painted this picture charged with sentiment it would be moving - for we know him not to be a sentimental artist, we have learned to trust his integrity and restraint. In this sense the name of Vermeer on the label means to us that we are in the presence of a genuine religious feeling and that we are not being had on the cheap. There is in the appreciation of art something akin to what psychoanalysts call ‘transference’. We are not ready to surrender ourselves to everything and everybody. We must first establish a bond of confidence that we may respond to the suggestion and guidance of the work without needing to be ashamed as we are when we come out of a tearful film. Call it snobbism or suggestibility if you like, but there is a little more in it than only that.

But the relevance of the context goes beyond such general interpretation. It changes the actual expression we see. Take the Head of Christ (fig.6) on the Van Meegeren which was the object of much fine writing. A well-known art historian wrote quite correctly that it had no parallel in the whole of Dutch art, not even in Rembrandt’s oeuvre. “The covered eyes give Christ the expression of deep inwardness.” “Behind these closed eyes” - writes another “there lies a deep secret, the experience and awareness of things momentous and mysterious.” But if you put the head in the context of other Van Meegerens (figs.8 & 9), other forgeries and the ghastly Mother you just saw, you will find that the expression changes without any more words. These closed eyelids do not hide any mysteries. They are the variations of an endless Frankenstein mask which re-occurs under different titles in Van Meegeren pictures. (fig.10) If they are expressive of anything they express the soul of a fraud who cannot look into your eyes. You see how far wrong the pathetic attempts of these writers went to translate the expression into words, and how easily it is put right through the simple verbal statement that this is a forgery by Van Meegeren. Which brings me back to my formula that while pictures cannot be translated into words, words cannot contribute in countless ways to the restoration of the original context.

For now I have a shock in store for you: Two authentic Van Meegerens that he published under his own name. I am sorry to have to desecrate this screen with this pretty nauseating trash but I need it for the sake of this very argument. You see, Van Meegeren was a semipornographic sentimentalist with a certain knack for drawing. In a time like ours when, rightly or wrongly, mere representational skill counts for nothing in art, when the artist is expected to express his feelings or dreams - he did so, with a vengeance. Had he lived in a century with a firm tradition, which prescribed to the artist his subject matter and the mode of its treatment, he would not have been a Vermeer but quite a respectable artist, perhaps a Metsu. His despair about the modern concept of art, which disregards what he could do and demands what he could not, his hatred of the present art world, was quite justified. He was a misfit, he himself demanded a different context. And yet, when we return from his authentic work to the forgery we see it in a different light. You see what would

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greater theoretical chance of being of use. For as I said, institutions and traditions have one useful quality for us they concern universals, they can be talked and reasoned about, argued about and checked through documents. Here the work of interpretation simply merges with that of the historian - which means to say that as our records are incomplete, we can never achieve finality in our reconstruction of contexts, that we can never complete the interpretation of a work of art, but that we have at least a good many means at our disposal to eliminate wrong interpretations and check flights of uncontrolled fancy.

always been recognised. But I thought it might be necessary to re-affirm this belief on a slightly more theoretical level, for the aesthetics of recent years have tended to undermine out belief in the relevance of historical facts. The aesthetic creed of Croce, above all, has come to insist on the insularity of the work of art, on its uniqueness and isolation from all other spheres of life, and, as a collateral, on the aesthetic irrelevance of anything outside the work itself. Art, to this creed, belongs to the sphere of pure expression with the effect that each work of art is really incommensurable and unapproachable except through intuition. I hope I have done justice to what seems to me valuable in this point of view, when I insisted on the impossibility of a total interpretation of any work of art. But Croce’s idea of expression as an irreducible quality and independent sphere seems to me to be the cause of much misunderstanding and vague talk which has seeped into the general jargon.

Here, then, is a thing that words can certainly do. They can remove wrong contexts, cut out misunderstandings and by eliminating false responses clear the path for better ones. All this may be called peripheral. It does not touch the core of a work of art. Thank God it does not. No one can tell us what a work of art really means because the word meaning is only metaphorically applicable to the totality of a picture. Its subject may have a meaning, its relation to other works may - for instance, it may be a parody - have a private meaning to the artist or to the patron, but the picture as a whole and unrelated means nothing but itself.

I do not think that this idea of expression as an irreducible message from soul to soul can help us much. Even in daily life the meaning of expression depends on our reading of the situation, our knowledge of conventions. The same smile that can be extremely moving in one circumstance, may, of course, be a mere empty grin in another or just a conventional mask. It is only against the background of known situations and conventions that the actions and reactions of people become meaningful in daily life, no less than in art and history. The most striking example of this interaction between convention and expression seems to me always the understanding of music. Where we lack the background, as with Oriental music, we cannot tell if the tune is sad or gay, martial or religious. By contrast we understand what is called the expression in western music, because we approach it with a frame of reference, a firm set of expectations which can be either fulfilled or disappointed in a myriad of expressive ways.

The dream of art as a kind of universal language, which bridges the centuries and speaks immediately to our understanding without the tiresome intervention of knowledge and convention is - a dream. True, art can give us the precious illusion of such immediate understanding, of such communion of minds, for once we know the background, once we have the framework we may and must forget it and surrender ourselves completely to the work itself. We do not think of syntax when we hear Mozart. And yet it is important to remember that as long as we are here on earth we are not disembodied souls who read others minds without the intervention of matter. That to us mortals even a faint glimpse of understanding is only given at the price of honest, prosaic work.

The purpose, then, of my Van Meegeren digression was to explain my belief that the visual arts, too, are more governed by such situational and conventional factors than is sometimes allowed for in theoretical discussions. In each period and every society the man who looks for or commissions a work of art approaches the subject with a certain set of expectations. They are the result of what he has seen before. In the late Middle Ages this expectation found even expression in legal practice. It was quite usual, when commissioning, say, an altar painting, to insert a clause in the contract saying that what was wanted was the kind of thing that had been done by another painter in the neighbouring parish ten years before. This is just one instance of what I might call the Institutional element in art. All art lives in such an institutional framework; portrait, caricature, landscape or still life could be described as such institutions. It is in the way the artist lives up to or modifies the expectations, the way he reacts to the institutions, conventions and traditions of his environment, that much of what we call expression resides. But if I am right there, if all these factors I have called contextual really matter, then, of course, words have a

I apologize if this sounds a little priggish. But it is again worry which drives me to underscore the need for work if we do not want to lose the understanding of our artistic heritage altogether. Many of the contexts in which these works grew are slipping away from us. The number of people who cannot tell what a classical scene, even an episode from the gospels is illustrated in the great works in our museums, is increasing daily. The idea that all this does not matter, that you can enjoy the works of art without understanding their cultural context is all the more alluring. Sure, you can enjoy them - just as you can enjoy a mountain scenery or a sunset. But if you want to understand what the artist wants to say you must learn the language of his age and nation. Learning languages needs sweat and toil. In the case of art it needs a good deal of unlearning of our own languages and conventions. But if, at the end of this toil, you feel that you have even moved an inch nearer to what a genius such as Rembrandt meant, you may find that it was worth the effort.

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Fig.1. Rubens, The Horrors of War, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Fig.2. Raphael, Madonna del Cardellino, Uffizi, Florence

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E. H. Gombrich: Pictures and Words

Fig.3. Raphael, Studies of the Virgin and Child, British Museum, London.

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Fig.4. Raphael, The Solly Madonna, Staatliche Museum, Berlin

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Fig.5. Dürer, The Knight, Death and the Devil

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Fig.6. Van Meegeren, Christ and the Disciples in Emmaus, Beuymans Museum, Rotterdam

Fig.7. Carravagio, Disciples at Emmaus, National Gallery, London

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Fig.8. Van Meegeren, Mother and Children, (drawing)

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Fig.9. Van Meegeren, I have summoned up the depths

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Fig.10. Comparison between the heads of Christ in the faked paintings [From left to right, and from above downwards: ‘Disciples at Emmaüs’, ‘Woman taken in adultery’, ‘Washing of the feet’, ‘Bust of Christ’ and ‘Last Supper’] and the head of the mother in the drawing ‘Mother and Children’

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The Roman imperial cult and the question of power Richard Gordon The historian is ever on the look-out for telling contexts.1 But how to judge, in the market-place of interesting contexts, between competing wares? Nowhere is this puzzle more pressing than in relation to religion, whether in ancient history2 or in a modern, but remote, society. A brief illustration will serve. It was recently reported that Shibani Mullik, a 27-year-old Hindu woman, had sacrificed with a knife her two children, a seven-year-old girl and a five-yearold boy, to the goddess Kali in a temple in the city of Tārās in northern Bangladesh.3 When arrested and charged with murder, she claimed to have had a dream in which the goddess demanded the deaths of the children.

sacrifice is regularly offered to her.6 All of this suggests a plausible set of themes for Mullik’s act, if not a direct motive. At the same time, a Classicist will not be able to ignore the possible analogy between Mullik and Medea. At least in Euripides’ version, Medea’s motive in murdering her children was to take revenge on her husband Jason, who had decided to abandon her to marry more advantageously. How better could she pay him back than by cutting off his house? Might the deaths of Mullik’s children have less to do with Kālī – even granted that she dreamed of her – than with family politics? What was Mullik’s relation to her husband? Was she the victim of pressure from her parents-in-law over her dowry? And what of the status of Hindus in Bangladesh, where they form only 12% of the population? Kālī is especially worshipped among the Hindus of Bengal, including Bangladesh. Might the children’s deaths be a means of calling attention to the plight of a religious minority in an increasingly Islamicised host culture? Might the Hindu temple where Mullik killed her children be a site claimed by Muslims as holy, just as in the north Indian city of Ayodhya a mosque was destroyed in 1992 by a Hindu mob claiming that it had been built on the site of an older Hindu temple?

Confronted with this report, we might judge simply that Mullik was mad. That would certainly be a plausible account if someone were to do such a thing in our society; and it would certainly help us maintain commitment to a favoured story, mother-love. But such an account would also have costs attached, for it would be to ignore completely her own reported rationale. If we choose to use this as a clue, one possible context for her act would be the associations of the goddess Kālī. Kālī (Sanskr. ‘the Black’) is one manifestation of Umā/Devī, the female counterpart of Śiva, who represents in some of her avatars the great mother, the benevolent goddess, refuge from sorrows, the protectress. But Devī was created by the gods as a destroyer to defeat Mahişa, the leader of the demonic powers, and is represented in this rôle as the divinities Pārvatī and Durgā. In the Devi-Mahatmya, Kālī emerges from Durgā’s forehead,4 bedecked with severed heads and arms, blood dripping from her mouth. In art, she is represented as a black-skinned woman with four (or more) arms; face and breasts are smeared with blood; her ear-rings are the corpses of children and she wears a necklace of skulls. Kālī represents the belief that birth and death, genesis and apogenesis, horror and joy are all part of the same universal process: in Tantric exegesis, her left arms signify her destructive aspect, her right arms the creative and beneficent.5 Devout worship of her brings protection and prosperity; but the price is the acceptance of death – blood

It might at first sight be supposed that these possible contexts are an invitation to a post-modernist shrug of the shoulders, implying the impossibility of doing more than linking events to a range of ‘discourses’. There could be many interpretations, all correct, depending merely on point of view. Among many literary critics, and some art historians, certainly, that would now be taken for granted. But I think it preferable to understand them as invitations to research, both of a proximate (what about Mullik’s husband?; where is the temple?) and of a more general kind (the cult of Kālī in Bangladesh). In the course of such work, the anthropologist – or, mutatis mutandis, the historian - would seek to assemble a hierarchy (or perhaps simply a series) of interpretative contexts, which bear in different ways upon the event in question, leaving the reader to judge whether, and in what sense, there is a privileged level of discourse. Indeed, the deployment, the rhetorical ordering, of invocable contexts is one main measure of the investigator’s skill; and many historical disputes concern precisely the choice between possible contexts, and their arrangement in an imaginary hierarchy. The inevitability of disputes does not mean that some contexts are not more illuminating than others.

A version of this paper was delivered to the ‘C’ Caucus Ancient History seminar, Cambridge, ‘The Religions of Rome’, organised by C. Kelly and W. Horbury, in November 2000. 1 L. Jordanova, History in Practice, London, 2000, pp.59-90; D.M. Potter, ‘Explicit data and implicit assumptions in historical study,’ Generalization in the Writing of History, L. Gottschalk, ed., Chicago, 1963, pp.178-94, remains worth reading. 2 Note recently, K. Hopkins, A World full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire, London, 1999, confessedly an ‘experiment’, which seeks to highlight the difficulty of writing the religious history of the Roman Empire. Judgements on his success differ widely. 3 Süd-deutsche Zeitung 22.11.2000, dpa report. 4 In other accounts, Kālī emerges from the forehead of Candī (Skt. ‘the horrible’). 5 The protective, beneficient side of Kālī was first stressed by the poet Rama Prasada Sen (1718-75), and is the aspect now predominant in Bengal and in the Hinduisms represented in the West.

6

On Kālī, see D.R. Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses, Berkeley, 1992; id., The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Krishna. Dark visions of the terrible and sublime in Hindu mythology, Berkeley, 2000. There can be little doubt that in the past human sacrifice was offered to the goddess, and her worship may still be felt to demand ritual suicide: J. Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens, 2: Der jüngere Hinduismus, Stuttgart, 1963, pp.20911. Among Kālī’s mythical followers are the Dākīnī, demonic attendants who eat human flesh.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Such a view implies that explanation need not be central to the historian’s agenda.7 At the same time, there is a justified feeling that historians need to pay more attention to the concepts they invoke, from periodisation to moral categories. The point here is not to encourage a neurotic selfconsciousness, but to maintain as freshly as possible a sense both of the otherness of the past, and of the delicacy of the historian’s negotiation between two worlds. Throughout his career, John Onians has understood how to maintain this balance between the strange and the familiar, and has boldly, often provocatively, sought out interesting and telling contexts for the art and architecture that he has studied. And I hope that he will take further pleasure in the fact that, in a volume mainly concerned with later and world art, this essay concerns an aspect of antiquity. After twenty years, Art and Thought retains its freshness, revelling in the diversity of contexts it presents for setting Hellenistic art and architecture off against contemporary ideas.

kind has however long been familiar in the field, and there have been many attempts to associate particular monuments with specific historical events.12 This approach has been brilliantly extended into Augustan politico-cultural history by Paul Zanker,13 and we may note individual attempts to contextualise imperial images by means of their dedicatory inscriptions,14 and in terms of gender considerations.15 But none of this work by classical archaeologists and arthistorians has addressed the issue of power very directly. Recently however, in a magisterial book, Marianne Bergmann has argued that the divine imagery employed in the context of imperial iconography constitutes a claim to special status negotiated between emperor and audience.16 Divine attributes are marks of honour, expressing a partial overlap between emperor and divinity, an overlap created by the acceptance of an analogy between the emperor’s virtues and the blessings emanating from the other world.17 Good emperors are good in the same way that the gods are good. The symbols of divinity are specific to a particular discourse: for an emperor actually to appear in public dressed like a god would be absurd or blasphemous. But as the Principate progressed, say under Commodus (A.D.180-96), and even more strikingly in the third-century crisis (A.D.236-70), the fit between image and real consent became increasingly tenuous, and the now-stereotyped symbols dwindle into references to claims once made, references to a consensus now impossible. On this account, the primary context for the imperial cult would be that of the imperial virtues, not merely the abstractions denoting ‘euergetic’ qualities such as liberalitas, iustitia, clementia, but also ‘salvific’ ones such as

My topic is one which begins in the Hellenistic world, with Alexander and the successor kings of his far-flung empire, though that is the extent of its affinity with Art and Thought.8 I want to re-open the question, which of late has become rather muffled, of the sense in which ruler cult, and in particular the cult of the Roman emperors, contributed to the maintenance of political power; and how we may envisage the part that images played in that process. Why did Roman emperors consider the multiplication of their likeness and that of members of their house, not merely in Rome and Italy, but throughout the provinces, by official fiat and by private initiative, and in many modes, so important?9 Is it possible to move away from conceiving the surviving imperial images, which I take loosely as manifestations of the imperial cult, as illustrations, as contributions to a notional catalogue, which is still how we mostly encounter them, towards thinking of them as elements in a discourse of power?

12

M. Torelli, Typology and Structure of Roman Historical Reliefs, Ann Arbor, 1982; cf. his Il rango, il rito e l’immagine: alle origine della rappresentazione storica romana, Milan, 1997; Tota Italia: essays in the cultural formation of Roman Italy, Oxford, 1998. 13 P. Zanker, Augustus und die Macht der Bilder, Munich, 1987; E.T.The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Ann Arbor, 1988; see also K. Vierneisel & P. Zanker, eds., Die Bildnisse des Augustus. Herrscherbild und Politik im kaiserlichen Rom, Munich, 1979; U. Haussmann, ‘Zur Typologie und Ideologie des Augustusporträts,’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, H. Temporini & W. Haas, eds., II, 12.2, Berlin, 1981, pp.513-98; M. Hofter, ‘Porträt,’ in: Kaiser Augustus und die verlorene Republik, Berlin, 1988, pp.291-343; C.B. Rose, Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian period, Cambridge, 1997. 14 Particularly Jane Fejfer, ‘Official portraits of Julia Domna,’ in N. Boncasa & G. Rizza, eds., Ritratto ufficiale e ritratto privato: Atti del II conferenza intern. sul ritratto romano, Roma sett. 1984, Rome, 1988, pp.288-304; U. Hahn, Die Frauen des römischen Kaiserhauses und ihre Ehrungen im griechischen Osten anhand epigraphischer und numismatischer Zeugnisse von Livia bis Sabina, Saarbrücken, 1994. 15 E. Bartman, Portraits of Livia. Imaging the Imperial woman in Augustan Rome, Cambridge, 1999. It is however extremely doubtful whether Livia, as Bartman claims, can be supposed to have had a hand in the creation of her official portraiture, cf. S. Walker, ‘The imperial image of Livia,’ Journal of Roman Archaeology 13 (2000), pp.529-31. 16 M. Bergmann, Die Strahlen der Herrscher. Theomorphes Herrscherbild und politische Symbolik im Hellenismus und der römischen Kaiserzeit, Mainz, 1998; cf. R.R.R. Smith, ‘Nero and the Sun-god: divine accessories and political symbols in Roman imperial images,’ Journal of Roman Archaeology 13 (2000), pp.532-42. 17 A key text is Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 98: ‘Yet these accessories (lit. ‘phylacteries’) and ornaments are placed on images and statues (of the emperor) to signify the blessings which those who are so honoured bestow upon the mass of humankind’.

The tradition of German art history, to which we owe the great bulk of work on such images, has tended towards the formalistic.10 This approach certainly has its justification, given our ignorance of the archaeological context in which most such images were found, and the sheer difficulty of assembling corpora of imperial images.11 Contextualism of a 7

Jordanova, History, pp.107-10. On Hellenistic ruler-cult, C. Habicht, Gottmenschentum und griechische Städte², Munich, 1970; D. Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West, Leyden, 1987-92, 1.2, pp.6-45. On images: R.R.R. Smith, Hellenistic Royal Portraits, Oxford, 1988. 9 The documentary evidence for the rôles of imperial images is well discussed by T. Pekáry, Das römische Kaiserbildnis in Staat, Kult und Gesellschaft, Das römische Herrscherbild 3,5, Berlin, 1985. 10 E.g. H.G. Niemayer, Studien zur statuarischen Darstellung der römischen Kaiser, Berlin, 1968; W. Eck, K. Fittschen & F. Naumann, Kaisersaal. Porträts aus den Kapitolinischen Museen in Rom, Mainz, 1986; W. Schindler, Römische Kaiser: Herrscherbild und Imperium, Vienna, 1986; and the incomplete series Das römische Herrscherbild, Berlin, 1940- . 11 Note the comments of E.K. Gazda & A.E. Haeckl, ‘Roman portraiture: reflections on the question of context,’ Journal of Roman Archaeology 6 (1993), pp.289-302 at 300f.; C.B. Rose, ‘The portraits of Agrippina the Elder,’ Journal of Roman Archaeology 9 (1996), pp.353f. 8

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pietas, moderatio, providentia or virtus, and the desirable states or utopias such as victoria, felicitas, or renovatio, all so familiar from the official coinage and Pliny the Younger’s Panegyric in honour of Trajan (A.D.100).18 The implication is that the imperial cult is best understood as a bid for legitimacy through the medium of values widely shared both by the élites and by the urban population of the Empire.19 Its keynote text is Plutarch’s observation, ‘Rulers serve god for the care and preservation of men in order that, of the excellent gifts which god bestows on mankind, they may distribute some and safeguard others.’20

und Gott extends to the western Empire the insights which Price offered for Asia Minor.24 His slogan is, ‘Antike Religion ist Handlung nicht Haltung’.25 To say ‘Augustus is a god’ is not an ontological statement in the philosophical sense, but a pragmatic statement recording the fact that Augustus received cult: ‘eine Gottheit ist, wer einen Kult erhält’. Clauss’ interest is not so much in the details of the institution of emperor-worship. For him what count are anecdotes, stories of the emperors’ extraordinary powers, the ‘exaggerations’ and ‘rhetoric’ of the poets, esp. of the silver age, the stereotyped formulae of the inscriptions, the dust and fluff that hang round in the corners of the great hall of evidence, and which betray most tellingly characteristic modes of popular thinking that challenge modern good sense and right-thinking. He sees this right-thinking as anchored in the doxa that God is fundamentally other than man: too many scholars still fail to appreciate the centrality of the notion of ‘deus praesens’, the living god, in the imperial cult. Belief in the emperor’s divinity was made possible by the sheer unclarity in antiquity of the distinction between man and divinity. ‘Die Trennlinie zwischen Gottheit und Mensch [war] unscharf.’26

The main advantage of this view is its concreteness. It views the imperial cult in transactional terms, and grounds it firmly in the context of the actors’ horizons of expectation. As such it responds to the now-dominant view, first articulated by Simon Price in 1984, which looks at the imperial cult as a form of negotiation.21 ‘Emperor worship was not a political subterfuge, designed to elicit the loyalty of untutored provincials, but was one of the ways in which Romans themselves and provincials alongside them defined their own relationship with a new political phenomenon, an emperor whose powers and charisma were so transcendent that he appeared to them as both man and god.’22 In this perspective, the emperor is located between two worlds, the ordinary human world and the world of the gods, and can be represented in a variety of stations on this continuum, in such a way as to make him a key mediator of transactions between Here and There. This Geertzian view was a reaction to the then general accounts of the imperial cult, either as an instrument of Staatsräson, an imposition from the centre, or, seen from below, as an idiosyncratic variety of political flattery. Price’s perspective enabled him to view the masses of epigraphic evidence for the introduction and maintenance of the cult in different cities, which had hitherto been considered as mere administrative detail, as the very process of negotiation with the superordinate power. As one review had it, ‘Nourries des faits et de détails signifiants, [ses analyses] nous font vivre le quotidien et le concret de ce culte, comme aucun livre n’y était encore parvenu.’23

These transactional views are all modern variations upon Otto Weinreich’s fundamental insight that the emperor’s status was inherently ambiguous, and that he can be represented as the meeting-point between two worlds.27 Wealth, status, and power are met with awe, respect – and cult. So far as it goes, this representation is irreproachable. But, as Peter Herz has pointed out, the institution of the imperial cult is too complex to be hung on a single theoretical peg.28 Once one begins to examine the very considerable bulk of documentary, epigraphic, architectural, numismatic and sculptural evidence in detail, there appears not one phenomenon but many.29 Herz distinguishes between: the dedication by communities, groups and individuals of sacral buildings and other sacral objects (e.g. altars) to the ruler and his family; the regional and local development of cult organisation complete with priesthoods, sacrifices, public feasts and festivals; the re-presentation of the emperor’s features and actions in an iconographic language taken from the religious sphere; the assimilation of the emperor to divinity; the dedication of votives to the emperor, the use of

The continuing persuasiveness of the transactional view has recently been confirmed by Manfred Clauss, whose Kaiser 18

24 M. Clauss, Kaiser und Gott. Herrscherkult im römischen Reich, Stuttgart & Leipzig, 1999. 25 Clauss, p.23. 26 Clauss, p.30. 27 O. Weinreich, ‘Antikes Gottmenschentum,’ in: Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 6 (1926), pp.633-51; cf. A.D. Nock’s observation, ‘Powerful as the gods, sprung from them, he is the effective present power ... this aspect of the ruler is central in homage paid to him in his life,’ ‘Notes on Ruler-Cult, I-IV’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 48 (1928), pp.21-43 at 37 (repr. in Nock’s Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Z. Stewart, ed., Oxford, 1972, 2, pp. 135-58). 28 P. Herz, ‘Der römische Kaiser und der Kaiserkult: Gott oder primus inter pares?,’ in: D. Zeller, ed., Menschwerdung Gottes – Vergöttlichung von Menschen, Novum testamentum et orbis Antiquus 7, Fribourg/Suisse & Göttingen, 1988, pp.115-40. 29 E. Bickerman, ‘Consecratio,’ in den Boer (n. 20 above), pp.3-25 at 9f. In the discussion after the paper, Bickermann was taken by den Boer, and others, to be implying that the notion of the ‘imperial cult’ is a modern invention.

J. Beaujeu, La religion romaine à l’apogée de l’Empire, 1: la politique religieuse des Antonins (96-192), Paris, 1955; J.R. Fears, ‘The cult of virtues and Roman imperial ideology,’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, H. Temporini & W. Haas, eds., II, 17.2, Berlin, 1981, pp.827-948. 19 Legitimacy is also the key for R.Turcan, ‘Le culte impérial au IIIe siècle,’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, H. Temporini & W. Haas, eds., II, 16.2, Berlin, 1978, pp.996-1084 at 1002. 20 Plutarch, ad Principem ineruditum 3, 780d; cf. G.W. Bowersock, ‘Greek intellectuals and the imperial cult in the second century,’ in: W. den Boer, ed., Le culte des souverains dans l’Empire romain, Entretiens Fondation Hardt 19, Vandoeuvres, 1973, pp.179-206. 21 S.R.F. Price, Rituals and Power: the Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor, Cambridge, 1984. 22 S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, men and gods in Asia Minor,1: the Celts and the impact of Roman rule, Oxford, 1993, p.103. 23 P. Gros, Revue des Études Latines 64 (1986), pp.321-3; Duncan Fishwick spoke of a ‘tour de force in historical analysis’, Phoenix 40 (1986), pp.225-30.

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associated with Talcott Parsons, which takes account also of the general conditions within which decisions may be taken in a given society, in its major and subordinate structures.32 On this view, power is not merely a matter of the ability of the political system to decide upon the allocation of scarce goods and resources in the face of varying claims and desires, but also of the system’s own drive towards ensuring its continuity and ability to function and develop quâ system. On this view, the imperial cult would belong less within the context of the unmediated application of power, that is conflicts over allocation, than within that of the system’s ability to maintain itself. In practice, the two aspects are not always easy to distinguish. The issue of consecration produced numerous conflicts, especially in the second and third centuries, precisely over ‘allocation’ - conflicts over which members of the imperial household were to receive divine honours: there were disputes between emperors, the imperial consilium, and the Senate over Trajan’s homonymous father, for example; over L. Aelius Caesar, the adopted son of Hadrian; over Iulia Maesa, grandmother of Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, who was consecrated in 223 or 224, damned in 235 but restored sometime before May/June 238; to say nothing of Traianus Decius, who was consecrated in early June 251 but damned before 15th July.33 But the theoretical distinction is clear enough.

One legitimate way of responding to this fact is to call for ever more detailed examination of specific problems, provinces and documents.30 In the long run, close examination will undoubtedly throw up new general views. But we should also consider the issues at a more general level, and reflect upon those which the transactional account obscures or neglects. One question it obscures is precisely the issue of the relation between power and the imperial cult: what kind of benefit did the ruling power get out of all this? How are we to envisage the paraphernalia of senatorial and council decrees, voting and erection of statues, the creation of priesthoods, the institution of festivals, processions and sacrifices, the dedication of votives, epigraphic formulae and all the rest, contributing to the creation, maintenance or aggrandisement of power? One preliminary answer might be to say that effort correlates with seriousness, and the product of effort is consent, which is more than the half of power. It might be then that all the imperial cult did was to achieve the precondition for power, consent, and not power itself. If we are to go further, we need to consider the issue of power more closely. Working with different notions of power, we can suggest different ways of conceptualising the links between power and imperial cult. I propose in what follows to confine myself to two possibilities, the naturalisation through religion of the social and political order; and the notion of power as essentially fictional, a matter of the possible options for future action that lie open to the individual.

If we adopt some such view as this (granted of course that plenty has been said about power since Parsons), we might situate the imperial cult as a specific instance of the ability of religious institutions and discourse to naturalize the existing socio-economic order. Religion reinforces the divisions of the social and political order by tacitly proposing and imposing a scheme of perception in terms of which the distribution of power and social advantage is as it must and can only be.34 The Princeps and his family do not represent the apex of a social hierarchy, but a mid-point in a vaster hierarchy of being without a meaningful beginning as it has no thinkable end. The socio-political order is not so much legitimated directly, as fitted into a wider order of things in such a way that it cannot readily be detached from that wider order and represented in and for itself. The contribution of the imperial cult, as a specialised sub-set of the religious system as a whole, is thus not so much legitimation of political power as its obfuscation, its redescription as an aspect not of politics but of the order of things. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, ‘Les topologies cosmologiques sont toujours des topologies politiques naturalisées.’35 At the same time, the imperial cult offered plenty of scope within the context of that process of naturalisation for the furtherance of group interests.

* There is a perfectly respectable view, shared for example by the authors of the article ‘Macht’ in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, that all uses of the notion ‘power’ are metaphors of the key, fundamental concept, which is political power.31 The classic version of this view is Weber’s, according to which power is to be understood as a specific opportunity, when an actor is in a position to impose his or her ‘will’ or ‘interests’ on the interests and will of another, when this other might wish to prefer his own will, and the situation is therefore potentially one of conflict. The stress here is upon decisions and negotiations. The stark version of this view has since the 1960s generally been superseded by what can loosely be termed a systemic view, 30 The need for still more detailed studies is a theme in D. Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West, Études préliminaires aux religions orientales 108, Leyden, 1987-92, (n.8 above); S.J. Friesen, Twice neokoros: Ephesus, Asia and the cult of the Flavian imperial family, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 116, Leyden, 1993; and U.-M. Lietz, Kult und Kaiser. Studien zur Kaiserkult und Kaiserverehrung in den germanischen Provinzen und in Gallia Belgica zur römischen Kaiserzeit, Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae 20, Rome, 1998. 31 T. Kobusch & L. Oeing-Hanhoff, s.v. ‘Macht’, in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Basel & Stuttgart, 5, (1980), cols. 585-88; cf. also A. Gehlen, s.v. ‘Macht’, in Handbuch der Sozialwissenschaften 7 (1961), pp. 77-81; Q. Gibson, s.v. ‘Power’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1 (1971), pp. 101-12; J. Groetschy, ‘Les théories du pouvoir,’ Sociologie du Travail 23 (1981), pp.447-67.

32

T. Parsons, ‘On the concept of power,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963) 232-62, repr. in his Sociological Theory and Modern Society, New York & London, 1967, pp.297-354. 33 See Clauss, Kaiser und Gott (n.24 above), pp. 137; 141f.; 316f.; 185 with CIL XI 4086 respectively. 34 Cf. the excellent account of C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, New York & Oxford, 1992, pp.169-223, developing the position argued in the 1970s by P. Bourdieu. 35 P. Bourdieu, ‘Genèse et structure du champ religieux,’ Revue française de sociologie 12 (1971), pp.295-334.

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In this connection, much of the most interesting material comes from Asia Minor. The keynote here was certainly given by Octavian in 29 B.C. when he permitted the inhabitants of Asia and Bithynia to set up sanctuaries of the goddess Roma and the deified Julius Caesar where the resident Roman citizens could worship, and at the same time allowed the Greek inhabitants to set up shrines for himself at the provincial ‘capitals’ Pergamum and Nicomedia.36 The second crucial move was evidently his decision to assume an impersonal name, Augustus, in Greek Sebastos, in 27 B.C., which, connoting as it did solemnity, dignity, reverence and numinosity, became part of the official titulature of all Roman emperors.37 The institution of provincial cults of the new emperor rapidly gave rise also to city cults: 56 cities in the empire are known to have had cults of Augustus, at least 50 of which date to his life-time.38 The driving force behind these foundations was mainly of two kinds. Many, especially in the Greek-speaking half of the Empire, were instituted by resident Roman citizens, who thereby expressed their rôle as mediators between the centre, at Rome, and the Greekspeaking provincials among whom they lived: in worshipping the emperor in, say, Ephesus or Ancyra, they presented themselves as a privileged subordinate power deriving its authority from the far-off centre. They also, of course, entered into a process of negotiation with that centre, expecting to gain privilege and notice by gestures which to a human being would have amounted to shameless selfabasement; but to a god, were nothing out of the ordinary.

the extended celebrations that accompanied the imperial festivals. There is a fascinating inscription from Ancyra, which lists the early priests of the Deified Augustus and the Goddess Roma in Galatia for the years between AD 19/20 and about 36/7.40 The earliest name that can be read, probably Castor the son of King Brigatus, who may have been the king of Amaseia until his kingdom was annexed in 3/2 B.C., is recorded as giving a public banquet, olive oil for a month, a gladiatorial show with 30 pairs of gladiators, bull hunts and other hunts of wild animals; in A.D. 22/23 the fourth priest, Pylaemenes, son of the last tetrarch of Galatia, King Amyntas, who had been murdered in 26 or 25 B.C., was even more generous, as befitted his enormous personal properties: he gave 2 public banquets, 2 gladiatorial shows, competitions for athletes, chariots and horse races; a bull fight; a wild animal hunt; olive oil. But he also made permanent gifts of land: the site where the temple of Augustus, the Sebasteion, stood, where the horse-races were held, and the site for the public market held in connection with the festival, the panegyris. In displaying such generosity, the most eminent members of local élite groups represented locally one aspect of the emperor, his beneficent care for the peoples of the empire, his cura, sollicitudo, providentia,41 and could impersonate through the imperial priesthood the emperor himself. By so doing they symbolically justified the massive inequalities of wealth, privilege and power which the empire maintained. Inequality seemed to be the pre-condition for access to the pleasures of the festival, the free wine and food, the spectacles that turned the spectators into judges of life and death.42 Moreover, in the non-urbanised provinces of the empire, the buildings of the imperial cult, such as the grand temple-complex at Antioch in Pisidia, which was visible for miles from the west, or the temple of Claudius at Colchester in Britain, were often the very first intimations of Roman civic magnificence, of the idea of the civilising city, to arrive in these provinces.43 They emblematized the sheer givenness of the Principate as an institution, suggesting that it was of a kind with the permanence of the gods, and with the permanence of human tendance of the divine.

Initially, then, the cult of the emperor masked from the worshippers themselves their own loss of political freedom and enabled them to negotiate a new relation to the centre. But once routinised, the cult conferred upon individual rulers a kind of temporary immortality until the point of eventual consecration, the official transition to the status of ‘god in heaven’ (divus). An official announcement of the accession of Hadrian in A.D.117, probably issued by the governor of Egypt, reads: ‘Be it known to you that for the salvation of the whole race of mankind the imperial rule has been taken over from the god his father by Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Optimus Augustus Germanicus Dacicus Parthicus. Therefore we shall pray to all the gods that his continuance may be preserved to us for ever and shall wear garlands for ten days.’39

The death of the emperor, the transition from one sort of godhead to another, may enable us to make a final observation about the naturalisation of imperial power. Augustus' wife, Livia, made a present of 1 million sesterces -

The other main group of initiators were members of local élites, and especially former kings and tribal leaders, or their descendants, who found in the establishment of the cult of the emperor, both provincial and municipal, a means of giving political edge to their rôles as benefactors of their communities or, as the case may be, their former subjects. Assumption of the provincial priesthood of the emperor involved often enormous expense, not merely for the immediate costs of sacrifical animals and processions, but for

40

OGIS 533 = V. Ehrenburg & A.H.M. Jones, Documents illustrating the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius², Oxford, 1976, #109, cf. S. Mitchell, Anatolia (n. 22 above) 1, pp.107-13. 41 On these imperial virtues, cf. J. Béranger, Recherches sur l’aspect idéologique du Principat, Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft 6, Basel, 1953, pp.186-217; J-P. Martin, Providentia deorum: aspects religieux du pouvoir romain, Collection de l’École fr. de Rome 61, Rome, 1982. 42 Cf. P. Schmitt Pantel, La cité au banquet: histoire des repas publics dans les cités grecques romain, Collection de l’École fr. de Rome 157, Paris, 1992 pp.359-420; D.G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, London & New York, 1998. 43 Mitchell, Anatolia (n.22 above) 1, pp.103-7; P. Drury, ‘The temple of Claudius at Colchester reconsidered,’ Britannia 15 (1984) pp.7-50; D. Fishwick, ‘Templum divo Claudio constitutum’, in: id. The Imperial Cult (n.8 above) 1.2, pp.195-218.

36

Cassius Dio 51.20.5-7. D. Kienast, Augustus. Prinzeps und Monarch³, Darmstadt, 1999, pp. 245f. 38 H.Hänlein-Schäfer, Veneratio Augusti: eine Studie zu den Tempeln des ersten römischen Kaisers, Archaeologica 39, Rome, 1985. 39 P.Oxy. 55, 3781, dated 11 May 117. 37

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies the wealth qualification of a senator - to a man of praetorian rank, Numerius Atticus, who took an oath that he had seen the dead emperor ascending to heaven just as Romulus, the founder of Rome, had appeared after his death to Julius Proculus.44 The historian Herodian describes how at least by the late second century A.D. an eagle was released from the top of an emperor’s multi-storeyed funeral-pyre as the flames consumed the body below: ‘the bird is supposed by the Romans to bear the emperor’s soul from earth to heaven.’45 So many pious fictions, so much more or less acknowledged pretence. But hardly anyone, outside the ranks of the philosophers, and one or two historians such as Hieronymus of Cardia, and often enough not even they, cared about the truth. There were few Plutarchs who cared to write: ‘Have not many kings been told they were Apollo just because they could hum a tune, or Dionysos because they got drunk, or Herakles because they had distinguished themselves in battle, and, in their delight, been led into utter disgrace by flattery?’46 For this was the point at which the Senate, speaking for the empire as a whole, was empowered to decide whether the deceased was worthy of becoming a divus, that is, a true inhabitant of heaven, a full divinity within the succession going back to Julius Caesar.47 The Senate's right to choose, to deify or to damn, served to underpin the moral authority of the imperial system as a whole. The pious spectacle enacted that moral legitimacy before the eyes of the empire’s inhabitants just as it confirmed that true emperors truly were not of this world.48

elder; and second, they thank the emperor Ti. Caesar Augustus... .49 The existence of the emperor makes political and social life possible. Nearly three hundred years later, the emperor Maximinus claimed in his rescript of 312 A.D. encouraging persecution of the Christians: ‘Who is so obtuse as not to see that the benevolent concern of the gods is responsible for the fertility of the earth, for keeping the peace and defeating unrighteous enemies, for curbing storms at sea, tempests and earthquakes, which have occurred only when the Christians with their ignorant and futile beliefs have come to afflict almost the entire world with their shameful practices?’50 At any rate from the emperors’ point of view, the safety of the Roman empire was a matter of constant and unremitting concern to the Other World. If to the people emperors looked very much like gods, to the emperors the gods looked very much like themselves – part of the order of things. * But what of the rôle of images, about which I have as yet said nothing? Some of the themes I have mentioned can certainly be illustrated. Several consecration issues (fig.1) depict the elaborate four-storey cremation-tower. The bier bearing the wax effigy of the corpse, which the new emperor (if the dead were his predecessor) kissed in farewell, is depicted on the second tier. The top tier is surmounted by an imperial quadriga – evidently a real one: the short-lived emperor Pertinax, for example, took his favourite chariot to heaven with him. We must of course imagine the rest – all the magistrates of the state in full gear, the entire senatorial and equestrian orders, the imperial family on its tribunal, the consuls setting fire to the tower, the scent of burning wood, offerings and spices, the intricate exhibition marching of the massed infantry and cavalry, the eagle rising heavenward bearing the new god. And the theme of the emperors’ self-identification with the cares of the gods is neatly suggested by the type (fig.2) issued on a considerable scale in commemoration of the recovery in 19 B.C. by negotiation (‘signis receptis’) of the legionary standards lost by the triumvir M. Licinius Crassus at Carrhae. Augustus planned, but never executed, a temple on the Capitol to house the standards, which eventually found a permanent home in the temple of Mars Ultor, the Avenger, dedicated in the Forum in 2 B.C.51 On the coin, we find Mars hurrying along to Rome with the standards, looking back as though to say ‘farewell’ to

At the level of public rhetoric, political power and religion were so closely interwoven that they could not and cannot meaningfully be separated. The decree of the Senate in the celebrated case of the treason of the consular Cn.Calpurnius Piso, delivered on 10th December AD 20; rescript of A.D. 312, opens with the words: The Senate and the Roman people above all else thank the immortal gods for not allowing the present peacable condition of the state, which could not be wished to be better and which we are able to enjoy through the beneficium of the emperor, to be destroyed by the impious conspiracy of Cn. Piso the

44 Cassius Dio 56.46.2, cf. Suetonius, Augustus 100.4; cf. S.R.F. Price, ‘From noble funerals to divine cult: the consecration of Roman emperors,’ in: Rituals of Royalty: Power and ceremonial in traditional societies, D. Cannadine & S.Price, eds., Cambridge, 1987, 56-105. 45 Herodian 4.2.11. A similar account by Cassius Dio of the consecration of Pertinax in June or July 193 AD: 74.4.2 - 5.5: ‘Then at last the consuls applied fire to the structure, and thereupon an eagle flew up out of it’; cf. Clauss, Kaiser und Gott (n. 24 above), pp.360-8. 46 Plutarch, de adulatore et amico 12, 56f.; cf. F. Taeger, ‘Zum Kampf gegen den antiken Herrscherkult,’ Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 32 (1935), pp.282-92. 47 For a convenient list of the 72 emperors and their relatives who are known to have been created divi up to and including Theodosius (but excluding Antinoos), see Clauss, Kaiser und Gott (n.24 above), pp.533-5. 48 At one of the high points of the ‘third-century crisis’ Traianus Decius (249-51) issued a coin-series showing the hallowed sequence of 11 ‘real’ divi – including Commodus but not Pertinax – stretching back to Augustus: H. Mattingly, ‘The coins of the ‘divi’ issued by Trajan Decius,’ Numismatic Chronicle 9 (1949), pp.75-82.

49 AE 1996: 885 = CIL II².5, 900 ll.12-15 (El Tajar, Cordoba); cf. Ovid, epist. ex Ponto 2.5.17f. 50 Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. 9.7.8, cf. S. Mitchell, ‘Maximinus and the Christians in AD 312: a new Latin inscription,’ Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988), pp.105-24 at 120; id. Anatolia (n.22 above) 2, pp.64f.; 101, fig. 22. 51 J.W. Rich, ‘Augustus’s Parthian honours, the temple of Mars Ultor and the arch in the Forum Romanum,’ Papers of the British School at Rome 53 (1999), pp.71-128. Augustus had probably vowed that the standards would be dedicated to Mars Ultor before their recovery. I think Zanker’s view, Power of Images (n. 13 above), p.186, that the image depicts an archaising statue of Mars in the Capitoline temple, very implausible. Rich has in my view made it very probable that, despite Cassius Dio 54.8.3, the senatorial decree for a Capitoline temple remained a dead letter.

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Parthia, a divine top-speed parcel-service. The image expresses: the divine favour that enabled Augustus to make good the Parthian insult to Roman arms, his restoration of the pax deorum destroyed by the civil wars,52 the recovery of Roman military power, the consolidation of the army, but more than any of these, the congruence between the care exercised by the gods and by the emperor.

process of naturalisation, as themselves assertions of or claims to the inexpressible variety of the emperor’s choices of action, a variety which constantly nudges against that traditionally ascribed to the gods. Whatever the actual restrictions of emperor’s existences, their political choices, and administrative responsibilities,56 the imagery deployed for them, and in particular the imagery of the imperial cult, suggests a limitless freedom of action, and in that sense unlimited power, a power that could be unfettered precisely because it existed only in and through the images.

Illustration however is not quite enough. If we are to make fuller use of ancient images related to the imperial cult, we need to appeal to a different notion of power from that of Parsons and Bourdieu. We may perhaps resort here to some suggestions offered by Kurt Röttgers in the light of Kant’s reflections, in the aftermath of the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, on the problem of what it means to ascribe power to Nature.53 Röttgers suggests that there can be a non-metaphoric notion of power which is not centred upon political power, citing Thomas Reid, Adam Smith’s successor (1764) in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow and founder of the Scottish school of moral philosophy: ‘Power is not an object of any of our external senses, nor even an object of consciousness...Indeed every operation of the mind is the exertion of some power of the mind; but we are conscious of the operation only, the power lies behind the scene.’54 There can be a transcendental conception of power. On this account, power is a non-normative, relative notion, essentially identical to the notion of possibility. In social processes, the primary function of power is to ensure the continuity of action. It is the creation and maintenance of options. Options are representations or images of possible forms of action, so that the content of power is basically fictional. Power prefers the invocation of the possibility of action, images of action, to action itself. From this perspective, power is best defined as the asymmetrical distribution of possibilities or options among potential actors. The person who has most conception of the opportunities available for action is most truly powerful. The most important aspect of acquiring possibilities of action is disposing of ideas about conceiving possibilities of action.55 To increase one’s power is to increase one’s power over possibilities of action, i.e. to acquire power over power. In that sense the drive for power can indeed never be satisfied, for it is constantly found wanting by the thought of new options, new possibilities.

I will limit myself here to a few suggestive images, deliberately ignoring considerations of time, space and development. We may start with the well-known bust of Caracalla (A.D.211-17) in the Berlin Antikensammlung (fig.3). Traditionally, imperial portraiture had differentiated between the emperor’s different rôles. This one suggests a desire to transcend such limitations. Who is Caracalla? The image, which draws on the iconography of the victorious athlete but also of the military commander (the sword belt, the military cloak), suggests first that the emperor can somehow simultaneously occupy both rôles, that he can at the same time be active in the gymnasium while he is commanding his troops. But the image also suggests an unbridled physical energy, as though the real Caracalla wished somehow to burst out of the confining marble. The features of the face, the brow drawn down towards the nose, and the jutting chin, convey a sense of remorseless, unbroken, concentration and determination. More than any other single feature, the vigorously unruly curling of the hair (present for the first time in imperial portraits) suggests unlimited possibility: some curls are tightly coiled and convey potential but suppressed action; others are already dancing upwards into space.57 It may be true that ‘l’état est le contraire de l’histoire’,58 but this image conveys the sense that an emperor is capable even of mediating the opposition between stasis and movement. One of the central themes of traditional discourse about the gods is their ubiquity. The multiplicity of imperial images enabled emperors in a sense to emulate the gods’ effortless ability to defy the limits of space and time. The living god could be ‘present’ in each of his temples, all over the empire, but also in public spaces, fora, cycles, odea, amphitheatres, and in rooms in private houses. Not merely that, he could be present in different scales, in different fractions or segments, each alluding to the real person but at the same time suggesting a transcendence of human limitation. A small bronze bust of Augustus, with the features of Octavian, now in the Louvre, may have stood in a Gallic temple. (fig.4) It is dedicated to him as a god by a certain Atespatus, a non-citizen Gaul whose name has

If we apply this conception to the case of the imperial cult, we might look at the surviving iconographic (and indeed epigraphic) evidence not so much as illustrations of a 52 Cf. the excellent study by P. Jal, La Guerre civile à Rome: étude littéraire et morale, Paris, 1963, pp.360-488. 53 K. Röttgers, Spuren der Macht: Begriffsgeschichte und Systematik, Freiburg & Munich, 1990, pp.488-537. 54 T. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, London, 1788, repr. New York & London, 1977, 6f. On Reid, see K. Haakonssen’s Introduction to T. Reid, Practical Ethics, Princeton, 1990; K. Holcomb, ‘T. Reid in the Glasgow Literary Society,’ in: A. Hook & R.B. Sher, The Glasgow Enlightenment, East Linton, 1995, pp.95-110. 55 ‘Das Verfügenkönnen über die Vorstellungen über das Verfügenkönnen zukunftiger Handlungen ist bereits der wahrscheinlich wichtigste Teil des Verfügenkönnens über zukünftige Handlungen’ (p.494).

56

Best described by F.G.B. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC-AD 337), London, 1977. 57 K. Fittschen & P. Zanker, Katalog der römischen Porträts in den Capitolinischen Museen, 1, Mainz, 1985, p.106 no.1; L. Giuliani et al., Die Antikensammlung Berlin, Berlin, 1992, pp.213-5. no.104. 58 M. Serres, Le parasite, Paris, 1980, p.133.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies nevertheless been Latinised.59 One of a pair with Livia, it employs the skills of naturalism to convey a sense of disembodied presence, principally conveyed by the exaggeratedly large inlaid irides and pupils, and by the tension set up between direction of gaze and that of the suggested torso. Moreover, John Onians has rightly observed that one of the values of the miniature in the Hellenistic period was the paradox implied in the suggestion that something very small could embody all the strength of something huge.60 The miniature introduces a domestic scale, which it simultaneously subverts by calling attention to its referent through naturalist virtuosity. But scale is of course entirely relative. The colossal statue of Augustus, which was visible through the pierced exedra in the theatre at Emerita in Lusitania (fig.5), as in numerous other known theatres, nevertheless seems dwarfed by its surroundings.61 In such theatres, the emperor is a kind of spectator, but a spectator not only of the play – he also spectates the spectators in the cavea, thus turning them into subjects of his imagined gaze. Elsewhere, again, colossal scale can be de-emphasized, as in the case of the seated togate statue (fig.6), probably of Hadrian (A.D.117-38), found in the ‘Byzantine esplanade’ near the Crusader fort in Caesarea Maritima in northern Palestine. It may have served as the cult statue in his temple, or have been set upon in the council-building. In this case, the nature of the stone and the seated pose serve to reduce the true scale, simultaneously suggesting superhuman magnificence and normal humanity. It is thus not merely the ubiquity of the emperor that was emphasized by the imperial cult, but also, once again, his ceaseless capacity to mediate between oppositions, to be as it were at least two things at once. Here again, it is the plurality of the emperor’s options that are stressed, his manifold Handlungsmöglichkeiten.

Caius is on the same footing as the inhabitants of heaven. But above them is represented the bust of Mars velatus, suggesting the supremacy of the divine-imperial mission of universal victory and conquest.63 Here Caius not only ‘bears’ the gods on his cuirass, he is descended from one and so equal to her (Venus), he is master of another (the statue of Victoria), but subordinate to – or beneath the protection of - yet another, Mars Ultor. Of course in one sense this can be read as ‘symbolism’, as a series of claims. What interests me in the present connection is the suggestion of the options that Caius, as a member of the Julian house, can exercise simultaneously in relation to the divine world. The emperor may have been a god, but he was also the key mediator between his empire and the other World. This rôle is repeatedly depicted in imperial art,64 for example in the panel from his arch showing Marcus Aurelius, capite velato, taking the incense from the acerra as he prepares to sacrifice in front of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter. (fig.8) The emperor’s key rôle in the state is connoted by his position between a flamen, presumably of Jupiter (to his right), and the bearded Genius Senatus to his left.65 Even though they may denote an actual ritual, in this case, say, his decennalia celebration in A.D.171, such images also connote the emperor’s rôle as exemplary sacrificant, which models the sacrificial acts of all magistrates, officials, military commanders, central and local, and even of every paterfamilias. The imperial images summarize, subsume, these thousands of daily sacrifices. But the claims made for the emperor’s sacrificial rôle, in maintaining the pax deorum and so the welfare and physical well-being of the entire population of the empire, are better expressed on the reverse of a Trajanic as from Caesarea Maritima (fig.9), showing the emperor, capite velato, in an abbreviated sacrificial gesture, dropping grains of incense on a portable altar. In his left hand he holds a cornucopiae, the symbol of domestic peace and agricultural fecundity. The image conveys the real consequences, in daily life all over the empire, of the totality of ritual acts that maintain the pax deorum, the return for the deaths of all the victims, the gods’ respect for Roman piety. And an essential aspect of that piety is sacrifice on behalf of, for, and even to, the succession of the divi, and the living emperor.

A quite different kind of option is suggested by an overlifesized cuirassed statue from the theatre at Cherchel (Shirshāll) in Algeria, probably set up in honour of Caius Caesar, Augustus’ ill-fated adoptive heir. As usual in Augustan imperial iconography, the cuirass is elaborately decorated with symbolic figures. (fig.7) The human figure ‘carries’ divine figures, thus setting it apart from mortals unequal to such burdens. That suggests one relation to divinity. Among the figures depicted is Caius (?) himself, at centre-right, heroically draped to resemble the image of the divinised Julius Caesar, solemnly offering a statue of Victoria, Victory, over the navel of the ‘real’ Caius, to an armed Venus, ancestor of the Iulii, who is depicted on the same scale, though slightly smaller, as befits a woman.62

The notion of totality is also suggestive for the issue of ‘transcendental’ power. On his succession in A.D.79, Titus issued a number of coins (fig.10) showing his father Vespasian passing a globe to Titus, who already stands beside the rudder of state. The legend, provident(ia) august(a), suggests Vespasian’s foresight in naming Titus his successor already in 69.66 The globe is a condensed symbol, connoting rule over the empire of course, which

59 This point has been much disputed, cf. Fishwick, ‘Liturgy and ceremonial,’ Imperial Cult (n.8 above), 2.1, p.544f; Clauss, Kaiser und Gott (n. 24 above), pp.31-33. 60 Onians, Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age, London, 1979, p.126. 61 Similar statues are known from the theatres at Orange, Arles, Lepcis Magna, and Bulla Regia; perhaps also at Tarraco, Vienne, Vaison-lesRomains, Cherchel, and elsewhere: Fishwick, ‘Liturgy and ceremonial,’ Imperial Cult (n.30 above), 2.1, p.522f. 62 Caius Caesar (cos. A.D.1) was sent with imperium proconsulare to the East in A.D.2 to settle the political situation in Armenia. On 9th Sept. A.D. 3 he was wounded at Atagira and died at Limyra in Caria on 21stFeb. the following year.

63 See the fine account by Zanker, The Power of Images (n. 13 above), p.223. The statue may have been erected by King Juba of Mauretania. 64 I.Scott Ryberg, Rites of the State Religion in Roman Art, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 22, Rome, 1955. 65 See Ryberg, Rites, p.157f.; R. Turcan, Religion romaine, Iconography of Religions 17,1, Leyden, 1988, 2, p.32 no.69. 66 Clauss, Kaiser und Gott (n.24 above), p.109f.

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the Romans liked to think as extending over the entire world;67 but it also connotes the permanence of the imperial system, denoted by the phrase aeternitas Augusti, of the universe, and the weight of ages.68 The scale of this responsibility is overwhelming. But the emperors are a match for the task: for they are vast enough to pass the world from hand to hand as though it were indeed a ball. Moreover, insofar as the globe denotes power, power is represented as a quantum, as a concrete totality, reified as a sphere, almost as a possession. This power cannot leak away, is dependent neither upon negotiation nor political calculation, fears not the mood of the military nor the assassin’s dagger. ‘The ideal social process of succession outflanks mere time.’69 Rethinking power may also involve a deliberate subversion of the usual rules for reading Roman iconographic language, a decision to read them for what they might tell us about ‘transcendence’, about power as option, possibility, the mediation of oppositions, being in more than one place at once. If there is anything at all in this effort at re-thinking, others will be able to turn it to their own ends. Duncan Fishwick ends one of his excellent essays on the imperial cult with the observation: ‘Generalizations are always risky and a piecemeal analysis clearly provides the soundest approach.’70 Details of course naturally delight the scholarly mind, but without contexts they remain mere details. Transactionalism will not remain the last word. The questions return. What ends are served by the imagery of the imperial cult? How are we to think of power?

67 J. Vogt, ‘Orbis Romanus,’ in his Orbis. Ausgewählte Schriften zur Geschichte des Altertums, Stuttgart, 1960, pp.151-71; C. Nicolet, L’inventaire du monde: géographie et politique aux origins de l’Empire romain, Paris, 1988. 68 See R. M. Schneider, ‘Rome aeterna – aurea Roma. Der Himmelsglobus als Zeitzeichen und Machtsymbol,’ in: J. Assmann & E.W.B. Hess-Lüttich, eds., Kult, Kalender und Geschichte. Semiotisierung von Zeit als kulturelle Konstruktion, Tübingen, 1997, (special issue of Kodikas/Code: Ars Semeiotica 20.1-2), pp.103-33. 69 M. Bloch, ‘The ritual of the royal bath in Madagascar: the dissolution of death, birth, and fertility into authority,’ in his Ritual, History and Power. Selected Papers in Anthropology, London, 1989, pp.187-211. 70 Fishwick, ‘The Augustales and the Imperial cult,’ Imperial Cult (n.8 above) 2.1, pp.607-16 at 616.

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Fig.1. Consecration sestertius for Julia Maesa, sister-in-law of Septimius Severus, depicting (rev.) the four-storey cremation-tower (A.D. 223). Legend: Consecratio S.C. H. Mattingly and E. A. Sydenham, Roman Imperial Coinage 4.2: Macrinus to Pupienus (London, 1938), p.127 no. 712.

Fig.2. Denarius, 17 B.C., depicting the god Mars carrying the legionary standards lost to the Parthians at Carrhae (53 B.C.) and recovered by Augustus’ diplomacy in 19 B.C. J.B. Giard, Catalogue des monnaies de l’Empire romain, 1 (Bibliothèque Nationale) (Paris, 1976), no. 1016.

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Fig.3. Marble bust of Caracalla, 58 cm high, A.D. 212-7, allegedly from Rome. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antikensammlung. M. Wegner, Das römische Herrscherbild, 3.1: Caracalla, Geta, Plautilla (Berlin, 1971), pl. 116.

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Fig.4. Bronze bust of Augustus, one of a pair with Livia, from Neuilly-le-Réal, now in the Louvre. The inscription reads: Caesari Augusto Atespatus Crixi fil. v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito), the normal formula for a votive (CIL XIII 1366).

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Fig.5. Statue of Augustus in the centre of the scaenae frons of the theatre at Mérida, Spain.

Fig.6. Porphyry statue of a seated emperor, probably Hadrian, from Caesarea Maritima (2.45 m. high). Caesarea Maritima Museum. K.G. Holum et al., King Herod’s Dream (New York, 1988), 125 fig.82.

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Fig.7. Marble torso of a cuirassed statue, probably of Caius Caesar, who died in A.D.4 (2.28 m. high). Musée archéologique, Cherchel.

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Fig.8. Relief plaque of M. Aurelius sacrificing, probably from his triumphal arch on the Capitol. Palazzo dei Conservatori, 3.14 x 2.10m. I.S. Ryberg, Panel Reliefs of M. Aurelius (NewYork, 1967), 21-4; 84-9, pl. 15-17.

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Fig.9. Reverse of as of Trajan, A.D. 115-17, mint of Caesarea: Trajan sacrificing, holding a cornucopiae. L. Kadman, The Coins of Caesarea Maritima (Tel Aviv, 1957), p.102 no.23.

Fig.10. Reverse of sestertius of Titus, showing Vespasian (l.) giving his son the world-globe. Legend: Provident(ia) august(a)/ S.C. H. Mattingly et al., Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum² (London, 1976- ) 2, pl.49.3.

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A Question of Language Raphael, Michelangelo and the Art of Architectural Imitation David Hemsoll Differing traditions in Italian Renaissance architecture are often indicative of distinctive ideologies, and sometimes relatable to discernible theoretical issues. Among the many such issues explored by John Onians in his book Bearers of Meaning, there is perhaps one that could be pursued further. It centres on the similarity between the development of architecture in some major Renaissance centres and the theoretical positions of certain Renaissance writers regarding their hopes for the development of the Italian language.1 More specifically, it concerns the correspondence between the approaches of those Renaissance architects who were ever more intent on assimilating classical elements into their designs, and the outlooks of writers, such as Cristoforo Landino and Pietro Bembo, who considered the best way of improving the modern language was to endow it with the properties of Classical Latin. For Onians, Landino’s literary outlook was neatly summed up when he stated that it was impossible to write well in the Italian volgare without ‘a true and perfect familiarity with Latin letters’ and this, in Onians’s view, could well have provided the ‘programme’ for the architecture of Landino’s Florentine contemporary, Giuliano da Sangallo, in the way it was conceived as a ‘more Roman’ version of the earlier Florentine style of Brunelleschi.2 In other words, Landino’s pronouncement is seen as having provided a theoretical means for the established Florentine tradition of Renaissance architecture to be developed in a more modern way.

argue strongly that Landino’s outlook relates very directly to the contemporary architecture of late fifteenth-century Florence, whereas Bembo’s rather different outlook relates to the rather differently conceived architecture of early sixteenth-century Rome and Venice, which was where Bembo himself was based. Indeed, I will propose that the shared characteristics apparent in the architecture of Rome and Venice at this time were in good part due to a broadly common theoretical approach that can be traced back to Bembo, and I will also propose that certain divergent approaches could well have found support in some of the variations to Bembo’s outlook put forward by other major writers on the Italian language of the period, such as Baldassare Castiglione and Giangiorgio Trissino. It is these relationships that I intend to identify and explore here, for it is my contention that the outlooks of linguistic theorists are of prime importance for an understanding of the development of Italian architecture during the early part of the sixteenth century. It is my contention, moreover, that the differing approaches to architecture represented by Raphael in Rome, and then by Michelangelo in Florence, also have their roots, or at least their justifications, in rivalling linguistic theories, as I shall presently describe. In this context, it is useful first to consider the ideas of Landino and their relationship to the approach of Giuliano da Sangallo, because this relationship seems to have set the pattern for the future.4 Landino’s statement about the writing of modern Italian, or rather of modern ‘Florentine’ or ‘Tuscan’, with a ‘true and perfect familiarity’ of Latin appeared in the preface to his edition of Dante published in 1481.5 Although largely developed from ideas Landino had put forward previously, it was made at a time immediately after Florence’s war with Rome (1478-80) and, as such, it marks the beginning of a new period of Florentine self confidence, when, under the aegis of Lorenzo de’Medici, the city was increasing viewed as a ‘new Rome’, and Florentine achievements in the arts generally were coming to be increasingly valued, as Landino himself made clear in his preface.6 Landino’s views on the modern language were that it should be firmly based on the work of Dante, but made more like Latin through a deep understanding of the structure and vocabulary of ancient writing, and in this respect his outlook is very precisely analogous to the approach

What I would like to suggest here is that such literary outlooks really did influence the approaches adopted by Renaissance architects very profoundly. These literary outlooks all gave centre stage to a concept of imitation, which concerned the ways that new works could be consciously modelled on past prototypes. Approaches in contemporary architecture also appear to have put particular emphasis on a principle of imitation, a principle which was by no means new to architecture but which now assumed a much greater general importance, and was now given new method.3 I would certainly agree that Landino’s outlook may well have provided what amounted to a theoretical basis for Giuliano da Sangallo’s architecture, but I would also suggest that the rather different outlooks of later writers could have then helped form the bases of differing architectural traditions. That is to say, I would 1

J. B. Onians, Bearers of Meaning; the Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton, 1988, pp.135-6. As noted by Onians, the general significance of Landino’s remark was stressed by H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton, 1966, pp.352-3. 3 For some discussion of the practice of imitation in earlier Renaissance architecture, see e.g. R.A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence. An Economic and Social History, Baltimore & London, 1980, pp.381-3; and R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, New Haven & London, 1998, p.122 & n.188.

4

For a more extensive consideration of this particular matter, see D. Hemsoll, ‘Giuliano da Sangallo and the new Renaissance of Lorenzo de’Medici’, in F. Ames Lewis, The Early Medici and Their Artists, London, 1995, pp.187-205. 5 C. Landino, ed. R. Cardini, Scritti critici e teorici, 2 vols, Rome, 1974, vol. 1, 139. 6 For Landino’s views on literary imitation see e.g. M.L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance. The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation from Dante to Bembo, Oxford, 1995, pp.167-83.

2

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies adopted with remarkable consistency by Giuliano da Sangallo in his architecture. This approach of Sangallo’s was taken up in the early 1480s, and it replaced his previous practice of basing designs much more directly on ancient Roman prototypes. It involved him now looking to local Florentine buildings for his models, particularly those of Brunelleschi, but then making his schemes more antique by recourse to his own unrivalled knowledge of ancient architecture, which is perhaps what Vasari was suggesting when he said that Sangallo left the ‘modes of Tuscan architecture’ with a better ‘form’ than before.7

developed by Bramante from c.1505 in his works for Riario’s cousin, pope Julius II, presumably under the influence of such figures as Tommaso ‘Fedro’ Ingherami, the eventual Vatican librarian, who advocated a much more radical cultural attunement to the ancient Roman past.9 So, as a result, it became very well suited to Rome but not very applicable to other parts of Italy. What made it possible for this to be changed so that a modern all’antica style of architecture could be transplanted to other parts of Italy was, I suggest, the appearance of a dominant new approach, or attitude, towards literary imitation. This, namely, was the one definitively set out by Bembo in his seminal work the Prose della volgar lingua, published in Venice in 1525 but largely written in Rome a decade previously.

Sangallo’s method is well illustrated by his sacristy complex at S. Spirito (1489), a scheme commissioned under the direct influence of Lorenzo de’Medici who was actually on the building committee. The sacristy proper, with its octagonal plan and its two storey interior covered by a cloister vault, has a basic model in Florence’s medieval Baptistery, while its articulation of dark stone members set against a white plaster background follows that in works by Brunelleschi such as the Pazzi Chapel. However, with its four diagonal apses, the layout is also dependent on ancient prototypes, particularly the domed hall of the Baths at Viterbo and the one near Cassino known as the ‘Studio of Varro’ (both drawn by Sangallo), while ornamental details such as the fantastical capitals of the lower-storey pilasters are inspired most directly by similarly fantastical capitals surviving from Antiquity. The vestibule to the sacristy is conceived in a similar manner, with its basic form derived from suitable local models, including the porch of the Pazzi Chapel, with its free-standing columns and coffered barrel vault. This form, however, is adapted in such a way that the vestibule is also plainly reminiscent of the ancient Portico of Octavia in Rome (again drawn by Sangallo), in that it has freestanding columns with proper Corinthian capitals (unlike at the Pazzi Chapel), that are arranged in rows to both front and rear, and run up to side-walls with openings in them.

Bembo’s theory, in this context, was significant because it again dealt specifically with the modern Italian language (volgar lingua), and also because it made explicit reference to contemporary artistic and architectural practice. Right at the beginning of the last of the three books, Bembo described how artists and architects such as Raphael and Michelangelo would make drawings and models of ancient exemplars, and how they would then refer to them when making new works, and he recommended that writers should follow a similar practice of turning to suitable prototypes which, for reasons of style, he had judged early on in the treatise to be the writings primarily of Petrarch and Boccaccio.10 He thus maintained that both writers and practitioners of the arts should consciously base their modern works on past prototypes that were chosen more for the intrinsic merits of their style than for their association. In other words, he viewed art and architecture in much the same way as he did writing, in that he saw them all as involving a process of imitation to produce new works of a broadly universal acceptability. Such views, of course, carried all the more force from being propagated by a Venetian writer who from 1513 was serving as a private secretary to pope Leo X, and they were particularly well geared to the ever more cosmopolitan Rome of the time, a city presided over by a pope who was also a Medici.

This method, although well attuned to the ethos of modernday Florence, was of course quite inappropriate to that of contemporary Rome. Nevertheless, Roman architects were probably thinking along broadly similar lines, not only in often turning to ancient prototypes when designing their modern buildings, but also in often working in the same circles as scholars who were very consciously looking back to ancient models for their modern works of writing. Their approach is well illustrated in the design of the Cancelleria, the palace built for Cardinal Raffaelle Riario (begun 1486), where the smooth rustication on the exterior elevations is derived from such prototypes as the Mausoleum of Hadrian, and was acknowledged at the time as being of a specifically ancient type.8 It was then

Bembo’s views of literary imitation may have contributed very quickly to a new perception of architectural style, arising from his close personal contact with Raphael. His views would certainly seem to be reflected in Raphael’s own writings. In the Prose, Bembo separated his discussion of the best linguistic models (Book One) from an examination of the formal repertory of the best language (Book Two). This he centred on a ‘general rule’, which was a notion of good literary style (maniera) that gave special consideration to the possible choice and sequence, or ‘order’ (ordine), of the words and the particular ‘style’

7

G. Vasari, Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architetti, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols, Florence, 1878-85, vol. 4, pp.290-91. 8 See M. Daly Davis, ‘“Opus isodomum” at the Cancelleria’, in S. Danesi Squarzina ed., Roma, centro ideale della cultura dell’Antico nei secoli XV e XVI, Milan, 1989, pp.442-57; and C. Brothers, ‘Architecture, texts and imitation in late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Rome’, in G.

Clarke & P. Crossley eds, Architecture and Language. Constructing Identity in European Architecture, Cambridge, 1999, pp.82-101. 9 For Inghirami, see e.g. I. D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance, Cambridge, 1998, pp.204 & 212-3. 10 P. Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Book 3, ch. 1; ed. C. Dionisotti, Prose e rime di Pietro Bembo, Turin, 1960, pp.183-5.

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David Hemsoll: A Question of Language - Raphael, Michelangelo and the Art of Architectural Imitation (maniera) that this would produce.11 Raphael, in the letter he wrote with Castiglione’s assistance to pope Leo X in around 1517 on his proposed survey of all Rome’s ancient monuments, made a rather similar distinction by first discussing antique architecture, or the good ‘style’ of the ancients, as a prelude to describing how the ancient works were to be recorded, and then alluding, in the final paragraphs, to a rather broader conception of this style.12 There, he took a very similar stance to Bembo by drawing attention to the ‘ornaments’ of ancient architecture and then noting, with precisely the same terminology as Bembo’s, the existence of five different ‘orders’ (ordini) thereby coining a brand new term in architectural theory and indicating that these were to be associated with different possible ‘styles’.13

strikingly Bembo-esque notion of style for the ornamentation of the various storeys, which was based on choosing from a broad classical vocabulary, and from a variety of different ‘orders’, to produce a range of differing stylistic options. Bembo’s views of imitation also paved the way for the acceptance of another crucial new idea in contemporary architecture, which was that a chosen prototype could actually be a modern one so long as it was of sufficient stylistic merit. With regard to writing in the Italian language, Bembo had looked back to Boccaccio and Petrarch as his principal models for the reason that these authors had set standards that he thought had not been surpassed subsequently, although he had implied that these standards might be attainable in the future. In his letter to Leo X, Raphael outlined a similar theory for architecture, by defining a style of the ‘good ancients’ that had fallen into ruin, an impoverished style of the subsequent period and, most recently, a modern style that was ‘very close to the style of the ancients, as can be seen from the many beautiful works of Bramante.’16 Theoretically, therefore, it was possible for Raphael to turn to the ‘modern’ works of Bramante as the models for new schemes - so long as certain deficiencies such as in the material quality of the ornamentation were rectified - and, indeed, it was Raphael himself who had demonstrated this principle by, for example, modelling the octagonal interior of his Chigi Chapel (c.1513) on the octagonal crossing of Bramante’s St Peter’s. This recourse, being now underpinned by a proper theoretical foundation, would have then provided a key stimulus for the widespread practice of creatively copying modern prototypes that was developed in subsequent Roman architecture and exported from Rome to the rest of Italy.

This new conception of architectural style can be seen, I would suggest, in the approach adopted by Raphael for the facade design of his now-destroyed Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquilla (1518). The facade had a basic model in that of the ancient Markets of Trajan (fig.1) and, as such, it also followed a precept put forward by Bembo in another of his works, when he argued that a temple design should be based on one rather than several ancient prototypes.14 This did not mean, however, that the model was slavishly copied since, to the contrary, it was considerably modified, in addition to being made flat rather than concave.15 (fig.2) The prototype’s three-storey format was retained, as was the distinctive motif of the tabernacled windows on the piano nobile and their alternation with a series of unadorned arches. These arches, however, were now made into niches, while the tabernacles themselves were provided with Ionic half-columns rather than Doric pilasters, and they were treated rather like the tabernacles inside the Pantheon by being given rectangular rather than arched openings, by being distributed with a simple alternation of triangular and semicircular pediments rather than with half-pediments as well, and by being surmounted by rectangular elements, although these are mezzanine openings rather than inlaid panels. This storey was then richly embellished with all’antica stucco work, in contrast to the much plainer lower storey with its arcade and its order of Doric half-columns coupled with pilasters at the ends and supporting an entablature with an omitted frieze, features both deriving (or supposedly so) from the ancient structure known as the Crypta Balbi. What all this suggests is that Raphael not only used models, when this was found to be appropriate, but that he also developed a

In Rome, the practice is well illustrated, for example, by the facade of Peruzzi’s Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne (c.1532) (fig.3) The palace was designed by Peruzzi well after Raphael’s death in 1520, and at a point in his career when he seems to have turned very abruptly to Raphael’s work as a stylistic model, not only for architecture but also for painting, as can be seen from his fresco of the Presentation of the Virgin in S. Maria della Pace (1523). The facade is notably similar to that of Raphael’s Palazzo Branconio (fig.2), in having the rather unusual format of a lower storey with an applied Doric order, a piano nobile with a mezzanine level and then an attic storey on top, although in some respects it seems to have been modelled even more closely on one of the courtyard elevations of Raphael’s palace which, like at Palazzo Massimo, had a lower storey with a tall Doric order framing large squaretopped windows, and a piano nobile that was without the tabernacles.17 Apart from its convex curvature, the

11

Bembo, Prose, Book 3, ch. 3-7; ed. Dionisotti, pp.132-42. V. Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti, nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letteratura del suo secolo, Rome, 1936, pp.91-2. 13 The significance of this usage of the term ordine forms the subject of P. Davies & D. Hemsoll, ‘Sanmicheli’s architecture and literary theory’, in G. Clarke & P. Crossley eds, Architecture and Language. Constructing Identity in European Architecture, Cambridge, 1999, pp.102-17. 14 In Bembo’s letter to G. F. Pico della Mirandola, as quoted in P. Portoghesi, ‘La lingua universale: cultura e architettura tra il 1503 e il 1527’, Studi bramanteschi, Rome, 1974, p.354. 15 Raphael’s design process as revealed in drawings is described by P. N. Pagliara, ‘Palazzo Branconio’, in C. L. Frommel, S. Ray & M. Tafuri eds, Raffaello architetto, Milan, 1984, pp.197-216. 12

16

V. Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti, pp.84-5. The courtyard elevation of Palazzo Branconio is known from a midsixteenth century drawing; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. II-I-429, f. 4; P. N. Pagliara, ‘Palazzo Branconio’, 212. Another of the courtyard elevations served as the prototype for Palazzo Massimo’s main courtyard elevation. 17

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies differences between the Palazzo Massimo facade and its prototype are mainly in the ornaments, and thus in the style. The lower storey has a paired order of columns and pilasters rather than a simple sequence of half-columns, while the window frames of all the storeys are of rather different design, and the whole of the wall surface is devoid of any sculptural embellishment and entirely faced in all’antica rustication of the type used previously for the Cancelleria, making the façade appear much more subdued and severe than its model.

with a range of different orders and ornaments and in a range of very different architectural ‘styles’.19 This practice was finally enshrined in architectural theory in that it clearly forms the basis of the first two published books that make up the core of Serlio’s architectural treatise, Books Four and Three published in Venice in 1537 and 1540. Serlio himself very much acknowledged the literary origins of his approach when stating rather baldly in his initial preface that the architecture of his century was now flourishing like ‘the Latin language in the times of Julius Caesar and Cicero.’20 He even derived the intended seven-book format for the treatise as a whole from a schema devised for the learning of eloquence by his friend the literary theorist Giulio Camillo Delminio, which Camillo himself had adapted to architecture.21 This Serlio modified and rearranged, but in such a way that Books Three and Four provide a close parallel to the discussion of writing in Bembo’s Prose, and also a detailed elaboration of the discussion of architecture in Raphael’s letter to Leo X. Thus his Book Three is assigned to architectural models which, despite being originally entitled On Antiquities, also includes works by Bramante, ‘the discoverer and the light of good and true architecture,’ as well as by Raphael and other modern masters.22 Book Four is then devoted to the repertory of ornamentation, dealing, as its original title proclaims, with the ‘general rules’ for the five ‘styles’ of architecture, and focusing primarily on the forms and applications of the now established five ‘orders’. This pairing, of course, implies an architectural methodology. The models supplied in Book Three are not there to be simply replicated, as Serlio himself indicated when discussing a villa layout of his own invention (although based in fact on a design of Peruzzi’s) and remarking that it could be built in ‘different modes and orders.’23 The ornamental repertory illustrated in the subsequent Book Four provides examples of these various different architectural adornments, which are now usefully classified according to the particular order and ‘style’.

The same practice was followed by architects who, after Raphael’s death, moved from Rome to northern Italy. These architects had a training and background that meant they were all well versed not only in a common architectural vocabulary but also, I would argue, in a common theoretical approach, which provided them with a theoretical justification to base new designs on appropriate past models of acknowledged merit, and to modify these designs in now established ways. Thus, in the case of Giulio Romano, we find him basing the design of his own house in Rome (1524; demolished) on Raphael’s Palazzo Branconio, by giving the main entrance bay the same three-story format with an order on the ground floor and a tabernacle above on the piano nobile, but making the lower order into one of plain Doric pilasters, giving the tabernacle a pair of rusticated Ionic half-columns, and sheathing most of the wall surface in rustication. Then, for his Palazzo Te (1525-), designed for Marquess Federigo Gonzaga in Mantua, we find him taking the same approach by conceiving various elements of the scheme, appropriately enough, as very obvious adaptations of comparable parts of Raphael’s papal Villa Madama in Rome (1516-). The main city facade, for example, with its three vestibule arches flanked by superimposed levels of rectangular windows, is based on the garden facade of the Villa Madama, although the pilaster order is changed from Ionic to Doric and removed from the vestibule piers, and the wall surface is engulfed in rustication almost entirely. In Venice, much the same practice was followed by Jacopo Sansovino in the new public buildings he designed in and around St Mark’s square. The Library of St Mark’s (1537), presided over by Bembo himself who had been appointed the city’s librarian in 1530, was designed in an especially Bembo-esque manner in having a facade, with its two storeys of arches and its Doric and Ionic halfcolumns, modelled principally on Rome’s ancient Theatre of Marcellus.18 The neighbouring Mint (1536), with its rusticated basement and its piano nobile with banded Doric half-columns, was evidently derived from a facade design previously used by - although not necessarily invented by Peruzzi in his painting of the Presentation of the Virgin. The nearby Loggetta (1537), with its engaged columns and its rich sculptural embellishments, was closely based on Rome’s Arches of Constantine and Septimius Severus, and it completed an ensemble of buildings that were treated

Although Serlio’s methodology accords closely with the outlooks taken by many leading architects of the period, these outlooks were not necessarily themselves precisely identical. Giulio Romano’s at Palazzo Te, for example, may have been aligned towards a more specifically courtly conception, similar to that put forward by his close friend, Baldassare Castiglione who, in his Book of the Courtier (published in 1528 but written earlier), listed the construction of great buildings as a princely virtue.24 19

On this, see of course J. Onians, Bearers of Meaning, pp.287-94. S. Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva, Venice, 1619, Book 4, f. 126. 21 See M. Carpo, Alberti, Raffaello, Serlio e Camillo; Metodo ed ordini nella teoria architettonica dei primi moderni, Geneva, 1993, pp.64-137. 22 Cf. S. Serlio, Tutte l’opere, Book 4, f. 139, 178. 23 S. Serlio, Tutte l’opere, Book 3, f. 122 v-123. Peruzzi’s scheme is known from a surviving drawing (Vienna, Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 10,935, f. 136 a). 24 B. Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, Book 4, ch. 36; ed. B. Meyer, Turin, 1964, 491-4. Cf. Book 1, ch. 2; Book 2, ch. 28; Book 4, ch. 19; ed. Meyer, 81-3; 233-4; 469-70. 20

18 As suggested in P. Davies & D. Hemsoll, ‘Sanmicheli’s architecture and literary theory’, p.107.

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David Hemsoll: A Question of Language - Raphael, Michelangelo and the Art of Architectural Imitation Indeed, it also seems to have been aligned to Castiglione’s particular views of the modern vernacular language that are put forward in the same book. The basing of the design on such a recent prototype, Raphael’s Villa Madama, ties in with Castiglione’s opinion that very modern writers could be worthy of imitation. The taking of a distinctly licentious approach towards architectural ornamentation also tallies with Castiglione’s ideas. The famous ‘dropped’ triglyphs in the courtyard, for example, could well have been construed as a joke or as some sort of metaphor, themes both touched upon by Castiglione in his discussion of language; and they certainly parallel Castiglione’s willing acceptance of grammatical abuses, so long as these were acceptable to ‘men of intelligence.’25 Perhaps significantly, this same outlook seems to be discernible just a little later in Michele Sanmicheli’s Palazzo Canossa in nearby Verona (1526/8), a building which was commissioned by Ludovico Canossa, the figure in Castiglione’s Courtier who explains the essential qualities of a nobleman, and actually puts forward Castiglione’s views on the Italian language. As if again to mirror these views, the facade has a basement that is closely modelled on the city facade of Giulio’s very recent Palazzo Te, except that the pilaster order is now removed entirely, and it also features similarly licentious details, such as the overlapping of the voussoirs of the three vestibule arches onto a string course running above them.

nobile of Sanmicheli’s Palazzo Canossa in Venetian ruled Verona. Indeed, a similar outlook would probably underlie the design of Giangiorgio Trissino’s villa at Cricoli just outside Vicenza (1532-), not least because it was Trissino, in a published letter addressed to the Medici pope Clement VII (1524) and in a short treatise entitled Il Castellano (1529), who was the main advocate of the time that the modern language was an ‘Italian’ language, and that the writings of Petrarch, for example, were ‘common to all Italy and understood by all Italy.’29 The villa’s two-storey facade would certainly seem to provide a fitting architectural parallel to this view, in that with its threearched loggias it was modelled closely on a scheme, which Serlio was to publish subsequently, purportedly for the garden facade of Raphael’s Villa Madama.30 For in being based on this recent model so closely, with only minor variations to some of the ornamental details, it thus made the very clear statement that what was appropriate to modern Rome was equally appropriate to the modern Venetian territories. In early sixteenth-century Florence, however, the situation was rather different, in that architects working there took only brief heed of the approach developed in Rome in the time of Leo X before they then discarded it under the influence of Michelangelo. Michelangelo himself had taken up the earlier approach, not very surprisingly, for his unexecuted design for the facade of S. Lorenzo, a scheme now known from a wooden model and various early drawings, and produced in final form in 1517 to a commission directly from the pope himself. Like so many other schemes of this time, the façade depends on modern prototypes of appropriate form and style, which include the designs for the facade prepared a little earlier by Raphael and Giuliano da Sangallo (by then Raphael’s assistant at St Peter’s), and it is composed from a vocabulary of fairly standard classical forms, with an order of engaged Corinthian columns on the lower storey and one of Corinthian pilasters on the storey above, and with niches and recesses for a great deal of sculptural embellishment. Indeed, the design seems to have been actually regarded by Michelangelo as one of orthodox and exemplary approach, seeing that he himself said that he wanted to create a work that would be ‘the mirror of architecture and sculpture of all Italy.’31 Having been espoused by Michelangelo, however, this ‘Italy’ orientated approach was then repudiated by him just a short time afterwards in his design for the New Sacristy of S. Lorenzo, commissioned in 1519 by cardinal Giulio de’Medici, the future pope Clement VII.

Architects working in Venice or the Venetian territories were, on the whole, more preoccupied than others in thinking of their buildings as being ‘Italian’ in style, particularly as Venice had long tended to view herself as a ‘New Rome’, and particularly too as this was a time of institutional reform and cultural renewal and, following the Wars of the League of Cambrai (1509-17), of rehabilitation within Italy.26 Thus the hope recorded by the Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo in 1515 that the proposed new library would be a ‘mirror and light of all Italy’ was to be prophetically fulfilled, albeit two decades or so later, by the construction of Sansovino’s overtly Bembo-esque building.27 This outlook may also help explain the decision to give Sansovino’s Loggetta, which was used as an assembly space for the Venetian nobility, the Composite order, since this order, in addition to its triumphal associations, was the one that Serlio noted was sometimes known as the ‘Latin’ or ‘Italic’.28 It could also explain the early and unusual use of this order to articulate the piano 25

For jokes and metaphors, see ibid., Book 1, ch. 29 & 34; ed. Meyer, 130-32 & 140-42. See also Book 2, ch. 41-89 (ed. Meyer, 254-321), where jokes themselves are discussed in detail. For grammatical abuses, see ibid., Book 1, ch. 35 & 37; ed. Meyer, 142-4 & 146-50. On this last point, see also M. Tafuri, Ricerca del Rinascimento: principi, città, architetti, Turin, 1992, pp.6-9. 26 For Venice as a ‘New Rome’, see in particular D.S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580, London, 1970, pp.12-30. For Venice’s institutional and cultural renewal during the dogate of Andrea Gritti, see M. Tafuri, in M. Tafuri ed., “Renovatio urbis”: Venezia nell’età di Andrea Gritti, Rome, 1984, pp.9-55; and M. Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1989, pp.108-12. 27 Entry 15 May 1515 quoted in P. Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity. The Venetian Sense of the Past, New Haven & London, 1996, p.273. 28 S. Serlio, Tutte l’opere, Book 4, f. 183.

This change of outlook, I would like to suggest, is closely relatable to - and perhaps directly attributable to developments in literary theory in Florence that were being aired during the early 1520s when the definitive scheme for the New Sacristy was gradually being formulated and 29

G. G. Trissino, Il Castellano, 140, in ibid., Scritti linguistici, ed. A. Castelvecchi, Rome, 1986, p.57. 30 S. Serlio, Tutte l’opere, Book 3, f. 121 v. 31 Letter of 2 May 1517 quoted in e.g. J. S. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, 2 vols, London 1961, vol. 1, p.13.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies refined (c.1519-24). It would certainly seem to be the case that Michelangelo intended his design to be based on local Florentine rather than, say, ancient or recent Roman models, and these would include Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy in the same church, which is of a similar domed square layout and a similar appearance with dark-stone architectural members set against white plaster walls, as well as other works such as Giuliano da Sangallo’s Sacristy at S. Spirito, which is like Michelangelo’s scheme in having a two-storey interior. The dependency on the Old Sacristy was of course highly appropriate in that the two occupied matching positions in the church of S. Lorenzo and both were to serve as Medici mausolea, and this similarity in particular was noted by Vasari who stated specifically that Michelangelo conceived his scheme ‘in imitation’ of Brunelleschi’s work.32 However, when Vasari then remarked that Michelangelo followed his prototype with ‘a different order (ordine) of ornaments,’ and that he devised a ‘composite ornament of the most varied and new kind’, he was also drawing attention to the novelty of much of the detailing. He was presumably referring in particular to the white marble elements between the dark stone pilasters, which are ‘composite’ this time in the sense that they are inventively composed of a range of motifs that are in some cases derived from a fairly recent all’antica usage, but with a handling and ornamentation that look back to the works of previous Florentine sculptor-architects such as Donatello and Mino da Fiesole. It is this combination of novelty with tradition that is closely paralleled in particular strands of Florentine literary theory of the time.

broadly ‘Italian’, most especially because the writers were themselves Florentine; and, secondly, that this language was in a perpetual state of natural evolution, which, as Machiavelli explained, was the process by which new words were from time to time adopted, but then modified so as to be given a ‘consonance’ with the Florentine language, and thus converted into Florentine words.34 This theory, therefore, seems striking similar to the approach to architecture finally adopted by Michelangelo at the New Sacristy, where the design was not only based on specifically Florentine models but also conceived in a modern decorative idiom that assimilated all’antica motifs by giving them a ‘consonance’ with past Florentine tradition. Thus, the approach may have been thought of as ‘new’, but it was one that was rooted in a well orchestrated literary theory which, in its particular Florentine context, would have seemed most appropriate. It was, moreover, one that effectively revived a specifically ‘Florentine’ style of architecture and, for this reason, Michelangelo was soon to be regarded, to use Serlio’s words, as an architect whose ‘bright light’ shone not only on the ‘Latin name’ but also on Tuscany.35

Indeed, it is perhaps no mere coincidence that this theory was voiced in Castiglione’s Courtier, albeit rather cursorily, by none other than Giuliano de’Medici, one of the two Medici dukes whose tombs are housed in the New Sacristy, and that it was enunciated in Trissino’s Il Castellano by Filippo Strozzi, who was the brother-in-law of the younger Lorenzo de’Medici, the other duke to be commemorated there. The point of view put forward by Giuliano in the Courtier was that the ‘Tuscan’ was the most beautiful of the modern vernacular languages, but that it was itself continually changing, insofar as many of the words found in Petrarch and Boccaccio had been ‘left behind by the usage of today.’33 The same view was rehearsed in a much fuller manner (if only to be rebutted) by Strozzi in Il Castellano, repeating ideas put forward a little beforehand by the Florentine writer Ludovico Martelli in a Repost of 1524 to Trissino’s Letter, and consistent too with those expressed by the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli in his dialogue on ‘our language’ of around 1525. In all cases, the theory remains the same in its essential premises. These are, firstly, that the language written by Petrarch and Boccaccio, and of course Dante, was ‘Tuscan’ or ‘Florentine’ and most emphatically not 34

N. Machiavelli, Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, paras 29-30, in O. Castellani Pollidori, Niccolò Machiavelli e il ‘dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua’, 234. 35 S. Serlio, Book 4, dedication; ed. and tr. V. Hart & P. Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, vol. 1, New Haven & London, 1996, p.251.

32

G. Vasari, Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architetti, ed. G. Milanesi, vol. 7, p.193. 33 B. Castigione, Il libro del cortegiano, Book 1, ch. 31; ed. Meyer, pp.134-5.

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Fig.1. Markets of Trajan, Rome

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Fig.2. Raphael, Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquilla, Rome (from P. Ferrerio and G.B. Falda, Palazzi di Roma)

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Fig.3. Peruzzi, Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne

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Luxuria and Decorum : changing values in public and private life Martin Henig It is next to impossible to encapsulate the lively genius of a friend whose insights have fertilised my own intellectual odyssey for well over forty years. Shared experiences, which began with explorations of prehistoric and Roman monuments, medieval churches and 17th and 18th century houses (often with the Cambridge University National Trust Society which we founded together in 1961), continued when we were fellow pupils in London (John at the Courtauld and I at the Institute of Archaeology) and later with discussions and arguments late at night, not only on our artistic and archaeological researches but also ranging more widely through morality, religion and human relationships. Like Socrates, who in so many ways he resembles, John has consistently been the gadfly who loves to challenge commonly held assumptions. Although his wild forays into what often seem at first sight to be the outrageous or the absurd have always been conducted with humour and compassion, they have the tendency, and frequently, I think, the intention, of shocking intellectual opponents and driving them into a state of fury.1 At any rate they give the lie to the assumption that the territory of ideas is a dry one, of merely academic concern, by demonstrating that the passions are deeply involved too. An important paper by John and his friend, the prehistorian Desmond Collins, on the Origins of Art explores the possibility that Cave Art, notably depictions of women, came about because palaeolithic boys were deprived of sexual gratification by their elders. It is both amusing and disturbing to hear John give a version of this paper to a crowded lecture room of first year undergraduates in which he unleashes some of the same Dionysiac, animal instincts which, he claims, created art in the first place.

volume on Roman architecture and architectural sculpture which I edited and in which John, himself, laid out the rhetorical approach to art championed and disseminated by Quintilian. Things are never quite what they seem and John has often pointed out to me that the most aesthetically pleasing objects are often objets trouvé which, as a linguistic purist, he would (of course) decline to call art? In connexion with the last hypothesis I remember that, when he was at Cambridge he once mounted a piece of twisted metal, found during a country walk as though it was a miniature sculpture on show in a Bond Street Gallery and led me to believe, for a few minutes at least, that he had entered the art market. Even when accompanied by numerous glasses of wine, such propositions are always supported (as were those of Socrates) with sparkling erudition and a formidable intellect, steeped as he is in the classical traditions of Antiquity. It does not much matter whether his audience agrees with or dissents from his propositions but the emotion engendered by them are always ultimately cathartic, not destructive. They lead away from the commonplace assumptions of the academic consensus, which bedevil so much that passes for wisdom nowadays but they are well rooted in humanitas, sometimes translated as civilization. Art or vice on a Roman silver cup To call myself a life-long ‘Oniansian’ is no more than to declare ,in common with him, a rejection of received theory (that modern substitute for thought); the mysteries of life and nature are not so simply solved. In embracing his paradoxical juxtapositions, black may not be white but (as Elisabeth once suggested to me) green! This paper is concerned with one particular way in which the whole fabric of the Roman Empire, certainly its moral sense seems to have folded in on itself and reversed direction to a quite remarkable degree. In tribute to John’s objet trouvé I will take as my starting point a news item which appeared in the Daily Mail on the very day I received an invitation to contribute to this Festschrift: ‘Lottery’s £300,000 poured into gay goblet’.

The concept of a ‘Natural History of Art’ which is implicit here is, of course, a deliberate Oniansian paradox for what is natural can strictly speaking never embrace ‘ars’. There are many others: Even if I invented the John Onians topos that ‘black’ is really ‘white’, I have certainly heard him maintain at a riotous party in Norwich that ‘men’ are in fact ‘women’. He has written (more seriously and convincingly) that the idealistic and art-loving Greeks were in many respects brutal militarists while in comparison the Romans were much more pacific and intellectual-this challenging the hackneyed assumption, which I last heard on the radio a few days ago, that the Greeks dealt in ideas and the Romans only in facts. He also challenges the humdrum way in which we tend to look at sculpture and painting and directs us back to the very different manner in which these were viewed in Antiquity. It is ten years since I dedicated a paper to John on the way that the Romans viewed small objects such as engraved gems, evidently unconcerned by differences of scale and thus blurring the distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ arts; that was in a

The story concerned the British Museum’s acquisition of an exquisite 1st-century silver cup formerly in the Warren collection. (fig.1) The repousée decoration shows a youth in sexual embrace with a boy and a man having intercourse with a youth while a boy looks on. Although these scenes have been read as political satire directed at princes of the Imperial House in the manner of some of the scandals in Suetonius’ biographies of the Caesars, we probably need search no further than Petronius’ Satyricon with the lovemaking between Giton and Eumolpius observed through a keyhole. The lovers are very probably only generic types, and the setting could well be a brothel.

1

It once involved the throwing of an omelette in a London street , though the reason for this incident is long forgotten.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Britain (fig.2) and found in graves at Welwyn, though here their exotic provenance undoubtedly enhanced their importance and, ironically, they fed in to the Celtic passion for display, further considered below. An onyx intaglio from the Agricolan fort at Elginhaugh on the Forth in Scotland demonstrates the ideal; its motif is a plain cup containing corn ears and poppy heads representing the bread and wine on which man lives. (fig.3) Petronius sets up his fictional Trimalchio to be the antithesis of these plain, ancestral virtues. Trimalchio is a mere freedman, bragging about his vast lands and immense holdings of silver and other works of art. He is an unlettered boor who flashes his golden rings as his wife flaunts her jewellery.

After the purchase of the cup a British MP is reported to have commented: ‘It does seem a hell of a lot of money to pay for a bit of silver...What is depicted on there seems pretty disgusting...One wonders whether this goblet has a place in our national museum.’ (Daily Mail, May 6,1999). Some of this criticism is surely conditioned by no more than the familiar Judeo-Christian homophobia, and no serious student of the luxury arts of Rome is likely to dissent from Dyfri Williams’s characterisation of the vessel as ‘the most significant purchase made by the Greek and Roman Department for more than 30 years’ (The Times, May 5,1999). It is not only a very highly accomplished example of the Roman silversmith’s art with a subject which is, at the moment, unique in that medium but it tells us a great deal about private life and a certain sort of Roman milieu. What is shown is surely no more morally reprehensible than the heterosexual lovemaking on Arretine cups, themselves surely derived from metalwork examples or a much later Romano-British pottery vessel from Horsy Toll, Lincolnshire (in Peterborough Museum) whose subject is likewise explicitly sexual, depicting a man ejaculating but well short of his female companion. Romans, like those of us not corseted in prudery, found sex rather interesting and frequently humorous.

‘The nobleness of life is to do thus’ By the end of the Empire, however, society had defined itself very differently. Gems, plate and gold medallions were handed down by the Emperor to favoured soldiers and civil servants. Services of plate were given at weddings, used in the daily levées of the Great and were displayed on tables and sideboards at banquets. The inscription around the central emblema of the great hunting plate from the Sevso treasure, probably from Pannonia, reads after a chi-rho monogram, possibly implying that Sevso was a Christian :

However, the remaining criticisms certainly do have a Roman resonance about them. First, the price was £1.8m, which can be compared with the vast sums recorded by the Elder Pliny for cups bought by private individuals in Antiquity. Such extravagance certainly can be regarded as pandering to luxuria, reminiscent of the excesses of the Orientalised, Hellenistic world. The cup is hardly useful and does not inculcate civic virtues as the image of a philosopher might have done. We should recall that the major count against Mark Antony was that he had subjected himself to this world of personal indulgence and extravagance and neglected his duty. Secondly, while no doubt items such as silver cups have a place in moderation in civilised life, they belong to the private realm of otium. They have no place in public life, especially when the theme portrayed does not inculcate virtus. The deeds of a hero such as Achilles or a political theme, one thinks of Augustus as ruler of the Roman world and the Triumph of Tiberius on two of the Boscoreale cups would, no doubt, have been more appropriate - a case could have been made; but a cup devoted to the pleasures of Dionysus is quite another matter. To make such a judgement need have nothing to do with wealth.

H(a)EC·SEVSO·TIBI·DVRENT·PER SAECVLA·MVLTA· POSTERIS·VT PROSINT·VASCVLA·DIGNA TVIS The verse suggests that these small(!) vessels will serve him and his heirs through future generations. (fig.4) On the body of a casket from the same treasure, presumably a container for cosmetics or jewellery, a silver mirror, buckets of water, bowls and boxes, also family silver are being produced for the morning levée of the domina, the lady of the house. The larger of the two toilet caskets in the Esquiline Treasure is embellished on the sides with a similar scene. On one side of the lid there is the wish, after a chi-rho: SECVNDE ET PROIECTA VIVATIS IN CHRISTO The cynic might recall the Biblical warning that it is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but the point is that in Late Antiquity society was held to mirror the Heavenly Kingdom. There was a religious aura not only in what the Emperor did but also in how the better class of people, the honestiores lived and exhibited their power over their less fortunate fellow citizens, the humiliores. In one sense great secular treasures such as the Esquiline, Kaiseraugst and Sevso treasures were the counterparts of the services used earlier by pagan temples and now, increasingly, by the church. Indeed, just as Christianity centred around a sacred meal, the Eucharist, so does the centre of the Sevso hunting plate have at its centre-piece a picnic under an awning after a successful hunting and fishing trip on the banks of Lake Balaton, now in Hungary.

In the Roman world, to qualify as a senator one needed to be worth a million sesterces and even an equestrian had to own 400,000. Ideally the aristocrat invested his wealth in land, preferably in Italy, and it was regarded as very bad form to flaunt his money or even the extent of his estates. Above all the aristocrat together with his family should dress with decorum, without ostentation, and above all avoid an excess of jewellery and plate. Early Roman silver tends to be simple and essentially practical like the small groups of relatively plain drinking sets from Arcisate near Como or from Tivoli or the silver cups imported into 134

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an eques from Arles, Pompeius Paulinus ‘descended on the paternal side from a tribe that went about wearing skins who had 12,000 pounds weight of silver plate on him when he went on campaign against tribes of the greatest ferocity’ (NH 33,143). For a Roman aristocrat this was reckless behaviour but is it not possible that Paulinus was doing what a Celtic prince should do? It was evidently appropriate to immolate a chest of Roman silver vessels with whoever was buried in the tomb at Folly Lane, Verulamium, probably a client king. Maybe the extant Hildesheim Treasure, which looks a little too late to be loot from the Clades Variana has a somewhat similar explanation. Certainly its disposal, especially if conducted with ceremony, would have been in accord with Celtic custom.

Luxury and the Celts The reasons for such a change are complex and the obvious answer, the one which is so often given, is that it was influence from the decadent East ‘the Orontes flowing into the Tiber’, ultimately from the Parthian and (later) the Sasanian Empires. However, one line of enquiry leads us in a diametrically opposite direction to the far West, specifically to Gaul and Britain before the Roman conquest of these provinces. John will have seen in his excellent local museum, the Castle Museum at Norwich and above all in the British Museum, an enormous collection of gold neck torques found at Snettisham in north-west Norfolk. (fig.5) It seems they were deposited in pits within a sacred enclosure delimited by a ditch. Similar deposits are known elsewhere, including a group of torques from Ipswich in Suffolk, and Strabo records the deposition of vast quantities of precious metal in lakes near Toulouse (Strabo IV,i,13). For the Celtic peoples neck torques were privileged items of dress and were only worn by members of the ruling class. The famous Capitoline ‘Dying Gaul’ is shown wearing one and so, in a description by the early 3rd-century writer Cassius Dio (LXII,2), is the Icenian queen Boudicca. Although the Celts coveted gold and loved fine craftsmanship it was potentially dangerous to the living and there was a long tradition of disposing of the self-same objects of value in tombs and especially in watery places, lakes, fens and rivers. Not only gold and weapons were here handed over to the gods but through sacrifice the precious lives of selected men and women.

We know too little about the ways in which Rome’s powerful Gaulish and British allies became Romans in their sympathies, outlook and style of life, men such as Julius Indus of the Treveri whose wife married Gaius Iulius Classicianus, the first post-Boudiccan procurator of Britain, himself surely a Gaul of the highest rank. And what of Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, Rex Magnus Britanniae? He was a ‘Great King’ with an oriental title to which education in Rome would have introduced him, but in Britain this would surely have been translated into that of a High King in the manner of Cassivellaunus, albeit with very different political affiliations. Overlord of most of Britain south of the Thames from Kent or East Sussex to the Fosse Way, he probably paid for the great temple dedicated to Sulis Minerva at Bath; the reliefs on its pediment celebrate the triumph of Claudius and the Roman and allied peoples, employing an allusive symbolism of the familiar Roman type which was structured, as John has shown, in Roman rhetorical education. The enormous palace built for him by Vespasian at Fishbourne is thoroughly Roman in its courtyards and comfortable suites of mosaic-floored rooms as well as in its axial plan and its great formal garden. What went on in the apsidal reception room may sometimes have appeared to be thoroughly Roman in style, but it is likely that when feasting his own people, he, like the regulus of Folly Lane, Verulamium, indulged in the customary lavish display of the Celtic peoples. It would have been expected of him. Celtic propriety was not Roman propriety.

The Roman response to this very different society is often seen as merely negative; after all the Toulouse lakes were drained and their treasure auctioned, sacred groves were cut down in Gaul and Britain and human sacrifice outlawed. The recent findings of archaeologists have led us to question whether there was any such caesura. Thus, to take evidence from southern Britain, coin in precious metal was deposited in the late Iron Age at such temples as Hayling Island, Hampshire, Harlow, Essex and Wanborough, Surrey all of which continued to function and to receive offerings through the Roman period. Outside Verulamium, in a grave at Folly Lane, a chieftain or king was cremated with a very large quantity of (presumably Roman) silver plate (alas all melted in the conflagration) and his tomb developed into a temple-site and place of pilgrimage. There is strong evidence that the rites here may have continued to include human sacrifice, and both Ros Niblett, the excavator, and I have speculated that this cult was the precursor and origin of the Dark Age and Medieval cult of St Alban.

An East Anglian connexion Nothing remains now of Togidubnus’ lavish entertaining save some detritus, the handle of a Roman bronze askos used for carrying water to mix with wine, many fragments of fine glass from contemporary drinking cups and quantities of samian ware and other pottery. Gems from the site include a beautiful amethyst (depicting Mercury); the stone would at least have been prophylactic in bouts of prolonged carousing. We can gain a better idea of the manner of feasting among the Celts in 1st-century Britain, however, from a modest collection of drinking vessels unearthed at Crownthorpe, Norfolk, all fashioned from bronze in the period of the Icenian client-kingdom (c. A.D.43-60) and which I first saw on a memorable visit to

In the past the Roman Empire has often been seen as a near-totalitarian state dominated by its army. In fact, as John has reminded us, society was very far from being either totally homogeneous or deeply militarised and the Roman polity was in large measure a sum of its ruling élites. It is not surprising, then, that those who continued to dominate both Gaul and Britain were of Celtic extraction and behaved in characteristically Celtic ways. One of the Elder Pliny’s most scathing diatribes is aimed at 135

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies wealth and increase, who is indeed shown on a silver plate from Chaourse (Aisne). Mercury was widely venerated in Gaul and the large hoard of silver plate from his temple at Berthouville (Eure) contains a number of representations on vessels given by men and women from the local gentry. The emblema of one plate shows busts of Mercury and a female companion, either his mother in Graeco-Roman myth, Maia, or the Celtic Rosmerta.

Norwich when I came to teach for John at U.E.A. some years ago. The cache, in the Castle Museum, consists of two cups based on Roman silver prototypes, together with a patera and a jug, all items required for Roman dining. In addition there was a native element, a strainer-vessel paralleled in other assemblages of the latest Iron Age such as one of the chieftain graves at Welwyn, Hertfordshire. It reminds us that here, as elsewhere in the Ancient World, alcoholic beverages were served in a particular fashion to suit local tastes. Here it is probable that the strainer and hence the set in general may have been used for beer or mead, which remained popular in Britain through Roman times and beyond: it should be noted that on one of the spoons in the sophisticated, late 4th or early 5th-century Roman gold and silver treasure from Thetford, Faunus is invoked as medigenus, ‘mead-begotten’.

The enormous Berthouville Treasure, now in the Cabinet des Médailles, does provide us with an idea of what individuals in Roman Gaul owned up to the end of the 3rd century. Even if vessels showing Mercury are rigorously excluded as having been especially made as gifts to the sanctuary (not necessarily a safe assumption) we find a pair of oenochoe showing scenes from the Trojan War, a phiale with an almost nude figure of Omphale and a cup depicting deities connected with the Isthmian games, all of 1st century date but given to the sanctuary, perhaps in the 2nd century, by Quintus Domitius Tutus. Such plate manifests a desire, quite early in the history of the northern provinces of Gaul, to flaunt culture as well as wealth.

Of course it would be impossible to sustain a claim that the entire change in the ethos of Roman society, its ‘Celticisation’ if one wishes to call it that, originated in East Anglia, within a few miles of John’s home, though as we shall see Norfolk and Suffolk provide one of the finest mirrors in all Europe of the ultimate result of the transformation in Roman attitudes to luxury. For the period of the Warren homosexual cup, the mid-1st century, there is relatively little surviving Roman plate from Britain. We can, of course, supplement the three simple Roman cups from two graves at Welwyn, Hertfordshire mentioned above and the rather more highly decorated cups in the cache from Hockwold-cum-Wilton, Norfolk with a few vessels from Gaul, for example the fairly plain cups and other vessels from Thorey (St-Germain-du-Plain, Saône-et-Loire), which like these remind us of Republican simplicity or at least those ‘elegant banquets’ which Tacitus (Agricola 21) says became popular in Britain and which he takes as proof of the Britons’ new-found humanitas.

By the later 2nd century, however, interest in texture and pattern, always important to Gauls and Britons was beginning to predominate in displays of silver plate. This is shown by the bold patterns picked out in black silver sulphide (niello) in the centres of dishes from the Chaourse treasure and especially from those of Graincourt-lèsHavrincourt (Pas-de-Calais) and Rhetal (Ardennes). Other vessels display indentations in the sides, designed to reflect light like cut glass. They are found, for example, at Berthouville and Chaourse. Most characteristic of all are rich vegetal friezes chased around the edges of bowls and dishes, often in the form of acanthus scrolls answering to the Celtic love of curvilinear design. Here the Hemmoorbucket and three flanged bowls from the Chaource treasure, a flanged bowl and dishes from Graincourt-lèsHavrincourt and Vienne (Isère) provide excellent examples. Related to these is the decoration around the edge of a large silver mirror found in the Forum of Wroxeter in John’s ancestral county of Shropshire. What it was doing in so public a place is unknown, but a mirror of just this size and shape is figured on an early 3rdcentury grave relief from Neumagen near Trier, showing a lady seated in a basket-chair being attended by four servants one of whom holds the mirror, another arranges her hair.

Silver plate in 2nd- and 3rd-century Gaul However, finds from Gaul in the Middle Empire show the range of plate which the upper classes of society came to use for drinking and dining. The treasures have been divided into two categories, those which apparently belonged to private individuals and temple treasures. Such distinctions are not, however, obvious because it is clear that some privately owned items were donated to temples and individuals owned plate which depicted deities. What is clear is that in decoration and in vessel type, a strong native element survived in these plates and perhaps in the use to which they were put. For instance, the Chaource Treasure in the British Museum contains two Hemmoortype buckets, one of them decorated with an acanthusfrieze but nevertheless continuing the Celtic use of the never-failing bucket or vat. In the British Museum is another example from Revel-Tourdan, Isère depicting the seasons. More typical specimens are of bronze and display hunting scenes. An obvious association is with the Celtic goddess who seems to represent satiety and is often depicted with a vat. She is sometimes called Rosmerta and is shown as the consort of Mercury, himself the god of

Display and Power in Roman Britain-Mosaics The culture which developed in the 4th and 5th centuries relished the public flaunting of wealth, as is evident from contemporary literature, describing the magnificence of the Caesars and of great magnates throughout the Empire. The same flamboyance is also apparent in architecture, above all in the great houses with their marbles and mosaics. This is the world of Ausonius’ Mosella and the villas described by Sidonius Apollinaris in Gaul. The Trier region, southern and western Gaul and Iberia have yielded many remains of this villa culture. However, some of the 136

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have been every bit as valuable as plate and thus such mosaics were also examples of aristocratic display. While those who concentrate on the Early Empire might dismiss interior decoration as of merely private concern, having to do with otium rather than negotium, it is impossible to ignore the ceremonious way in which the lord (dominus) and lady (domina) of a great estate conducted their lives in the 4th century. This is manifest in representations of dining ranging from the al fresco picnic of fish and wild boar on the great Sevso platter, mentioned above, to the courtly scene in the Vergilius Romanus where Dido, Aeneas and Ascanius all nimbed, recline on a stibadium beneath a canopy within Dido’s palace and are being served wine in elegant silver beakers by beautiful longhaired page boys, very like those in the bodyguard of Theodosius and his sons on the famous silver missorium in Madrid. While this dining-scene is absent on the Low Ham mosaic, Dido’s first meeting with the two Trojans has the air of a public drama. The flashing eye contact between the two human protagonists confirms the reality of a drama whose tragic outcome made even St Augustine weep. For the ancient viewer its setting was surely envisioned as a space like the great hall at Woodchester where a lord and his wife would have presented themselves in a personal adventus before their clients. Between Dido and Aeneas on the Low Ham mosaic stands a diademned Venus nude, apart from a distinctive body chain, just like the one from Hoxne.

most striking evidence comes from Roman Britain which, although in some ways idiosyncratic in its Roman archaeology, seems to have been immensely rich in the 4th century. The setting for aristocratic display here is best seen in the West Country, which comprised the province of Britannia Prima with its probable capital at Cirencester (Corinium). Although there are many large villas floored with mosaics of outstanding design, the treasure which we can imagine as the accompaniment to ceremonial audiences and banquets has, to date, been lacking, though we can guess at its nature from the treasures found in East Anglia. The discrepancy has never been fully explained; it may simply be the result of intensive agriculture in Eastern Britain, but other factors like differences in hoarding habits could be involved as well. The architectural setting and above all the decor of reception rooms demands consideration first. At Woodchester, Gloucestershire, a palatial villa was built with such a reception room floored by a mosaic and at its centre was a fountain and also, slightly off centre, a figure of Orpheus accompanied by a canine creature, whether a hound or a fox is disputed. (fig.6) Around Orpheus is a circle of birds, a band of acanthus and a circle of wild beasts. In the corners of the floor are water nymphs. The mosaic can be dated to the first decade or two of the century and is of a design which seems to have been invented by a Corinian workshop. It seems that the origin of the type was a local hunter-god who came to be conflated with Orpheus who symbolises power over nature, the still centre in a turning world. Transcendental neo-Platonic notions come together with the idea that the Dominus is literally ‘Lord of all he surveys’. He does so by his presence, by his magnificence. Such British Orpheus mosaics spread south to other mosaicists in the south-west and also to the mosaic school of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire (the so-called Petuarian school). At Littlecote, Wiltshire a separate three-apsed building (fig.7a) may have served for more than dining. The visitor was welcomed by a cantharus flanked by sea-panthers (fig.7b) and progressed to the main chamber where Orpheus is surrounded by representations of the seasons. Here Orpheus is the seer who reconciles the worlds of Apollo the sun-god and Bacchus with his chthonic role. Whether the hall was a reception/dining hall or a pagan chapel the iconography of its floor conveys the power of the owner, in part through use of most erudite myths.

On the Low Ham mosaic the agonising conflict is a moral and intellectual one, epitomised by the last passionate embrace of Dido, nude and vulnerable and Aeneas, already armed to do his duty in Italy. We know the rest as did everyone else in this social circle. The last scene of all in the very centre of the Low Ham pavement reveals Venus as controller of human destiny, a divine domina indeed. In some way she epitomises the power of the human domina too. A bust of Venus, likewise diademned, presides on a magnificent mosaic in one of the chambers of another grand villa at Bignor, West Sussex where cupid-gladiators fight to her bidding. (fig.9) It is of some interest that in the refined world of the Late Romano-British aristocracy, gladiators hardly appear; when they do, as here (and at Brading, Isle of Wight) they symbolise the turmoil of life. In fact, even in the wider world of the province, the absence of proper stone amphitheatres in Britain, apart from those outside the legionary fortresses of Chester, Caerleon and (presumably) York or the one found at the capital, London, emphasises that they were never accepted by the Romano-Britons. The earth-dump arenas and theatre-arenas were probably largely used for religious and social gatherings rather than for gladiators and wild beasts: it would seem that when the British saw an amphitheatre they put an eisteddfod in it!

The Roman aristocrat demonstrated his superiority through his paideia, his love of learning, and this is equally evident from the Vergilian mosaic from the baths at the Low Ham villa, Somerset and from mythological scenes at Keynsham, Somerset and at Frampton, Dorset (see below), which reflect the Metamorphoses and other works by Ovid. (fig.8) It is likely that such highly individual mosaics were based on the owner’s de-luxe illustrated editions of the classics, books like the illustrated manuscript of the poet, now in the Vatican, known as the Vergilius Romanus which some, including myself, believe could be of British origin; if not, it is surely Gaulish. Such manuscripts must

A third image of supernatural power popular on mosaic floors was Bacchus, god of wine and of the feast. He stands beside his panther in the centre of the main panel of the lost mosaic from Stonesfield, Oxfordshire and reclines on the beast’s back at Thruxton, Hampshire (fig.10) in a 137

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies mosaics and such items. The closest parallel to the jewelled body chain worn by Venus on the Low Ham mosaic is an actual body chain from the Hoxne Treasure, while the bracelets worn by Dido in the Romanus banquet recall the bracelets from Hoxne, one of them (fig.12) inscribed:

room evidently dedicated (ex voto) by Quintus Natalius Natalinus-an invented tria nomina at a time, the 4th century, when this formal nomenclature had largely gone out of fashion- with his clients(?) the Bodeni. In a sense the power relationship between Natalinus and his dependants is expressed by the presence of the god. Bacchus appears twice in the series of mosaics from Frampton, Dorset, which may have carpeted some sort of private sanctuary rather than a conventional villa; on one occasion he is standing in a central roundel, surrounded by four scenes of myth (taken from Ovid, see fig.8) expressive of the power of nature over human destiny, and again seated on a leopard, flanked by hunting scenes.

VTERE FELIX DOMINA IVLIANE -words reminiscent of the similar invocation to Sevso on his great dish. (fig.4) Lady Juliana was no doubt an elegant and dignified lady. It is hard to think that she wore the splendid chain which seems rather adapted to riotous orgy.

A curiosity of Frampton is that alongside a wealth of pagan myth scenes (see above), representations of deities notably Bacchus and Neptune and lines of pagan verse, a chi-rho is intruded. It is found on the chord of an apse attached to the main hall. Perhaps too much has been made of it, but this is surely the spot where the owner of the complex is likely to have stood when greeting his clients. (fig.11) The chi-rho was at the very least a potent symbol of celestial power, the sign seen by Constantine in the sky, and even if the owner of the complex surely had heterodox views, he would probably have called himself a Christian. So, even more probably, would the owner of the villa at Hinton St Mary, likewise in Dorset, where a bust of a young man with a chi-rho behind him, and in the midst of a room with the tree of life and scenes of hounds chasing stags surrounding it, shows that Christ was being pressed into service in the same way as Orpheus, Venus and Bacchus as symbolising the divine equivalent to earthly power. Another section of floor figures the myth of Bellerophon despatching the Chimaera (also depicted at Frampton). His monster-slaying like that of the legendary Christian saint, St George, in later times could be seen as a poetic version of the owner’s ability and resolve to guard the home, the estate and the tenants from the predations of robbers. Although the Hinton St Mary mosaic has sometimes been identified as a house church it is easier to view it as another reception room in which the decoration of the floor (and perhaps the walls) would have proffered divine sanction to the earthly power of the dominus. The very casual way in which Christianity could be absorbed into this courtly, learned culture is demonstrated by the famous mosaics from the triclinium or rather the stibadium of the Lullingstone villa. Here the myth of Europa and the bull is shown with a couplet of verse in Ovidian metre, but alluding to the storm which brought Aeneas to Carthage. The villa owner encodes his name, Avitus, and that of Jesus in an exercise of rather impressive dexterity with letter-counting. A man of humour, perhaps known to his contemporaries at Taurus, Avitus also commissioned a Bellerophon and Chimaera scene as a pendant to that of Europa.

The society which commissioned all these items used them to define itself just as early Romans defined themselves through restraint. The Mildenhall Treasure provides a good starting point. One of its most distinctive items is a fluted bowl with handles used for hand washing, an activity carried out with ceremony at the table. A very similar bowl was found in 1997 at what was probably a villa but may have been a sanctuary site at Blunsdon Ridge, Swindon, Wiltshire and similar bowls are known elsewhere as well, for instance in the ‘hacksilver’ hoard from Traprain Law. The Mildenhall Treasure, at least as we now have it, is dominated by a splendid plate (fig.13), which whether being carried to the table or displayed on the sideboard, was meant to impress the beholder by reason of its size and entrance by reason of the dancing rhythms of its subject-matter. The major concentric register chased on the dish shows Bacchus and his companions, the inner register is a marine thiasos and at the hub is a mask of Neptune. The interplay of the worlds of Bacchus and Neptune here, as at Frampton, is complex and polyvalent. One represents wine, the other water; one the lively dance, the other stillness; one life, the other death. Both, however, display the powers of nature, which are in some way those of the owner of the treasure, no doubt the owner of an estate and thus from his dependants point of view, a ruler, a chief of men. In some ways the design of the Mildenhall platter recalls that of the great Woodchester mosaic which, as mentioned above, likewise articulates the power of the patron (as Orpheus) over his dependants (the animals). Bacchic scenes are to be seen on two smaller Mildenhall plates, which can perhaps be seen as companion pieces. Amongst other items are bowls showing animals, domestic animals and felines attacking them. Again Frampton provides parallels. The centre of one bowl shows a man spearing a bear. Unlike the mosaics these dishes were not made locally but they presumably reflect the taste of someone in Britain. Another item of plate, a rectangular lanx from Risley Park, Derbyshire showing a boar hunt may, however, have been made here. It seems to have belonged to a man called Exsuperius, a Christian bishop, who gave it to a local church. Like Sidonius Apollinaris in 5th-century Gaul he was presumably a member of the land-owning class as well.

Display and Power in Roman Britain-Plate and Jewellery It is quite easy to relate a number of personal items in precious metals to such displays of imagery and power. Sometimes there are resonances between objects shown on 138

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the 7th century and the Byzantine plates, one of them amongst the largest known, the Celtic hanging-bowls and sceptre and the rich ‘Anglo-Saxon’ gold jewellery which display the Imperial pretentious of the king or chief buried in his ship at Sutton Hoo.

The act of showering precious gifts on religious institutions (as seen here), was not a new, Christian phenomenon. Temple treasuries (like that at Berthouville) had always been full of gold and silver, but churches quickly took up the theme as we can see from the Liber Pontificalis with its listing of enormously lavish accumulations of gold and silver. It is not surprising that by the second half of the 4th century even a church at the small town of Water Newton (now in Cambridgeshire) possessed a set of Eucharistic plate originally presented to it by several quite wealthy individuals. The reason for the burial is unknown but it resulted in the preservation of the earliest such set to have survived from the Roman world. In addition a cheaper range of votive leaves was given, in form just like others presented to deities like Mars, but here at Water Newton with chi-rho symbols upon them instead of figures of pagan gods. These probably represent the offerings of poorer people, perhaps dependants of the donors of the silver vessels who must have belonged to the local gentry. The conservative appearance of the plaques is another indication of the traditional way in which Christianity was encountered in the British provinces.

Later implications: Medieval magnificence Was there a connexion between the world of Snettisham and that of Sutton Hoo? I think there may well have been. As the Western provinces grew in wealth during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, its ruling classes were avid for Roman culture, grew ever richer and more acquisitive. In the 3rd century Gaul sported its own native-born emperors and places like Cologne and Trier were from time to time the seats of power. For a decade, under Carausius and Allectus (286-96) London too was an Imperial capital. In the 4th century Trier became one of the greatest cities of the Empire, and here, in Aquitania and in southern Gaul villas flourished as they did in Britain. Here the aspirations of native magnates found expression in the arts, especially that of mosaics. The Celtic love of display was, in truth, never extinguished in the countryside of Britain, even in those parts which became ‘English’ and, indeed, opulence was subsumed in all that it meant to be Roman. These western provinces of the Gauls and Britons, once a byword for everything that was barbarous, became in the end resolute defenders and bastions of Romanitas; only for them it was a way of life that owed as much to an indigenous Iron Age past as it did to the Mos Maiorum of the Roman Republic, which in theory at least, looked ascance at anything much finer than a pottery cup.

Classical culture was capable of some very strange metamorphoses. Who would have believed that the most rustic of cults of the Latian poets, that of Faunus, would manifest itself in a collection of silver and silver gilt spoons and an array of some of the most splendid gold rings ever found and that they would have been made and buried in Roman Britain? It might have been assumed that the dedication of spoons to the god was an act of scholarly, esoteric antiquarianism but the Celtic epithets of the god are earthy, he is the prick-eared god who brings plenty and fertility to his followers; as we have seen he is the god of the mead-hall. The addition Cranius seems to denote him as guardian of buried treasure, which in the light of the subject matter of this paper is highly significant. What is certain is that the satyr-like figure on a gold buckle and a panther on a silver-gilt spoon pointedly proclaim him as having Bacchic connections.

Although in some ways the Franks and Anglo-Saxons will have brought their own attitudes to treasure with them, they would inevitably have mixed and intermarried with Gallo-Romans and (as I believe) Roman Britons too. Hanging bowls those characteristic examples of later Celtic art, manifest the same skills in metalworking as is found in the Iron Age, though accompanied by greater proficiency in metalworking. They self-evidently belong as much to the world of Celtic feasting and display as do the vessels in the Crownthorpe cache even if those who used them sometimes, but certainly not always, spoke a ‘Germanic’ tongue. Such vessels continued to evolve and one especially splendid descendant was the 9th century bowl, now lost, found in the River Witham near Lincoln, a wonderful display item made of silver and embellished with filigree and gems.

What sort of rites went on here? A small cache of silver, a bowl with indented sides and an infusor in a silver box were found concealed in the wall of the 3rd-century Mithraeum beside the Walbrook at London but almost certainly post-date the Mithraic cult once resident there. It is likely that in the 4th century the Walbrook Mithraeum was used by worshippers of Bacchus and that the infusor was employed to lace alcoholic beverages with narcotics. It is not impossible that the cult at Thetford was similarly concerned with obtaining revelations of the divine through massive drinking in Celtic style, very probably enhanced by drugs.

In Ireland and in the lands of the Picts and Scots insular Celtic society evolved without the intervention of Germanic settlers. The Derrynaflan treasure of the 9th century, from a monastic site in Co.Tipperary, comprises a great silver chalice embellished with gold filigree panels and amber settings and a large paten, similarly embellished though with glass and enamel settings. There is also a strainer-ladle and a basin. Although undoubtedly Christian, of the 8th-9th centuries, the cache brings to mind insular late Iron Age and Roman period drinking sets from the Welwyn graves and Crownthorpe onwards. Another

The Thetford Treasure and the secular jewellery and plate from Hoxne describe much of the essence of late Romanitas so well as a culture of display and perhaps excess, from drug-laced drinks to erotic, perhaps nude, dancing (as suggested by the body chain). We can look back from them to the torcs at Snettisham and forward to 139

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies building in Britain’ or the Great Tower of Chepstow Castle (fig.15) and the keep of Colchester Castle which run it very close. The former with its brick course, perhaps brought by ship from demolished buildings at Caerleon, so was William fitz Osbern rebuilding Arthurian Camelot?; the latter, consciously or unconsciously, replacing the Temple of Divus Claudius, which began like the Norman castles as an expression of conquering power, the arx aeternae dominationis (Tacitus, Annals 14,31), but as the locus of the Imperial cult would, in course of time, have become a place for members of the provincial council (the chieftain class) to display their own wealth and influence. I take the point that, as Professor Eric Fernie another of John’s many friends reminds us, that it may have been seen as the palace of King Coel, father of Helena.2 The architecture of power and display evinced by Norman castles had evolved, ultimately, from the Roman villa, as can be seen by looking at the famous Carthage mosaic portraying the villa and estate of Dominus Iulius or of course the castelated villa of Diocletian at Split. However, little more than a century after the Conquest, the power of the AngloNorman monarchy meant that the need for defence did not need to remain paramount and manor houses, royal or otherwise and looking very like Roman villas functioned in the same sort of way. The palace of Westminster was one such great house but there were many others. Indeed, the Oxford Institute of Archaeology has been revealed in recent excavations to stand on the site of a building, very probably the hall of Henry II’s Beaumont Palace, situated on rising ground well away from the cramped and noisome castle. As I sit in my office I delight to think of the great Angevin holding on this very spot, great feasts on the boar and venison hunted in the extensive Royal forests near Oxford. Smaller, later and still extant manor houses include Tretower Court, Powys and Stokesay Castle,

cache, contemporary with Derrynaflan, was found at Ardagh, Co.Limerick in the 19th century. Besides another very beautiful silver and gold chalice, there were exceptional silver gilt annular brooches whose form ultimately derives from Iron Age/insular Roman pennanular brooches like the superb pennanular with enamelled terminals one portraying a bird and the other a bird and a fish, found in the sacred spring at Bath and probably 4th-century in date. (fig.14) Is it of Irish origin or, as now seems to me more probable, the product of a western British workshop? Of course Irishmen, Britons and Anglo-Saxons in their guise as Christian missionaries played a key part in bringing culture back to much of northern Continental Europe during the Dark Ages and perhaps, by so doing, reinforcing the trends we have been examining. In metal and manuscript ‘the work of angels’ as Giraldus Cambrensis designated the insular style was the product of a society which valued display above all things. Thus, much of the local attitude to wealth, the way in which it was flaunted and enjoyed and even its ostentatious disposal will have continued in much the same style throughout the long centuries of changing political institutions. The continuing tradition Both John and I live on the sites of great medieval cities which were founded in the latter decades of the first millennium A.D. and whose first great buildings date from the Norman, that is the Romanesque period. It is apparent from the architecture of the cathedral of Norwich and St Frideswide’s priory, Oxford and especially the former that these great edifices were designed with display very much in mind. This is of course true of other cathedrals and abbeys: Lincoln cathedral is entered through a massive Triumphal Arch which doubled as a fortress! In the Middle Ages such buildings were veritable treasure houses, containing valuable jewel-encrusted shrines and vast collections of plate. In the apse of the presbytery at Norwich is the Bishop’s throne perhaps as early as the 7th century in date (transferred to Norwich from North Elmham). It is, of course, the seat (cathedra) from which the bishop presided, dressed in his finery and bearing his precious jewelled staff of office (crozier) just as a Roman Emperor or a lesser secular lord of Late Antiquity would have appeared in his audience chamber. Long before then, however, one wonders not only about near eastern or Hellenistic kingship but about Celtic kings. How did Cunobelin, Verica or Togidubnus appear to their peoples? How far is it from the apsed hall at Fishbourne, the putative audience chamber of Togidubnus, to the world of medieval kings and bishops? Less obvious but no less true, was the rich style in which secular lords of the Middle Ages lived in their castles; that at Norwich (even beneath its heavy Victorian repair) remains a remarkably decorative building, a tower of strength but also in its embellishments looking like a gigantic shrine or jewel casket: the same can, of course, be said of William’s White Tower, which I informed some startled members of the British Archaeological Association (but not Eric Fernie who would know what I meant) was ‘the finest Roman

2

A forerunner of the display of Romanitas seen in Norman castles in England and Wales may, as Julian Munby reminds me, be seen at the Carolingian chateau at Mayenne with its extensive use of spolia from Jublains. With regard to Chepstow and Caerleon, the concept of Camelot as Arthur’s capital was the product of French romances and Geoffrey of Monmouth who was not born until about 1100 was apparently the first writer to have the king reigning from Caerleon. But surely this is a case where he may well have been preserving and drawing on a local tradition, even if it was not a very ancient one. In the later 11th-century the idea of the site as the centre of British-Roman power may have appealed to the Normans, who were initially in league with the last king of Gwent, Caradog ap Gruffudd, and could therefore have presented themselves as defenders of Britain against the ‘invading’ Saxon. As Raymond Howell points out (‘The demolition of the Roman tetrapylon in Caerleon: an erasure of memory?’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 19, 2000, 387-95) during the 13th century in the face of conflict with the Welsh, the equation of the Norman/Angevin monarchy with the British had broken down. It seems that one of the marcher lords, whether William Marshall or a successor, took the trouble to demolish the Fortress Baths and a massive four-way arch, amongst the structures to which Giraldus Cambrensis alludes as standing impressively in 1188, because they might serve as possible foci for Welsh resistance based on Arthur’s old capital. Interestingly, there is no sign of the material so obtained being used decoratively at Chepstow or elsewhere. It might be added that the remains of sumptuous apartments built at this time at Chepstow have a more private feel to them than does the great Romanesque hall of the first castle, pre-eminently a symbol of power and display.

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the most part these traditions were western, centering on Italy, France, the British Isles and Germany. A constant theme in our studies was the love of ceremonious display, whether or not disguised as being in the service of the church.

Shropshire (whence John’s family on his father’s side are descended: their memorials are to be seen in the parish church). We should not look at Norman castles or the manors of the 12th-15th centuries without remembering that just like the cathedrals they contained within them much that was precious, sculpture and fresco-painting, fine metalwork and even manuscript illumination, and we can envisage the lord and his retinue resplendent in brightly coloured, richly embroidered garments and jewelled belts, on special occasions eating and drinking from gold and silver. A rare survival of 12th-century secular silver from a cache of gold and silver from Dune, Gotland, the work of an English silversmith called Simon, though made for a Slav lord is inscribed with a legend echoing the Sevso dish:

In presenting this paper and tracing from Romano-Celtic culture some of the influences, which made later Western art what it was, it is important not to forget that it is not the whole story. Man, as John reminds us, has animal instincts, and like the bower bird, display is part of his nature: he has a natural history as well as a history. The Roman parvenu, Trimalchio, never listened to a philosopher so how would he have known of far-away Celtic customs, any more than do his modern representatives? This reminds me of an episode in one of our National Trust trips from Cambridge, long ago. On one occasion, looking at a Tudor manor house with John, the owner came out. Impressed that we were undergraduates from Cambridge -therefore cultured if not rich- he invited us in to see the interior and showed us his paintings and furniture with the proud remark ‘No reproJaco here!’ Of course there was: there always is.

ME IVSSIT PROPRIO ZALOGNEV SVMPTV FABRICARI: ERGO POSSIDEAR POSTERITATE SVA: VALE This style of living did not end with the Reformation. The Tudor and Stuart Courts (like contemporary courts in Europe) had, indeed, an enhanced style of living. The clothes worn by Queen Elizabeth detailed in her wardrobe accounts and shown in scores of paintings chronicle a lavishness of display that not even the most vain of Celtic leaders could have emulated. But here might be the point, for antiquaries were rediscovering or reinventing a Celtic past, not just for Arthur but for Cunobelin (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline) and Boudica (Fletcher’s Bonduca) who could add a glorious ancestry to Britain’s imperial present. Tudor and early Stuart historians such as William Camden and John Speed and poets were certainly right in their assessment of the very public nature of Celtic monarchy. It was so like that of their own times!

At the conclusion of my contribution, first, I am delighted to have been able to pay John’s ‘Celtic’ genius this small tribute from the world of Romano-British studies, often seen as a sequestered garden remote from wider Roman culture let alone the rise and fall of civilisations. Nevertheless it seems to me that the art of the province demonstrates in its abstraction and use of emotion and rhetoric in its picture language, some of the themes which John has explored on his more extensive canvas of World Art Studies. Like the butterfly stamping its foot, ancient British kingship may after all have raised palaces and shaken kingdoms.

The language of display rolled on through the 17th to 19th centuries. Richard Hingley’s recent book, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen states the obvious in showing how British Imperialists used Rome to mirror their own view of Empire, but strangely he does not discuss such amazing centres of display as the Colonial Office, with its marbles and frescoes glorifying the Empress of India and her son. Here, if anywhere, is Imperial Rome transformed into Imperial Britain. If our own lifetimes have seen a downturn in this display culture perhaps we can glimpse a ghost of the past on rare occasions like the Queen’s coronation or Churchill’s lying in State or especially Princess Diana’s funeral with its spontaneous shrines and mounds of gifts.

My second gift is concerned with ancient art in general and is far more personal in its implications. It returns me to the Warren cup with which I began. Like all artefacts it exists in various guises. As a scholar I became aware of it shortly after its publication in Antike Kunst, volume 6, published in 1963. I was then shown the Ashmolean Museum’s replica at an academic seminar concerned with techniques of silversmithing, not sex! The Senior Common Room of Corpus Christi College, Oxford displays a more recent copy. What do the Fellows make of it, and would not members of the Junior Common Room, who have far more time on this earth before them, learn more from it? What indeed does the wider public now think, having had two years to enjoy the original in the British Museum, two years in which on the one hand there has been growing acceptance of gay lifestyles and on the other (in the popular press at any rate) a witchhunt against ‘paederasty’, which was precisely the form in which that way of life manifested itself in Greece and Rome. As a student of ancient art I love to speculate on what it has meant to those who have owned it and, I hope, drawn inspiration and perhaps comfort from it in original or ‘repro’. But I cannot stand back and pretend that I am not

John and I were lucky to have been able to attend the late [Professor] C.R. Dodwell’s lectures at Cambridge in the early 1960s and benefit from his wonderful slide shows of early medieval manuscripts, continental and English (including of course the early, Irish and Northumbrian masterpieces) which can be designated in whole or part as ‘Celtic’. Implicit here was the continuity of a tradition leading back to Roman times. Although sometimes invigorated from the East Roman Empire (Byzantium) for 141

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies without having travelled beyond the written page: Over there in the Himalayas and beyond there was a transmution of ideas quite as radical as that in the Roman Empire. It is for Isabelle and Charles to answer the question which has always puzzled me of how some of the exponents of Buddhism, a faith rejecting the trappings of material wealth and holding all life sacred, came to immense wealth and to the acceptance of a meat-eating, warrior way of life. My suspicion is that geography, environment and ancestral custom played a large part. I hope that Elisabeth, Isabelle and Charles as well as John will be entertained by my tale of cultural metamorphosis and of a very natural history, showing how black became white or, at the very least, silver.

personally affected by a subject that I see as being concerned with the beauty of the human body, in this case the youthful male body engaged in joyous activity. It has nothing to do with any sort of pornography, which has precisely the opposite aim. As the Classical Greeks had of course long realised such a celebration is both desirable and wholesome, provided it does not become mysogenystic, by denying appreciation of the female body as well: my own view is that ideally, art historians of both sexes are drawn by their calling to be bisexual. The Warren cup has a deeply serious import for me, personally ever since I have known it and, I wish I had seen it earlier: its subject matter deals with learning (paedia) and experience; in fact seeing it and drinking from it echoes my own ‘Coming Out’ for whom the little boy at the door, peeping out in on the embracing couples is an apt metaphor. 1963 was also the year in which John and I left Cambridge and began the next stages of what E.M. Forster, the greatest and most perceptive of Cambridge novelists, called ‘The Longest Journey’. In John’s present concern with Natural History I hope that my own Dionysiac odyssey on the wilder shores of that sea has added something to his appreciation of the human mystery.

Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Lauren Golden, not only for conceiving the idea of this Festschrift but for encouraging me to ‘speak what I feel; not what I ought to say’.

A note on sources Never apologise and never give references unless you have to! Many of the ideas in this paper are implicit in various of my writings, notably The Art of Roman Britain (1995); others are in print in various notes and articles, amongst which I would especially single out ‘Graeco-Roman art and the Romano-British imagination’ (JBAA 138,1985) and ‘A new star shining over Bath’ (OJA 18,1999) which firmly suggest that the Britons of Britannia were in charge of their own destinies. Another paper, especially pertinent in a contribution dealing with display and its meaning, entitled ‘Continuity and Change in the Design of Roman Jewellery’ was published in Anthony King and Martin Henig, The Roman West in the Third Century (BAR Int.ser.109,1981), a volume which also contains a paper by J.F.Drinkwater on the so-called ‘rent-paying scenes’ on Gallic reliefs. My gratitude to Catherine Johns, the doyenne of Romano-British studies, has always been immense, both for her monographs on the Thetford Treasure (1983) and the Snettisham Jeweller’s Hoard (1997) to which I contributed sections on gems, and above all for her splendid general study, The Jewellery of Roman Britain with its thought-provoking sub-title Celtic and Classical Traditions, London 1996. For plate in Gaul see the splendid catalogue by François Baratte and Kenneth Painter, Tresors d’orfevrerie Gallo-Romains (Paris, 1989), and for a new evaluation of mosaics in late-Roman Britain in their social context, Sarah Scott, Art and Society in Fourth-Century Britain: Villa Mosaics in Context, Oxford, 2000. There has been some discussion of hoarding recently by Martin Millet, Catherine Jones and others (see Britannia, 27, 1996, pp.1-16). The purpose of hoarding, protective ritual or as accumulation of loot doubtless varied and it has not really been my purpose here to engage in this discourse beyond observing the special love of treasure as an aspect of display prevalent over a long period of time in the West, and nowhere more so than in

In writing this essay I have kept in mind three other close friends, all fine scholars in their own right, observers and quite unavoidably Oniansians in outlook - they happen to be John’s wife and children, and they are very much in my mind in the dedication of my paper. Isabelle’s remark to me, on the day upon which (unbeknown to her) I finish it, saying she was escaping to London from Oxford and that she saw this as going into the country, is a splendid Oniansian topos of opposites, which can stand for much of what I have written above. The villas of Woodchester, Thruxton (owned by Quintus Natalius Natalinus), Lullingstone (belonging to Avitus) and the residence of lady Iuliana whose bracelet was found at Hoxne, were hives of frenetic activity, and certainly not places where one could abandon one’s responsibilities: Otium had in truth become Negotium. Elisabeth’s own researches on the very different cultures of the cities of the Netherlands in the Golden Age presents a sort of parallel to the story of the transforming power of riches in Antiquity. I think, specifically, of her own distinguished contribution to the volume of Transactions dealing with Utrecht which she edited for the British Archaeological Association, where she explored the seductive power of Mannerist Rome on artists of that city, who created a pastoral ideal that had never existed but idealised the roots of their power in the land, very much in the manner of the mythological mosaics of Roman Britain. Charles the journalist and photographer, travelling through Asia and recording his experiences in word and picture, is providing the raw material for future cultural historians. Isabelle, analysing the history, custom and language of Tibet, is busy recovering the same sort of secrets from the past. Between them they are pursuing the same humane objectives that their parents have sought in Europe. But some things we can see through our common humanity, 142

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Norfolk and Suffolk. Taking the theme further on in time there is a vast bibliography but citing two authors whose work will have special resonance to John as well as to myself there are C. R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art. A New Perspective, Manchester, 1982 and Peter Lasko, Ars Sacra 800-1200, Harmondsworth, 1972. John’s important paper on ‘Quintilian and the idea of Roman Art’ mentioned early in this paper together with my own excursus into the question of scale, ‘A house for Minerva: temples, aedicula shrines and signet rings’ appeared in the volume which I edited for the Oxford University Committee for Archaeology in 1990, Architecture and Architectural Sculpture in the Roman Empire. Of course the ideas there are also employed in his magisterial overview, Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome, New Haven & London, 1999.

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Fig.1. The Warren cup (detail of electrotype). Original in British Museum (Institute of Archaeology, Oxford Archive photo)

Fig.2.Two silver cups; Welwyn, Hertfordshire Ht.11cm(Photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum)

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Fig.3. Onyx intaglio; Elginhaugh, Lothian. 12.5mm x 9mm (Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, Archive photo)

Fig.4. Great hunting plate from Sevso Treasure. Diam. 70.5cm (Institute of Archaeology, Oxford Archive photo)

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Fig.5. Gold torque; Snettisham, Norfolk. Diam.20cm. (Photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum)

Fig.6. Reception room from Woodchester, Gloucestershire. Reconstructed copy (Photo: G.Soffe)

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Fig.7. a. and b. The triconch-hall with mosaic at Littlecote, Wiltshire (a) with detail of mosaic(b) (Photos: author)

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Fig.8.

Mosaic from Frampton, Dorset(detail). Cadmus and the serpent of Mars. Engraved by S. Lysons

Fig.9. Mosaic from the villa at Bignor, Sussex. The domina as Venus, with cupid-gladiators. Engraved by S. Lysons

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Fig.10. Centrepiece of mosaic from Thruxton, Hampshire. Engraved by J. Lickman

Fig.11. Mosaic from Frampton, Dorset. Main reception room with apse and chi-rho. Engraved by S. Lysons

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Fig.12. Gold bracelet from Hoxne, Suffolk. Diam. 6cm. (Photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum)

Fig.13. Great dish from Mildenhall Treasure, Suffolk. Diam.60.5cm. (Photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum)

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Fig.14.

Terminals of enamelled pennanular brooch; Bath. Each terminal 1cm. (Institute of Archaeology, Oxford)

Fig.15. Ceremonial entrance to the Great Hall of Norman Chepstow Castle, Gwent (Photo: author)

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Contemplating Chimera in Medieval Imagination: St Anselm’s Crypt at Canterbury T A Heslop impossible to find cases to justify a view of hybrids as ‘popular culture’ – though, during the Romanesque period at least, they might well be the exceptions to prove the rule.

Crypts are mysterious places. Sometimes partly subterranean and inevitably gloomier than the buildings beneath which they lie, they serve a number of purposes from the spiritually significant to the practical and prosaic. Their primary justification in any particular church can be the burial of saints’ bodies, the desire to elevate a high altar platform above, or simply to level the ground or provide a damp-proof void. But whatever their raison d’être, as an architectural phenomenon for many centuries they retained the characteristics of the grottoes and the catacombs of Antiquity. A sense of secrecy, the private and the arcane, was often reinforced by limited access. Even as crypts were dramatically enlarged during the course of the eleventh century, they arguably never quite lost their liminality, being placed between this world and the underworld, between the intelligible and the ineffable.

The Head The first of the two short case studies I wish to present before concentrating my attention on Canterbury crypt is a pair of animal hybrids occurring together in four different manuscripts. These books come from what is now, roughly speaking, south and south-west Germany, from Bavaria, Swabia and the Middle Rhineland and all seem to be from Benedictine monasteries of some importance, such as Tegernsee and Hohenburg. The example in figure 3 comes from a Benedictine Antiphoner from an unidentified monastery in Swabia, and is now in Karlsruhe.1 The composite creatures are accompanied by verses, the upper one as follows:

There is something about crypts reminiscent of the Cretan Labyrinth harbouring the Minotaur or of the cave inhabited by dragons, so perhaps we should not be surprised if we encounter ‘monsters’ in them. Seen in this light, or rather relative darkness, the fantastic creatures carved on one of the capitals in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral could be regarded simply as ‘in their element’. (figs.1 & 2). But that cannot constitute much of the explanation for their presence. Earlier crypts from Romanesque Europe do not exhibit imagery of this kind. Indeed such thoroughgoing enthusiasm for invented hybrids is hard to find anywhere before the late eleventh century. And even if, by the second quarter of the twelfth century, they are more widespread, very few artists moved as far beyond the accepted mythic conventions, of centaurs and mermaids, etc., as did the sculptor at Canterbury. The questions I wish to contemplate are ‘why did he do it’ and ‘what might his contemporaries have thought about it’?

‘The foot, an ox; the head, a hare; the mouth, a bird; the chest, a horse; the hand, a man; the abdomen, a serpent; the tail, a peacock; the mane, a lion; the leg, a crane.’ The parts of the figures are further labelled with various sins, thus the peacock’s tail is vainglory, the serpent’s belly earthly desire, and so on, making clear the vicious nature of this composition. The lower is more ominously aggressive: ‘Barking, I bite with my tooth; a man, I strike with my hand; a stag, I attack with my antler; a horse, I kick with my hoof; a bird, I push forward with my chest; a scorpion, I kill with my tail; or a wild cat, with my claw I rip asunder.’ These creations seem intended as warnings to the unwary, and their explicitly moral dimension means that they cannot be accused of being meaningless or unedifying. Their recurrent location within text can also be taken as deliberate, and their verbal exegesis effectively limits the freedom of their readers to interpret them in other ways. In these respects the hybrids may be specifically designed to overcome the criticisms voiced by St Bernard in his famous Apologia to William of St Thierry, written probably in 1125.2 There he describes the four sides of some (perhaps notional) cloister capital with phrases such as: ‘On one side the tail of a serpent is seen on a quadruped, on the other side the head of a quadruped is on the body of a fish. Over there an animal has a horse for the

It goes almost without saying that we do not have an account from Canterbury around 1100 to give us a direct answer. My strategy is thus to examine a number of issues that I take to be relevant, such as the other contexts in which novel or unfamiliar hybrids were encountered and consumed, and the relationship between their visual representation and verbal commentaries upon them. The first section looks at some uses to which they were put and the audiences who would thus have been responding to them. The aim here is to explore how interpretations of this genre of visual imagination may have varied depending on function, audience and context. I hope that stating this ambition at the outset will allay any suspicions that what is on offer is a generalised account of the meaning of composite figures. But one consequence of seeking to be particular is that the selection of material is determined by having provoked a medieval ‘scholarly’ response that can be analysed. As a result, none of my examples can be regarded as ‘carnevalesque’ or ‘folksy’; they come from learned and (or) elite contexts. This is not to suggest that it would be

1 Discussed by Gerard Cames, Allegories et symboles dans l’Hortus Deliciarum, Leiden, 1971, pp.117-20, fig.117; see also Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, London, 1939, p.62, fig.61 for the Tegernsee manuscript. 2 Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art, Philadelphia, 1991, p.283 & passim for discussion.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies front half and a goat for the back; here a creature which is horned in front is equine behind’. He continues ‘in short, everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at every one of them than meditating on the law of God.’ But if the creatures are in books to begin with and one’s wondering is constrained by accompanying words which support the law of God by reproving sin do Bernard’s objections still stand?

imagination of a single ‘author’. It is unfortunate that we do not know who that author was. This sophisticated procedure takes us rather beyond what Horace was envisaging, since there is no evidence that the opening of the Ars poetica was meant to be illustrated. Nonetheless during the Romanesque period artists elaborated the text into an image. (fig.4) Although I am aware of only three examples, that number represents perhaps ten percent of the twelfth-century copies of the tract. The likelihood that the manuscripts are of different origin (probably from Western France, the Low Countries, and Italy) suggests the possibility of independently similar reactions, which may be taken as indicative of an enthusiasm for this specifically pictorial mode of composition.4

A further point of interest is that the text accompanying the figures is metrical. It suggests that a possible stimulus which their deviser had in mind was the opening of the Ars poetica of the Roman author Horace. Horace’s tract was, and remained for many centuries, the principal authority for the comparison of pictorial and poetic imagination. It is the source for the famous tag, ut pictura poesis, usually translated as ‘a poem is like a picture’, but there are several more points in the text where Horace makes explicit comparisons between visual and verbal composition.3 For example, he suggests that ‘poetic licence’, another phrase for which the Ars poetica is famous, is transferable, and specifies pictorial artists as recipients of this ‘licence’ as though it were a grant: ‘you will say, “the right to take liberties of almost any kind has always been enjoyed by painters and poets alike.” I know that; we poets do claim this licence, and in our turn we grant it to others’.

One aspect of the fashionable appeal of hybrids during the Romanesque period is likely to have been a belief that they constituted an ancient, Roman artistic genre. Horace himself may well have been taken as evidence for this, for it is far easier to believe he was criticising painters’ actual practice in his own day than that he was inventing a non-existent mode of imaginative composition in order to laugh at it. But if anyone in the twelfth century had been in doubt about the antiquity and prestige of the hybrids, the survival and reuse of ancient gemstones engraved with ‘gnostic’ figures would have settled the issue once and for all. In particular, knowledge of them was disseminated by their reappropriation as privy seals by people of the highest status. This meant that a single intaglio could circulate in hundreds, or even thousands of wax impressions.

The opening words of Horace’s text are deliberately suggestive: ‘Supposing a painter chose to put a human head on a horse’s neck, or to spread feathers of various colours over the limbs of various different creatures, or to make what in the upper part is a beautiful woman tail off into a hideous fish, could you help laughing when he showed you his efforts?’ It has been convincingly argued that this passage was a source for Bernard of Clairvaux’s critical description cited above, but it was also clearly a stimulus to artists and poets, or indeed artist-poets. Among the latter should probably be numbered the person who devised the Karlsruhe hybrids, for surely in this case words and images were conceived together. In devising the verses, the ‘poet’ had to invent something that could be represented graphically, making sure that no part of either body was left unaccounted for. Otherwise than as an elaborate version of a centaur, with three pairs of limbs, how might the poet have conceptualised a creature with human hands, horses’ hooves and lions’ claws. But would it have been possible to compose hexameters that take account of all the distinctive visible features of the beast, unless the words for those features had been chosen because they would scan? Thus the least complex explanation is that verses and images came into being together, by elaborating standard hybrids as a basis for both verbal and visual invention, presumably in the

The evidence that these often beautiful relics of Antiquity were admired and sought after is good. The best of them were used only by the wealthiest and most elevated people in society. Thus we have instances of gems with gnostic figures being owned by archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen and a bishop of Chichester in the second half of the twelfth century.5 The example I illustrate (fig.5), however, apparently belonged to the king of France, Louis VII. It shows Abrasax, a figure combining parts of human, equine and serpentine bodies.6 It appears once as a small counterseal to his seal of majesty, but would normally have been employed on its own, impressed in small pieces of wax attached to his correspondence. Although the impressions would have arrived at their destinations appended to a letter, its text would have shed no light on the imagery of the seal – it is quite a different case from the invariable and explanatory words associated with the Karlsruhe hybrids. The words that came sealed by the signet varied on each occasion of its use 4

T. A. Heslop, ‘Brief in Words but Heavy in the Weight of its Mysteries’, Art History, 9, 1986, pp.1-11 at pp.2-3. For further information on Vatican, Reg. Lat. 1701, see Marco Buonocore, Codices Horatiani in Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican, 1992, no.95, pp.144-45. I am indebted to Jonathan Alexander for this reference. 5 Martin Henig, ‘Archbishop Hubert Walter’s Gems’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 136, 1983, pp.56-61 at p.59. Hubert Walter himself used a Chnoubis gem, but at Rouen and Chichester Abrasax was preferred. 6 Martine Dalas, Corpus des sceaux, II: Sceaux des Rois et de Regence, Paris, 1991, no.68, p.148.

3

Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough , Cambridge Mass., revised edn, 1929. R. W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, the humanistic theory of painting, New York, 1967, discusses the place of Ars poetica in later art theory; I know no overview of its impact on art in the Middle Ages.

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and were quite unrelated to it. One could argue that the obscurity of the hybrid’s meaning is a metaphor referring to the inaccessibility of the message it enclosed. Until such time as it arrived at its destination and the wax impression was destroyed in the process of opening the letter no secrets were revealed and even then they were not the secret of the seal itself. Its ‘privacy’ is underlined by the lack of a legend round its circumference, a characteristic of gem signets in the middle years of the twelfth century. So the implication is further that the seal identified the sender only to those already privy to the secret of its ownership.7

dreaming: Horace called them sick man’s dreams (somnium aegri). Cicero puts into the mouth of his academician, Cotta, the question ‘Why do we have in our minds images of creatures which have never existed and could never exist, such as Scylla and Chimera ... . And why do they come to us unbidden in our sleep?’ Following on from pagan criticisms and adding to them a phobia inherited from the Old Testament, Early Christian authors such as Origen (in his Homilies on Exodus) castigated the visualising of composites. For Origen, an idol was ‘that which is not. A form which the eye does not see, but which the mind examines for itself. For example if someone should fashion the head of a dog or a ram on human members, or again, devise two faces on one appearance of a man, or join the hindmost parts of a horse or a fish to a human breast’. He who makes these things ... does not make a likeness but an idol’. It is ‘that which the idle and curious mind itself perceived in itself.’10 It is noteworthy here that the objection is to the making of something which derives from visual imagination: one of the principal and perennial problems with the visual form was its freedom from verbal control.

As an example of the kind of composition which Horace ridicules, Louis’ signet was one piece of evidence among many that ‘inventions’ of this kind constituted an ancient genre. But another implication of its use by a king is that they were not thought quite so ridiculous in the twelfth century as Horace had wished them to seem in his own day. While one can well suppose that great princes and senior churchmen might wish to communicate under the cover of elite and arcane objects, it is harder to imagine they wanted their correspondents to fall about laughing or snigger at their lack of decorum. The popularity of this type of imagery among pillars of Christian society in the twelfth century, such as the bishops mentioned above, is in many ways paradoxical. It was generally associated not only with paganism, but with kinds of paganism which many of the most admired pagans had themselves scorned. Horace is a case in point. Written around 10 BC, his Ars poetica was attempting as part of its aim to rationalise and professionalise poetry, and one of his strategies was to mock the notion of ‘inspiration’ by comparing it with the invention of composite figures. For Horace, the idea of decorum was opposed to ‘enthousiasmos’ or possession, which he associated with the long-dead poet Democritus: ‘Because Democritus will not allow a place on Mount Helicon to poets of rational mind, a good many will not take the trouble to trim their nails and beards: but haunt solitary places.’8

When Isidore discusses Chimera in his Etymologies in the context of poetic and pictorial fictions he implies this distinction. ‘Poets’ he writes, ‘invent fables ... on the nature of things: ... that tripartite beast, to the fore a lion, to the rear a dragon, in the middle Chimera itself - which is a roe deer, wishing thereby to distinguish the ages of man. The first, adolescence, is bold and dreadful like a lion; the middle, like a roe deer, the most unclouded part of life ... then old age, the dragon bent with misfortune.’11 Here as ‘invented’ by poets it is apparently acceptable as allegory. However, when he comes to discuss painting the tone darkens. ‘Pictura sounds like fictura ... having nothing of faith or truth. Whence there are some pictures which ... while they pretend to enrich, lead to falsehood: thus they who paint the tripartite Chimera or Scylla.’12 There is no hint that the painted representation can carry the same interpretative weight as the poetic. His concern is part of the general suspicion that imagery could lead to idolatry when it was free from the restraining power of words.

He was not alone in pointing the finger of accusation in this direction. Cicero had already invoked Democritus in the context of imaginary creatures: ‘what is the difference between imagining a god and imagining a centaur? All other philosophers regard such creations of thought as empty fancies; but you speak of them as images coming from without and entering into our minds ... . This whole fantasy is something you have derived from Democritus.’9 Like Horace, Cicero too associates these imaginings with

The texts cited above are only a small sample of those available directly or indirectly to Latin Christians in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but they are representative of the generally derogatory attitudes taken to composite figures by some of the best known and most respected authors. We can now return to Canterbury crypt and revisit the hybrids on one of its capitals where they exist (now, at least) without any directly accompanying text which controls their meaning or interpretation. This makes them potentially dangerous in a

7

When gem seals have legends, they usually begin with the word ‘secretum’ with all that implies about both the personal and the arcane nature of the imagery itself and perhaps also their role in protecting a message by sealing it closed. It confirms that their primary function was on letters rather than on major public documents. 8 Horace, Ars poetica, line 290 ff. On poetic theory regarding inspiration, D. A. Russell, Criticism in Antiquity, London, 1981, chapter 5. 9 De natura deorum (Book 1,105-7), the translation is that of H. C. P. McGregor, Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Harmondsworth, 1972, pp. 12-3

10 Carlo Ginzberg, ‘Idols and Likenesses: Origen’s Homilies on Exodus VIII.3, and its reception’, Sight and Insight. Essays on art and culture in honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians, London, 1994, pp.5576. 11 Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive originum, libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols., Oxford, 1911, I, xl, 4. 12 Ibid., XIX, xvi, 1.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies way that the Karlsruhe manuscript’s figures are not, mediated as they are by text. But perhaps those viewing Canterbury crypt in 1100 or shortly afterwards did have texts, in their heads, which they brought to bear on the images. There are, for example, sections of St Anselm’s writings which attach immoral character to animals. ‘Truly, the vale of pride is a horrible place, in which dwell most fearful beasts: that is to say the lion of ferocity, the bear of cruelty, the wolf of impiety, the serpents of detraction, the foxes of envy, porcine uncleanliness and also many others’.13 But linking such a text to the capital has a degree of arbitrariness about it. Anselm does not identify parts of the different beasts on his list with particular vices, so no artist or viewer would know which elements of each creature to isolate or identify. Anselm was not producing a recipe for a hybrid in the way the Karlsruhe poet did, and inferentially this was not his intention. The most we could attribute to a community of his monks, imbued with these attitudes, would be a susceptibility to this kind of reading. But even allowing that some contemporaries may have approached the figures in this frame of mind, we are still not in sight of a satisfactory explanation for the figures.

of the seven heads and/or the ten horns with crowns which the Biblical text describes. Even the head of the ‘flower’ which is being ‘wounded to death’ could be a scriptural reference (Rev. 13.3). Furthermore, a good case can be made for an Insular pedigree for this image of the text of Revelation, for its earliest surviving representation, in a Carolingian manuscript, bears the stylistic hallmarks of a Northumbrian model.16 (fig.8) Such an interpretation might also explain the carefully delineated female breasts, appropriate to the Whore, and the outstretched arms. Depicting the Whore as a double-headed ‘dog’ with bared teeth would not, perhaps, be an unthinkable transposition for an inventive artist to make. But quite apart from being so uncanonical as to defy easy recognition, how should we attempt to reconcile such a reading with the apparent paganism of the elaborated centaur we have just examined? If we require consistency in order to claim plausibility for an interpretation, this does not appear to be a fruitful avenue to pursue. Furthermore, analysis of the kind just attempted implies a degree of visual literacy, a wide range of visual reference and skill in construing compositional elements. If we were meant to disaggregate the Canterbury hybrids, why were we not provided with a key, such as the Karlsruhe artist-poet saw as a necessary part of the interpretation of his images?

As chance would have it, a copy of Horace’s Ars poetica apparently made at Canterbury and datable by its script to the 1090s survives in Trinity College Cambridge.14 (fig.6) So it is also conceivable that at least some of the monks would have known Horace’s text and would have used it as a frame of reference when they looked at the sculpture. If they were conscious of ancient imagery of this kind, such as found on gems which between them have many features in common  the face on the chest, and the wings, for example figure 715  then the antiquity of the mode of depiction will have been reinforced, but so too may have been a sense of its paganism. Perhaps for some viewers these misgivings would have been confirmed by other visual characteristics of the centaurderived creature on the Canterbury capital, for example the ‘gorgon’ mask.

Thus far we have a number of ways of reading the forms on the capital, through visual association with other hybrids or by (rather arbitrary) conjunctions with absent text. There remains another strategy, which is to examine more closely the architectural context, for as we have seen at each stage of our exploration so far it is not the genre per se which is significant, but the circumstances in which it functions. The Body It has been argued convincingly, perhaps unassailably, that the columns in the central aisle of the crypt at Canterbury Cathedral are organised in an ascending order of complexity.17 (fig.9) This is clearest in the southern arcade where, the scheme develops the sequence from the relatively simple, superficial ‘fluting’ of the westernmost, through alternate columns until, by the time we reach the altar space at the east end there are deeply cut continuous spirals of subtle profile channelled into shafts which ascend uninterrupted towards heaven. This climax takes as its ultimate model the ‘Solomonic’ columns of the sanctuary at Old St Peter’s in Rome. As a climax it was presaged in various early medieval buildings, both on freestanding ‘furniture’, such as the ciborium canopy over an altar at Sant’ Apollinare in Classe at Ravenna, and integrated into the architecture itself, as in the crypt at Repton in Derbyshire.

Perhaps fortunately, one of the other faces of the capital has on it a composition which may have helped to bring it into a Christian framework; a serpent derived design. Here the formal associations are with Apocalyptic imagery. In general layout it most resembles a tradition for representing the Whore of Babylon mounted on the Beast of the Sea. Such an origin would explain the curious detail of the flowering crockets on the Beast’s neck, which would thus be versions 13

Memorials of St Anselm, eds R. W. Southern & F. S. Schmitt. Oxford, 1969, p.308. 14 Written in the same script as a copy of St Jerome’s Letters, Durham Cathedral MS B.II.10, for which see Anne Lawrence, ‘The Influence of Canterbury on the Collection and Production of Manuscripts at Durham in the Anglo-Norman period’, The Vanishing Past, Studies in Medieval Art, Liturgy and Metrology presented to Christopher Hohler, eds. Alan Borg & Andrew Martindale, British Archaeological Reports, International ser. 111 (1981), pp.95-103 at p.97 & pl. 8.12; and parts (e.g. fol. 2 verso) of The Domesday monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury (Canterbury, Dean and Chapter MS E 28), ed. David C. Douglas, London, 1944. I am most grateful to Teresa Webber for her assistance with this script. 15 Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Le moyen age fantastique: antiquités et exoticismes dans l’art gothique, Paris, 1955, figs.8 & 12.

16 Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, I, Insular Manuscripts, Sixth to the Ninth Century, London, 1978, no.64. 17 Eric Fernie, ‘St Anselm’s Crypt’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Canterbury before 1220, eds Nicola Coldstream & Peter Draper, British Archeological Association Conference Transactions, 5 (1982), pp.27-38, & idem, The Architecture of Norman England, Oxford, 2000, pp.140-3. For discussion of the sculpture, Deborah Kahn, Canterbury Cathedral and its Romanesque Sculpture, London, 1991, chapter 2, and Richard Gameson, ‘The Romanesque Crypt Capitals of Canterbury Cathedral’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 100, 1992, pp.17-48.

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Its most sophisticated exemplification, very close in date to the design of Canterbury itself, was in the main elevation of the transept and presbytery of Durham Cathedral, begun in 1093. Like Canterbury, that too culminated in continuous spirals around the sanctuary, and these too were incorporated into the arcading. Durham also alternated its development of various patterns of incised columns with a uniform sequence of undecorated supports, though these were compound piers not plain shafts.18 It cannot be simple accident that the two cathedrals are so close in date and use the same idea in similar ways.

another three years from 1103. It is perhaps for this reason that some contemporaries regarded the architecture as the responsibility of the prior of Canterbury, Ernulf of Beauvais. Nonetheless, the project must have been designed before Anselm’s first exile, and if we take seriously Eadmer’s attribution of the project to him, Anselm will have been a party to deciding what messages the new building was meant to convey. Unlike most later archbishops, but like Lanfranc immediately before him, Anselm (1033-1109) was very much a monastic prelate. Although he was not above the world of politics and administration, he is remembered primarily as a great scholar and theologian formed within a strain of eleventh-century Benedictinism notable for its moderation.21 Coming to Normandy from his home in the Italian Alps, Anselm had become first a monk, then prior and, finally, in 1078 abbot of Bec, a monastery noted for corrected editions of patristic texts and contemplative theology. He finished writing his Monologion around 1076. Eadmer encapsulated Anselm’s achievement thus: ‘Here, putting aside all authority of Holy scripture, he enquired into and discovered by reason alone what God is’.22 It is indeed remarkable that Anselm’s method depended so little on the authority of earlier text, preferring to rely on the resources of the mind. A good and pertinent example for our purposes comes in Chapter Ten of the Monologion, where Anselm discusses the Creation:

There are however important differences. At Durham the combination of the screen of spiral columns across the transept with a group of four on axis on a square plan is probably directly based on the arrangement at Old St Peters, whereas at Canterbury the reference to St Peter’s is in the number of columns, twelve.19 Another distinction at Canterbury is the alternation of capitals, for although the spiral columns has quite plain capitals, the plain columns support figured capitals, such as the one we have looked at. It is worth considering whether these too are progressive, and take us up to a point where increasing conceptual complexity is preparing the viewer to recognise that the most sacred space is that around the altar. This is not an unreasonable proposition. Quite apart for the apparently deliberate progressive elaboration of the columns, the ostensible founder of the work, St Anselm, was particularly concerned with logical and speculative approaches to the ineffability of the divine.

But what is the form of things, which in the Maker’s thought preceded the things to be created, other than a conceptual expression of things? - just as when a craftsman who is about to make a work from his craft first speaks of it within himself by a mental conception? Now, by “mental expression” or “conceptual expression” I do not mean here thinking the words which are significative of things; I mean, rather, viewing mentally with keenness of thought the things themselves which either already exist or else are going to exist. For in ordinary usages we recognise that we can speak of a single object in three ways. For we may speak of it either (1) by employing perceptible signs ... or (2) by imperceptibly thinking to ourselves these same signs ... or (3) neither by perceptibly nor by imperceptibly using these signs, but by inwardly and mentally speaking of the objects themselves by imagining them.

According to his biographer, Eadmer, the construction of the new east end, with its underlying crypt, was Anselm’s work, and when the rapacity of the king, William Rufus, threatened the financing of the work, it was Anselm who in 1096 provided the replacement revenues from his own income.20 This episode is often taken to mean that the work began in 1096, though it could equally suggest that it was already in progress. But even if it had been underway for a year or two already, the extent of any direct personal control exercised by the archbishop would have been thwarted by his exile from 1097 until Rufus’s death in 1100, and again subsequently for 18 Eric Fernie, ‘The Spiral Piers of Durham Cathedral’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Durham Cathedral, eds., Nicola Coldstream & Peter Draper, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 3, 1980, pp.49-58. 19 Fernie, Architecture of Norman England, p.134 & note 56. Perhaps there is an allusion here to Exod. 24.4: ‘and Moses … builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars according to the twelve tribes of Israel’. The ‘hill’ is Sinai – and the presence of the law-giving Lord  so perhaps the crypt was part of a larger general iconography. 20 Eadmer, Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed., M. Rule (Rolls series, 1884), p.75, trans. Geoffrey Bosanquet, Eadmer’s History of recent events in England, London, 1964 pp.78-9: ‘he made over to the Church of Canterbury for a term of seven years his demesne manor of Petham that out of its revenues (which amounted in those days to about thirty pounds weight of silver pennies) the loss occasioned to the Church might be made good. So for that term the Church of Canterbury held that manor and the timber of the manor and all its revenues were expended on the new work at Canterbury which extends eastwards from the great tower, work which is well known to have been begun by Father Anselm himself’. It is notable that the revenues, at £210, far exceeded the 200 marks (£133/6/8d) taken by the king from the Cathedral treasury.

21

Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism, London, 1984, discusses the ‘primitivist’ strain in eleventh-century monasticism, which may be distinguished from the liturgically elaborate, ‘high church’ attitude associated with Cluny and other old-established Benedictine filiations. The Cluniac strain was well represented in Normandy, thanks to the influence of William of Volpiano at Fecamp and elsewhere. The regimes of the abbeys of Bec and St Etienne at Caen seem, thanks perhaps largely to Lanfranc, to have provided more time for reading and personal prayer and contemplation. See Margaret Gibson, Lanfranc of Bec, Oxford, 1978. 22 Eadmer, The Life of St Anselm, ed. & trans., R. W. Southern, London, 1962, p.29.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies In order to clarify Anselm then gives examples, respectively: ‘I speak of a man when I signify him by the name “man”. In another way when I speak the name silently. In a third way when my mind beholds him ... .’23 Thus for Anselm the notion of speaking is also used for a wordless mental image.

God’s Creation in both the material and cognitive sense, though he left this deduction implicit. There is a conception of the distinct parts of things being retrieved from the memory in order that new compositions could be imagined. Anselm’s principal critic, Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutier, recognised the importance of these metaphors and reassessed them. His aim was apparently to distinguish between the vitality of the conceptual process and the lifelessness of any product of human artifice. Not matter how lively an artist’s imagination, he could not create a living organism:

His conception of visual imagination as ‘speaking’ is manifest in the next section of the chapter. ‘Yet words of that kind of speaking which I mentioned third, and last, are natural and are the same for all races, provided they are not the words of unknown things.24 And since all other words [i.e. verbal signifiers] have been formulated because of these natural words [i.e. things], wherever these are no other word need be present for recognising an object.’ Anselm’s strategy for regarding natural signs as words derives from Augustine, but his motivation is, no doubt, stimulated by his need to accommodate ‘In the beginning was the word’. The beginning was Creation and that was God’s wordless imagining: it was only at a later stage that verbal discourse became necessary and Adam gave names to the things God had created. It was later still that the building of the Tower of Babel led to the diversification, and (confused) deployment of words as signifiers.

For before the painting was made it existed in the painter’s art (arte). And such a thing in the artist’s art is nothing other than a part of the artist’s understanding. For as Augustine says: “When a craftsman is about to make a chest, he first has it in his art [i.e. conceptual skill]. The chest which is produced is not alive; but the chest which is in the art is alive because the soul of the craftsman is alive, and in it exist all these artefacts before they are produced” (Augustine, Commentary on John’s Gospel, 1.17). For why are these artefacts alive in the living soul of the craftsman except because they are nothing other than the soul’s knowledge and understanding? But except for things which are known to pertain to the very nature of mind, whenever anything that is heard of or thought of is understood to be real, then without any doubt the real thing is different from the understanding by which it is apprehended.26

In the next chapter of Monologion, he went on to draw fundamental distinctions between what God did at the beginning of time (before verbal language) and subsequent, mundane artistic imaginative processes: It is true that the Supreme Substance spoke within itself, as it were, all creatures before it created them ...  just as a craftsman first conceives mentally what he subsequently produces in accordance with his mental conception. But even though this is true, I detect in the comparison many differences. For the Supreme Substance did not from anywhere borrow anything at all whereby to fashion in itself the form of the creatures which it was going to make ... . By contrast an artist cannot at all conceive in his mind, imaginatively, any material object except one which he has already in some way experienced (either in its entirety all at once or through parts) from various objects. Moreover, an artisan cannot produce the work conceived in his mind if he lacks ... the materials ... . For although a man can form the concept or the image of some kind of animal which has never existed, he can do so only by putting together parts which he remembers from his experience of other objects.25

Gaunilo’s anxiety seems to be directed against any idea that the realisation of the artist’s conception would have any of the ‘life’ that it had when in the living imagination. But subtle and necessary as it may have been for his own purposes, Gaunilo misses the point of Anselm’s mentioning an imaginary creature which the artist is going to depict, as a remote analogy for God’s creative act. Nonetheless, his position helps us to realise the fundamental part composites had to play in Anselm’s logical approach to God. For although in highly significant respects their ‘creation’ was not like the creative acts of the deity, artists came as close as it was possible for human being to come to it. What Gaunilo contributed to the debate was the idea that imagination manifested understanding, itself inevitably a gift from God. As a consequence Anselm himself returned to and elaborated on the analogy with Creation in his Prosologion. ‘For when an artist envisions what he is about to paint, he has it in his understanding, but he does not yet understand that there exists what he has not yet painted. But after he has painted it, he has it in his understanding and he understands that what he has painted exists’.27 Here Anselm is expanding on the location of the artist’s conceptual capacity, but apparently only in so far as it concerns things which would not otherwise exist. We are back with Chimera.

Here, clearly, Anselm has in mind the human ability to imagine composite creatures, and is saying that these are recognisably the distinct parts of things which are natural, put together by man in new combinations. Aggregation and disaggregation are a mental faculty which depends upon 23 Jasper Hopkins & Herbert W. Richardson, trans., Anselm of Canterbury, Vol.1., Toronto & New York, 1974, pp.18-19. 24 The idea may come from Augustine, De trinitate, Book 15, chapter 10. 25 Hopkins & Richardson, trans. p.20.

26 27

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On Behalf of the Fool, Chapter 3, trans. Hopkins & Richardson, p.116. Prosologion, Chapter 2, trans. Hopkins & Richardson, p.94.

T A Heslop: Contemplating Chimera in Medieval Imagination: St Anselm’s Crypt at Canterbury

text has been determined by a desire not to stray too far from Canterbury, from people who had lived there or visited it, or their friends.

We can now return to the ‘chimerical’ capital in Canterbury crypt. It is placed half way down the northern arcade, on the sixth out of the eleven free-standing shafts, and is the last on our progression towards the altar to be carved with figures. It is also, as will have become clear, sculpted with designs which show, in Anselmian terms, the maximum extent to which human art can approach the wordless speaking of the ‘Supreme Substance’ at the beginning of time. That we are still only half way to the culmination of the avenue, may be taken as indicative of the distance which separates human and divine imagining.

A good starting point is Honorius Augustodunensis. Honorius’s origins are obscure, though it has recently been suggested he was a relative of Anselm’s, perhaps from Savoy.28 Despite his toponym (apparently alluding to Regensburg, after years of being translated as ‘of Autun’), he was in England for an important and formative decade or more in his early maturity, and was probably resident at Canterbury in the mid 1090s, when Anselm’s new east end was designed and begun. We may speculate that Honorius was in part formed by the attitudes which shaped Canterbury crypt, for throughout his years in England he was very receptive, absorbing ideas from the people, especially Anselm, and the texts he encountered. The short treatise of his which I wish to call as evidence, the Scala coeli maior (the great ladder of heaven) was, however, written after his departure for Regensburg. Its subject is spiritual vision and accordingly it contains a quite detailed categorisation of aspects of imagination. In a dialogue between master and pupil, the master says that the soul (anima) vivifies the body and through the body apprehends corporeal things. That part in which images of physical things are formed is truly called spirit, while that which understands [i.e. through reason] internal and external things is called mind. Spiritual vision is when things which are not physical but which are like physical things are seen in the spirit, which is joined to the ladder of his title by twelve steps.29

We are in no position to know how many, if any, of Anselm’s monks at Canterbury would have interpreted the ‘hybrids’ capital in this way. If they were told to then, even if it was not an exclusive reading which displaced any moral or ‘classicising’ chords which the imagery may have struck, it would have been hard to dismiss the idea. But if they were not given instruction, what could they be relied on to ‘see’? What, indeed, if they were not told about the progressive sequence of columns either; would they have ‘seen’ that? It does not help that neither the sequence of columns nor of capitals has a relentless logic. Recent historians have regarded the erection of the crypt as hasty, and some elements as unfinished, and or out of place. That is quite possibly the case (see Appendix). But even if we see the building as it was planned, we are here on that very slippery ground between interpretation and intention, and they are both quagmires. On the one hand, no-one can carve a spiral column or hybrids capital without intending to, the question is why the decision was made. On the other hand how these forms are received is constrained by the audiences’ variable predispositions, which may or may not be informed by the originating decision-making process. We certainly cannot rule out that some viewers placed an Anselmian reading on the composite figures, but was that an option which the patron himself envisaged and even desired? Given Anselm’s expressed interest in the transition from the conceptual to the material as a model for God’s Creation, we would be as unwise to ignore the possibility as we would to accept it unreservedly. Despite the fact that not every element in the design is quite where modern commentators would like it to be, the developmental logic of the crypt, as we progress down the central aisle from west to east, is sufficient to suggest a purpose. Accidentally, perhaps that purpose is more obscure than was planned, and thereby (accidentally) better represents our inability to know God.

He enumerates. The first step is when any likeness of a body, perceived through bodily sense, is formed in our spirit, and is kept in the memory, such as girls. The second, when we think of something absent but noticed and form images of them in our spirit, such as cities.30 The third, when we consider likenesses of those things we do not know, but of whose existence we have no doubt, such as of unicorns or griffins. The fourth, when we imagine through our will those things which do not exist or which we do not know to exist, such as that beast Chimera. He continues through imagined speech; conceptualising something which is to be made, such as a house; anticipation; dreaming; and fantasies such as those which come to the mad (phreneticis). He concludes with three kinds of ‘out of body’ experience, those in extremis, of ecstasy and finally of prophecy.

The Tail What has been suggested above is an unconventionally optimistic and theologically opportunistic reading of an artistic mode which was normally treated with suspicion, if not actually derided or castigated. What this final section of my tripartite creation offers, is a discussion of the development of attitudes to hybrids, through the twelfth century, which will show how many of the old, negative connotations reasserted themselves. I have deliberately avoided visual evidence for these attitudes since I have come to believe that in the course of the twelfth century it was verbal criticism which triumphed. The basis of my choice of

It is a remarkable sequence, and placed in an ascending order of remoteness from most people’s experience. In so far as 28 Valerie J. Flint, Honorius Augustodunensis of Regensburg, Aldershot, 1995, for a full discussion of his career. 29 Honorius, Scala coeli maior, in J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina cursus completa, vol.172, cols 1229-1240. 30 This cryptic reference can probably also be explained by Augustine, De trinitate, Book 8, chapter 6, in which Augustine compares the mental image which he has of Carthage, a city he knows well, with his capacity to imagine Alexandria, a city he has never visited. In other words, the point being made here about imagination is that cognition works through categories by referring an unknown example to an known instance within the same category.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies this is a ladder which leads to heaven, the higher up one’s vision is, the closer one is to a sense-denying vision, a vision in pure spirit. Conversely, the lower down the ladder one’s vision, the more mundane it is. If we return to our contemplation of the Canterbury capital, we can see that on Honorius’s scale, the lowest level it equates with is that of Chimera on level four. We might choose to place it at six if in Anselmian terms we are contemplating it as something to be made, at eight if it is a dream or at nine if it is the fantasy of a frenetic. In so far as Canterbury crypt is concerned, sixth out of twelve would be the ideal position not just because the ‘hybrids’ capital is halfway to the altar but because the point Honorius makes about the craftsman’s mental conception is the same as Anselm’s in the Monologion. There is indeed another reason for placing it there rather than in fourth place, for Chimera already exists as a visual convention, and so does not need to be invented by a craftsman. It is only when an artist conceives modifications that the Anselmian notion of imagination becomes pertinent. Following this line of argument, it is thus a matter of some significance that the Canterbury capital does not show conventional hybrids.

influential example known in the West was the newly translated works of Avicenna.33 But around 1100, Adelard’s view was something like orthodoxy, and versions of it, with all their unresolved implications, continued to dominate nonspecialist (i.e. non-medical) thinking. Thus, despite increasingly sophisticated conceptions of the brain and its operations, from the perspective of most writers in the middle of the twelfth century, the dreamlike and fantastical aspects of the chimerical loomed ever larger and more threatening. My witness from this generation is John of Salisbury whose association with Canterbury stemmed from his appointment to the household of Archbishop Theobald (like Anselm, formerly a monk of Bec in Normandy). John’s own education had not, however, been monastic. After the fashion of the times he had gone from ‘school’ in England to ‘university’ in northern France. There he studied with most of the great names, such as William of Conches and Peter Abelard. In the late 1140s he was secretary to Peter of Celle, abbot of Montier-la-Celle, and came to the notice of St Bernard of Clairvaux, a friend of Peter’s, who recommended him for appointment in the household of Theobald Archbishop of Canterbury. After Theobald’s death in 1161 John stayed on as secretary to his successor, Thomas Becket, but before that happened, in 1159, he had completed his Policraticus, in Book Two of which he twice discusses the issue of hybrids.

However that may be, in the early twelfth century scholars were not generally so ‘categorical’ as to divorce fantasy from imagination in any very rigorous way; the ‘scientific’ model of the brain that was generally current was too simple to allow it. The brain contained three ventricles variously titled. The first one, at the entrance and closest to the organs of sense is often called fantasy or common sense. Generally this is followed by a processing compartment where reasoning or understanding takes place. And finally there is memory. Thus, in his De eodem et diverso, which is more or less contemporary with Honorius’s Scala coeli maior, Adelard of Bath writes ‘the soul … has also dedicated different parts of the head to different duties – for in the prow it imagines (in prora enim imaginatur), in the middle it uses reason and in the stern (that is the back part), it stores away the memory.’31 In his slightly later Questiones naturales the situation is presented as rather more complex. Apparently taking the same sequence of ventricles, he writes of the first that there ‘she [the soul] uses the movement of fantasy [fantastico motu], that is ingenuity [id est ingeniali].’32 Taken together these passages suggest an elision of fantasy, ingenuity and imagination. Their place is at the entrance to the mind, where sensory perception is first accommodated before it has been ‘digested’ by reason or judgement.

The first context concerns dreams. He introduces the subject by saying ‘In dreams especially, since it is the sleeping state, the animal properties – which is to say the senses, which are called corporeal but are in reality spiritual – are quiescent, but the natural properties are intensified.’34 It appears to John, perhaps rather surprisingly, that by being closer to nature than spirit ‘it sometimes happens that the mind … contemplates truth with greater intuition, now figuratively, now allegorically, now face to face’. This sounds potentially positive, but we are shortly to be disappointed. The categories of dreaming which John recognises are derived from Macrobius’s commentary on the Dream of Scipio. It is when he discusses one of these ‘Phantasma’ that he quotes the opening of Horace’s Ars Poetica. ‘Phantasm gives rise to strange kinds of forms, contradicting nature with respect to their substance, quantity or arrangement … . Physicians state that such appearances are the result of impaired mental or physical health … . They assign to the same category ephialtes or nightmare’. As a result, John concurs, ‘all these types are in need of the doctor rather than our verbal treatment’. So here at least he reaches the same conclusion as Horace, that hybrids are ‘sick men’s dreams’.

One of the difficulties of such a view is that, as Anselm and others had made clear, all the imaginative functions depend on the recollection of things already processed by reason and accommodated in memory. Within fifty of so years, this scheme was to begin to yield to a more sophisticated one, which had its origins in ‘Arab’ medicine, of which the most

33 E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: psychological theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, London, 1975, esp. pp.23-24 for a succinct account of Avicenna’s schema, which includes, for instance, transferring to the central ventricle the capacity to combine and separate forms, where imaginativa and cogitativa coexist. See also Ynez O’Neill, ‘Diagrams of the Medieval Brain: A Study in Cerebral Location’ in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed., Brendan Cassidy, Princeton, 1993, pp.91-106. 34 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed., C. J. Webb, Oxford, 1909, book 2, chapters 14-15, pp.87-9; translation by Joseph B. Pike, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, New York, 1972, pp.75-6.

31 Adelard of Bath’s Conversations with his Nephew, ed. & trans., Charles Burnett, Cambridge, 1998, pp.70-71. 32 Ibid., pp. 124-25, where Burnett however translates as ‘she uses the movement of imagination, that is of the intelligence’. In the imagined dialogue, Adelard’s nephew echoes these divisions by responding that Aristotle in his physics, and other authors too ‘fantasiam...dicant in parte cerebri anteriore, rationem in medio, memoriam in occipitio.’

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His second contemplation comes in a section concerned with imagination and understanding: ‘in the case of bodies not present, your imagination…can bring them before you’. However ‘it associates that which is dissociated if it “should join a horse’s neck to a human head, laying on bright plumage everywhere”, with the result according to the poet “A lovely woman’s form above, below becomes a black and ugly fish”. Poets convey such conceptions to their readers by means of words when they describe a goat-deer, a centaur or a chimera’.35 For John the phenomenon of such hybrids is problematical for ‘Understanding proceeds directly as long as it contemplates any particular object – for example when it apprehends a horse or a man’ but when it ‘examines things otherwise than they are, having formed them by combination, it tends to error’.

[which are] being preoccupied with those vanities or that tablet of the inward imagination…decorated with imaginary images …. (phantasticis imaginibus tabula depingatur internae imaginationis). For we do not prevail against this entanglement of the senses by any effort made at the time of prayer to free the wings of thought from the exceedingly tenacious, deeply rooted birdlime of fantasies.’38 In short, painters are breaking the Law and hindering our salvation by putting forward their inventions for our contemplation. The echo of St Bernard’s concerns about the distracting nature of hybrids can be explained by the fact that Peter of Celle, as well as having been a friend of Bernard’s, was writing De conscientia for a monk of Clairvaux. It demonstrates what is generally insufficiently acknowledged, that an individual monk’s attitudes to art did not necessarily follow party lines. For all the high Benedictine credentials which were to make him acceptable at Reims, and for all his commitment to realising its new and elaborate architecture and colourful stained glass, Peter was a virtual Cistercian in respect of hybrids.39 Furthermore, Peter’s views on fantasy were also directed to those who would not have wanted to hear them, such as Nicholas of St Albans:

Although John does not say so outright, one implication of his discussion is that visual imagination is potentially inimical to understanding. Seeing combination figures as an example of this kind of obstruction presumably means that when John looked at the hybrids capital in Canterbury crypt it was effectively impossible for him to construe them as Anselm, or Honorius Augustodunensis might have done. But then John was far more ‘literary’ than his two predecessors and, despite his urbanity, was weighed down by his immense knowledge of pagan classical and Christian authors. He, of course, did not see it that way, stating at the outset of Policraticus that ‘divine commiseration, to offset human frailty, provided mortals with the knowledge of letters’. It is as noticeable throughout John’s text, as it was in the case of Isidore of Seville, that the mental image of chimera, she of dreams and imagination, is more worrying than the verbal signifier. For all John’s anxieties about hybrids, he is more than content to keep using the description at the opening of Ars poetica as a tool for thinking with even if encountering it in his mind’s eye would apparently have sent him scurrying to the doctor.

English levity may not be unworthy if it is more substantial than Gallic maturity. But obviously an island is surrounded by water, and thus its inhabitants are understandably affected by the special quality of this element. Comparing, or should I say preferring their dreams to visions, they frequently turn them into the slenderest, subtle fantasies by means of excessive flightiness (nimia mobilitate). And what fault is it of Nature if this is the nature of the land? Of course, I know well that the English are greater dreamers than the French. For the brain is very quickly ensnared by the vapour of the damper stomach, and paints within itself anything at all in the way of images (quaslibet imagines in seipso depingit) which … invented [at a place in the mind] below the truth of judgement (infra iudicii veritatem confinguntur), may thus be called phantasms or dreams. France is not cavernous or wet like this; there are stone mountains where iron is found, and the land is measured by its firmness.40

John wrote to his old friend and patron Peter of Celle in 1159 sending him the newly completed Policraticus for comment.36 Before long, in 1163, John was to find himself back in Peter’s company, as the antipathy of Henry II, and then the Becket crisis, kept John in exile in France. We do not know whether they discussed hybrids. But the presence of a huge bronze candlestick, some eighteen feet high, its base covered with centaurs and chimera, in the choir of St Remi, at Reims, where Peter had been appointed abbot in 1162, could well have provoked a conversation on the theme.37 What Abbot Peter’s attitude to it would have been can be guessed from his work De conscientia, completed while he was still at Montier-la-Celle. In discussing the Second Commandment he wrote that ‘the law does not teach what or how you should paint, it only prohibits what you should not paint …. . The law shows the vices of art …

38 Jean Leclercq, La Spiritualité de Pierre de Celle, Paris, 1946, pp.193230 for an edition of De conscientia. The translation is that of Hugh Feiss, Peter of Celle, Selected Works, Cistercian Studies series, 100, Kalamazoo, 1987, at pp.160-61. 39 For Peter’s architectural patronage see Anne Prache, Saint-Remi de Reims: l’oeuvre de Pierre de Celle et sa place dans l’architecture gothique, Geneva, 1978. 40 Peter of Celle’s letter to Nicholas of St Albans is in J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina cursus completus, vol. 202, col. 614, and was written c. 1178. The main subject was the English enthusiasm for celebrating the feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an innovation which Peter regarded as without authority. For the influence of moisture on invention compare Adelard, Questiones naturales, (ed. cit., p.124), Ingenium quippe per humiditatem viget; memoria vero per siccitatem. Adelard explain that whatever is moist can be easily impressed, like a seal in soft wax, but can also be easily erased.

35

Ibid. Book 2 chapter 18, ed., Webb, pp.103-4, trans., Pike, pp.89-90. Letters of John of Salisbury, Vol. 1 the early letters, eds., W. J. Millor & H. E. Butler, revised by C. N. L. Brooke, Oxford, 1986, no.111, pp.180-82. This is one of ten letters extant which John wrote to Peter. 37 For the candlestick, Madeline Caviness, Sumptous arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine, Princeton, 1990, pp.41-43. 36

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Had Peter taken his fantasy about the English from the solid shores of France and crossed the water to the cavernous crypt of Canterbury it seems unlikely that his racial stereotype would have required serious adjustment!

The art and theological scholarship of Romanesque Europe is, in many respects, remote from present day concerns. But perhaps the issues touched on in this paper still have some relevance. It is striking that during the course of the twelfth century, as academic specialisation and compartmentalisation triumphed over generalism, scholars tended increasingly to turn in and dwell upon their chosen disciplines. Perhaps they lost sight of some larger issues as a result. It is also worth asking whether we are any closer than Anselm and Honorius were to understanding the nature of visual imagination, and if not whether there is anything we should be doing to remedy our lack of progress. We could also consider whether the relationship between artists and the images they make have been any better served by art historians in recent times than they were by authoritarian critics in the medieval past. Anselm’s clarity and charity may still have things to teach us.

Peter’s caricature Englishman must have been a long way from his experience of the real thing, at least in so far as one of them was John of Salisbury. Other sources too make clear, what Romanesque art itself demonstrates. For even from the few example given in the first section of this paper, it is obvious that any attempt to explain the enthusiasm for and distribution of visual hybrids by environmental or racial means is doomed to failure. Criticism is widespread too. The author of the tract known as Pictor in Carmine (the Painter in Verse) was probably Adam of Abbey Dore in Herefordshire, an English Cistercian who is forthright in his condemnation.41 He blames those who sponsor such work for ‘putting off what is useful and honest in favour of a disgraceful excess of invention (adinventionum turpitudine)’, and avows that it is ‘the abominable presumption (nefanda presumptio) of painters that has gradually introduced these hallucinatory playthings (fantasmatum ludibria).’ In common with Peter of Celle, Adam saw composite creatures as something artists had contrived in order that their independent inventive capacity be manifest for all to see. But even Adam of Dore is caught up in the tension between the visual and the verbal. For among the things he castigates are ‘the logical chimera…the fabled intrigues of the fox and the cock...and Boethius’s Ass and Lyre.’42 It is as though the author does not realise that by naming or describing these ‘inventions’ in words he is criticising subjects with long and distinguished literary pedigrees and that they cannot be simply the fantasies of his artist contemporaries. In so far as there was a battle between the visual and the verbal, one can see that for most writers it was the authority (and safety) of word that had to win. Hence the fate of Chimera and all that she stood for in visual imagination. But for a period of almost a century, while the extent of the threat was being worked through, she and her fellow composites, played (as well as having) many parts. They focused discussions about dreams and portents, they gave opportunity for cautionary moralising and they represented an ancient mode of ‘inspired’ pictorial invention. Thus for some, including the most learned and socially elevated, they provided food, and even tools, for thought. They also, perhaps incidentally, supplied artists with a genre in which they may have believed they were exercising a freedom of (almost) abominable presumption, even though they were only ‘rude mechanicals’. They may even have realised that it brought them closer to exemplifying God’s creative process than mere wordsmiths could ever achieve.

41

M. R. James, ‘Pictor in carmine’, Archaeologia, 94, 1952, pp141-66. I have avoided discussing the ‘logical Chimera’. Commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories by both Porphyry and Boethius discuss nonexistent substantives using Chimera as an example. The usage is adopted by Isidore, Etymologies (e.g ed. cit., II, xii, 1) and becomes a commonplace. 42

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T A Heslop: Contemplating Chimera in Medieval Imagination: St Anselm’s Crypt at Canterbury

Appendix: the layout of sculpture in Canterbury crypt (fig.10). On the westernmost freestanding capital of the southern arcade are represented images of a man on horseback (twice), a quadruped (perhaps a goat) and a man (albeit with a tail) fighting a lion. Next comes an ‘unfinished’ capital, laid out to show foliage wrapped around beaded straps. Then comes a supposedly ‘reused’ corinthianesque capital, and finally foliate scrolls sprouting from the mouths of animals. Of the series, the latter is the most obviously ‘artificial’ concept. The northern sequence is harder to fit into the argument. First comes a series of heads enmeshed in foliage, then a lion (twice), an eagle and a griffon (the two latter vanquishing dragon-like serpents), and finally the chimerical inventions. Whereas the claim that the final capital in the sequence is the most ‘outlandish’ is reasonably secure, it is less obvious that lion and eagles are more imaginative than heads in foliage. The columns of this arcade also present their difficulties of interpretation. The first decorated one has deeply cut spirals, similar to those around the sanctuary. This appears to be anomalous, and it has been suggested that it is a mistake, brought about by the misplacing of the column. This is clearly a possible explanation, but against it must be set an unanswered question: how is it that the masons would have set about carving five deeply cut spiral shafts if only four were ever going to be needed? If this ‘mistake’ were unique, then we could press the case of poor co-ordination between the designer and his workforce. However, other churches in Anglo-Norman England also have non matching columns at the entry to the eastern arm of the building. Perhaps the most suggestive pairing of such supports occurs at Peterborough where the abbot from 1107-14 was Ernulf, who had been Prior of Canterbury when Anselm’s Choir was begun. It may be then, that this ‘error’ was deliberate and significant. One possible, authoritative and ancient source for this irregularity is the pairing of the columns called Jachin and Boas at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple. In other words, the Solomonic spirals around the sanctuary were being introduced by another reference to the Old Testament prototype in Jerusalem, one of which was seen to foreshadow or prepare one for the sacred climax of the interior.43

It is unfortunate that the fire of 1174 has deprived us of the principal part of Anselm’s Choir which rose above the crypt. It was famous in its day as the ‘Glorious Choir’, of which William of Malmesbury wrote in 1124: ‘Nothing like it could be seen in England, either for the brilliancy of its glass windows, the beauty of its marble pavements, or the many coloured pictures which lead the wandering eye to the very summit of the ceiling.’ In the absence of the marbles, perhaps inlaid in the ‘Cosmatesque’ manner essayed in the 1060s at Monte Cassino, and of the programmes of glass and ceiling painting, we will never know how, or even if, the ideas expressed in the crypt were enlarged upon in the church above. It is quite likely that the late twelfth-century glazing and marble flooring preserve some aspects of the destroyed Anselmian scheme. Even so, we can never be certain to what extent or which parts were most faithful to the original.

This possibility raises the prospect that there are fewer illogicalities than has been generally supposed in Canterbury Crypt. One can speculate, but no more, that the ‘unfinished’ capital in the southern sequence is also deliberately indicative rather than a sign of hasty construction. It might, perhaps, exemplify the transition between the artist’s conception of his work and its final realisation. In any other context, such an argument could justifiably be dismissed as special pleading, and even here I would not press the case. 43

On Jachin and Boas see Onians, Bearers of Meaning. It should also be pointed out that the wall shafts themselves do not match, that to the south being a cylindrical column while to the north is octagonal (Kahn, ill. 20). These are generally considered to be relics of Lanfranc’s crypt, and if in situ lead to the conclusion that at least in this respect Anselm’s design developed an idea already expressed in the earlier work.

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Fig.1. Face of the Hybrids capital, from the centre of the north arcade of Canterbury crypt (photo, Courtauld Institute).

Fig.2. Face of the Hybrids capital, from the centre of the north arcade of Canterbury crypt (photo, Courtauld Institute).

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T A Heslop: Contemplating Chimera in Medieval Imagination: St Anselm’s Crypt at Canterbury

Fig.3. Karlsruhe, Bad. Landsbibl. Aug. Perg. 60, fol. 2 (after Cames).

Fig.4. Vatican Library, Reg. Lat. 1701, fol. 60 (after Buonocore).

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Fig.5. Signet of Louis VII of France, from a cast in the Archives nationales, Paris (after Dalas).

Fig.6. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.57, fol. 51 verso (courtesy of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge).

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T A Heslop: Contemplating Chimera in Medieval Imagination: St Anselm’s Crypt at Canterbury

Fig.7. Ancient gems, (after Baltrusaitis, Le moyen age fantastique)

Fig.8. Valenciennes, Bibl. Mun. MS 99, fol. 31 (photo, Prof. David Wright).

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Fig.9. Canterbury crypt, general view looking east.

Fig.10. Plan of St Anselm’s crypt, Canterbury, and a schematic rendering of its central aisle (after Fernie, The Architecture of Anglo-Norman England).

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Materializing Power Cardinal Ippolito D’Este in 1540 Mary Hollingsworth Account books are surprisingly revealing documents. They might lack the personal touch of a letter or the intellectual subtleties of a literary text, but they do allow us to put a precise financial value to the theoretical concepts of magnificence and liberality, two virtues much admired in the Renaissance. This was a society in which conspicuous expenditure was the prime vehicle for the display of status and the survival of over 200 of the account books of Ippolito d’Este (1509-72) in the archives in Modena gives us the opportunity not only to examine his taste for fripperies and baubles, as well as for the more mundane necessities of life, but also to consider how much it actually cost to create an image of wealth and power in sixteenth-century Europe.

dressed in matching outfits of orange and white, the colours of his personal livery. The valets and squires, also dressed at his expense, wore black velvet. His horses were superbly caparisoned in black velvet embroidered with gold thread, their heads ornamented with plumes of black and white feathers. His dogs wore red leather collars studded with silver. Ippolito himself dressed superbly in coats lined with lynx, beaver and sable, robes of damask and velvet, and shirts of the finest embroidered linen trimmed with elegant lace. He carried an ornate inlaid arquebus, made for him in Cremona, its holster made of red leather imported from Brabant and its gilded powder flasks covered in green velvet decorated with green silk tassels and buttons. And he did not just look rich. Anyone who got close to Ippolito he would have been able to smell the expensive citrus and jasmine oils his barber applied to his beard and the extremely costly ambergris and musk that were used to perfume his expensive Spanish leather gloves.

In 1540 Ippolito was 31 years old, a wealthy and ambitious aristocrat with excellent career prospects and advantageous connections at the French court.1 He was the second son of Alfonso d’Este and Lucretia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, and he was brother to the current Duke of Ferrara, Ercole d’Este, who was married to Renée, the sister-in-law of Francis I. Destined for a career in the Church, he had been made Archbishop of Milan in 1519 (aged 9). He had been in France since 1536, where he had been sent by Duke Ercole who was determined to ensure the survival of his state in the political chaos created in Italy by the Habsburg-Valois wars: he made alliances with both protagonists (their younger brother Francesco went to join the court of Charles V). Ippolito had been an instant success at the French court, especially with the King. The two men shared many interests, not the least of which were hunting, women and gambling, and were soon close friends. Francis I showered Ippolito with benefices, including the prestigious archbishopric of Lyon and the valuable Abbey of Jumièges; he also appointed Ippolito to his Privy Council and used his influence with Pope Paul III to get Ippolito a cardinal’s hat.

Ippolito spent 23,041 scudi as he travelled across Europe in 1540 and his account book itemises this expenditure in minute detail. The new cardinal was fully aware of the importance of displaying an image of wealth and power: this paper will examine what he spent in three areas: on himself, on his household and on the presents he gave to other people. Ippolito was a conspicuously expensive dresser and during 1540 he spent 1,461 scudi on new clothes.2 Large quantities of stockings, shoes and slippers, and several pairs of leather boots for riding, were bought from specialist suppliers: a hatter in Rome was paid in March for a black taffeta and velvet hat ornamented with peacock feathers.3 But most of his outfits, his jackets, coats and breeches, were made by his personal tailor using materials bought in bulk by the wardrobe. The cost of this material, 1033 scudi, came to 70% of the total clothes account. Much of it was bought in Venice, where Ippolito could be sure of acquiring top quality damasks, velvets and satins. The ledger recorded several large consignments of these materials, which were sent in April from Venice to Ferrara, presumably to take to France. By the end of June more damasks and velvets were needed which Ippolito bought from a merchant in Paris. Like most cardinals of the period, his colour-preference was for red, which he bought in a range of shades, invariably dyed with expensive kermes dye (made from insect bodies and imported to

Ippolito spent most of 1540 travelling. In January he was in Rome, having arrived at the papal court in October 1539 to attend the ceremonies that formally invested him as a cardinal. He left Rome in March and spent ten days in Ferrara preparing for his return to France. He arrived in Lyon on May 17th and made his formal entry as the new Archbishop; he left five days later going north to Fontainebleau to join the French court and spent the rest of the year with Francis I on his leisurely progress around northern France, returning to Fontainebleau for Christmas. Ippolito travelled in style. Twelve pack mules plus two horse-drawn carts carried his baggage, all packed in specially-made travelling cases made of wood and covered with red, green or black leather. His six grooms were

2

Archivio di Stato di Modena, Camera Ducale, Amministrazione Principi [hereafter ASM.CDAP], vol.935, ff.23v-37r. Sixteenth-century currencies were complex. This account book was kept in gold scudi, with fractions expressed in local currencies: the gold scudo was worth 105 baiocchi in Rome, 71 soldi in Ferrara and 45 sous in France. To simplify my text I have converted all sums to gold scudi, and rounded them up where necessary. 3 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.23v.

1 On Ippolito, see V.Pacifici, Ippolito d’Este, Cardinale di Ferrara, Tivoli, 1920.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Venice from the Middle East (Arabic: qirmiz) rather than the cheaper European grana – dark red (morello), brilliant red (rosso), reddish-brown (bruno); he also favoured a tawny-orange (alionato) and black; there is no mention of anything for himself in blue or green. These shades of red were also predominant in the wardrobes of other cardinals: Paul II had decreed in 1464 that kermes was ‘the cardinal’s purple, even though it be red’.4

two deacons who would assist him at mass.8 The contract with a merchant in Paris, outlined in the ledger, specified a total cost of 1000 scudi, with 300 scudi as an advance. Each piece was to be made of dark red velvet, embroidered with figures in silver and silk, with Ippolito’s coat-of-arms emblazoned in gold and silver against a background which was to be filled with suns embroidered in gold: the altarcloths were also to be threaded with pearls.

At the end of the clothing account is a list of the items made by the tailor during the year – a total of forty new garments.5 It did not include Ippolito’s breeches, which were mostly in red or black velvet, nor his fine white linen shirts. Only two items were recognisably religious: a mozzetta made of dark-red satin and a bright red camurro. Amongst the other garments were a coat-dress (zimarra) of dark-red damask, a bright-red riding-coat (saltinbarcha) lined with fox fur and trimmed with sable, and a nightgown (vesta da notte) lined with sable. There were also six short jackets (giuppone), made of taffeta or satin, three of which were padded with silk, and twenty-four robes of various types (seven robbe, six veste and eleven saglii). The cost of the materials ranged from 25 scudi for a black velvet saglio to 60 scudi for a dark-red damask vesta with wide French sleeves; the tailor charged about 1 ½ scudi per item, though the padded jackets, which involved a lot more work, cost as much as 14 scudi to make. Many of the saglii were lined with fur and must have looked particularly impressive: one of black velvet was lined with black lambskin and trimmed with sable, another of dark red velvet was trimmed with lynx , a bright red velvet saglio was lined with fox fur and trimmed with sable, and one of red satin was similarly lined and trimmed. Fur was surprisingly cheap. The furrier’s bill for OctoberDecember 1540 came to 152 scudi: he charged 12 scudi for the 7 ½ fox pelts used to line the red satin saglio and 21 scudi for the 1 ¾ sable pelts: at 12 scudi a pelt, sable was only slightly cheaper than lynx, which cost 13 scudi. 6

And there were other, less costly, ways which Ippolito used to display his prestige. For the annual Carnival parade in Rome, he commissioned an elaborate float, converting a cart to look like a ship under sail, adorned with festoons and flowers, and manned by a crew of children; the cost, over 46 scudi, included nails, wood and rope as well as clothes for the children and the rent of the sails from a sail-maker down by the Tiber. 9 He bought an antique bronze head of Emperor Vitellius from the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini for 20 scudi and paid him 114 scudi for a set of four silver candlesticks.10 His cardinal’s biretta, symbol of his new status, was kept in a wooden hatbox, appropriately covered in red leather, for which he paid 1 ½ scudi to a scabbard-maker in Rome; he spent 4 scudi on a little silver-decorated flute and bought a parrot for 6 scudi, an exotic, though somewhat frivolous purchase which cost the equivalent of six months wages for one of his grooms.11 A carpenter in Ferrara received 7 scudi for making a walnut four-poster camp bed, a walnut box for his antique medals and a wooden case for his bed linen.12 He also spent just under 10 scudi on his new Cremonese arquebus, together with its red leather holster and gilded powder flasks in their green velvet bags.13 The prime vehicle for the display of rank in sixteenthcentury Europe was the household. Ippolito’s household in 1540 numbered about 150 persons, larger than the average of 100 for a cardinal in the sixteenth century, and large for a man of his age, but not outrageously so.14 His account book reveals precisely why a household was such a key indicator of status: its costs were substantial and they accounted for over 50% of Ippolito’s expenditure in 1540.

Gloves were another major expense. Ippolito spent 90 scudi on gloves, and the perfumes used to scent them, mostly bought one of the squires whose sole responsibility seems to have been taking care of the collection. He spent 10 scudi on a dozen pairs of Spanish gloves, bought from a Jewish merchant in Mantua, and the substantial sum of 48 scudi on musk and ambergris, purchased in Venice for the trip to France: at 12 scudi an ounce, ambergris was a serious statement of wealth, the same sum could buy 284 ounces of the citrus and jasmine oils that Ippolito used to perfume his beard.7 Easily the most expensive item he bought that year was a matching set of altarcloths for his chapel, a chasuble and cope for himself and outfits for the

The most obvious cost of a household, though not the largest component, was the salary bill, which came to 1,665 scudi.15 At the top of the social hierarchy came the courtiers, many of whom were Ferrarese nobles, from 8

ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.58v. ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.63v-64r. 10 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.45r, 124v. 11 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.48r, 54v, 66v; for the groom’s wages, see below. 12 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.51r. 13 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.50r, 53r. 14 On cardinals’ households in Italy, see Lowe, op.cit; L.Byatt, ‘The Concept of Hospitality in a Cardinal’s Household in Renaissance Rome’, Renaissance Studies, 2 (1988), pp.312-20; D. Chambers, A Renaissance Cardinal and His Worldly Goods, London, 1992; on the household of Ippolito’s grandfather, see T.Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este 1471-1505 and the Invention of a Ducal Capital, Cambridge, 1996, pp.30-43. 15 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.129v-133r; for the salary list for 1540-1, see ASM.CDAP, vol.902. 9

4 K.J.P.Lowe, Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy. The Life and Career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini 1453-1524, Cambridge, 1993, p.230. 5 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.35r-36r. 6 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.36v-37r. 7 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.52r, 53v; for the price of citrus & jasmine oils, see f.50r.

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Mary Hollingsworth: Materializing Power - Cardinal Ippolito D’Este in 1540 scudi,20 over six times the amount he spent on salaries. The household accounts for the four months from December 1539 to March 1540 that Ippolito spent in Rome totalled 4,844 scudi, an average of just over 8 scudi per head per month and equivalent to eight months salary for one of his grooms. Nearly 25% (1,052 scudi) was spent on wheat, which was exceptionally expensive that winter as a result of poor harvests that had forced Paul III to allow merchants to import grain and to raise the price from below 5 scudi to 8 scudi a rubbio (2.3 hectolitres).21 Ippolito’s next largest expense was wine (862 scudi), which he bought at several different prices. Rough wine for the lower levels of the household (vino corso) cost around 1 scudo a barrel. He also bought vino greco from Ischia and Somma at 2 ½ scudi a barrel; according to Paul III’s cellarman, the Pope himself liked to drink this wine with his meals, and he used it every morning to rinse his eyes and wash his virile parts.22 Ippolito also imported French wine at 5 ½ scudi a barrel and bought really expensive wine from Albano at 7 scudi a barrel, presumably for his own personal use. The household ate a lot of meat (818 scudi) and fish (636 scudi). No contracts with suppliers survive from 1540 but they do from other periods: in Rome again in 1566, his butchers delivered live cows as well as veal, beef, mutton, pork and pork fat, capons, hens, pullets, pigeons, geese and rabbits, while his fishmongers supplied sea and freshwater fish, raising the prices of both by 25% during Lent.23 Other expenses included 353 scudi to his spice merchants, which included a total of 149 scudi for medicines, 234 scudi on firewood, 43 scudi for candles and 16 scudi to the laundresses who washed the huge quantities of dirty bed and table linen.

families with long traditions of service at the Este court. The highest salary, 150 scudi a year, went to his secretary; two gentlemen, Count Niccolò Tassone and Scipione d’Este, a distant relative, both earned 100 scudi. Other courtiers, such as the major-domo, the steward, the master of the stables, the valets and squires all earned 30-40 scudi a year. Several of them earned no salary at all but had incomes from other sources: Ippolito’s treasurer and master of the wardrobe, Tomaso Mosto, had been rewarded for his services with benefices in Ippolito’s archbishoprics of Milan and Lyon, and Ippolito also paid the cost of registering these benefices in Mosto’s name at the Curia.16 Below the courtiers came the officials such as the purveyor (the spenditore) and those responsible for the running of the kitchen and dining-room, as well as the men who worked under the masters of the wardrobe and the stables. Ippolito employed five cooks as well as a French pastry chef, two wine waiters, two men to look after the larder and two men who took charge of cooking, laying out and serving the credenza, the elaborate cold table that was such a feature of Italian dining at this period. His officials also included a French tailor, an Italian barber, two falconers, two kennel-men, a saddler, a farrier and two other assistants in the stables. Most of the officials earned in the region of 15 scudi a year, but there were two notable exceptions, both of whom played significant roles in the creation of Ippolito’s image: his French tailor, who was paid 48 scudi a year, and his chief cook, who earned 24 scudi. Also part of the household were Ippolito’s five grooms, who earned 12 scudi a year, and five musicians, whose salaries ranged from 15-40 scudi. At the bottom of the scale were the servants and stable boys who could expect to earn about 5 scudi a year.

Another of the accounts in the 1540 ledger detailed the 386 scudi that Ippolito spent on other items for his household.24 All the pages and the boy sopranos had their heads washed at least once a month – presumably for lice. There were also doctor’s bills. One of the French boy sopranos broke his collarbone in Cremona in April and it cost 12 soldi (less than ¼ scudo) to fix it: he got ill again in October, this time with an eye infection, and Ippolito gave him 4 scudi so that he could go home to Pontoise to recover, sending another 4 scudi in December when he was well enough to rejoin the court.25

There were also a number of other people who earned no salaries but lived as part of the household, such as his three French boy sopranos, ten pages and the many servants of his courtiers, who were paid wages by their masters. One page, Pompilio Caracciolo, was promoted to valet in Rome and by October he had become under stable-master.17 Also in this category was a Gascon stocking-maker, who billed Ippolito for his work.18 Another was Cellini, who had met Ippolito in France in 1537, and been given an advance on a commission for a silver basin and jug; he had used the money to return to Rome, where he was imprisoned by Paul III on a charge of stealing papal jewels. 19 Ippolito engineered his release in November 1539 and Cellini moved into Ippolito’s palace, where a workshop was installed so that he could start on the silver basin and jug, a present for Francis I (see below).

The major expense in this account was clothes, which Ippolito gave to several members of the household as part of their salaries – and as part of his own appearance. Shoes and stockings were supplied regularly to the men in 20

ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.4v-13r. M.M.Bullard, ‘Grain Supply and Urban Unrest in Renaissance Rome: The Crisis of 1533-34’, in P.A.Ramsey (ed.), Rome in the Renaissance, Binghamton NY, 1982, pp.279-92, pp.281, 283 & passim. 22 M.Rinaldi & M.Vicini, Buon Appetito, Your Holiness: The Secrets of the Papal Table, London, 1998, p.222. 23 On Ippolito’s food supplies in 1566, see M.Hollingsworth, ‘Ippolito d’Este: A Cardinal and His Household in Rome and Ferrara in 1566’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), pp.1-22. 24 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.69v-93r. 25 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.92v, 111v, 112r.

By far the largest expense in maintaining a large household was the cost of its upkeep. Ippolito’s expenditure on food and wine, and the other household items, came to 10,822

21

16

ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.47v, 48r. ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.48v, 70r, 95r. 18 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.32v-33r. 19 On Cellini and Ippolito, see C.Hope & A.Nova (eds.), The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Oxford, 1983, pp.112-17; see also J.Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, London, 1985. 17

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies second only to the papal Palazzo Venezia at S. Marco.33 Ippolito’s agent in Rome had spent 2,400 scudi preparing the palace: the rooms were all cleaned and whitewashed, new locks were fitted to Ippolito’s doors and new glass put into his windows (his staff had theirs relined with cheap cloth).34 He also bought new furniture and kitchen equipment. The two most expensive items were wine and mattresses. He spent 450 scudi filling up Ippolito’s wine cellar, over half on three large consignments of vino greco, and 350 scudi on mattresses. Although many of the less important officials and servants shared beds, they were still a considerable outlay: Ippolito’s own mattress was made of expensive wool, the servants had straw palliasses. Ippolito also had to pay the exorbitant costs of transporting 150 people and their baggage across Italy and France. The cost of the mules, carts and men needed for the trip from Ferrara to Lyon (a 29-day journey) came to 80 scudi; and he spent another 520 scudi renting carts and mules from mid-May to December while he accompanied Francis I around France.35

charge of the dogs, as well as to their three assistants, to the valets (who also got leather boots for the journey to France), to the pages and to the boy sopranos, who got through 23 pairs of shoes during the year, in addition to their new leather boots. Some of the men also got clothes. The dog handlers had jackets made of coarse black cloth, cotton blouses and woollen hats, which they wore with red stockings; a similar black jacket was made for the pastrycook.26 Pompilio Caracciolo, the new valet, was given three black velvet robes (saglii), a black silk hat and an orange satin jacket, in addition to his new blouses, shoes, boots and stockings.27 The black velvet robes were valuable enough to be pawned: in January Ippolito had to repay a Jewish money lender (with 11 % interest) after another valet borrowed 7 scudi using his robe as security.28 The grooms, pages and the boy sopranos were dressed in orange and white, the colours of Ippolito’s personal livery, over which they wore cloaks for travelling: grey cloth slashed with grey velvet for the grooms and pages, red and black for the sopranos. These cloaks were also not cheap: Ippolito had to spend 8 scudi on a new one for a page who lost his on the road between Lyon and Paris.29

One of the most public statements of wealth and power in the sixteenth century was the act of giving, and Ippolito was suitably generous in his alms and presents. The alms account, which amounted to 224 scudi, detailed his charity to the needy.36 He gave money to the ill, to pilgrims and to priests and nuns, to churches where he heard mass or viewed relics, and one of the grooms was given sums every few days to dispense to the poor. In February and March he also paid 25 scudi to the fund which Paul III levied from cardinals in Rome to distribute to the city’s poor; in Lyon he gave a substantial sum, 20 scudi, to the Hôtel-deDieu.

Ippolito’s official entry into Lyon in May was an important occasion for display. New outfits were ordered for the grooms, pages and sopranos: jackets in orange and white striped velvet, with matching stockings and red hats for the grooms, robes for the pages, and stockings, all in Ippolito’s colours, for the pages and sopranos.30 Most of the clothes were made with material already in stock in the wardrobe, but Ippolito still had to pay out 5 scudi for the hats for the grooms and 27 scudi to the shopkeeper in Lyon who supplied the stockings. A month later Ippolito’s tailor was busy again making new outfits for the party’s arrival at the French court: he was sent on ahead in order to make the clothes in time for their arrival and put in a bill to cover his travelling expenses.31 This time the material had to be bought in Paris, where the tailor spent 58 scudi on cloth for Spanish-style capes for the grooms, decorated with wide stripes of orange velvet and white taffeta, and red coats, slashed with black velvet, and sleeves and collars alla Francese for the boy sopranos.32

Not surprisingly, his offerings in the secular arena were considerably more lavish: he spent over 1853 scudi on tips and presents.37 Tipping was standard practice for services rendered, and the size of the tip reflected not only the donor’s liberality but also the status of the recipient. Large sums went to the staff of the many places where he received hospitality during his travels. He gave 30 scudi to members of the households of Paul III and the other Farnese families in Rome over Christmas, 18 scudi to the Duke of Urbino’s staff in Pesaro, and 84 scudi to members of the Duke of Mantua’s household who looked after him over the two nights he spent in Mantua and Cane.38 Another large tip, totalling 75 scudi, went to a company of actors in Rome who staged two plays during Carnival.39 Other, more modest, tips went to musicians and dancers who entertained Ippolito on his journey, to innkeepers, to guides who led the party across the Alps, to several May

And there were other expenses involved in running a household, particularly one that moved around. There is no evidence in the account book of what rent, if any, Ippolito paid his cousin, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, for the use of his palace on the Corso in Rome, but it was a grand residence in a prestigious location: a tax levied on the owners of all the palaces on the Corso in 1538 to finance improvements to the street had assessed Gonzaga’s palace

33

R.Lanciani, La Via del Corso dirizzata ed abellita nel 1538 da Paolo III, Rome 1903, pp.18-19. 34 ASM.CDAP, vol.870. 35 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.59v-60r, 66r. 36 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.17v-21r. 37 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.99v-113v; see also N.Z.Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Oxford, 2000. 38 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.100r, 102v, 104v, 105r. 39 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.100v.

26

ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.69v, 70r, 70v, 72v, 81v. ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.76v, 81v. ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.92v. 29 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.81v, 93r. 30 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.74r, 74v, 81v. 31 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.120r-v. 32 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.75r. 27 28

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Mary Hollingsworth: Materializing Power - Cardinal Ippolito D’Este in 1540

Queens in France, and to the many ferrymen who transported the household across the rivers of Europe. He paid ½ scudo to the owner of a dog which covered one of his bitches and ¼ scudo to a woman who accommodated him in her house for half a day while he was out hunting with the King.40 Some tips were more official. The sum of 20 scudi was paid to the usher of Francis I’s Privy Council when Ippolito joined it in August 154041 and, perhaps the oddest tip of all, 100 scudi went to the priest of Lyon Cathedral for docking the tail of the mule Ippolito had ridden into the city during his official entry: the entry in the ledger stated that this was the custom of the place and that earlier archbishops had established the price for this service.42

Ippolito gave two presents to Francis I in 1540: Cellini’s basin and jug, and a bronze copy of the antique statue of the Spinario on the Capitol in Rome. Cellini was paid nearly 75 scudi to cover the cost of gilding his basin and jug, but there are no other payments for his work: Ippolito may well have taken into account the fact that he had already spent over 92 scudi on Cellini’s travel expenses, salaries and clothes for his assistants in Rome, as well as the costs of setting up workshops in both Rome and Ferrara.48 The copy of the Spinario was made by two Florentine sculptors, and the contract seems to have been arranged by Cellini: Ippolito paid 100 scudi in advances to the sculptors, and he also paid 2 scudi to one of Francis I’s carpenters for an elaborate tripod with a turn-table on top to display the statue.49

Tips were also given to the people who brought presents to Ippolito. He received an interesting range of gifts: wine and fruit from the Princess of Salerno, a basket of salad from Girolamo Orsini, lemons from the brothers of San Benedetto Po in Mantua and a bunch of flowers from a girl in a French village.43 Perhaps more to his taste were the various animals given to him by members of the papal and French courts, expensive gifts designed explicitly to cement political relationships. He received horses from Pier Luigi Farnese, Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi and Galeotto Pico della Mirandola, whose son as later to marry Ippolito’s daughter, a mule from Anne de Montmorency, Francis I’s Grand Constable, fourteen hunting dogs from the Comte de St-Pol, and more horses from the Dauphin, the King of Navarre and the Duc d’Orléans.44

Ippolito’s total expenditure in 1540 (23,041 scudi) was only just covered by the income of 23,569 scudi received by his treasurer during the year.50 Only 9,200 scudi came from his benefices (Lyon yielded 3,500 scudi and the Abbey of Jumièges brought in 1,886 scudi); much of the rest was money from his estates in Ferrara, forwarded to France by his factor. But Ippolito also had another source of income: one entry detailed the sum of 2,114 scudi which was the profit he had made gambling over the past twelve months, mostly playing cards and betting on real tennis matches, a favourite sport of both Ippolito and Francis I. This was an enormous sum – 10% of his income – and it gives us a surprising insight into the character of this extravagant cardinal on the eve of the CounterReformation.

Ippolito’s own presents tended towards luxury pieces. A boy of Paul III’s buffoon was given a very smart outfit worth nearly 14 scudi, comprising a turquoise velvet jacket, with matching breeches, stockings and hat.45 Cardinal Enrique Borgia, who had been made a cardinal at the same time as Ippolito, received a particularly expensive dark-red damask coat-dress and matching robe: we have no precise cost for this as it was made with materials from the wardrobe, but the damask for similar garments made for Ippolito came to nearly 120 scudi.46 He spent 190 scudi on perfumed rosaries made of gold and gold thread, which were intended for ladies at the French court; other items in the gift account for which the recipients were not named included two clocks, bought in Rome for 100 scudi, ten expensive pairs of black and white silk slippers (20 scudi), a gilded scabbard (15 scudi), a sword (21 scudi), and ambergris and musk (25 scudi) to perfume nine pairs of gloves.47

40

ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.109v, 110r. ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.109v. 42 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, f.107r. 43 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.100v, 104v, 106v. 44 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.100r, 101v, 104r-v, 109r, 109v, 111v. 45 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.99v, 113r. 46 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.104r, 113r; for Ippolito’s garments, see ff.27v, 33v. 47 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.103r-v, 105r, 105v, 108v, 109r, 112r, 112v. 41

48

ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.9v, 43v, 44r, 44v, 49v, 63v, 64v, 102r, 113r. ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.45r, 48v, 111v. 50 ASM.CDAP, vol.935, ff.1r-4r. 49

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174

The Origins of Art Paul Jordan provision of their graves. The graves of the Levantine moderns cannot in themselves be distinguished from those of the Neanderthalers by a greater sophistication of construction - any more than their hearths or their shared Mousterian tool kits. But, in contrast with the Neanderthal dead, there seems no doubt that the Mount Carmel moderns sometimes furnished their departeds’ graves with provisions of an ideological content. Some of these graves do appear to have contained animal parts that were intentionally buried with the dead: a man of some forty years lay on his back with the jaw bone of a wild boar in his arms; a child was buried with the skull and antlers of a deer. There are associations of ochre and marine shells with some of the burials. Contrary to bold claims made in the past for Neanderthal burials in Europe and Asia, there are no indisputable cases of the provision of grave goods in any Neanderthal graves and no clear instances of burials that really amount to more than disposal except in the (very likely late) Neanderthal ‘cemetery’ of la Ferrassie in France. This provision of grave goods for some of the Levantine early moderns hints at the development of novelties in the mental sphere, with the possibility of a more conscious awareness of death and capacity for symbolic handling of provision for the dead in an imagined afterlife. There is no art here (despite the ochre and shells), but there are inklings of attitudes related to artistic production and suggestions of a more human social environment, of the modern sort, than the Neanderthalers evince.

In all the long story of human evolution, there is no record of anything that could be called art before about 40,000 years ago. Only some ambiguous scratchings and peckings of marks on bone and stone, only a few collections of quartz crystals or bear teeth, only the occasional hoarding of lumps of ochre and other colouring materials can be called in to suggest even the most tentative foreshadowings of artistic production through the hundreds of thousands of years of Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Representatives of the fully modern species of humanity we call Homo sapiens sapiens had themselves been on earth, as far as we can see, for something like 50,000 years before getting round to art. But when they did, it was spectacular from the beginning. The fact that physically modern humanity took so long to achieve art, as we may apprehend the situation with hindsight, is a puzzle prompting fruitful speculation. There are human skeletal remains from Africa and, in particular, from the area of Mount Carmel in Israel, that date from 90,000 years or more ago and are anatomically so like all modern forms of man even in the detailed shapes and sizes of their skulls that it is very difficult to believe that their brains were not built along just the same lines as our own and capable of operating in the same ways. And yet the Mount Carmel moderns lived alongside Neanderthal folk (or at least came and went in the same region) with whom they shared an almost identical way of life, making the same Mousterian tools through many tens of millennia. Whatever their modern-looking brains were capable of, it would appear that they were not yet being employed in the interests of very much more than those of their predecessors and more backward-looking contemporaries. Some people have speculated that there were yet to come some crucial rewirings, as it were, of brain neurology by means of mutation and natural selection that are not apparent to us in the fossils we have to deal with. Perhaps the Mount Carmel ‘moderns’ were to begin with only a human variant with the potential for further, invisible, brain evolution during the next tens of thousands of years, not realised at the beginning of their career. On the other hand, this was a time when, in competition with the Neanderthalers of western Asia and Europe, there would have been a selective premium on cleverness in all the strategies of life, so it is more than likely that the distinctive character of the early moderns of Africa and the Near East carried selective advantages of some sort from the start.

Rather than speculating about further neurological evolution in the brains of the moderns between the time of their first appearance about one hundred thousand years ago and the spectacular début of the Upper Palaeolithic way of life, with an abundance of personal decoration and art, after 40,000 BP (before the present), we might perhaps better conclude for the moment that the moderns were long capable of that cultural flowering (and everything of the same sort since) but that culture itself - and not necessarily brain wiring - needed to evolve over a long period to the point of prompting its own surge in the hands (and brains) of people who were up to it. In 90,000 BP, the Upper Palaeolithic had simply not yet been invented and very likely it required a long period of build-up - particularly perhaps in the sophisticated use of language - to reach the point where it could be invented. It is interesting to note that some (though only a few) of the last of the Neanderthal types in Europe adopted at the very end a sort of reduced Upper Palaeolithic culture with elements of personal decoration (something for which they show no previous propensity) in the form of pierced animal teeth - a development they almost certainly took to as a result of acculturation from the Aurignacian moderns with whom they briefly shared the region of south-west France and northern Spain at around 35,000 BP. It is as though their brains could never have hit upon this sort of thing for

If there is anything at all to suggest that the moderns of the Mount Carmel caves had an edge over the Neanderthal people of the same area then the evidence lies in an apparently somewhat better judged hunting strategy, that saw them taking their prey mostly in the summer (whereas the Neanderthalers just scraped by with an all-year-round grind of foraging) and - perhaps more significantly - in the 175

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies have been at work in varying degrees from the monkey to the fully human ends of the spectrum among our evolving hominid ancestors as well. Observation of monkey troupes or bands of apes makes it clear that individuals prosper by their mentally-rooted capacity for buttering one another up and deceiving each other, for cooperation and selfishness as it suits, for forming alliances and breaking them in season, for second-guessing the intentions of their fellows and dissembling where their own are concerned.

themselves, but they could just about see the point of it (or some of it) when faced with a living example. This is not to degrade the achievements of the Neanderthalers but only to highlight the gulf that divides their behaviour from our own, particularly in the area of the sort of symbolic endeavour involved in personal adornment and the making of art. Both of these activities carry a strong symbolic content that points to complex mental performance, and personal adornment has further implications of consciousness, both of self and of others, about it that we are entitled to think must lie close to the secret of modern humanity’s evolutionary success. To decorate oneself in a social context is to be more aware of oneself, more self-conscious, and to invite others’ awareness, consciousness of oneself; to recognise the decoration of others it to be more conscious of their selves and more conscious of oneself in relation to them.

All this calls for great brain power to run experimental models of behaviour and consequences in the ‘mind’, with the back-up of good memory. Thus, we may speculate, there came about a peculiarly social sort of ‘consciousness’, very bright and inventive in the sphere of social intercourse, but not embracing any other aspects of life such as technicalities like fruit picking, sex per se (beyond jockeying for opportunities), or toolmaking when it joined the range of primate accomplishments. It is interesting to hear that vervet monkeys, for example, are finely focussed on their social dealings, but relatively dense about much else in their lives including dangers from their enemies that look obvious to us. Social consciousness, according to this surmise, was the first sort of consciousness: its most basically useful sort. Natural selection would eventually find other uses for subsequent extensions of consciousness beyond the purely social sphere, but consciousness was initially selected for its social usefulness.

Consciousness is a notoriously difficult thing to pin down, let alone explain. Some people have concluded that consciousness can in the nature of things get no further with an examination of itself than simply be itself: that as conscious beings we can only be conscious that we are conscious, and leave it at that. Trying to look further into the matter is rather like gazing into a hall of mirrors, with the added difficulty that our consciousness is constantly changing from moment to moment throughout our lives. For all that, from an evolutionary point of view we can see how the appearance among our ancestors of this presidentially executive aspect of mentality, with its ability to oversee and juggle a great many of the varied sensations and impulses at work in us, might well have conferred great advantage on its possessors over individuals in whom it was more weakly developed, or not at all.

The evolution of full humanity is indeed the history of the extension of the social sort of consciousness dimly seen already in our primate relatives (in particular, close ones like the bonobo chimpanzees) to a wide range of other experiences in all aspects of our lives. (We are not, of course, conscious of the operations of our autonomic nervous systems or by definition of the machinations of the unconscious parts of our minds.) We may conjecture that each successive species of evolving humanity, with increase of brain size, added to the complexity of its capabilities in, say, toolmaking and hunting and gathering and shelter building alongside an ever elaborated social consciousness - but, crucially, without much progress towards an integration of all these separate domains of mental capability into a single conscious experience of life no longer tied exclusively to social dealings. Language probably remained an almost entirely socially-concerned affair (to this day it retains its pre-eminent role as a form of social ‘grooming’), without much application to the business of toolmaking, for example, which was carried out on automatic pilot, so to speak. We might cite the Neanderthal folk as the last and best in this line, who had become by 60,000 BP a population of big-brained huntergatherers capable of existing in the harsh climate of ice age Europe and Asia and given, on occasion at least, to supporting their infirm and burying their dead with some care and concern. But they created no art of any kind that we can recognise and, left to themselves, were evidently uninterested in the suggestive subtleties of personal decoration with manufactured adornments. The best we

The current surmise of students of our ancestors’ mental evolution is that consciousness (or, more accurately, a particular prototype form of it) arose in a strictly social context. It is contended that, among all orders and genera, the cleverest species are the most socially organised and that among primates, in particular, the already honed brains of creatures with precise stereoscopic vision and adeptly manipulative hands were further improved by the selective pressures of group living. Society brings liabilities in the form of disagreement and competition and risk of disease by contiguity, but also benefits in the shape of cooperation, mutual support, stimulation and shared defence. Social relationships, whether between sexual partners and rivals or relatives, allies and enemies within the group, are an important part of primate life; monkeys, let alone apes, show a keen awareness of close kinship, for example. The demands of social life probably played as big a part in the evolution of quick-wittedness among the higher primates as did stereoscopic vision and manual dexterity in securing food. The ability to operate with subtlety in social relations, on the basis of what we can only call ‘imaginative’ rehearsals of social interactions in the ‘mind’s eye’, is of advantage not just to human beings but on a reduced scale to apes and monkeys too, and must 176

Paul Jordan: The Origins of Art

contemporaries for natural selection to vigorously perpetuate and promote the genetic mutations that made them what they were. At any rate, it is clear that, once the Crô-Magnons were arrived in Western Europe, it took only a few thousand years for their superiority in winning their subsistence and bringing up their offspring to marginalise and see off the last of the Neanderthalers, without necessarily any wars or exterminations.

can do for them is to acknowledge that they may have daubed their bodies with natural pigments (though there’s no proof of it) and they may have maintained an awe of bears that reached a symbolic expression in a very few instances that have come down to us (though the evidence is ambiguous). We would be wrong, however, to see the Neanderthalers as evolution’s final stumbling block on the way to integrated consciousness in the modern way. For, as we noted at the beginning, there are fossil remains of human beings physically to all intents exactly like ourselves (and contemporary for tens of thousands of years in their respective spheres with the Neanderthalers) who for a very long time exhibit little or no difference in their behaviour as witnessed in the archaeological record from the Neanderthal people and their mutual ancestors like Homo erectus. How did these first representatives of the modern species Homo sapiens sapiens come to extend a sociallygenerated sort of consciousness into many other domains of activity and experience alongside their social dealings? And thereby bring their newly integrated minds - the first minds in our sense - creatively to bear on a range of things like fashions in toolmaking, specialised hunting strategies, sophisticated burial customs, long-distance trade with other communities, elaborate personal adornment and dress, and even art and implied religion?

The best candidate for the role of forcing agent, as it were, in the selectively crucial development of the integrated consciousness is language. It appears that the Neanderthalers were physically capable of speech, though perhaps with a less clear articulation of the full range of vowels and consonants available to us, and it is overwhelmingly likely that they did speak - but only a socially-concerned ‘language’ of a very limited scope (limited even in its social application in line with the limitations of Neanderthal society, and with next to nothing beyond the social). Our use of language is capable of handling an impressive range of matters from the immediately practical to the highly abstract, but it has been persuasively argued that it evidently rests on no very exalted mental endowment, rather on a technical capacity of the brain, inherent in almost every one of us however disadvantaged in terms of physiology or education. Notyet-educated children and also some natural-born idiots (otherwise terribly limited in their mental possibilities) display a well-established capacity to wield even complex grammatical construction, if sometimes only in the interest of uttering fluent nonsense. A series of genetic mutations that enhanced this language capacity up to its present rate would have been powerfully selected by nature as a means of improving the social interactions of our ancestors in the line of Homo sapiens sapiens with clear survival benefits: at the same time, the complex language skills so developed might have been precisely the tool needed to bring into consciousness the formerly more or less unconscious domains of mental activity devoted to the technical businesses of toolmaking, hunting, cooking, breeding, child-rearing and so forth. A rudimentary sort of language, handling only social scenarios on behalf of a sociallyorientated form of consciousness, thus became a complex language, capable of putting all experience into words in a symbolic expression that could be manipulated by a general form of consciousness, no longer exclusively (if still largely) with a social focus.

Evidently integration of mind was in place by about 50,000 BP, to judge by the striking innovations in technology that initiate the Upper Palaeolithic sequence at that time - and there followed the flowering of all the cultural traits outlined above, together with the spread of humanity to places like Australia and the Americas where no presence of earlier forms of human being is obvious. Like nothing else (in the absence of written records which only begin about five-and-a-half thousand years ago) the appearance of works of art conclusively demonstrates the arrival of the integrated mind of full humanity. What we have surmised to have started life as a purely socially-orientated form of consciousness and imagination, with the rest of human activity compartmentalised in the (unconscious) mind into domains of technical expertise or foraging procedures or sexual habits or child-nurturing instincts and so forth domains with little or no interaction and all unavailable to conscious reflection - now became a general consciousness in which everything that was available to it could be subjected to the workings of imagination. The inventiveness unleashed by the mental integration of Homo sapiens sapiens is most evident in the new and immensely varied tool types and in the works of art of, above all (despite the claims of very ancient decorative work in caves in Australia, for example), the Crô-Magnon people of Western Europe after about 35,000 BP. What their ancestors had been doing with their potentially inventive brains for 50,000 years or more before this time may not be clear, but we can be sure that natural selection had already set great store by it. Perhaps an accumulation of small clevernesses in getting their livings gave them just enough edge over their African (and, later, European)

The creative imagination that had previously been brought to bear only on the rehearsal of social concerns could now, through the medium of words, be applied to all the activities of the integrated mind. The dialogue could be both internal in one mind and external between minds. Our ancestors could henceforth talk and think, with passion, about their technologies, their hunting schemes, the ways of their prey, the sharing and preparing of their food, the attractions of their mates, their tribal relations, their encounters with strangers, the forces of nature, everything in their whole world. It was the ability to talk of all these things and think of all these things with 177

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies times. The oldest animal paintings of the Aurignacian caves are separated from the Gravettian figurines by more time than separates the Impressionists from the artists of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Though we can imagine that in that long time many a local genius (even a van Meegeren or two) and many a school must have arisen and been superseded, it is clear that certain motifs persist throughout this first great phase of artistic endeavour. There are overwhelmingly the animals of the CrôMagnons’ world, some much more heavily represented than others. (figs.1, 2 & 3) There are also the strikingly rendered figures of invariably adult human beings, sometimes rather bestially distorted to our eyes or hybridised with animals, there are the outlines of human hands, there are the in fact not so common but unmissable figurines of women, and finally there are the abstract ‘signs’ that some have interpreted as images of optical hallucination from migraines or trances or, in some suggestive cases, as depictions of female human sex organs. Whatever the meanings of individual pieces of this earliest art, and whether or not we can ever attain to those meanings, it seems clear that the creation of the art of the Upper Palaeolithic was driven by the fears and desires of its makers as they represented themselves to humanity in its earliest way of life, still close to its primate ancestry and without the complicating overlay of new influences that have arisen with farming, settled life, civilization, class division, religious authoritarianism and commerce. The images we are privileged still to encounter in the earliest art of humankind have a pristine character to them, a quality of primal imaginativeness and untrammelled directness of expression. In these works we see the first fruits of an imagination recently realised in an organism evolved in accordance with the biological mechanisms of random mutation, genetic inheritance and natural selection.

imaginative drive that brought the world the culture of the Upper Palaeolithic, including its art and religion. The difference between the early moderns of 90,000 years ago and the Crô-Magnon artists of 30,000 years ago resided in the fact that, by the time of the Crô-Magnons, the Upper Palaeolithic culture had been invented, thanks to the innate capabilities of the brains of Homo sapiens sapiens and the mediation of complex language. Minds dominated (as ours are still) by a long history of socially-orientated consciousness were bound to anthropomorphize everything that came their way, everything that now entered into the new general consciousness from the previously unintegrated and unconscious mental domains that were not concerned with social interactions. We are inveterate anthropomorphizers. We can scarcely restrain ourselves from imagining constantly what the other fellow is up to and the other fellow need not be human, not be a living creature, not even exist at all. We tend always to think that the whole universe about us is motivated by desires and purposes essentially like those of which we are conscious in ourselves and share between ourselves in talk. Magic and religion as well as art are products of this outlook - so, if we are not very careful, is science sometimes, too. The art of the Crô-Magnon people shows minds at work like ours. Instead of just foraging and breeding as best they could and without much awareness of it like the Neanderthal folk, the Crô-Magnon people made images by way of their minds’ eyes of the natural world of animals and men and (especially perhaps) women that was so important to them. For our present purpose, it hardly matters whether at one time or another it was hunting magic or fertility ritual or totemic initiation or sexual dualism or mother-earth religion or whatever that motivated their artistic production. The point is that they were realising their inner visions on the world outside themselves: on pieces of carved bone, on painted or sculpted cave walls, on shaped (and eventually fired) clay. They were able to have these inner visions and to give them outer form because the integration of their minds could bring together conscious experiences of, say, the hunt with conscious awareness of desires and purposes and conscious deployment of technical skills in their social context. And whatever the shifting motives of their artistic creation, it was always a matter of symbolic representation arising in conscious minds endowed with imaginations driven by human intentions and needs that could be talked about and thought about in a social setting.

These images of the earliest art show us what people first wanted to depict when biological evolution (chiefly of the brain) and cultural evolution (chiefly of language) had newly engineered the imaginative consciousness of Homo sapiens sapiens. Animals as potential prey, animals as totemic mysteries perhaps, animals hybridised with human beings, human hands (the agents of the art and nearly everything else they produced), women and sometimes their genitalia: these are the main components of the Upper Palaeolithic repertoire. Next to no scenes and no composed frames feature in this art and there is very little depiction of the plant world. With the exception of the not numerous signs and shapes that elude explanation, the Upper Palaeolithic art appears to be predominantly concerned with what we may call the animated component of the Crô-Magnonards’ world: the parts of it into which a human sort of animation could be read by these first exponents of the integrated human consciousness, the realm of human beings and of animals invested with human concerns. The human figures, faces, hands, sexual parts are not nearly as common as the animal depictions and, interestingly, when they occur they are never treated to the degree of ‘realism’ that some of the animal pictures and many of the animal carvings display. The paintings

The world of the Crô-Magnon artists was a rich one which afforded, unusually for foraging people, a relatively easy and bountiful life. Their successors in post-glacial Europe and their confrères leading the hunter-gatherer way of life in other parts of the world rarely if ever had it so good. This in part, at least, explains the magnificence of CrôMagnon art if we take it altogether from Aurignacian through Gravettian and Solutrean to Magdalenian times: an immense span of more than 20,000 years, with something like a thousand generations of human experience; a lot of living and feeling even for the small populations of the 178

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and engravings of human figures, and more so of faces, often have a sketchy and, in fact, theriomorphic look to them (some male figures are ithyphallic and, in one case at least, apparently shot with arrows) and there is considerable exaggeration of secondary sexual features in the female figurines with skimpiness of detail in faces and extremities. If many of the human depictions have a faintly bestial look to them, there are others in which the human is explicitly hybridised with the animal. One of the earliest and most striking pieces of Upper Palaeolithic carving from the Höhlenstein-Stadel cave in southern Germany (in mammoth ivory) shows a lion-headed human figure, and a half-man half-bison features in the recently discovered paintings of the Chauvet cave in France: both are over 30,000 years old. The anthropomorphizing tendency of these artists’ vision is clear in these and several more examples, as is the general fertility of their imaginations. I believe the animals so observantly engraved, painted, carved and modelled throughout the span of Upper Palaeolithic art were also credited with the same animation as the artists experienced within their own imaginative consciousnesses’: some more than others, which may help to explain the repertoire’s failure to match simply a hunter’s wish-list.

arise. The social cleverness of our more recent ancestors (especially the ones we share with the gorillas and various sorts of chimpanzee), managed by large and capable brains, has given rise in the grip of natural selection first to a social and then a general consciousness driven by imagination so as to be capable of producing art, indeed incapable of not doing so. It is incapable of not producing art since the mental operations that produce it are one and the same as those that have given us an edge in the struggle for survival: they enable the imaginative rehearsal of potential situations, loaded with emotional concerns, inside our heads, with a view to realising them (or avoiding them) in the world outside. From our most distant ancestry might have come inherited responses to certain colours, textures and shapes and even whole complexes of imagery that still operate within us in certain situations of fear and desire; to the more recent reaches of our evolution we might owe a powerful engagement with the iconography of animal vitality, sex and fecundity, conflict and death. That we make art at all and that we make the sort of art we do are both circumstances derived from our biological make-up, which itself has resulted from a long period of biological evolution as the certain sort of primate that we are. Hence the potential value of the perspective of evolutionary biology for the study of the history of art.

Since it came into being, the imaginative consciousness of the human race has only ever had, to work with, its own interior disposition - genetically derived - and its particular experience of the world around it in any given time and place, conditioned by environment. Whatever our genes hold within them to shape our fears and desires, the expression of these drives is only ever achieved in continual interaction with the world we find ourselves living in. For human beings, the environment is as much cultural as natural and usually makes its impact in a more cultural than natural fashion. If as we have suggested Homo sapiens sapiens became human because of culture (language especially, we aver), then we face with the CrôMagnons an expression of art already steeped in culture; indeed, it could not be otherwise. This is the art of huntergatherers living in small, but evidently interconnected, communities, with a keen eye on the natural world (its animal part in particular) on which they depended to exist at all. The very longevity of the Upper Palaeolithic tradition warns us that there was ample time for cultural elaboration of all sorts to take place and much of it must remain for ever quite unknown to us. Nevertheless, these artists were living closer to our primate ancestry than any have since and in a world that had nowhere seen any of the cultural developments associated with civilization which have now reached into practically every corner of the globe. What they wanted to do with their artistic impulse, taken together with consideration of how that impulse came about in the course of a particular branch of primate evolution, offers to illuminate our entire understanding of art and the history of art. The peculiar circumstances of primate evolution in the remote past with its development of stereoscopic colour vision and manual dexterity as selective advantages in food procurement, have established the ultimate basis upon which an art-making animal might 179

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Fig.1. Painted hands and horses at Pech-Merle, 25,000 BP (Photo by courtesy of Dr. Paul G. Bahn).

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Fig.2. Oxen in high relief at Fourneau du Diable, c.20,000 BP (Photo by courtesy of Dr. Paul G. Bahn).

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Fig.3. Bull’s Head, Lascaux, c.14,000 BP (Author’s own photograph)

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Tiepolo: Ambiguity and Imprecision Nigel Llewellyn I In the 1740s, visitors to Carlo Cordellina’s new country estate at Montecchio Maggiore near Vicenza were entertained amongst elegant surroundings dominated by sculptures and paintings on mythological and allegorical themes.1 Before the villa were the Bonazza’s stone figure groups amongst formal box hedges and inside the house started by Massari in 1735 - there were paintings by Tiepolo. In the main hall was a decorative illusionistic fresco, usually entitled “Fame’s Triumph over Time” (although for reasons which will become clear I prefer “The Triumph of Intelligence over Ignorance”) surrounded by six “chiari scuri” (or grisailles) of Warfare, Politics, Poetry, Music etc. In a rare letter dated 26 October 1743 2, Tiepolo refers to these works and reveals that, by then, half of the main picture itself was done. Tiepolo’s correspondent was Francesco Algarotti, a fellow Venetian, a truly international figure, a connoisseur, an entrepreneur and someone well-known in his day for his stylish popularising summary of Newtonian cosmology “Newtonismo per le Dame” (1737).3

moment immediately after Scipio’s act of clemency: showing the general, seated with Peace and Plenty at his feet and flanked by Minerva and Apollo (standing daresay for Wisdom and Enlightenment) and making a reassuring gesture of donation. The subject of this essay is a particular characteristic of Tiepolo’s visual language which tends to surface in an analysis of his manner of painting on occasions such as these and it leads to my main argument which is that he used ambiguity and imprecision in order to place a burden on the beholder to explore the narrative possibilities via an interpretative act, rather than by means of a single defintive meaning. II On the opposite wall to the Cordellina Scipio is a picture which illustrates this argument. Here Tiepolo takes his narrative from the history of Alexander the Great, in which Curtius Rufus tells how the family of the defeated Persian emperor Darius mistook the victor’s closest friend Hephaestion for Alexander himself and erroneously made obeisance to the wrong conqueror. Whereupon Alexander, not wanting to embarrass his friend but wishing to register his own restraint in the face of this potential insult disregarded the Persian’s lack of tact and simply denied the error with the words: “My Lady, you made no mistake. This man is Alexander too”.5 Alexander built on this gesture of moderation by treating the beautiful unmarried princesses in Darius’ household with the respect that he might have paid to his own sisters although, as Curtius wryly comments, Alexander was only rarely able to maintain such continence over the course of his short adult life.6

The Cordellina were socially ambitious and the villa’s central ground-floor space acted as a theatre for the family to fashion its status and both the allegories above and the mythologies on the wall take for their themes the liberality of judicial judgement, intended no doubt to reflect well on the patron’s competences as a lawyer and significant in view of what was a lively contemporary debate on the nature of the law in the Venetian Republic. In the mural showing the “Continence of Scipio” Tiepolo extols the virtues of Roman law as founded on natural principles and as a source of enlightenment to a backward people. Livy4 tells how Scipio, in the course of a campaign in New Carthage in Spain in 210 BC, and having guaranteed the safety of an elderly female captive, found his resolve severely tested by “a grown maiden of a beauty so extraordinary that wherever she went she drew the eyes of everyone”. Resisting the temptation to exercise his right, Scipio handed her over to her betrothed, unsullied both in reputation and person, and so won with his continence the loyalty of Rome’s former enemy. Tiepolo chooses the

The iconography at Montecchio falls into a kind of pattern repeated often in the history of early modern art: the exploitation by artists of classical mythology in order to explore the specific concerns of their patrons. The traditional application of the principle of decorum led to exactly these kind of decorative and instructive works in buildings like the Villa Cordellina7, whose owner was a Venetian lawyer, a class with substantial wealth but little direct political power. Carlo Cordellina claimed noble status and he was a beneficiary of the will of the last of the Manin, one of whose number had served as Doge in 16461655. But the subject of this essay is the issues raised by an analysis of Tiepolo’s narrative style. Since the later seventeenth century, “Alexander at the Tent of Darius” had

•

Some of the ideas presented here were first shared with an audience at “Art/Literature Interfaces: A Classics Research Seminar” held at the University of Bristol in March 1993. I was grateful to be invited to that event and to benefit from the discussions held there. 1 See Michelangelo Muraro and Paolo Marton, Venetian Villas, Cologne, 1986, pp.428-36 for an accessible introduction to the estate. See too F. Rigon et al. (eds.) I Tiepolo e il Settecento vicentino, catalogue of an exhibition at Vicenza, 1990, especially the section “La Cordellina: L’Olimpo in villa” pp.296-332 which was a full account of the whole complex. 2 See Michael Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo. His Life and Art, New Haven & London, 1986 pp.118 ff. 3 A thorough re-appraisal of Algarotti would be useful, meanwhile see Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters… (1980 ed), pp.347 ff & pp.40910 and Levey loc cit. 4 Livy XXVI 49-50.

5

Q. Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, 3.1.16 Many ancient biographers stress how hard Alexander found such restraint. 7 For an exposition on decorum in the western visual tradition see, of course, John Onians, Bearers of Meaning. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton NJ, 1988 pp.36-7 etc. 6

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies been a famous exemplar of the challenges facing the academic history painter, most famously in the case of the director of the French royal academy Charles Le Brun (1619-90), whose account of the episode was widely known both through engravings and an apologia by Félibien, who wrote at some length about how the story might be represented. However, as is suggested by his long-standing anti-academic reputation, Tiepolo showed throughout his career little apparent interest in the standard precepts of history painting: he did not use expression to signal the subject and object of dramatic exchange, he did not concern himself to be historically accurate in costume or to make appropriate choice of settings and he tended not to be loyal to text in the organisation of narrative action or space. According to academic convention - theorised over several generations by the mid eighteenth century - these kinds of devices could be set to work beneath the overarching principle of disegno, which grounded the visual creative act in the intellectual and manual business of drawing. But here we need to take note of an important paradox. Tiepolo may not have tackled history painting in ways of which a profesor such as Le Brun would have approved, nor was he practiced in disegno in the Vasarian sense of having a narrow competence in a particular kind of intellectual and manual process. Nevertheless, drawing is as central to his conception of visual story as it was for any of his academic contemporaries. Amongst the drawings that were undertaken for the Montecchio “Alexander at the Tent of Darius” is a preliminary but quite finished sketch at the V&A which employs washes of pen and ink over crayon and is close but identical neither to the oil modello nor to the finished work.8 For the ceiling paintings other Tiepolo drawing have survived, mostly detailed studies in chalk, some of which were worked up in the fresco, others of which were discarded.

Algarotti tells us that he asked Tiepolo to make a copy of Veronese’s picture and a drawing has also survived made after one of the figure heads. We have no idea of the extent to which Tiepolo’s audience at Montecchio valued the Alexander mural because of its echoes of Veronese but it is clear that the whole point of the story turns on narrative confusion. Darius’ household, terrified and traumatised in the aftermath of catastrophic military defeat, makes an understandable error of identification. They wrongly assume that Alexander is the taller of the two young strangers who have appeared before them, since, as Curtius Rufus explains: “While Hephaestion was the king’s age, in stature he was his superior”. How should a painter resolve such a problem and find his way out of such a paradox? How might he choose between the naturalism called for by the story and the moralising demands of idealisation? If he shows naturalistic inclinations he might be inclined to show two Greek generals hard to distinguish except for their relative height. If Darius’s mother is led into confusion, then so should the viewer be. If, however, the painter chooses to stress the ideal he will construct the kind of person and God-like bearing that might be evoked by the name and heroic reputation of Alexander. However, one might claim that the highest moral purpose of both the story and of the picture is to show off Alexander’s gracious reaction to the error, not to portray the mistake itself and were we to apply this logic to the Veronese stereotype we should identify the man in red as Hephaestion and were we to make such an identification we would find ourselves in good company, namely that of Goethe who came to a similar conclusion (Italian Journey, 8 October 1786). But we cannot be sure and it perhaps the case that those laurels on the man a little further to the right are a modest sign of the presence of the victor himself.

At the very basis of academic drawing practice lay an assumption that the student would benefit from an exposure to historical sources of high standing, models from the antique or the old masters. Amongst other things, history painting was intended to show an awareness of an historical traditon. Tiepolo may since have acquired a mixed reputation as a history painter but he was wellknown in his own day as an historicist although as Alpers and Baxandall have shown this was not a simple question of revival but rather of performance.9 The Cordellina “Alexander at the Tent of Darius” includes a near quotation from Paolo Veronese and in the latter’s famous version of the story, bought by the National Gallery, London directly from the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta on the Grand Canal, we see the same use of the Palladian screen and a similiar disposition of figure groups and showy costume (fashionable in Veronese’s day but, of course, anachronistic for Tiepolo’s audience).10 Furthermore,

Tiepolo’s solution to this narrative dilemma at Montecchio is brilliantly simple and, characteristically, demands that the viewer do some hard visual work, in fact, he hands to the viewer the responsibility for following the story. He treats the right-hand grouping of Alexander/Hephaestion as a single narrative entity, their bodies barely separated under a mass of drapery, with no clear gestures of disclaimer or acceptance to help either the viewer or indeed the confused old lady who kneels in the centre foreground. A closer look identifes for us a hand on a shoulder, perhaps indicative of Alexander’s presentation of Hephaestion to the Persians as his other self. III What kinds of creative processes lie behind the preliminary drawings that Tiepolo made for projects like the Montecchio ‘Tent of Darius’ and what relationships might we assume to have linked his use of drawing to the verbal texts which sometimes at quite distant points lay behind the stories he paints. Clearly, the opposition lying at the very centre of the traditional model, namely that works of high academic standing were grounded in the principles of disegno, and that they demanded intellectual engagement;

8 George Knox, Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1975 pl. 183 verso. 9 Svetlana Alpers & Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, New Haven & London, 1994, p.27. 10 National Gallery, London No. 294, see Cecil Gould’s catalogue, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools, London, 1975 pp.320-22.

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whereas works based on colorito appealed only to the senses, is a hopelessly inappropriate cliché since Tiepolo’s pictorial language of myth so obviously demands concentrated imaginative and intellectual work by its audience. Concentration is a necessary requisite of engagement with Tiepolo because of the theme of ambiguity which was so central to these stories – even in their purely verbal forms - and to the way that Tiepolo painted them. The resulting art was so demanding to its viewers that the problematic lack of narrative and compositional clarity has itself often been ignored or obscured.

Tiepolo’s early career, namely his contribution to the set of twelve paintings of the Apostles, commissioned for the rebuilt Palladian church of San Stae, on the Grand Canal. The commission was a fulfillment of a will which directed that two famous painters were to nominate a further ten artists, and that each of the twelve were to paint an Apostle. The final set of pictures were to be hung on the nave-pier pedestals of the church. Tiepolo, then aged twenty-six joined this esteemed company of artists – a mark of his growing reputation - and was given as his subject the martyrdom of St Bartholomew.12 In the hands of a grotesquely mannered flayer, the saint struggles to reach the extreme corner of the canvas and in so doing defies the laws of anatomy. But the main point for us about the San Stae picture is the fact that the viewer is denied key narrative information, for example, about the face of the anonymous thug who binds Bartholomew’s feet. In the finished painting, corporeal form is defined by light against a very dark background and the artist sets up a simple structural opposition: that which is transcribed as light and colour becomes visible to the eye, while that which is left in the dark takes no formal part. Against the whiteness of the background paper in the V&A drawing this is a convention which cannot be followed and Tiepolo’s interests seem clearly to lie in an exploration of the uncertain boundaries between what, by academic convention, should be the polar opposites of corporeal form and its other, that is, space itself.13

A study of Tiepolo’s preparatory drawings helps clarify the narrative obfuscation of the final painted version of the Cordellina “Tent of Darius”. The year of the Villa Cordellina, 1743, represented a key stage in Tiepolo’s development. For the remaining twenty-seven years of his career, chalk drawings were used alongside pen-and-ink for all his major projects. 1743 was also the year in which his eldest son, Domenico, started to emerge as an independent artist. Before that date, and despite the heroic effors of George Knox, we know almost nothing about the relationship between the two Tiepolos which was, of course, not only that of master and pupil but also father and son. What needs to be evidenced here is that drawings by both the Tiepolo show a number of characteristics which illustrate themes I have already touched upon: ambiguity of action, a pleasure taken in testing narrative conventions, uncertainty of meaning and an interest - even a celebratory willingness - to reveal to the viewer the actual creative process which the artist has been undertaking. An early drawing by Giambattista in Frankfort exemplifies these traits: as our eye moves out from the centre towards the periphery of the composition the figures become ever less distinct, the body of the central figure is described partly by outline, partly by shadow and partly by a contour left for the eye by a pattern of background forms.11 In a rare self-revealing comment, Tiepolo himself used the words “first thoughts” (“primi Pensieri”) about some of these drawings. In another sheet, this time from Cologne and dated to the later 1720s, we see many figures, some with marked foreshortening of form. On the right-hand side are some additional marks which suggest the kind of calligraphic activity that this class of drawing represented for Tiepolo. These marks are twisting curving spirals, warmings-up, loosenings of the pen, the graphic equivalents of a musician’s lubrication of the mouthpiece or of the fingers prior to a performance, the clearing both of the instrumental tubes and the tubular horny midrib of the draftsman’s quill, that epidermal appendage filled with inky fluid that forms the graphic extension of the artist’s wrist.

Tiepolo drawings often treat these themes of ambiguity as they evidence a willingness to reveal creative uncertainty, the moment itself and the pleasure taken in testing narrative conventions. We find these ideas in relation to all Tiepolo’s work at Montecchio Maggiore. Another drawing has survived - usually entitled a study for “Amor and Psyche” – made for the ceiling, although the group it shows was never used.14 Amor is certainly present in the composition but the scale of the reclining or standing figure that supports him seems too massive for Psyche. Some iconographers have resisted detailed identification preferring to label these kinds of figures personifications of past time.15 IV Tiepolo’s interest lay in manipulating creativity in the field of narrative invention and he placed ambiguity at the very centre of his treatment of mythological subject-matter. The approach to the Villa Cordellina takes the visitor past sets of garden statuary made to designs by Tiepolo and some of the drawings for these works are again in the 12 William L Barcham, The Religious Paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo. Piety and Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Venetian Painting, Oxford, 1989, pp.43 ff. 13 G. Knox, Catalogue …V&A, no. 7 recto. 14 A. Rizzi op. cit. no. 60 & plate 87. The drawing is at the Fondazione Horne, Florence. 15 For example, a drawing usually labelled “Time sending the Future on his way and rejecting the Past” in J. Bean & W. Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, no. 206, p.216.

The contorted form that finally resolves out of this mass of ink turns out to be an important figure in a key picture in 11 Frankfort, Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, “Four nude figures”, measuring 429 x 292 mm, for which see A. Rizzi, Disegni di Tiepolo, Udine, 1976, pp.54-5 and plate 7.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies V&A.16 What we find here are the kinds of designs that might readily be worked up by a stone carver - Zephyr and Flora on a plinth in the kind of pyramidal pose that sculptor’s appreciate - and there are other amorous figure groupings, for example, Diana and Endymion.17 These groups take for their subject both the intellectual disabling of the individual by love, and their physical disabling via the act of love and this theme of bodily weakness is referred to in another extraordinary late mythological painting by Giambattista, the “Apollo and Hyacinth” in the Thyssen Collection, formerly in Lugano and now sold to the Spanish Government. This was one of a group of pictures undertaken by the workshop in the early 1750s when they were painting at Wurzburg. One drawing for the Apollo and Hyacinth is a characteristic warm-up exercise and in it Tiepolo imagines the fallen athlete propped up on the thigh of the kneeling Apollo.18 In a second drawing, the bearded face of an unknown onlooker gazes at the artist’s highly speculative treatment of the pair of lovers, this time with Apollo dragging Hyacinth away across the ground.19 A third drawing returns to the first idea and includes a reference to the wayward discus that felled the beautiful boy and here too Tiepolo signals the presence of the god Apollo, whose head is as the radiant sun.20 However, the discus has started a metamorphosis which Ovid never could have mentioned because in a chalk drawing which is mostly concerned with working out some Wurzburg fresco details we find a tennis racquet, a pretty inoffensive weapon one might assume but potentially dangerous in the wrong hands.21 In the Thyssen picture Tiepolo replaces the discus with the racquet and characteristically plays down the full horror of the original story, which of course tells how jealous Zephyr sent the discus off course with results that were fatal and tragic to all concerned.

Even with these pointers, Tiepolo leaves the viewer with a considerable amount of interpretative work still to do. We might ask where do his sympathies lie in his retelling of this tragic story? The stern faces in the crowd are unbending and some seem positively hostile to what has been going on and the presence of the satyr might well be taken as a sign of mockery of a messy end to an elicit affair. In fact, satyrs as a species, gave Tiepolo other opportunities to engage in creative mythic fantasy. In Milan in 1740, at work on an enormous fresco of Apollo for the dining room ceiling of the Palazzo Clerici Tiepolo included satyrs seated on fictive cornices, their forms first worked up in a set of drawings now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and formerly bound into a volume entitled “Vari Pensieri”.23 Some of these are the comrades of the satyr in the Thyssen picture, figures fully equipped with all the usual male attributes. But others are less certain in terms of gender categories and Tiepolo even explores the possibility that satyrs might breed and form harmonious domestic groups. I cannot find any classical precedent for non-male satyrs, who usually play the bestial male other to their fellow arcadians the nymphs. These observations weave a familiar pattern for anyone who takes time to get to know Tiepolo, the creative, imaginative exploration of a single theme through a set of fantasy variations. By the late 1740s, this was an interest that had manifested itself in his Vari Capricci, the famous set of speculative etchings whose precise subject-matter has quite properly escaped the categorisation of the iconographers. Again, these are scenes that are intended to place the interpretative burden firmly on the viewer’s shoulders. In an instant, we might spot the figure of Death in one of these prints, but who exactly is in his audience?. Who is that dog more appropriately named ‘Mange’ than Fido? In these works we are repeatedly denied the kind of helpful narrative data that was taught over generations of historical picture-making, for example the viewers reading of the passions of individuals registered by their facial expressions. In so many case in Tiepolo, the faces are turned away from the viewer, a kind of denial which is not merely a rhetorical gesture which might anchor the picture firmly in text (as is the case with the frescoed figure of Agamemnon at the Villa Valmarana, who follows Homer in shielding his face from the horror of the scene before him), but is rather a conscious attempt to inject ambiguity into the proceedings.24

Phillip Fehl has identified a textual source for the tennis racquet22 and argued that Tiepolo consulted a particular translation of Ovid published in Venice originally in 1561 and several times thereafter. Furthermore, there are several other visual references to the fatal match between the lovers, the broken pediment on the rustic screen which displays a tennis-ball for a finial, the funereal cypress trees beyond and to the right a repulsive Cupid, a parrot and between them - its phallus hidden but clearly signalled by Apollo’s melodramatic gesture - a satyr grins down at the fun. We should also note the skin tones of the main protagonists, the whiteness of the feminised Hyacinth in contrast to Apollo’s masculine tanned complexion.

V Tiepolo called his etchings Capricci, a term which has connotations both of those animals that are notoriously frisky, irrational and quirky, the goat-like (capua), and of that kind of shuddering (capricciare) that we feel when we confront a mystery. Indeed, the parallel collection of Tiepolo’s etchings, the Schezi di fantasia, also of the

16 See especially G Mariacher “Le sculture di villa Cordellina” in F. Rigon et al eds., p.321 ff. 17 G. Knox, Catalogue … V&A plates 74-80. 18 G Knox, Catalogue … V&A, plate 186 verso. 19 G Knox, Catalogue … V&A, plate 186 recto. 20 G. Knox, Catalogue … V&A, plate 185 recto. 21 Stuttgart Kupferstichkabinet illustrated in D Von Hadeln, The Drawings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, reprinted New York, 1970, plate 137. 22 Critical Enquiry, 1979, pp.761-91.

23

See Bean & Griswold, op. cit. no 195, p.207. Michael Levey, “Tiepolo’s Treatment of Classical Story at Villa Valmarana …”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XX, 1957, pp.298-317. 24

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1740s, does indeed contain a fully capricous goat. But what are we to make of the other nameless forms that people these “Jokes of Fantasy”? They resist any kind of satisfactory translation into verbal equivalence. They are completely ambiguous both as a set and as individual pictures. They are contradictory, inconsistent in their depictions of time and place and in the way they identify and do not identify their protagonists. They are, in fact, the very antithesis of the kind of historical mythological picture that since Vasari has been placed near the top of the genre hierarchy, the kind of picture assumed to give theoretical priorty to idealisation, to the supremacy of pure form, to the intellectual resolution of narrative problems prior to the artist’s work in creating a visual image, in short to the supremacy of the word over the image.

Vivaldi as an old man “who composes furiously” and he heard him boast “that he could compose a concerto in all its parts more quickly than the copyist could write it out.”28 This is the musical equivalent of one of the familiar topoi from the lives of the artists, the idea that they could paint a picture more quickly than their assistant could mix them up their colours. Writing a biography of Tiepolo’s master in 1734, Vincenzo da Canal describes the younger man as “resolute, wild and rapid” in his technique and his nature as “all spirit and fire”, fertile in his imagination and his works full of invention and whimsy, all very useful qualifications for a fresco painter and someone who intended to make a career treating mythological subjects which were familiar to his audience.29 Tiepolo’s work forms a body of visual representation, partly analogous to music, which represents a distinct alternative to the verbal domination of image in the tradition of the academic history painting. The istoria was, in theory, aimed at clarity in the transcription of the word. But Tiepolo’s intentions as a mythological painter must also be understood within another context, the way in which the visual arts in eighteenth-century Italy were expected to create and confirm identity on a number of levels. Tiepolo’s was a specifically Venetian response to mythological narrative and the personal, regional and national politics of his position are suggested in the words of a letter written on 18 March 1780 by his son Domenico - by then himself President of the Venetian Academy - to his opposite number at the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, to express his gratitude at the honour being done to him through his election to that august body. In the letter Domenico describes himself as “poco esperta nella quanto altretanto difficile liberal arte della Pittura”30, that is, as a man with “a little expertise in that oh so difficult liberal art of painting.”

I think that the importance of these observations about Tiepolo’s interest in narrative ambiguity is two-fold. First, and in the longer run less importantly, because his manner challenges the historiographic commonplace about Tiepolo that he is a mere colourist, that his sensual approach to visual creativity represents a kind of anti-intellectualism.25 Second, because it raises the possibility of an alternative paradigm to the verbal analogue which underpins early modern expectations of historical painting. If, in Tiepolo’s work, we find that narrative ambiguity prevents us from satisfactorily setting the Image alongside the Word, we might ask whether there might be a third element in the equation. A clue lies in that other discourse which leads us to encounter the term “capriccio”, in music.26 In seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century music, the word is applied to a whimsical form in which the basic subjects of musical discourse are not resolved in an orderly fashion. This is a form that allows for improvisation, for speculation, it is an art “wherein the force of imagination has better success than observation of the rules of art”.27 In a very well known case, a contemporary of Tiepolo’s, Vivaldi, offers up extracts of verbal description enclosed by more open-ended, evocative, synchronically readable material, for example, in the captions to the “Four Seasons” and elsewhere in his Opus 8 dated 1725, a set of programmatic concertos that he calls Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione, the competition between harmony and invention. The essence of invention was the capacity of the artist to capture and transmit the creative moment. Speed of execution had to be displayed by the work not suppressed by an excess of preparation. Mistakes are not crimes for artists like Vivaldi and Tiepolo. De Bosses describes 25 For further thoughts on the status of eighteenth-century Italian art in relation to ideas about the senses and the intellect see my essay, “‘Those loose and immodest pieces’: Italian Art and the British Point of View” in Shearer West, ed., Italian Culture in Northern Europe in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1999, pp.67-100. 26 I have explored some of these ideas further in “The sound of Tiepolo’s fantasy; visual culture and music theory in Baroque Italy” in Struggle for Synthesis; The total work of art in the 17th and 18th centuries, Lisbon, 1999, I, pp.85-94. 27 Furetiere (1690) quoted in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London, 1980, p.738.

28

Michael Talbot, Vivaldi, London, 1978. G. Romanelli et al., Masterpieces of Eighteenth Century Venetian Drawing. 30 J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, p.16, note 11. 29

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The Notion of Secretum in Renaissance Bologna: Toward a Sociology of Secrecy in Italian Culture Elena de Luca

I Once upon the time there was a secretum Sometimes it is useful, while following the filigree of a culture, to consider what is not there and why it is not there. Early modern Italian culture is strongly connected to eloquence and words, but what can we say when we encounter silence, a notion which denies words. To consider this concept is like observing the negative of a print. It implies an attempt to make notions, such as silence or secrecy speak, in spite of the fact that their very nature is speechless. In sixteenth century Italy, scholars, writers and artists refer regularly to secrecy and silence. This paper, however, will restrict itself to analysing this phenomenon in the cultural production of Bologna.

II Silence and its synonyms Recent studies on silence have brought out the importance of social implications of the subject.3 The raising of silence as a social concern corresponds to a decrease in the explicit use of it as a term. This linguistic change reflects in part the increase in the semantic complexity that the word began to assume in Italy from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century. In the fifteenth century the connotation given to silence was often closely linked to the Neoplatonic conception of wisdom, such as when Marsilio Ficino insisted on the importance of silence as an instrument of meditation and advancement. Elsewhere, silence began to be associated with the term ‘dissimulation’, because by maintaining silence one is able to dissimulate something. Conversely, simulation came to mean ‘to pretend’, ‘to be’ or ‘to know’ etc., as in the case when the ‘actor’ simulates through the act of speaking. Silence took many forms, which included a great variety of dissimulation: dissimulation of virtue -as recurrent in Della Casa- dissimulation of political opinions, which at that time implied religious opinion as well, and pure religious dissimulation. Gradually the notion of dissimulation blended with the notion of discretion.4

The notion of secrecy was conveyed through various forms: in enigmas, mottos, in paintings presenting different iconography, or in printed plates using different devices, as notion of forbidden knowledge: ‘Arcana Dei’, ‘Rei’ and ‘Naturae’. As such it was discussed in the literature of the ‘books of secrets’ often in terms of admonition to silence, and in the literature of the so-called ‘conduct-books’. Several questions arise: do these secrets refer to the same notion of secretum? In other words, are they sharing the same episteme? Or is it possible to distinguish more than one nature within the same notion? Which were the reasons for such a cultural interest toward the notion of secrecy and silence?

This is precisely what emerges from texts by authors from various areas of the Italian peninsula, such as Celio Calcagnini, Piero Valeriano, Marcello Palingenio Stellato, Giovanni Pontano, Giovanni Della Casa, Gerolamo Cardano, and later Stefano Guazzo, who all discuss or refer to the notion of silence. This is part of a potentially wider anthology. In the present article only some of the authors mentioned will be considered. The idea of agire coperto, ‘to act covertly’, emerges as a positive feature, but implies some regret for the duplicity. Metaphorically we could say that silence was part of the fabric of simulation and

Mystery, secrecy and silence have often been connected during the Renaissance to religion, spiritual attitude, and not least to Neoplatonic philosophy. This paper will claim different reasons behind the use of the secret and the resort to secrecy and silence, both in literary and the figurative arts. These reasons were often unrelated to religious matters or Neoplatonic thought; rather they were connected to a paradoxical use of the notion of secrecy. Bologna had a long-standing cultural tradition bound to the Studio (the university), which was strongly Aristotelian in outlook.1 When considering the period between 1420 and 1620, we agree with Jan Maclean that it is Aristotelianism and not only Platonism that constitutes the ‘appropriate context in which to see the dominant universe of discourse of the day and…this philosophy (Aristotelianism) can be shown to possess the resources for escaping its own limitations’.2

3

Burke, P. The Art of Conversation, Cambridge, 1993, particularly: Notes for a social history of Silence in Early Modern Europe, Chapter V. On the silence of children and youth see, Nagel S. & Vecchi S., “Il bambino, la parola, il silenzio, nella cultura medioevale”, Quaderni Storici, 1984, 19, pp.719-763. 4 Albano Biondi pointed out how much wider were the territories of the words ‘dissimulation’ and ‘simulation’ within the ethics and intellectual dynamic of the Sixteenth Century, often with no reference to religious movement such us Nicodemism. Biondi has also contributed to clarify the definition of Nicodemism, discussing what was called Nicodemism by Calvin. Nicodemist is somebody whose belief is in tune with the Devotio Moderna, Evangelism, Trinitarism, somebody who publicly dissimulates her/his creed, while practising it privately. The term came from Nicodemus, the character from the Gospel (Jh.,3,1ff) who went to visit Christ secretly only during the night. Moreover there are different opinions about who the ‘Nicodemitics’ were, as indicated by Calvin in his list of simulators. On those matters see Biondi, A. “La Giustificazione della Simulazione nel Cinquecento”, in Eresia e Riforma nel Cinquecento, Miscellanea I, Firenze, 1974, pp7-68; Ginzburg, C. Nicodemismo. Simulazione e Dissimulazione Religiosa nell’ Europa del Cinquecento, Torino, 1970.

1

On the persistence and legacy on Aristotelianism see Schmitt, Charles B., Aristotle and the Renaissance, Harvard, London, 1983; The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Schmitt, Charles B. general editor, Skinner, Quentin & Kessler, Eckard editors, Cambridge, 1988; Maclean, I., “Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: an Aristotelian Counterblast”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1998, vol.59, n.1, pp.149-166. 2 Maclean, I., 1988, op.cit., p.150.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies dissimulation. It also has to be stressed that both dissimulation motivated by religious belief and, dissimulation motivated by non religious convictions, were products of the scenario of repression imposed on Italian culture by the policy of the Papal State during the sixteenth century.

Silence appears too in books in which the notion of prudence is discussed and Giovanni Pontano’s treatise De Prudentia, of 1518, offers a good example (CerretoUmbria 1426/9-Naples 1503).9 Although, within the long list of virtues necessary to live, Pontano does not mention silence, but among the attributes of prudence he indicates: simulation, dissimulation and discretio. All involve silence in one way or another, and in book LXXXVI, Pontano even affirms that sometimes the circumstances could require one not only to dissimulate, simulate or to conceal, but also actively to feign. The ideas of medietas, prudence, versatilitas, were not put in relation with moral categories of good or evil, but they became themselves parameters of behaviour, because what was under scrutiny was not an ideal prototype of the ‘gentleman’, but a possible mode of behaviour adaptable to historical circumstances.10

Around 1544, Celio Calcagnini (Ferrara 1479-1541) discussed the subject of silence in his Opera Aliquot and in more detail in the essay Descriptio Silentii.5 Here Calcagnini considers the problem of silence and secrecy in dialectical terms. For him the legitimacy of keeping silent about knowledge was not so obvious. On one hand, he believed it vain and ignoble to keep a ‘treasure’ hidden away from the majority of people. On the other hand, he was aware that a ‘published mystery’ is a contradiction in terms, and he also stressed that a ‘treasure’ must not be wasted. Calcagnini’s reflections should also be related to the rapid rise of the printing press and the strains that this new device brought to culture. Of course the first dichotomy that emerged was related to the degree of diffusion that knowledge could have without censorship and control. This was a particular issue for the Papal State, and on this subject Calcagnini was notably searching for a diplomatic way to consider the problem.6 He supported the idea of using enigmatic language and silence by saying that this was the way used in ancient times to discuss divine mysteries. As long as mysteries are kept away from ‘profane ears’, they will still always be mysteries. Therefore in the Descriptio Silentii he suggested a few solutions to this dilemma, demonstrating for example how to speak in riddles.7 What is not so clear is what he meant by profane ears. Whose ears ? Initiated people? Friends’? Perhaps he was simply suggesting that the writer should select the people to whom he wanted to address his text. Secondly, and perhaps more relevantly, Calcagnini suggested a judicious use of enigmatic words recalling their ancient use in divine mysteries, as discussed e.g. by Iamblicus, vindicating in this way the legitimacy of silence. Since Calcagnini - alongside other humanists such as T. Beccadelli, P. Valeriano and M. Flaminio - struggled with the interference of the new policy of the Papal State, it could be argued that the legitimisation of riddles and enigmatic language could rightly be interpreted as a way of avoiding conflict.8

A similar approach to the idea of circumstances can be found in Giovanni Della Casa’s work (Borgo San Lorenzo 1503, Montello-Abbazia di Nervesa 1552). When he considers the individual’s possibilities of affecting current customs, he says: ‘You must realise that it is expedient to control and check your manners not according to your own judgement, but in order to please those with whom you are dealing, and whom you address’.11 He admits the inadequacy of a personal effort in modifying the short term state of things. Silence as such is only a few times discussed, always in terms of what is appropriate and inappropriate to say on social occasions.12 He states that: ‘It is possible to lie without speaking, through your acts and your work’; this sentence in itself could be easily associated with some of the very difficult situations of the century, but is instead linked to very simple aspects of life.13 Even though Della Casa discusses the notion of silence, we learn very little about it if reading his word literally. The consequence is that Il Galateo is read as a manual of conventions and norms of behaviour which at the end of the Renaissance came to replace the more idealistic ‘vision of man’s dignity’. However, a few years before writing the Galateo, Della Casa wrote the Trattato degli Uffici Comuni tra gli amici superiori e inferiori, a work published in 1561, five years after his death. Here Della Casa considered all the lowest aspects of human nature pragmatically, and in some passages reveals his vehement disappointment with the current situation.14 9 Giovanni Pontano, De Prudentia, in Opera, Venetiis, 1518; Dini V., Stabile G., Saggezza e Prudenza, Napoli, 1983, p.53ff; Tateo, F., ed., Giovanni Pontano. I Trattati delle Virtù Sociali, Roma, 1965. 10 Dini G.& Stabile G., 1974, op. cit., p.60. 11 ‘Dei sapere che a te convien temperare e ordinare i tuoi modi non secondo il tuo arbitrio, ma secondo il piacer di coloro co’ quali tu usi, e a quello indirizzarli’, Giovanni Della Casa, Galateo, 1558, Introduction by Saverio Orlando, Milano, 1988, p.16. 12 ‘... similmente si disdice il favellare delle cose contrarie al tempo ed alle persone che stanno ad udire.’ Giovanni Della Casa, Galateo, 1558, 1998, op.cit., ch. X, p.25. 13 ‘Puossi ancora mentir tacendo, cioè con gli atti e con le opere’. Ibid., ch. XI p. 25; & ch. XIII p.30. 14 ‘ Ma quando a gli uomini quando si ha riguardo? Quando nelle infermità o negli altri bisogni si provvede? Qual sorte d’uomini a Roma e più indegnamente e con malvagità lacerata, che gli amici bassi da gli uomini potenti? Questo non solamente per carità e umiltà cristiana, ma

5

Caelii Calcagnini, ‘Descriptio Silentii’, in Opera Aliquot, dedicata ad Ercole Farnese Duca di Ferrara, Basileae, 1543, p.491. On the intellectuals’ role: Dionisotti, C. Chierici e Laici, in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, Torino, 1967; Romano, R., Tra Due Crisi l’Italia del Rinascimento, Torino, 1971. Regarding the Church policy toward the printing press see, Grendler, P F., The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540-1605, Princeton, 1977; Rozzo,V., & Menchi, S., “Livre et Reforme en Italie”, in Gilmont J.F. ed., La Reforme et le Livre, Paris, 1990, pp.327-374. 7 Edgar Wind had considered this aspect of Calcagnini’s attitude in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London, 1958, Introduction. The Language of Mysteries, pp.11-12. 8 Frangito, G., In Museo e in Villa. Saggi sul Rinascimento Perduto, Venezia, 1988, p.17. 6

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Della Casa’s political role led him into profound contradictions. In fact he collaborated with the new policy quite actively, since he was appointed to publish the first Index Librorum Proibitorum, 1546. When he wrote Il Galateo he was at the end of his life, his career was over, so he did not explicitly recommend the use of silence or dissimulation because the most important aspects of the world that he loved were already condemned being ‘silent’. All he could do in his writing was to offer some solutions to the extremely iniquitous relationships human relationship. The action of appearing and being becomes a game of exchange and, within this dynamic, silence plays a crucial role. To live with caution and discernment implies the use of discretion.15

appreciated him. In his Pronexeta seu de Prudentia, Cardano monitored human behaviour presenting a catalogue of social hierarchies, each one labelled by its own behaviour. The Pronexeta is a man detached from conventional morality that adapts him to circumstances, using simulation and dissimulation, with which Cardano associates the deployment of silence. In Chapter XXXI, entitled Silentii Laus, he discusses silence specifically stating: “Because silence is effective in controversial matters, when we fear something or somebody it is necessary to mask not only facts and words but also our soul...in order to protect ourselves, what is left, once again, but silence?”19 In Cardano we meet a typical case of a scientist and scholar directly exposed to the new intrusion of the Catholic Church. For him, the notion of silence became a declared way of life, and this represents a rare example of an explicit denotation of the notion of silence through the use of the proper noun - and not through the use of any related synonym.

On a similar basis the famous physician, philosopher and mathematician Gerolamo Cardano (Milan, 1501-1576), discussed the problem of dissimulation and of appropriate behaviour, but in contrast with Della Casa, Cardano did use the word ‘silence’ in his terminology. In his own autobiography De Vita Propria, posthumously published in 1643, he claimed to have a special ‘natura arpocratica’ which gave him the gift of divination (Ars Magna, 1545). He had already investigated the notion of silence twenty years earlier, in his commentary on the Quadripartitum by Tolomeo, an important astrological book. Here he discussed the nature of the Egyptian god Harpocrates, later identified as god of silence.16 (fig.1) Later on, troubles darkened Cardano’s life and in the religious controversies that he faced, he found Carlo Borromeo on his side. 17 The latter played a crucial role in his admission to the University of Bologna, where he taught for several years [1562-1570], and where he probably completed a book entitled Il Pronexeta seu de Prudentia civili liber, which was ready in 1566, but published only in 1627.18 Cardano’s personal situation and experience was not different from that of many other intellectuals of that time. He experienced suspicion against himself, even if in Bologna both scholars and ordinary people generally

Considering this linguistic and semantic trend, we can argue that the notion of silence was under a process of reification. Silence became fragmented into different unrelated aspects. It was not anymore the ‘rule’ as it was for the initiated in sects such as ‘the Pythagorean’, or as it was in Neoplatonism. 20 It was not even the introspective and philosophical silence of Petrarch’s life. Silence became more problematic and the way it was treated by intellectuals was consistent with the wide spectrum of its variations. Ultimately, we can say that silence covered grey areas between religion and lay culture that, precisely around the middle of the century, were topics forced into a strand of clarity in order to be consistent with the new cultural desiderata. Religion had to be expressed through new devotional roles. Secular culture had to follow theological patterns and methods. People had to adopt new ways of speaking through appropriateness and modesty. Literature was forced to be more concerned with devotional and religious subjects. To discuss silence in this climate means to analyse all the shadowy areas behind which silence was hiding and toward which it was heading. In some way we can say that at that time silence became a dumb protagonist. Although, Calcagnini and Cardano did not share the same concerns about the notion of secrecy. Calcagnini’s approach belongs to humanism with all political implications in term of diplomacy and religious politics; he expressed his reservation on a notion of secrecy

anco all’umanità più volgare grademente contrario. Guardiamoci dunque di fare che l’umanità dalla fortuna sia spenta, la libertà dalle ricchezze e dalla potenza non sia oppressa.’ Quoted from Gareffi, A., “Giovanni Della Casa e il ‘‘Galateo’’. La Retrazione Manieristica degli opposti, il loro riconoscimento”, in Le Voci Dipinte. Figura e parola nel Manierismo Italiano, Roma, 1981, chapter II, pp.62-63. 15 Dini, V., & Stabile, G., 1984, op. cit., p.89. 16 Gregori, C., “L’Elogio del Silenzio e della Simulazione come Modelli di Comportamento in Gerolamo Cardano”, in De Benedictis A., ed., Sapere e/é Potere, Bologna, 1990, vol III, pp.73-84. Cardano was interested in a very large spectrum of disciplines. He wrote on chiromancy, astrology and geomancy. On Cardano ‘s life and interests see, Ingegno, A., “The New Philosophy of Nature”, in The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1992, op. cit., Part 2, chapter VI, pp.247-250. 17 In 1557 Cardano’s persecution by the Roman Catholic Church began and defamation against him was so strong that, in 1561, he was expelled from the University of Pavia. He was arrested and tried between 15701571. 18 Hieronimi Cardani Mediolanensis, Pronexeta seu de Prudentia Civili liber, Lugd. Bat.,1627. The text, a manuscript until 1627, was already completed in 1566. See Bortolotti, A., “I testamenti di Gerolamo Cardano”, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 1882, pp.638-647. For Cardano at the University of Bologna see, Costa, E., “Gerolamo Cardano allo Studio di Bologna”, Archivio Storico Italiano, 1905, series 5, vol 35, pp.425-436.

19 ‘Itaque hoc solum silentium, infinitum pelagus dispotationum (in quo semper aliquid importuno relinquitur, quod aequi speciem praefe ferat) ita exhaurit, ut vestigium ullum supersit, cui unicum possit annectere, ut te pertubet’, and at the end Cardano said ‘...in universum illius memineris, solum silentium integra omnia tipi reliquere.’ Gerolamo Cardano, Silentiu Laus, in Pronexeta, 1627, op. cit., Caput XXXI, p.124. 20 Lamberton, R., “The ΑΠΟΡΡΗΤΟΣ ΘΕΏΡΙΑ and the Roles of Secrecy in the History of Platonism”, in Kippenberg H. G., & Stroumsa, G.G., eds., Secrecy and concealment: studies in the History of Mediterrean and Near Eastern Religions, Leiden, 1995, pp.139-152; Bremer, J. N. “Religious Secrets and Secrecy in Classical Greece”, 1995, ibid, pp.6178.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies tout-court, while he was keen on maintaining the rhetorical devise.21 Cardano, referred to secrets, as an object of study in itself. He contradicted the inner low of secrets and secrecy, because he unveiled their contents. He was operating within a new framework within which the ‘Arcana Naturae’ were under great scrutiny, a fact that implied a new ‘gnosis’ of knowledge, science, and human life. In spite of their differences, both the intellectual approaches were confronted by the same situation of political restriction and control implemented in Italy during the sixteenth century. However, the statute of secrecy was reverted: those who owned the secrets became a majority.

Quantitatis, it is divided into three parts: the first is Delle Forze Numerali or De Arithmetica; the second, called Della Virtù et Forza Lineare et Geometria; the third De Documenti Morali Utilissimi. The last part is what interests us here because it is not ‘scientific’, and includes recipes, acrostics, proverbs, and anecdotes and, most importantly, 222 riddles each followed by a specific solution.24 The section of riddles is titled: De problematibus et enigmat literalibus which are followed by Problemata vulgari a soli citar. in geg.o; et a solazzo. (268r) (fig.2) Pacioli’s manuscript as whole, needs to be considered within the development of scientific literature during the early sixteenth century. In its subject matter and its narrative structure the manuscript is similar to the style of the popular ‘books of secrets in which recipes, remedies and technical knowledge were summarised and published together. This is not inconsistent with Pacioli’s wellknown interest in the diffusion of mathematical knowledge written in vernacular, as documented by his translation of the ancient sources. The first chapter of part III of the manuscript is entitled:

III Bologna ‘Piazza dei Segreti’ III 1 Riddles and secrecy During the sixteenth century Bologna was a city of water. Many canals crossed the urban scenario and even more were the water mills. Silk production was the great pride of the city and the technical aspects of the silk mills were protected by special legislation just as an alchemist would protect his Opus Nigra. The nature of the process of silk manufacture was called Opera Tinta and Opera Bianca, depending on the quality of fabric for which Bologna was world famous.22 In fact one could say that the city had its own ‘Opus Secreta’.

Do della forza e virtù naturale nel scrivere […] le quali cose certamente a chi ignora li secreti suoi (della natura) parano miraculi e pero prima daremo modo et documento a sapere diversamente scrivere in carta bianca che scritta non se veggano le lettere ma poi ora un modo e’ ora alatro se fanno parere diversi colori…25 ( 236v)

The notion of secrecy in Bologna can also be connected to Albrecht Dürer, who believed that he could unravel some secrets there. In October 1506, he wrote to the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer from Italy. He told his friend that he decided to return to Bologna for a very special reason: ‘…for love of the secret perspective that somebody there can teach me…(in Bologna)’.23 This information needs to be contextualised because of the high level in mathematics and geometry in Bologna. It has been suggested that the ‘somebody’ available to teach could have been Luca Pacioli.

Within this material the concept of the secret and the miracle, both sources of surprise to ignorant people – ‘meraviglia degli idioti’- are recurrent within the third part which begins with the proverb ‘Chi suoi secreti con altrui ragiona/ apre luscio altrui e se imprigiona’26 (231v)

Luca Pacioli is thought to have been teaching in Bologna between 1500 and 1505, since he is documented as lecturer ad Mathematicam in 1501-02. As a testimony of his residence, he left an extraordinary manuscript De Viribus

We can also recognise in Pacioli’s systematic recollection and subdivision of recipes, riddles, poems, a specific interest for this material to be used for educational purposes. The subject seems as relevant to Pacioli as his mathematical theorems, or his explanation of mechanics. Terms like miraculi or segreto, are used in a rhetorical manner to create suspense, but not an aura of real mystery. For each riddle he suggests a solution. Nevertheless, at times he uses the rhetoric connected to mystery, probably

21 The use of a symbolic language could be also connected to the broader debate on ‘italian’ language that had paramaount importance in Italy, during sixteenth century. See, Elena de Luca, Rhetoric, Silence and Secular Culture in the Symbolicae Quaestiones by Achille Bocchi. Bologna 1555, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1999, ch.. IV, section III, ‘From an oral epistemology toward a visual epistemology’. On the ‘Questione della Lingua’ in Italy and the various implications see Formentin, V., “Dal Volgare al Toscano all’Italiano”, in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, Malato Enrico editor, Roma, 1996, vol.IV, pp.177-250; Tateo, F., “Classicismo Romano e Veneto”, ibid., pp.457-506; Sozzi, L., “Retorica e Umanesimo”, in Storia d’Italia, annali 4, Intellettuali e Potere, Torino, 1981, pp.49-78. 22 Poni,C., “Sinergia di Due Istituzioni. Chiaviche e Mulini da Seta a Bologna”, Quaderni Storici, n.64, 1987, p.113; “Sviluppo, Declino e Morte dell’ Antico Distretto Industriale Urbano” (secoli XVI-XIX), parte I,II,III, in Storia Illustrata di Bologna, Tega, V., ed., Bologna, 1989, pp.321-380. 23 Dalai Emiliani, M., “Per Amore dell’ Arte della Segreta Prospettiva…:Itinerario Bolognese di Luca Pacioli e Albrecht Dürer”, in Leonardo e il Codice Hammer, exibition catalogue, Firenze, 1985, pp.185-189, p.188, n.48.

24

Frate Luca Paciolo, Ex Biblioteca Ioannis Iacobi Amadei Binonin, Compendio Detto De Viribus Quantitatis, 1498, in 4, Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, Manuscript 250. For literature related to this manuscript see Pedretti, C., “Il De ‘Viribus Quantitatis’ di Luca Pacioli”, Studi Vinciani, 1957, VIII, cc, II, p. 41; Dalai Emiliani, M., 1985, op. cit., p.186; Giusti, E., ed., Luca Pacioli e la Matematica del Rinascimento, exibition catalogue, Florence, 1994. 25 ‘ Such a things will certainly appear like miracles to those who ignore the secrets of nature and will firstly learn how to write on blank paper in such a way that letters will not show, but then re-appear in various colours.’ 26 ‘who shares his secrets with others, opens his door to them and locks himself in.’

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reflecting an already current linguistic devise followed by people during conversation. A potential teacher could use the riddles and their solutions. Pacioli announces the awareness of his method:

III 2 ‘Books of secrets’ Pacioli’s interest in cultural dissemination, was part of a cultural wave which involved also the literature of the so called ‘books of secrets’. It was a kind of literature already well known during the Middle Ages under the designation of secretum secretorum, in which all sort of subjects might be discussed: technical problems, accounts of experiments, examples of ‘how to do certain things’ such as how to use pigments, empirical and medical remedies, cooking recipes, diagrams of machinery. This tradition, dating back to Hellenistic times, developed during the Middle Ages and became popular in Bologna too. The secretum secretorum attributed to Aristotle, was published various times by the Aristotelian philosopher Alessandro Achillini, between 1501-1555.31 The genre achieved an even greater degree of popularity with the introduction of the printing press. They were printed all over Europe and were read with increasing interest, particularly in Italy and in Bologna.32

Sonno li problemi cosa asai gentile per vedere enigmi et fanno asutigliere molto li ingegni a giovini et fanno li desti et prompti si li vulgari co’mo litterali…27 (261r) At the same time as Pacioli was articulating his mathematical riddles, the theme of silence was interpreted in the visual arts. Around 1505-06 Francesco Rabiolini called Il Francia (?-1517), made a drawing in which three figures stand in a minimalist scenario. (fig.3) The figure in the centre has been identified as Angerona, the Roman goddess of silence, because her gesture indicates silence.28 Although, we do not know the purpose of this drawing, and the suggested connection to the ‘camerino of Isabella d’Este’ is still uncertain, it is significant that Francesco Francia made the work during the very crucial years in which the Bentivoglio were exiled from Bologna, in 1506. In this period the city confronted the new Papal authority which took control of the government of the city. In this situation silence would be a meaningful device.

But, we are dealing with the sixteenth century the Italian century of science. Scholars, mathematicians and physicians everywhere measured their own attainments against Italian achievements. This behaviour was encouraged by the great activity of the Italian printinghouses and their pre-eminence within the European context. Calcagnini and Cardano were perfectly aware of the relevance of printing in their day, that is why Cardano articulated the contradiction between the use of secrecy and the publications of his research. Yet he also defended the value of secrecy by saying: ‘a secret is not a secret because it is hidden; it is a secret because it is worthy of hiding’.33 Natural philosophers at the time began to reject the usual textual exegesis and turned to a more concrete way to define physical problems; new fields of research appear, including such diverse disciplines as chemistry, magnetism and metallurgy. Nature now seemed to supply an almost infinite number of processes waiting to be discovered. According to Eamon, the search was conceived as venatio, and it was a frantic one, where the hunter was pursuing the ‘secrets of nature’. This was the attitude of the so called ‘professors of secrets’ as manifested in the large literature of the ‘books of secrets’.

A more courteous representation of silence a few years later was given by Dosso Dossi (?1488-1542), in which Hermes personified silence: ‘Jupiter, Mercury and the Virgin’.29 Dosso’s iconography still recalls the role of Hermes as messenger of the gods and mediator between the human dimension and the divine silence. This iconography had gradually absorbed the meaning of Hermes, identifying him as god of silence, instead of god of eloquence, as he originally was.30

27

‘Problems are gentle things, which help to resolve riddles and to sharpen young minds and make them prompt and ready to resolve either the vernacular (problems) or the literary (problems).’ 28 ‘Francesco Francia, Composizione di tre figure, (Allegoria del Silenzio), Ashmolean Museum. Faietti, M., ed., Bologna e ‘Umanesimo, 1490-1510, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1988, pp.264. 29 Dosso Dossi, Jupiter, Mercury and the Virgin, canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. see Gibson, F., Dosso e Battista Dossi, New Yersey, 1968, pp.212-214, ill. 73; Humfrey, P., & Lucco, M., Dosso Dossi. Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, New York, 1998, pp.170-174. 30 On Hermes god of eloquence see Hallowell, R., “Ronsard and the Gallic Hercules Myth”, Studies in the Renaissance, 1962, vol. IX, pp.242255. Silence was the ‘protagonist’ of different kind of associations and interpretations. Probably coming from Ferrara there is an interesting etching by the Maestro Z.B.M, dated 1557. It is known as ‘Pandora’s box’ after Dora and Erwing Panofsky’s interpretation. We wish to argue that silence, instead of Pandora, is represented, connected to vigilance and knowledge. This work is going to be discussed in a forthcoming article. Panofsky E., & D., Pandora’s Box. The changing aspects of a mythical symbol, New York, 1956. Another relevant representation of silence is by Michelangelo, in the drawing of the ‘Madonna del Silenzio’, beside the Virgin is visible Harpocrates. On this drawing see Gould, C., “Some Addenda to Michelangelo Studies”, Burlington Magazine, n. 93, 1951, pp.279-282.

The new idea of nature involved a new attitude with regard to the sources of knowledge of nature. In 1531, Jean Louise Vives (Valencia 1492-Bruges 1540) in his De Causis Corruptorum Artium, affirmed that the knowledge of nature is not entirely in the hand of philosophers and dialecticians. He believed that peasants and artisans had a greater knowledge. Two years later Rabelais stressed the

31 Schmitt, Charles B., “Francesco Storella and the Last Printed Edition of the Latin Secretum Secretorum (1555)”, in Warburg Institute Survey, Pseudo Aristotle, The Secrets of Secrets, Sources and influences, London, 1982, pp.124-131. 32 Eamon, W., Science and Secrets of Nature. Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Princeton, New Jersey, 1994, p.45. 33 Eamon, W., 1994, op. cit. p.280.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies same concept.34 This was the beginning of a process of integration of hitherto different cultural approaches. Scholars were now seeking to articulate differently the empirical understanding of the causes for a particular phenomenon, and their conception of the ‘intelligible essence of nature’ as definable through mathematics. A similar approach was earlier expressed by the scholar and humanist Filippo Beroaldo, the elder (Bologna 1453-1505) not specifically in regard to science, rather in relation to wisdom. In his Oratio Proverbiorum, Beroaldo introduces the reader to his own approach by declaring his intention to leave alone the ‘res sublimiores’, which are related to God, in order to gain a better knowledge about the human world. For this reason, he intends to mingle with the common people and carefully examine popular proverbs, which he considers; ‘in no way less juicy or useful to life than the sacred books of the philosophers.’35

Piacevoli, by Francesco Ricci, published 1580, followed by the Nuovo Lucidario de segreti, di Zanni Bolognese, 1585; Giardino Medicinale di Nuovo Dato in luce, by Mario Galasso, 1587, and others in which secrecy plays a great role even if the word -secret- in itself gradually disappears. The sixteenth century ‘books of secrets’ constituted a point of osmosis between oral and written culture. The oral culture transferred into written form, received further dissemination.38 At the same time this literature still preserved some of the esoteric connotations which were enjoyed during Hellenistic and Medieval times.39 This was partly due to the fact that there was a sort of continuity between the tradition of the secretum secretorum and that of the corpus hermeticum or hermetica. This aspect was reflected into the narrative structure of the book, in the use of some of the τοποι of the hermetica literature: a letter to a patron; the discovery of a secret book; an ecstatic experience of revelation; the imposition of silence.40 The moral injunction to protect their content from profane ears, eyes and hands, became part of a literary strategy and a specific rhetorical textual device. It preserved the idea of the esoteric value of secrets without excluding anybody, for the simple reason that books were public and therefore, potentially available to anyone. The tension between secrets and their public representation was relaxed within the narrative sequence of the recipes, and the other secrets, which everybody could read. The ‘secret’ narrative structure of the ‘books of secrets’ become a guiding light to the reader.

It is possible to say that, Bolognese scholars strove to organise knowledge in a novel way, alongside strictly religious concerns. This they did by exploring other possibilities, such as knowing the reality of the world through ‘experience’, considering all its aspects in a unified way and -finally- ‘experimenting’ with these concepts. 36 ‘Books of Secrets’ flourished along with the translation of classical works connected to the study of philology in the Studium. This literature includes books on prognostications and almanacs, largely produced by important Bolognese mathematicians, books on medical remedies and compilations of technical trade ‘secrets’ which were the most evident antecedents in Bologna for the success of the ‘book of secrets’. Some of the most popular examples of the genre Il Libro dei Perchè, first published by Girolamo Manfredi in 1474, then in 1547 and again in 158837; the Giardino di Segreti Rarissimi, Utili e

III 3 Nature and enigmatic culture: the garden of Casaralta Not only books secreted secrets, nature itself was ‘the’ main source. Thus, it is not surprising that the manipulated nature of a cultivated garden, could contain secret words. In the neighbourhood of Bologna there were many country villas in which great decoration on frescos found a perfect setting. The retreat of Casaralta was owned and restored from 1527 until 1550 by the cavaliere Achille Volta, who

34

Rossi, P., Philosophy, Technonology, and the Arts in Early Modern Era, Attanasio, S. translator, New York, London, 1970, p.6. 35 Philippo Beroaldo, Oratio Proverbiorum a Philippo Beroaldo / Qua Doctrina Remonitor Continentur, Bologna, Anno undiquingentesimo, p1v. 36 This attitude is demonstrated also by the position taken by the philosophers Alessandro Achillini (Bologna 1463-1512) and Pietro Pomponazzi (Mantua 1462-Bologna 1525). Achillini did not disdain his support to Bartolomeo della Rocca called Cocles, who was an unknown self-taught man. Achillini wrote in 1503 an introduction for Rocca’s Chiromantiae et Physionomiae anastasis cum Approbatione Magistri Alexandri de Achillini. The same element of great integration with the culture as whole, emerges in Pietro Pomponazzi’stand within the debate on Volgare language. He instisted on the equality of languages; on the overriding necessity of using Volgare in the humanist field; and lastly and more importantly, the need to use Volgare not only when discussing trivial subjects, but also when treating the complex topics of philosophy and science. In a polemical vein, Pomponazzi describes the absurdity of approaching language with the same reverence one uses when touching holy relics. Pomponazzi ultimate concern was for the gente (people) – that know should be spraid among them all. See, Sperone Speroni, Dialoghi di M. Sperone Speroni, Nuovamente Ristampati e con Molta Diligenza Riveduti e Corretti, Aldo Manunzio,Vinegia, MDXLVI, p. 115v. 37 Girolamo Manfredi, Liber De Homine: Cuius Sunt Libri Duo. Primus de Conservatione Sanitatis Capitulum Primum De Causis e Naturis Omniu, Eorum quae Sumuntur in Cibo. Quaesita LXX., Bononiae, 1474. Manfredi, Hieronimo de, Libro Intitulato Il Perchè Tradotto di Latino in Italiano dell’ Eccellentissimo Medico e Astrologo M.Hieronimo Manfredi…, Venetia, Appresso de Salvador, 1588.

38 This was particularly true in the case of Bologna, where the presence of the Studio, the University, was pervasive within the city. 39 The esoteric implication of this literature during Hellenistic time, it has been argued, was not without social implications. Secrecy and Esoterism can have two main strains, either as an agency of change or as an agency of social stability. Martin,L.H., “Secrecy in Hellenistic Religious Communities”, in Kippenberg, H. G., & Stroumsa, G.G., eds., Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions, Leiden, 1995. 40 For these narrative aspects see Eamon, W., 1994, op. cit., part I. Interesting insights on the Hermetica are pointed out by Copenhaver, B., ed. & tran., Hermetica, the Greek ‘ Corpus Hermeticum’ and the Latin ‘Asclepius’, Cambridge, 1992. In the introduction Copenhaver remarks that in the Byzantine codex used by Marsilio Ficino for his first translation of this text (1463, printed 1471), there was very little occult and magic material. This aspect has had several repercussions on the critics of Francis Yates’s book, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, (1964), in which Hermeticism is related to the rise of modern science and more generally on the connection of Neoplatonism to Esoterism. See also, Copenhaver, B., “Natural Magic, Hermetism and Occultism”, in Early Modern Science, Reappraisal of the Scientific Revolution, Lindberg, D., & Westman, R., eds., Cambridge, 1990, pp.261-301.

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decided to have a complex iconographic plan for the whole building. Around the old Commenda there was a splendid garden, which could be called ‘emblematic’, due to the fact that it had patterns with epigrams and riddles, establishing one of the earliest examples of this genre.41 (fig.4)

preoccupied with Bocchi’s presumed interest in Neoplatonism and Hermeticism. In Symbol LXII the god Hermes is directly and explicitly represented, but his iconography exploits a combination of aspects derived from the Egyptian god Harpocrates, Hermes, and Hermes Trismegistus. The god indicates silence by placing his forefinger on his lips, while with the left hand he is holding the Hebrew candlestick. He stands upon an inscription in Greek which reads: ‘Word is silver, but silence is gold’, while above him a second Greek inscription appears in a circle: ‘The monad remains in itself’. The importance of maintaining silence or, more precisely the ability to use silence is also referred to by the motto ‘Silentio deum cole’ (Adore God in Silence) and the title of the epigram: ‘He often repents of speaking, never of remaining silent’ (Plutarch, De Garullitate, 514-1515. 23).43 Bocchi thus incorporates different elements related to the notion of Silence, not only at an iconographical level, but also at a textual and conceptual level, although a religious concern is more evident in the motto ‘Silentium Deum Cole’. Indeed, this aspect of the symbol has received the particular attention of scholars who have considered the possibility of Bocchi’s involvement in Nicodemitic beliefs.44

The popularity of Casaralta in particular is due to an inscription, a real enigma, which through the centuries has attracted travellers and scholars: the epigraph Aelia Laelia Crispis, is still without a consistent interpretation. The garden of Casaralta included other inscriptions and this shows, not only the great interest in collecting epigraphs and inscriptions from antiquity and the use of mottos and proverbs, but also the love to create a microcosm where secrecy challenged the contemplative disposition of visitors who enjoyed the beauty of the garden perhaps too passively. Although, the epigraphs in the garden appeared to be all focused on specific meanings or were dedicatories, whilst the enigma of the Aelia Laelia Crispis seems to represent the place where visitor have to ponder, to doubt, and to be disoriented eventually. Secrecy either could create disorder, or could constitute an element of order, through which it is possible to implement control. Whoever knows a secret, is empowered by it in relation to other people without that knowledge. Another implication is that secrecy functions as element of distinction. Whoever keeps a secret affirms his/her identity from a supposed external uniformity, and associates him/herself to a particular group of people. This last meaning recalls Calcagnini’s approach and introduces to Achille Bocchi’s way of using symbols and silence.

Hermes’ association with silence also derives from the tradition of Neoplatonic thought, and is based on ideas found in, among other sources, the texts of Hermes Trismegistus. Silence for Ficino was part of the pattern of purification attained by the philosopher through elevation in order to re-ascend the ‘vinculum universum’ between the physical world and God. The connection between the adoration of God and silence has a long history. In the light of this we can consider the origin of Bocchi’s idea of silence as linked to faith, deriving not only from Ficinian thought, but also from a broader spectrum of sources. It is worth recalling that silence, for Plutarch too, was connected to the gods as he affirmed: ‘ I think in speaking we have men as teachers, but in keeping silent we have the gods, and receive from them this lesson of silence at initiations into mysteries’ (Plutarch, De Garullitate, 505506.7) Silence was reconfirmed as a privileged way to comunicate and emulate the nature of the gods by Iamblicus, Cicero and St. Augustine.45 Bocchi’s iconographical choice seems equaly related to this

IV The epiphany of silence IV 1 Symbol LXII of Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicae Quaestiones A landmark of the Bolognese culture of the mid sixteenth century is represented by one of the earliest Italian emblem books, published in Bologna in 1555, by the humanist and scholar Achille Bocchi. The Symbolicae Quaestiones quas serio ludebat, libri quinque constitutes a peak within the artistic and intellectual production of the century. The notion of silence in the Symbolicae Quaestiones is mainly associated with Symbol LXII (fig.5), which is perhaps ‘the symbol’ of the book. However, the book contains one hundred and fifty one symbols each including an epigram, a motto and an image, and from the beginning Bocchi warns his readers about the secrecy of the book.42 The majority of the commentatories on Achille Bocchi’s book have focused on symbol LXII, and have been chiefly

43

Plutarch, Moralia, De Garullitate, 502. B. W. C. Plembold., trans., London & Cambridge MA., 1970. This connection is weakened by the difficulty of recognising in the Symbolicae Quaestiones an instrument of heretical propaganda, given the enigmatic quality of the symbols. In this line Setefano Colonna has prudently affirmed that it is only possible to consider Bocchi as part of a complex, refined and symbolic humanism that was speculative, sometime heterodox, but not Nicodemitic as such. Colonna, S., “Arte e Letteratura. La Civiltà dell’ Emblema in Emilia Romagna, nel Cinquecento”, in La Pittura in Emilia e in Romagna, Il Cinquecento, Torino, 1995, pp.102128, p.109. 45 Scarpi, P., “The Eloquence of Silence. Aspects of a Power Without Words”, in Ciani, M.G., ed., The Regions of Silence, Studies on the Difficulty of Communicating, Amsterdam, 1987, pp.19-40. See also, Waddington, R. B., “The iconography of Silence and Chapman’s Hercules”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, XXXIII, 1970, pp.248-263. 44

41 Mustichiello, N., ed., Aelia Laelia Crispis. La Pietra di Bologna, Bologna, 1989. 42 Symbol 0 is the emblem through which Bocchi introduces the reader to the notion of initiation, stating that his book was inspired by God, and in the epigram he states: ‘…Sed Involucra Esse Abdita/ Scientiae Haud Erraticae/ Nec Pervagatae, Scilicet/ Ne Sacra Polluant Mali/ Et Sancta Quique Perditi…’ (On the contrary (the symbols) are like hidden shells containing science, neither false nor trite, so that evil people are not able to violate sacred matters and lost people will not desecrate sanctity).

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies tradition. His decision to incorporate the iconography of Harpocrates within the iconography of Hermes, thus inventing an iconography, can be seen as a way of reinforcing the spiritual meaning of the symbol focused on faith and silence. For the title of the epigram Bocchi uses a quotation from the De Garullitate of Plutarch, although it was in Plutarch’s De Isis et Osiridis that the meaning of Harpocrates was clarified: ‘(Harpocrates) is representative of the discourse of men about gods, that is naturally immature, imperfect and disarticulated. Therefore the god has the finger on his lips, as a symbol of his virtue of silence and of silence itself.’46

connects the image of a scholar not only to silence, but also to faith. (fig.7) This idea is represented in frescos and images related to the monastic rule of silence, particularly in Benedictine monasteries. The association, between scholarly’s life and the notion of silence, was restated by Francesco Petrarca before being codified in Andrea Alciati’s image of the intellectual in his studio. The humanists’ reference to the ancient Harpocrates, used by Alciati, Bocchi and Cartari, along with the new elaboration of the iconography of the ‘wise man’ represented by the scholar in his study, has been claimed as a crucial element within the process of the ‘secularisation’ of the iconography of silence.49 In contrast to this claim we will see that Bocchi created a symbol of silence in which he does not mix the image of Harpocrates with the image of a scholar, rather with an image of another god: Hermes. Bocchi deliberately chose not to present silence through the picture of the studioso, because he wanted to avoid this overlapping mixture of meaning linking ascetic wisdom and the role of intellectuals. Instead, he decided to invent a new iconography, in which the most popular meaning attributed to Hermes was spiritual, and this was highlighted by the combination of elements derived from iconographies of Harpocrates and Hermes. In this way Bocchi obtained a symbol with a clear spiritual connotation, a reference which could thus hardly be associated with the life and role of intellectuals, that as we have seen it was under great scrutiny.

The combination of Harpocrates and Hermes appears instrumental to the emphasis placed on the connotation of Hermes as a logos intermediate between the dimension of transcendance and that of human life. In other words Hermes’ significance is shown in theological terms. If this is true, then symbol LXII can take its place in a long tradition of thought on the limits of mankind in relation to transcendance. The genealogy of this symbol implies that Bocchi was aware of Neoplatonism, but it is hard to say that Bocchi fully subscribed to the Neoplatonic approach to knowledge and faith. It is even more problematic to extend the meaning attributed to this symbol to the whole collections of symbols which is after all concerned with issues of vita activa and rhetoric. Bocchi has different views on matters of human knowledge and matters of transcendental knowledge. He rather thinks that the latter should be approached through the method followed by Greek neophytes in Antiquity: initiation through the adoption of silence. In this perspective it is necessary to pursue and understand Bocchi’s way of treating the topics belonging to the two different spheres.47 Bocchi does not represent silence using the popular symbol codified by Andrea Alciati in his Emblematum Libellus (1531), a scholar in his study, an idea which came from the medieval ‘theory of the humors’ in which the melancholic character is associated with the activity of studying. (fig.6) Later this association was developed even further through the new precepts of the devotio moderna, for which interior life was linked with taciturnitas.48 In fact the later edition of Alciati’s Libellus (1564) reflects this concern, as it

Silence was again represented in Bologna after the middle of the century, though only in a civic context. In 1564 Orazio Samacchini (1532-1577) painted a fresco above the fireplace in the dinning room of the Anziani of the Palazzo Senatorio in Bologna (fig.8) The work was commissioned by the Vessillifero degli Anziani, Francesco Maria Casali.50 Here silence is depicted as Harpocrates, who stands beside Vigilance, who holding an oil lamp, a crane is on her left. Those attributes were followed by Cesare Ripa’s description of Vigilance, while silence is represented through an old Harpocrates dressed in Roman military dress.51 In Samacchini’s picture, however, there is no spiritual connotation. Silence is presented with a purely secular reference as defending the ancient Roman origin of the city and also as guard of that discretion required by the governing groups. The crane is in itself a symbol of vigilance and this reinforces the meaning of ‘good government’ which is expressed in the motto Fideli Tuta Silentio (The faithful is protected by faith) below the frescos. This picture on the walls of an official room shows the importance of silence for the government of the city. Bologna’s freedom and its autonomy were under great pressure, during the beginning and after the middle of the century, and this is the reason why such a powerful image was displayed in this official setting. The room of

46 Plutarch, Diatriba Isiacca e Dialoghi Delfici, V. Cilento, ed., Firenze, 1962, p.121, 68-c. 47 Regard to symbol LXII see, Wind, E., Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London, 1968, p.12, n.40; Yates, F., The Art of Memory, London, 1966; Innocenti, G., L’ immagine significante, Studio sull’ emblematica cinquecentesca, Padova, 1981, quotations pp.155-156, p.99; Lugli, A, “Le ‘Symbolicae Quaestiones’ di Achille Bocchi e la Cultura dell’ Emblema in Emilia”, in Le Arti a Bologna e in Emilia dal XVI al XVII secolo, C.I.H.A., conference proceedings; Emiliani, E. ed., Bologna, 1982, pp.87-95, p.87 & 92; Giombi, S., “Umanesimo e Mistero Simbolico: la Prospettiva di Achille Bocchi”, Schede Umanistiche, 1988, Quaderno n.1, pp.169-216. Related also to the subject of silence during Renaissance, Chastel, A., “‘L’ Art du Geste à la Renaissance”, Revue dell’ Art, 1987, n. 75, pp. 9-16, quotation from p.14. See, Watson, E. S., Achille Bocchi and the emblem book as symbolic form, Cambridge, 1993, pp.142-143. 48 Dal Prà, L., “Il Gesto del Silenzio: Segreto, Meditazione e Ascesi nell’ Arte Figurativa”, 1989, in Boldini, M., & Zucal, S., Il Silenzio e la Parola, conference proceeding, Brescia, 1989, pp.403-419.

49

Ibid., p.414. Winkelmann, J., “Orazio Samacchini”, in Fortunati, V., ed., Pittura Bolognese del’500, Bologna, 1986, vol. II, p.639. 51 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, (1603, 1618) reprinted edition, Buscaroli, P., ed., Milano, 1992, pp.446-467. 50

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the Anziani was a public place, but it was at the same time an intimate private space, where the interests of the city could be asserted with discretion.

those formulated by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) requiring clarity and legibility in all fields and senses. At this time, the notion of secrecy, became highly suspect, eventually becoming associated with spying. Silence thus carried the stronger meaning of reticence: in the eyes of the inquisitor the silence of the defendant was tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Later still, when Counter-Reformation strategies were well established, in 1590 Silence was represented in Bologna by Bartolomeo Cesi (1556-1629), in a triptych composition.52 (fig.9) On the left and right sides the ancient Harpocrates appears. In the first depiction, he turn his sight from the beholder with his skin marked with eyes and ears (which meant to look and to listen a lot rather than to speak), as recommended by Cartari, whereas in the second depiction he indicates silence. Between them, a new iconography of silence wears a counter-reformist dress: his mouth is covered by monastic habit, while he is opening his arms wide in a gesture of fraternal indulgence. The preoccupation of this picture is with the uniqueness of the unity of the true faith, as the motto Nusquam Tuta Fides underlines (Faith is not protected in any case).

A crucial aspect of the change is that the negative value attributed to silence was at the same time attributed to its opposite, rhetoric. Already from the first part of the century the positive meaning of rhetoric began to be distorted and became associated with lying.55 This degradation occurred notwithstanding the Catholic Church’s desperate attempt to assume a ‘new look’ and to gain a new credibility by disconnecting itself from the Italian rhetorical tradition, and promoting instead a new rhetoric, a Counter-Reformist one. It was this new rhetoric which, by the ‘Baroque’ period, eventually became the glorious expression of the Catholic Church’s self celebration - a fact which, paradoxically, confirmed for some people the previous connection between rhetoric and lies. For both these reasons the two opposites -silence and rhetoric- ended up being catalogued in the same inventory of moral judgement as suspicious. Rhetoric may not be directly associated with the lying, but lying was immediatly connected with rhetoric. In order to explain how this came about, let us consider another characteristic shared by silence and rhetoric.

It is interesting to note that the details of the eyes and ears of Harpocrates are transferred by Cesare Ripa to the representation of the Spy, who has his mouth covered by a cape spotted with eyes and ears, although, if we look carefully, we can see that man represented is Hermes with winged feet.53 (fig.10) Silence at this point in time was associated with a negative value, a connotation that become stronger in the following century. V The eloquence of silence: a theory and some hypotheses on the culture of the secret V 1 Sociology of secrecy and similarities between rhetoric and silence ‘Although the secret has not an immediate connection with evil, evil has an immediate connection with secrecy...’. George Simmel was the first to point out the mutual implications of secrecy and illegality.54 More precisely, in his view, secrecy and the silence which it implies, assume a negative connotation because they are often not in line with the policy of a central power. However, Simmel’s views must be relativised historically. The evil connotation assumed by silence developed during the second part of the sixteenth century, and this is reflected in the migration of Harpocratic characteristics, these, were at first only linked to the iconography of silence, but later absorbed by the imagery connected to the action of espionage. The action of espionage has different implications from the action of using silence per se, because it is deliberately invasive of external - and protected - spaces, while silence is mainly self-referential and a ‘passive’ form of action. What gave secrecy its contradictory meaning was the transformation of the historical situation in Italy and in Bologna. After the middle of the sixteenth century Italian culture as a whole had to be reformed according to the new rules, especially

George Simmel maintains that secrecy can be seen as ‘...a form of action without which certain purposes...can simply not be attained...’.56 The implication of this statement is that the employment of secrecy as a sociological technique enables the agent of the secret to pursue various forms of aims, private and social. Seen in this light, secrecy appears as a way of acting, parallel to rhetoric. Both, secrecy - and by implication silence - and rhetoric embody actions that would otherwise be impossible. Because both of these notions were closely connected with a ‘way of acting’ and later with ‘a negative value’, it can be argued that the reason behind this connection was that both silence and rhetoric expressed intellectual preoccupations, perhaps ones that related to politics.57 The control and suppression of personal action and personal decisions was part of the Counter-Reformats strategy: thus, silence, secrecy and 55 From Seventeenth century onwards, the bonding between truth and rhetoric was defined in terms of ‘regions of malice and the lie’. Moretti, F., Signs Taken for Wonders, London, 1988, p.13. See also, Segre, C., “Edonismo Linguistico”, in Lingua Stile e Società. Studi sulla Prosa Italiana, Milano, 1963,p.377. Sozzi, L., “Retorica e Umanesimo”, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 4, Intellettuali e Potere, Torino, 1981, vol.IV. 56 Simmel, G., 1950, op. cit., p.332. 57 I refer to the notion of rhetoric considering the attitude shared by intellectuals between the end of the Fourtheenth century and the beginning of the Fifteenth, by Lorenzo Valla, Francesco barbaro, Guarino and Colluccio salutati, which was powerfully associated with a notion of rhetoric end could legitimate their actions, their writing, their interests and engagment in political matters and, most importantly, their elaboration of a lay culture. Regarding this aspect: Barthes, R., La Retorica Antica, Milano, 1998; Kahn, V., Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance, Ithaca, New York, 1985.

52

Fortunati, V., Pittura Bolognese del ‘500, Bologna, 1986, pp.803-844. Ripa, C. 1992, Ibid., p.147. Simmel, G., The Sociology of George Simmel, Trans., Kurt H. Wolff, Glencoe, 1950, Chapter 3, p.331.

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on the other hand the much more public literature of the ‘books of secrets’. These two strains worked at two different levels: the humanist’s silence or secrecy, had an ‘internal’ significance, because somehow their secrecy and silence determined their reciprocal relations. The secrecy of the literature of the books of secrets is by contrast a paradoxical secrecy, because its significance is external. In this case the relation between he/she ‘who knows’ the content of the books and he/she ‘who does not know’ is blurred, because the secret is kept in a book which everybody could potentially read. The secret is thus possessed by the majority of people and not by the minority, as it is usually. This kind of situation in Italy has been known as the segreto di Pulcinella, ‘the secret that everybody knows’ and is therefore emptied of meaning. However, because, we can recognise in the literature of the ‘books of secrets’ the manifestation of the inversion of social hierarchies, the meaning of their ‘secrecy’ can be recognised in this social connotation. This phenomenon can be clarified if we remember that secrecy has been considered an instrument of social control, as Luther Martin maintains: ‘ The ‘doing’ of secrecy [...] is not primarily a concealing of some knowledge, but rather embodies the ritual procedures necessary for the formation and maintenance of social boundaries’.60 In our case although it seems that the ‘books of secrets’ functions within this logic, it is with an opposite effect. The fact that ‘the secret’ is potentially known by the ‘majority’ of people, presents an inversion of the social hierarchy, rather than a confirmation of the traditional strength of social boundaries. In some respect, this is also discussed by George Simmel, when he considers the function of secret societies saying that: ‘the secret society is the suitable social form for contents which are still (as it were) in their infancy, subject to the vulnerability of early developmental stages.’61 The historical situation of the first half of the sixteenth century presented two major cultural trends which were very vulnerable. The culture represented by Bocchi’s generation was receding, while a new one was trying to adapt itself to the ‘new’ central power by affirming a new attitude to knowledge - this was the culture represented by the Book of Secretum Secretorum. To the latter secrecy meant the possibility to grow and establish itself, while for the humanists of the elder generation, as Simmel observes: ‘secrecy became a device for social endeavours and forces that are about to be replaced by new ones’.62

Somehow, the jeopardised morphology of silence offered an ideal means for the diffusion of this modality of expression, because it increased the adaptability of the notion - and this helps to explain the popularity of silence within Italian literature. Silence among humanists was not inconsistent with virtue and a virtuous attitude in life. Achille Bocchi too recurrently discussed the dilemma of virtuous behaviour, and silence/secrecy are elements perfectly integrated within his ‘discourse’. In this perspective the problem of silence is historically connected to the rise of Modernity and its subsequent developments. Reinhart Koselleck has well articulated the effect of peaceful actions carried out by secret societies. He shows, that because they were non-political and they acted respecting a precise paradigm of virtues, the effect of this attitude was indirectly political.58 This pattern of ‘marginal involvement’ was also followed e.g. by Achille Bocchi, who sometimes offered shelter in his house and protection, to persons in high risk positions. Not because he was involved in the same situation, but because he shared their ‘dissidence’ and it was part of Bocchi’s way to express his disagreement with the new cultural trends. Bocchi’s case is representative of the stance of intellectuals in the sixteenth century. His action was mainly embodied in his writing, we argue that he chose an emblematic rhetoric as a way to act - and to act openly, if we assume that writing is in principle opposed to all secrecy.59 This apparent contradiction is coherently resolved by Bocchi within the narrative structure of the Symbolicae Quaestiones which included secrecy as one of its strategic components, thus allowing the two extremes to be reconciled. V 2 Silence: being and not being Whatever the pressure humanists felt, their habit of referring to silence and secrecy persisted. Ultimately, the widespread reference to silence can be seen as a sort of trans-regional preoccupation associated with different meanings and purposes. Certainly what we are discussing here is not the existence of a ‘secret society’ in which members played according to a particular rule, that of silence. Our subject is more opaque. Still the protagonists of silence during the sixteenth century did share a common starting point, so that we can recognise two main strains in the understanding and use of silence. On the one hand there was the humanists’ silence (and their use of it), and

60 Martin, L. H., “Secrecy in Hellenistic Religious Communities”, in Secrecy and Concealment in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions, eds., H Kippenberg & G.G. Stroumsa, Leiden, 1995, p.110; I wish to thank doctor Cesare Poppi for drawing my attention to this aspect and to the work of L. H. Martin. The implication of secrecy being connected to central control is also discussed by Paolo Scarpi, 1987, op. cit., pp.30-31. 61 Simmel, G., 1950, op. cit., p.346. 62 Ibid., p.347.

58 Koselleck, R., Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Cambridge MA., 1988, p.85. Original title, Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der Bürgerlichen Welt, Munich, 1959. 59 See above note 56; Simmel, G., 1950, op. cit., p.352.

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Elena de Luca: The Notion of Secretum in Renaissance Bologna: Toward a Sociology of Secrecy in Italian Culture normativity, often repressively.65 The seeds of this later affirmation of the Absolutist State were already present - in nuce - during the dramatic changes that Italy experienced during the sixteenth century.

In other words, secrecy and silence were associated with ‘liminal spaces’, giving form to transitions between stages ‘of being and not being’. Such a transition was precisely the historical impasse in which Bocchi’s action happened to take place.

Ultimately, silence within the development of the new framework was no longer legitimate and became condemned rather as reticence, but this is a development that took place much later than the period here discussed.

V 3 From Silence to reticence Somehow secrecy and the use of the notion of the secretum and silence responded to the sense of oblivion and disorientation felt by several groups in society at that time. By developing secrecy and silence intellectuals articulated their feeling of uneasiness. If Bocchi ‘dissimulated’, he did so not only with regard to his ‘religiosity’, but concerning his entire intellectual stance. This is because, we would like to argue, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the foundations of the intellectual attitude which, e.g. Bocchi was keen to promote, were disoriented and scattered- when not actually banned - by the progress of the Catholic Reformation. The use of secrecy and silence, was a way both to go into exile and to resist at the same time. Secret societies emerge in opposition to the pressures imposed by a central power. Even if our case is different and we are not dealing with secret societies as such, the use of the notion of the secret and silence expressed a collective response to a collective cultural condition. Moreover, the secret lends its owner a position of ‘exception’. It provides a form of identification which helps to distinguish the possessor of the secret from the mass of the crowd.63 Those observations are part of the scenario of a culture undergoing deep changes, a culture in which the reaction to external pressures was associated with a strong sense of isolation. This dynamic produced a model which anticipated the way in which European culture during the seventeenth-and eighteenth-centuries, later developed new patterns of social behaviour. Particularly from the second half of the sixteenth century these amplified the dichotomy between ‘sovereign and subject’ and between ‘public and private morality’.64 In these terms Reinhart Koselleck summarised the roots of Absolutism, as grounded in a strict separation between the State and what was later called society. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that there emerged a new concept of ‘private life’, precisely at the time when silence and prudence were assuming the new form of discretion. That was the period when the difference between the private sphere and the public sphere increased, and discretion ceased to be grounded in ideal categories, but was referred to specific parameters of behaviour. In this regard, Vittorio Dini maintains that what happened was ‘the constitution of a secularised ethics as opposed to a theologised politics’. On the one hand this resulted in an interiorization of individual normativity, due to the discontent and marginalization of intellectuals, while on the other hand the State increased its juridical 63 64

Ibid., p.334-338. Koselleck, R., 1988, op. cit., p.1.

65

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Fig.1. The god Harpocrates, represented by Cartari as a boy and a young man wearing a walf skin, with a hat and the body covered by eyes. Vincenzo Cartari, Imagini delli dei de gl’ Anticchi, (Venice 1556) Venice 1647.

Fig.2. Luca Pacioli, Compendio Detto De Viribus Quantitatis, 1498c, Bologna University Library, Manuscript 250

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Fig.3. Francesco Francia Composition of three figures (Allegory of Silence), 1505-6, drawing, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum.

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Fig.4. The text of the inscription Aelia Laelia Crispis as it appears in the book by Salomon Rybish, Monumenta Clarorum Virorum…, Frakfürt, 1589c, p.125

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Fig.5. Achille Bocchi, Symbolicarum Quaestionum de Universo Genere quas Serio Ludebat, Libri Quinque, Bologna, MDLV, symbol XLII

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Fig.6. Andrea Alciati, Emblematus Libellus, Augsburg, 1531

Fig.7. Andrea Alciati, Emblematus Libellus, Lyon, 1564

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Fig.8. Orazio Samacchini, Silence and Vigilance, 1564. The fresco was above the fire place of the Palazzo Senatorio in Bologna. Museo Civico Medioevale, Bologna

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Fig.9. Bartolomeo Cesi, Allegory of the Faith and the Silence, 1590, fresco in Palazzo Magnani, Bologna.

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Fig.10. Cesare Ripa, The Spy, from the Iconologia, 1603.

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208

The Asymmetry of Sanctity John Mitchell There is a long, almost ubiquitous, tradition in western sacred architecture, probably in sacred architecture in most cultures throughout the world, of following symmetrical schemes, of locating the focus of cult and devotion prominently on the major axis of a building. Thus the principal relics, for in these are constituted the most powerful transcendent energies and the principal sacramental features in a Christian church, are typically aligned on the centre-line of the nave – so for instance in the late medieval parish church of St. Agnes, Cawston, in central Norfolk, where the font at the west, the rood, the prominent cross carrying the image of the crucified Christ filling the chancel arch over the chancel screen and the principal altar at the east end of the sanctuary are all in axial alignment. (fig.1)

abbots, which were situated at the entrance to the church, on either side of the main door, each corresponding with the portrait in the crypt some sixty metres to the West, Joshua to the north and Talaricus to the south. The axial arrangement is paramount, with the principal relics in the confessio-window directly beneath the altar in the sanctuary placed on the centre-line of the basilica, while the important secondary relics closely associated with the two abbots responsible for the construction of the building repose in their vases on emphatic secondary east-west axes. Innumerable other instances of this phenomenon could be cited throughout Christendom. However, there is also a long tradition of setting up counter-accents in ecclesiastical buildings, accents which break the overall symmetry of layout, in order to accentuate sacrality and cult. This is particularly the case where there is a major site of devotion which operates alongside and effectively independently of the regular liturgical functions in a church. In modern times, this is to be found within churches in chapels which are dedicated to popular cults, in particular those relating to the Crucified Christ, to the Virgin Mary and to especially venerated or newly canonized saints.3 Such sites are commonly located prominently on one side of the nave of a church, with a devotional axis at right-angles to that of the nave. The focus is usually a prominent image, the Crucifix, the Virgin, or a saint, emphasized by lights and by an extravagant decorative setting. Devotees stand and kneel, sometimes with rows of seating extending into the nave, facing the chapel. The arrangement is designed to break into, and conflict with, the general longitudinal orientation of the interior cult space leading up to the main altar and apse; and to signal to the visitor that a site of devotion of particular, exceptional power is located in the building. Where this special focus and counter liturgical space is located in the main volume of the church, in the nave, major liturgies centering on the special image and altar have to be scheduled not to conflict with the main liturgies aimed at the principal altar in the apse. The status and power of the devotional focus is continually underscored and brought to the attention by the presence of individuals at their private devotions before the special image, even during the process of a major liturgy on the major axis in the same space.

An exemplary instance of this phenomenon from an earlier age is to be found at the early medieval monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, some fifty km. to the east of Monte Cassino, in the modern region of Molise. There a new abbey church, San Vincenzo Maggiore, was constructed under the abbot Joshua and dedicated in 808).1 (fig.2) Some ten years later, under Joshua’s immediate successor, Talaricus, an annular crypt was inserted into the central apse, to house and display the principal relics in the possession of the monastery, probably including ones of St. Vincent which the community may have acquired recently from Valencia.2 These were deposited in a carefully constructed box in the sill of the fenestella confessionis, the little axial window which gave access from the nave into the crypt. (figs. 3 & 4) A lamp hung in the window over the deposit and at the end of the nave an axial pathway flanked by screens and paved in opus alexandrinum, with carefully shaped pieces of polished polychrome marble, led directly to the reliquary-window. The main altar must have stood immediately above at the front of the elevated sanctuary. In the central chamber within the crypt, important secondary relics were displayed in two fluted marble Roman funerary urns, set in deep niches facing the window with the main relics. Painted half-figures of Joshua and Talaricus, the abbots responsible for building the basilica and inserting the crypt, filled the two niches, their hands raised in veneration of the relics. These niches were also aligned with the tombs of the two 1 R. Hodges & J. Mitchell, The Basilica of Abbot Joshua at San Vincenzo al Volturno, Monteroduni, Abbazia di Montecassino, 1996; R. Hodges, Light in the Dark Ages: The Rise and Fall of San Vincenzo al Volturno, London, 1997, pp.83-94; R. Hodges, S. Gibson & J. Mitchell, ‘The making of a monastic city. The Architecture of San Vincenzo al Volturno in the ninth century’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 65, 1997, pp.238-51. 2 Hodges, Gibson & Mitchell, op. cit., 1997, pp.242-6; J. Mitchell, L. Watson, F.de Rubeis, R. Hodges & I. Wood, ‘Cult, relics and privileged burial at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the age of Charlemagne: The discovery of the tomb of Abbot Talaricus (817-3 October 823)”, in S. Gelichi, ed., I Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Medievale, Pisa 1997, Florence, 1997, pp.315-21.

When a relic or image embodying particular powers and virtues is located in its own chapel, as is the case for instance in the late sixteenth-century Cappella Sistina in S. Maria Maggiore in Rome, where the focus of attention is the relic of Christ’s crib, or in the early seventeenthcentury chapel of San Gennaro in the Cathedral of Naples, which houses the phials of periodically liquifying blood of 3

H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago & London, 1994, p.11, fig. 2.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies the patron martyr, St. Januarius, liturgies can if necessary take place simultaneously here and in the main body of the building.

something that is confined to the Christian tradition, and among the four instances to be considered here, the first is one of the great temple complexes of Roman Italy.

An off-axis location can be used most effectively to draw attention to a locus sanctus which is the focus of pilgrimage. At a national and international level this occurs in the Santo at Padua, where the tomb of St. Anthony is located not at the high altar but behind the altar in the major chapel on the north side of the nave. Here, in what is effectively the everyday major devotional focus of the church, the faithful can walk into the chapel which is completely open to the nave, with no front wall, proceed behind the free-standing altar and pay their devotions to the saint by ritual physical contact with the great worn slab of stone which covers the back of the tomb.4

The Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste The great sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia (Fortune the First-Born) at Praeneste (modern Palestrina), twenty-three miles from Rome on the Via Praenestina, was one of the most spectacular cult centres of the Roman world.6 A complex sequence of ramps and terraces, with galleries and porticoes, constructed on concrete vaults, articulated with hemicycles and exedras, it is arranged in strict symmetry about a central axis, culminating at the top originally in a round temple. The sanctuary was the home of an oracle which functioned by sortilege, divination through the casting and reading of lots – pieces of wood carrying marks through which the goddess could be consulted through the operations of chance selection and interpretation. The principal cult image was a statue of Fortuna Primigenia with the infants Jupiter and Juno seated on her lap, later venerated in the upper temple as the protector of children. Carneades of Cyrene, the founder of the New Academy, who visited Rome in 156/7 BC, as a member of a distinguished Athenian delegation of philosophers, observed that he had never seen a more fortunate Fortune than the one at Palestrina – clearly the oracle enjoyed a high reputation.7 Cicero, in his book on Divination, describes the origins of the oracle.8 A citizen of Palestrina of noble birth, Numerius Suffustius, was told in a dream to excavate on the rocky slope of the mountain on which the ancient settlement of Praeneste stood. Ignoring his neighbours who laughed at his enterprise, the nobleman broke open the rock at the place indicated in his dream, close to the statue of Fortuna, and there in a pit he found the lots, made of strips of oak wood, into which were carved ancient characters. At the same time, according to Cicero, an olive tree, growing in the place where the Temple of Fortune stood in his time, miraculously flowed with oil. A casket to hold the lots was made from the wood of this tree.

At a very local level a similar phenomenon is to be found in a number of late medieval churches in East Anglia, for instance at Bramfield in north Suffolk, where in the late Middle Ages there was a shrine of the Good Rood, a plain wooden cross which was the object of intense local veneration.5 This was one of a number of focuses of local inter-village pilgrimage, in which the faithful made their peregrinations of a dozen or so miles, in homely but nonetheless effective imitation of the great international progresses to Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, to St. Peter’s shrine in Rome and to St. James at Compostella. At Bramfield, the church received special ornamentation as the theatre of the cult; perhaps most prominently in the surviving chancel-screen, the roodscreen, which supported the other large image of the Cross in the church, the rood bearing the crucified Christ high up within the chancel arch. (fig.5.) Here the woodwork is rather richly decorated with relief patterns in gilded oil gesso, and a curious cross-configuration is worked into the wooden tracery at the top of the screen. This screen framed the axis leading up to the main altar. An alternative and possibly more powerful devotional focus, which only came into full operation on particular days, was located on a different alignment. This was another wooden cross, more accessible than the one over the screen, the Good Rood, flanked by painted flying angels carrying inscribed scrolls, set in a large red-painted arched recess in the north wall of the nave. (fig.5) It was this cross in the north wall that was the actual focus of the pilgrimage.

The ancient town was captured by Sulla in 82 BC after his victory over the younger Marius, and plundered, and its male inhabitants executed. Sulla founded a new town on the plain, where he settled a colony of his veterans. The two earlier settlements, one on the lower slopes of the mountain, and the other higher up, are usually thought to have been remodelled by Sulla, with ranges of buildings

There is another aspect of this phenomenon, in which a particular feature, the most important symbolic and mnemonic site in the building or sacred complex, is incorporated and emphasized in such a way as to fall out with, to jar with, or even to twist the general axialities and symmetries of the structure in an obvious and unmistakable way, so as to make clear its overriding status as a site of sacred energy and power. This is not

6

A. Boethius, Etruscan and Early Roman Architecture, 2nd edition, Harmondsworth, 1978, pp.168-74; F. Fasolo & G. Gullini, Il santuario della Fortuna Primigenia a Palestrina, Rome, 1953; H. Kähler, Das Fortuna Heiligtum von Palestrina, Saarbrücken, 1958; G. Iacopi, Il santuario della Fortuna Primigenia e il museo archeologico prenestino, 4th edition, Rome, 1973; J. Champeaux, Fortuna. Recherches sur le culte de la Fortune à Rome et dans le monde romain des origines à la mort de César, 2 vols., Rome, Collection de L’Ecole Français de Rome, 64, 1982, 1987. 7 Cicero, De Divinatione, II, 85-7. 8 Iacopi, op. cit., 1973, pp.5-6; Boethius, op. cit., 1978, pp.169-70; Champeaux, op. cit., 1982, p.9.

4

S. B. McHam, The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo and the Development of Venetian Renaissance Sculpture, Cambridge, 1994. 5 J. Middleton-Stewart, Inward Purity and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370-1547, Woodbridge, 2001, pp.131-3.

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round a forum on the lower site and the great sanctuary above. The upper sanctuary is a masterpiece of symmetrical planning, built on a sequence of terraces, which are interconnected by ramps and a monumental staircase on an ascending central axis. (fig.6) Seven terraces lead up to a temple at the very top. Staircases rise on either side from the second to the third terrace, where they face columns screening well-houses. From here long ramps lead up to the fourth terrace, where the central axial stair begins. Along the full length of the rear wall of this fourth terrace there runs a portico with a row of shops, interrupted by the axial staircase in the middle and by two columnar hemicycles to left and right. Many inscriptions and the bases of ex voto images found on this terrace show that it attracted the particular attention of devotees of the goddess. There were structures associated with each of the two hemicycles. Directly in front of the western (left) hemicycle was a miniature altar, and a statue-base and a small ornate circular structure, with seven Corinthian columns supporting a conical roof, and with ornate railings between the columns, were set in the vicinity of the eastern (right) hemicycle. However, this little tholos was not centred; rather it stood off to the left-hand side of the eastern exedra.9 It was built over a pit, it seems the one in which the old lots were found by the noble Praenistine digging on the mountain-side. This has been identified as the religiously screened place of the oracle, the “locus saeptus religiose” described by Cicero.10

columnar ciborium, was erected over the Sepulchre; the construction of the rotunda which finally enclosed the Sepulchre involved removing the rock of the hillside from around the grotto, and levelling the ground, a considerable undertaking which was not completed until well after Constantine’s death. Then to the east of the Sepulchre was erected a great peristyle court, and beyond it to the East was constructed a five-aisled basilica, known in the fourth century as the Martyrium, a building which was dedicated on 17th September, 335. The whole complex was axially laid out, with the Basilica and the Sepulchre more or less aligned on the atrium and steps which constituted the main entrance to the complex from the colonnaded street to the East. (fig.7) It is unclear when the rock of Calvary, Golgotha, received architectural definition – it is referred to by the earliest visitor, the Pilgrim of Bordeaux, who saw it in 333, as “the little hill of Golgotha”. This apparently was an isolated block of rock, situated in the south-east corner of the colonnaded court between the Sepulchre and the Basilica. The rock may have carried a monumental golden jewelled cross on its top12 - although this has been disputed13 - and is referred to by the pilgrim Egeria at the end of the fourth century as “At the Cross”.14 Behind it, at a location which Egeria refers to as “Behind the Cross”, was a chapel in which the wood of the True Cross was displayed and venerated on Good Friday.15 In is unclear precisely how the rock of Golgotha and the associated chapel were incorporated into the colonnades of the court, and to what extent they would have related visually to the surrounding structures. However, it is striking that the site of Christ’s martyrdom is neither located on the dominant axis running from the entrance through the Basilica and on to the Sepulchre, nor stands in any obvious focal position; rather it is tucked into the corner of the peristyle court between the Martyrium Basilica and the Sepulchre. Of course this location may have been conditioned by what was thought to have been the actual topographical relationship between the Hill of Calvary and the Christ’s Sepulchre; but it certainly draws attention to the overriding importance of the place of Christ’s death, to the rock which was not, could not be, incorporated into the overall axial organization of the other principal memorial buildings at the site, a complex of loca sancta which in the fourth century was known by the encompassing name, Golgotha.16

So, throughout the whole sanctuary, the strictly symmetrical sequence of terraces, ramps and stairs, porticoes and exedras is broken at only one place, at the little round shrine on the fourth terrace. If its identification with the pit in which the old oaken lots were found is correct, this would have been the most sacred place in the whole complex. Its peculiar, apparently arbitrary location would have told the visitor that it was the very sacredness of the place which had prevented its being dragged into alignment with every other feature of the sanctuary. Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem A second instance of the off-axis location of a major sacred site is the rock of Golgotha at the Anastasis complex in Jerusalem. Soon after the excavation and identification of the Sepulchre of Christ in 325/6, in the area of Hadrian’s great urban development in Jerusalem, Constantine initiated the construction of a major complex of buildings to encompass the rock-cut tomb in which Christ’s body was laid, and Golgotha, the mount on which he was crucified.11 Initially a small sanctuary, a open-air

Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City, Cambridge, 1995, pp.85-94; M. Biddle, The Tomb of Christ, Thrupp, Stroud, 1999. 12 Vincent & Abel, op. cit., 1914, II, pp.188ff.; A. Frolow, ‘Numismatique byzantine et archéologie des Lieux Saints. Au sujet d’une monnaie de l’impératrice Eudocie’, in Mémorial Louis Petit, Paris, 1948, pp.34ff.; G. Matthiae, Mosaici medioevali delle chiese di Roma, Rome, 1967, p.182; D. Meehan, Adamnan’s De Locis Sanctis, Dublin, 1983, pp.48-9; R. N. Bailey, England’s Earliest Sculptors, Toronto, 1996, pp.46-7. 13 C. Miller, ‘‘Lignum Vitae’ or ‘Crux Gemmata’? The Cross of Golgotha in the early Byzantine period’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 20, 1996, pp.77-99. 14 Wilkinson, op. cit., 1981, pp.43, 133-6. 15 Coüasnon, op. cit,. 1974, pp.50-3; Wilkinson, op. cit., 1981, pp.43, 1367. 16 Wilkinson, op. cit., 1981, p.42.

9 Fasolo & Giullini, op. cit., 1953, pp.147-53, fig. 191, plans, VIII, XX, XXI. 10 Kähler, op. cit., 1958; Boethius, op. cit., 1978, p. 74. 11 L. H. Vincent & F. M. Abel, Jérusalem, recherches de topographie, d’archéologie et d’histoire. II. Jérusalem nouvelle, Paris, 1914; C. Coüasnon, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, London, 1974, pp.14-53; V. C. Corbo, Il Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme, 3 vols., Jerusalem, 1981; J. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land, Warminster, 1981, pp.39-46; R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th edition, Harmondsworth, 1986, pp.60-3; A. J.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies San Vitale, Ravenna One of the best preserved and most spectacular surviving buildings from Late Antiquity is the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. (fig.8) The church was begun in 526 under bishop Ecclesius (521-34) and completed a quarter of a century later and consecrated on May 17th 548 under Bishop Maximianus (546-554).17 The precise original function of the building and the reasons for its foundation are unclear. The mosaic panels in its sanctuary, showing the reigning emperor, Justinian, and his consort Theodora, making their offerings to the church, suggest that the emperor and empress may have had a hand in the foundation. However, it is recorded in the Liber Pontificalis of Ravenna that the person principally responsible for founding the church was a certain Julianus Argentarius, one of the most prominent citizens, who is known to have been responsible for the construction of other churches in the city (S. Maria Maggiore and S. Michele in Africisco), as well as the great funerary church of S. Apollinare in Classe, the port of Ravenna.18 In San Vitale, Julianus’s name was recorded alongside that of the commissioning bishop, Ecclesius, in the now lost golden mosaic dedicatory inscription, as the person actually responsible for the ornamentation and dedication of the church.19 His monogram is carved onto some of the capitals alongside that of the contemporary bishop, Victor (538-45),20 and the marble reliquary box deposited beneath the main altar when the sanctuary was consecrated bears his name alone: “Julianus Argentarius servus vester precibus vestris basilicam a fundamentis perfecit”.21 He is probably to be identified with the man represented prominently, beside the Emperor, in the mosaic in the sanctuary.

palm tree”, perhaps a sobriquet alluding to martyrdom. This would seem to have been identified with the site on which the church of S. Vitale was subsequently built.24 Now there is a peculiar feature of S. Vitale, which has given rise to much comment and various explanatory hypotheses. This is the skewed orientation of the narthex. In the sixth century the church was entered via an atrium (now completely erased), and then through the so-called ardica, a wide narthex, with apses at each end. S. Vitale is an octagonal structure, with its sanctuary to the south-east, the apse replacing one of the eight exterior wall-sections. One would expect the narthex to have been aligned on the apse, abutting the side of the octagon opposite the sanctuary. But this is not the case. It is set aslant, with the mid-point of one side pivoting on the exterior angle between two adjacent sides of the octagon. The narthex was entered from the atrium through three openings, a triple gateway in the middle and two single doors towards each end. But there were only two, rather than three major openings leading from the narthex to the interior of the church. These were set so as to correspond with the midpoints of the two adjacent slanting walls of the octagon and here the octagon walls were replaced by wide openings, each screened with two columns. The northern of these two inner entrances is axially aligned with the sanctuary, the main altar and the apse to the east, but the southern entrance leads onto five-eleven o’clock axis running through the centres of two of the seven columnar exedras which form a circular scalloped colonnade separating the central nave from the surrounding ambulatory. That the two axes were conceived of as being of comparable importance is suggested by the way in which the jambs of the two major doors in the inner wall of the narthex are angled in alignment with the two axes projecting across the interior of the building.

One of the principal functions of the church seems to have been that of a martyrium, a memorial church erected over the tomb of a martyr.22 The church was dedicated to Vitalis and to his two sons, Gervasius and Protasius. Vitalis, if he was a historical figure, seems to have been martyred at Bologna, in the third century. However, according to the Passio beatorum martyrum Gervasii et Protasii, a text composed in the early sixth century, probably at Ravenna, and issued under the name of the great fourth-century bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, Vitalis was associated with Ravenna and was the principal member of a family of martyrs, the husband of S.Valeria and the father of Gervasius and Protasius.23 According to this document, Vitalis suffered martyrdom then, with his family and together with a companion Ursicinus. The place of their deaths is identified as ad palmam, “at the

Various explanations for this arrangement have been proposed. Jackson suggested that it may have been designed to provide a long narthex and to create spaces for the two flanking stair-towers.25 De Angelis D’Ossat proposed that the layout may have been determined by preexisting physical features in the area, including the lines of existing streets.26 The atrium was certainly aligned on an existing main road to the West, but this does not satisfactorily explain the angled orientation of the church. Deichmann proposes that the narthex was set askew in this manner for static reasons.27 He observes that set in this way the vault of the hall and the two flanking stair-towers can effectively buttress three of the eight exterior angles of the building. He argues that the building must be that much more stable for having only three rather than four of its angles left unpropped. Even if the physics behind this explanation are correct, the swinging of the narthex does

17

C. Rizzardi, S.Vitale di Ravenna: L’architettura, Ravenna, n.d., pp.512. 18 F. W. Deichmann, Ravenna, Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes, Band III, Kommentar, 2. Teil, Wiesbaden, 1976, pp.21-2. 19 Rizzardi, op. cit. (n.d.), pp.11-12; Deichmann, op. cit., 1976, p.3; O. G. von Simson, Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna. 2nd edition, Princeton, 1987, pp.5-6. 20 Deichmann, op. cit,. 1976, pp.4, 23, fig. 24. 21 Deichmann, op. cit,. 1976, p.4. 22 Deichmann, op. cit,. 1976, pp.7-9. 23 Acta Sanctorum, Junii, IV, pp.683f; Patrologia Latina, XVII, col. 742.

24

von Simson, op. cit., 1987, pp.5, 15. G. Jonescu, “Il problema planimetrico della chiesa di S.Vitale in Ravenna”, Felix Ravenna, 43, 1934, p.51. 26 G. De Angelis D’Ossat, Studi Ravennati, Ravenna, 1962, p.78. 27 Deichmann, op. cit., 1976, pp.81-2. 25

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seem to be a rather drastic and inelegant solution to the problem.

there is little doubt that from the time of the foundation of the church a major altar to St. Vitalis, vying in status and emphasis with the main Marian altar in the eastern apse, was located here. This was the reason for the disposition of the ardica, which resulted in two principal axes, a liturgical one to the main altar and apse, and a martyrial one to the spot on which the patron saint suffered death and was commemorated. The power of the saint was such as to drag the entrance hall round out of its natural alignment.

A much more likely reason for the oblique narthex is “martyrial”.28 By the later Middle Ages, the right-hand entrance and axis was certainly the martyrial axis. The shrine and altar of St. Vitalis in this period was located in the first exedra through which this axis passed, in the fiveo’clock position – it was here that the patron saint was venerated, rather than at the high altar which was dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages - and there was a corresponding memorial to his co-martyr Ursicinus in the opposite exedra, in the eleven o’clock position. Indeed, in the Middle Ages the principal entrance to the church was not through the narthex at all. In the thirteenth century the old atrium had been converted into a cloister for the Benedictine monastic community which had been established at the church since at least the ninth century. The main entrance at this time was though the door which lies at eleven o’clock on the martyrial axis. The old axis was now traversed in reverse, by passing first over the stone which commemorated the decapitation of Ursicinus in the eleven-o’clock exedra, then on to the shrine of S. Vitalis in the opposite one. There is record of an altar in St. Vitalis’ exedra in 1314, and in 1583 a painting by Federico Barocci of the saint being cast while still alive into a well (now in Milan in the Brera) was installed over the altar. The well in question was supposedly located at this very spot, and in the sixteenth century the faithful coming to venerate the saint could drink healing water here from beneath the altar. In its baroque setting two highly polished convex slabs of black marble flanked the altar, darkly reflecting the circling interior of the building and concentrating it on this spot. This was the public axis and focus, the pilgrim’s axis - the monk’s axis lay across the church, via an entrance, at three o’clock, leading in from their cloister and finishing in the large medieval chapel of St. Benedict, built off the nine-o’clock side of the octagon, and demolished at the end of the nineteenth century.29

St. Demetrios, Thessaloniki The basilica of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki was built originally probably early in the sixth century.31 Its size and ambitious design with five aisles and transept suggest that from the outset it was intended to serve as the focus of a major cult..32 (fig.9) The passion and afterlife of St. Demetrios are recounted in the seventh-century Miracles of St. Demetrios.33 The saint is said to have suffered martyrdom at Thessaloniki during the persecution of Galerius, around 300. He was stabbed to death in the furnace room of a public baths, and miracles and cures began to occur at the site soon after his death. A Prefect of Illyricum, Leontios, is said to have later built a church to him there. There never seem to have been primary relics of St. Demetrius in Thessaloniki; only a special shrine, a ciborium, as it was called, which played a central role in the manifestation of the saint,34 a small inaccessible cruciform crypt beneath the main altar, which seems to have contained secondary relics of some kind,35 and an extensive and somewhat enigmatic crypt area behind the apse of the church.36 The structures in the area behind the apse have been interpreted as the remains of old Roman bath buildings, presumably the very bath in which the saint was believed to have been martyred. Demetrios became established as the patron saint of Thessaloniki, closely identified with its fortunes and a symbol of its independence from Constantinople and of its high standing. He protected the city when it was under threat, for instance on various occasions during the perilous Avar and Slav siege in September 586, when he appeared on the walls fighting alongside the garrison.

Excavations in 1911 and 1925 revealed clear traces of a shrine of some kind immediately beneath the five-o’clock exedra in the church: a small building with elegant mosaic pavement containing an altar, a table supported by four legs, with a relic deposit beneath.30 This would appear to have been a memorial to St. Vitalis which stood on the spot already before the present church was built in the sixth century, constructed at the place of the well into which the saint is said to have been thrown. The medieval chapel of St. Vitalis apparently continued the memory of this fifth-century memoria in the five-o’clock exedra, and

31

B. Brenk, ‘Zum Baukonzept von Hagios Demetrios in Thessaloniki’, Boreas, 17, 1994 (= M. Jordan-Ruwe & U. Real eds., Bild- und Formensprache der spätantiken Kunst. Hugo Brandenburg zum 65. Geburtstag), pp.33-4; G. & M.Sotiriou, Hi basiliki tou Hagiou Dimitriou tis Thessalonikis, Athens, 1952; J.-M. Spieser, Thessalonique et ses monuments du IVe au VIe siècle: Contribution à l’étude d’une ville paléochrétienne, Athens & Paris, 1984, pp.165-214; Krautheimer & Ćurčić, op. cit., 1986, pp.125-8. 32 R. Cormack, ‘The making of a patron saint: The powers of art and ritual in Byzantine Thessaloniki’, in I. Lavin, ed., World Art: Themes of Unity and Diversity, University Park & London, 1989, p.549. 33 P. Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans, I, Le texte; II, Commentaire, Paris, 1979, 1981; R. Cormack, Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and its Icons, London, 1985, ch. 2; Cormack, op. cit., 1989. 34 Cormack, op. cit., 1989, pp.548-9; Brenk, op. cit., 1994, pp.31-2. 35 Brenk, op. cit. (1994), p.36, figs. 1 & 4. 36 Ibid., pp.37-8.

28 C. Ricci, ‘Chiesa di S.Vitale in Ravenna: l’altar maggiore e l’altare del santo’, Felix Ravenna, 11, July 1913, p.471; G. Gerola, (July 1913), ‘Il sacello primitivo di S.Vitale’, Felix Ravenna, 11, July 1913, p.465; J. Connors, “Borromini, Hagia Sophia and S. Vitale”, in C.L.Striker, ed., Architectural Studies in Memory of Richard Krautheimer, Mainz, 1996, pp.46-7. 29 Ricci, op. cit., 1913; Connors, op. cit., (1996), pp.46-7. 30 Rizzardi, op. cit. (n.d.), pp.71-3; Deichmann, op. cit., 1976, p.47, figs.46; Connors, op.cit., 1996, p.47.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Similarly he worked miracles and cures for individual votaries who sought his help.

Now the ciborium did not stand in the centre of the building, or behind the main altar, or in some other central axial setting. Rather, it was situated on the north side of the nave, a little over a third of the way along from the west wall, close to the sequence of four columns of green Thessalian marble in the middle of the nave-colonnade.43 That is, it seems to been located off any obviously recognisable axis. To a degree its position may have been determined by the route which devotees and pilgrims took to approach it. Generally, the laity do not seem to have had access to the naves of churches in this period, and were restricted to the aisles and galleries.44 At St. Demetrios, the public would have entered the church and approached the ciborium by the inner north aisle, where they would have seen on the walls above their heads votive images recording previous miraculous interventions of the saint.45 Further, the door into the ciborium faced the nearest intercolumniation of the north nave arcade, that is it faced visitors approaching from the north aisle. However, despite this, the idiosyncratic position of the ciborium is significant; it is not aligned with any of the dominant architectural axes and accents within the building.

The focus of his presence and activity was the ciborium in the nave of the basilica. (figs.9 & 10) This no longer stands, but its foundations survive beneath the pavement which was laid down in the early modern period when the building was transformed into a mosque.37 It was also represented in sixth-century mosaics on the walls of the north inner aisle, mosaics preserved only in water-colour copies made before the church was badly damaged by fire in 1917;38 and it is described in the Miracula of the saint. It was a hexagonal structure, originally of wood encased with silver, later of stone, with six columns set around it, and a circular roof surmounted by a globe and a cross.39 Inside was a silver couch and icons of St. Demetrios and the Virgin.40 It was popularly thought of as the “tomb” of the saint, although it is recorded that there were none of his relics in the city.41 The ciborium was the dwelling of the saint, the locus of his powers and presence, and many miracles are recorded as having taken place there. These often involved dreams. For instance, at the time of the Avar/Slav siege in 586, a noble citizen dreamt that he was standing in front of the narthex of the basilica, when two splendid individuals, looking like imperial bodyguards, appeared, and entering the narthex asked one of the attendants where the master of the place was.42 The visitors, whom the citizen recognized as angels, asked the attendant to lead them to the ciborium and knocked on its door. The citizen, watching from the colonnades, saw the door open and St. Demetrios standing just inside, with rays of light gleaming from his face. The angels told Demetrios that their Lord had sent them to bid him to leave the city as it was doomed and come to the Master. The saint, looking despondent, refused, saying he would survive or perish with the citizens. The dreamer awoke, told the defenders of his dream and of course their morale was incalculably strengthened and with the saint’s aid the invaders were repulsed. Miraculous cures were also effected by incubation, by the sufferer sleeping outside the ciborium and being visited by the saint during the night. The ciborium then was the dwelling of the saint, the site at which he could be encountered, and from which he worked his miracles (It seems that citizens of high standing and the clergy could go into the ciborium, although the common people were excluded and could come into the presence of the saint only on occasions on which he came outside or in front of his icons in the church).

********* From these somewhat disparate examples, it would seem that the off-axial, apparently arbitrary location of a shrine is a means occasionally employed in the context of major cults to catch the attention of the faithful and to signal the quite exceptional nature and power of the site. In the four instances we have considered, patrons and architects have drawn attention to the overriding importance and sacrality of a principal cult focus by constructing the complex or building around it, or by locating it in such a position that it forces itself on the attention by its awkward positioning. The overriding significance of the focus is signalled by the visual implication that its siting cannot be subordinated to the dictates of axial and symmetrical design which overtly govern the rest of the structure. It is so powerful than it resists this kind of control, and in the case of San Vitale, twists the axis of the whole building. In a way the relationship between these awkwardly positioned focuses of sacred power and the complex and elegant generally symmetrical structures which incorporate them is parallel to the way in which the relics of saints, the real loci of sacred power and the most effective channels of contact between the mundane and the divine, in the context of Christian cult, relate to the edifices and caskets which contain them.46 The buildings and the reliquaries are designed with the utmost elegance, order and

37

Cormack, op. cit., 1989, p.549, fig.3; Brenk, op. cit., 1994, p.31. R. Cormack, ‘The mosaic decoration of S.Demetrios Thessaloniki –A re-examination in the light of the drawings of W. S. George’, The Annual of the British School of Archaeology of Athens, 64, 1969, pp.17-52; Cormack, op. cit., 1969, pp.31-2, pls.3 & 7; Cormack, op. cit., 1989, fig.4. 39 Lemerle, op. cit., I, 1979, pp.110, 114-5. 40 Ibid., pp.111, 115; Cormack, op. cit., 1989, pp.548-9; Brenk, op. cit,. 1994, pp.31-3. 41 Cormack, op. cit., 1989, p.549. 42 Lemerle, op. cit., I, 1979, pp.159-65; Cormack, op. cit,. 1985, p.67. 38

43

Brenk, op. cit., 1994, p.30. Ibid., pp.31-2. 45 Ibid., pp.31-2. 46 A. Legner, ed., Reliquien: Verehrung und Verklärung. Skizzen und Noten zur Thematik und Katalog zur Ausstellung der Kölner Sammlung Louis Peters im Schnütgen-Museum, Cologne, 1989; A. Legner, Reliquien in Kunst und Kult zwischen Antike und Aufklärung, Darmstadt, 1995. 44

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symmetry, and are typically beautifully ornate, while the relics themselves are bare bones, rusty irons chains or nails, murky glass phials of grim sanguinous liquid. The ultimate virtues and powers of the relics is of course expressed through the orchestrated juxtaposition of their bleak everyday, decaying ugliness with the supreme ordered beauty of their settings. And mutatis mutandis the same relationship can be established to equally powerful effect between a cult complex and the site of sanctity it serves and celebrates. The sacred has a long history of association with notions and physical manifestations of centrality and symmetry. Contemporary debate on the matter stems from Mircea Eliade’s proposition that at all levels of expression, cognitive, symbolic and material, the sacred naturally gravitates towards the centre, and that consequently loci of sanctity tend to be spatially on-axis, symmetrically set and centred.47 In most cultures throughout the world this formulation would generally appear to ‘save the phenomena’. However, the identification of the sacred with the centre inevitably engenders the opposite. The natural and anticipated privileging of the axial and the central leads to its weakening and devaluation, and to the need to find alternative ways to dramatize and announce the overriding power of a focus of spiritual and social energy. In a complex and thought-provoking recent essay, ‘Tenere la Piazza!’ – ‘Hold the square!’, Cesare Poppi has taken issue with Eliade’s thesis and has shown how in certain traditional societies in Europe and in Africa spiritual presence and power is manifested on the margins and in the interstices of social space rather than at its centre.48 In the periodic masquerades of the Ladins of the Dolomites, in northeastern Italy, and in those of the Vagla people of northwestern Ghana, all-important social rituals which act to protect the communities from harmful spirits, to ensure successful harvests and to initiate adolescents into full membership of society, the all-powerful masks operate in semi-secret, half-way between jest and deadly earnest, on the boundaries of public and private space, on the outskirts of the settlement, in its lanes and on the roofs of the houses, not in the main square in full view of the whole community. These patterns of social process offer a striking parallel to the off-axis position of prepotent focuses of transcendent energy in cult buildings of Roman and Christian antiquity. In promoting the ultimate powers of the sacred, the square is abandoned, the centre no longer holds; instead the peripheral and the arbitrary become empowered and the focus is on the haphazard, the excentric, the edge.

47 M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York, 1959, pp.42-55; C. Poppi, ‘“Tenere la Piazza!” Masquerading and the political economy of space: A Europenan and an African case’, in AINAS: Journal of the International Centre for the Anthropology of Art, vol.1., 2001, (forthcoming). 48 Poppi, op. cit. (forthcoming). Many thanks to Joe Connors and Cesare Poppi for their help.

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Fig.1. St. Agnes, Cawston, nave looking east.

Fig.2. San Vincenzo al Volturno, San Vincenzo Maggiore, plan (Karen Francis).

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Fig.3. San Vincenzo al Volturno, San Vincenzo Maggiore, crypt, looking east (Photo: author).

Fig.4. San Vincenzo al Volturno, San Vincenzo Maggiore, central chamber of crypt, looking west (Photo: author).

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Fig.5. Bramfield, Suffolk, parish church of St. Andrew, interior to the North-east, showing chancel screen and the shrine of the Good Rood. (photo: author).

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Fig.6. Praeneste, Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, axonometric plan (after Boethius 1978, fig. 158)

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Fig.7. Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre, plan (after Osterhout 1990, fig. 3).

Fig.8. Ravenna, S. Vitale, plan (after Rizzardi n.d., fig. 3).

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Fig.9. S. Demetrios, Thessaloniki, plan (after Brenk 1994, fig. 1).

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Fig.10. St. Demetrios, Thessaloniki, votive mosaic on inner wall of inner north aisle, with the saint standing in front of his ciborium, watercolour by W.S. George (after Cormack 1985: fig.27).

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‘Kunstgeographie’, or the Problem of Characterising the Art of a Region Stefan Muthesius I The mighty German efforts, earlier in the twentieth century, to create the ideal methodology for the history of art can broadly be divided into three main concerns. Firstly, iconology; secondly, the analysis of changes of style or form which largely meant an explanation of art in relation to the course of time, and, thirdly, the attempt to systematize the geographical diversity of works of art.1 The latter, Kunstgeographie, appeared then, and now, as the least important of the three, except during the period of the late 1920s into the 1940s, when the efforts of much of German art history were instrumentalised, to put it mildly, by new nationalistic trends.2 This, in turn, related to a problem which looms larger within Kunstgeographie than in the other art historical pursuits, namely the relationship between the historical development and diversity of art and the evaluation of artistic quality in absolute terms. It was with iconology that the judgments of artistic value could most successfully be set aside in day-to-day art historical practice - while, of course, assuming an immense, a universal value for Western art as a whole. As regards the Wöllflin/Riegl methods of formal analysis, here, too, one of the major factors of art history’s Wissenschaftlichkeit, its academic credentials, was the assumption that the development of a style, or a ‘stylistic innovation’, did not necessarily coincide with the highest artistic quality and that therefore the history of art and the evaluation of art could be kept apart. In the Kunstgeographie movement, however, statements about geographical specificity invariably carried assertions of artistic quality.

It is also hard to mark out a precise beginning of the attempts to think specifically in terms of a ‘geography of art’. There was, in contrast to the other two method strands, no major individual methodologist, no major name. Wöllflin, of course contributed enormously, but implicitly rather than explicitly. One reason for the foregrounding of any kind of methodological issue was, naturally, the growing professionalism all-round, the desire of art history to present itself as a discipline in its own right. Academic art history’s practitioners had to distance themselves from anything that sounded like mere local antiquarianism or local pride. One has to remember that art history, as well as art criticism had always been international subjects. It was self-understood that a German art historian of standing, say a medieval architectural historian, would, or could, comprise France, Italy, as well as Germany in his or her investigations. One result of the greater quantity and greater diversity of investigations was that the earlier clear-cut divisions according to major nationalities had become diffuse, for example when considering the role of the Normans in Romanesque/Gothic architecture. But at the same time, old geographical labels could not be dispensed with - be it those of nations, or regions - definitely not as far as medieval artefacts were concerned. But a mere antiquarian identification of a work of art with a locality appeared less and less important, or rather, it could only serve as a point of departure; the artefact then had to be placed into a wider national and international art historical context by the professional researcher. A mere local researcher was not deemed capable of such a procedure. In analogy, and in tandem with the question of the age of the object, the question of the location, of its origins, became a major preoccupation vis a vis the increasing number of objects which turned up without documented age or location.

Of the three approaches, Kunstgeographie was also the most recent. Before WWI the issue did not exist as a separate methodology. It went without saying that all works of art were located somewhere. There was the division of European art into national styles, perceived in the older, taxonomic sense of the term style; whereby writers frequently, at least since Romanticism, linked styles with other factors of cultural or national geographical identity. Many writers, but certainly not all, who foregrounded the perceived ‘German’, or ‘English’ elements, did so because they wanted to extol what they saw as the national virtues of the style, and their panegyrics were often accompanied by a grudge against French or Italian hegemony. But issues of geographic systematicity were not raised.

Two factors seemed to have led specifically to the rise of Kunstgeographie after 1910 and its explicit formulation as a problem. The growing internationality of German art history did, of course, not eliminate the question of what was peculiarly German, in a way, it made it more exciting and the answers could now be far more variable and flexible. What emerged from the long story of the attempts to ascribe the invention of Gothic to France, Germany, England or to some vague ‘Nordic’ world, respectively, was a new argument, entailing a solution in which each country could have its very own, national version of Gothic architecture, mostly occurring at the time of Late Gothic. In 1913 one of Wöllflin’s pupils, Kurt Gerstenberg, made an attempt at a comprehensive definition of the German version of Gothic, entitled ‘Deutsche Sondergotik’ [‘sonder’: special/separate]. His method, a welter of formal observations (e.g. the perceived factors of ‘movement’, or ‘Verschleifung’ [fusing or evening out]), derived very largely from his teacher, as

1

M. Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven and London 1982; P. Betthausen, P. H.Feist & oth., Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, Stutgart, 1999. 2 See L. O.Larsson, ‘Nationalstil und Nationalismus in der Kunstgeschichte der zwanziger Jahre’, pp.169-184, in L.Dittmann (ed.), Kategorien und Methoden der deutschen Kunstgeschichte, Stuttgart 1985; S.Muthesius, An Introduction to Art, Architecture and Design in Poland, Koenigstein im Taunus, 1994; D. Gamboni, ‘Esquisse pour une géographie de l’histoire de l’art en Suisse’, in: Unsere Kunstdenkmäler, Mitteilungsblatt für die Mitglieder der Gesellschaft Schweizerische Kunstgeschichte, 1987, pp.399-413.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies well as from August Schmarsow’s writings about ‘architectural space’. In a short separate chapter Gerstenberg tries to underpin the Germanness of his German late Gothic with a perceived general character of the German people, using the term ‘race’ and citing factors taken from the discipline of ‘Völkerpsychologie’. ‘German’, to Gerstenberg, boils down to the well-recited national characteristics of anti-balance, and the emphasis on the ‘process of becoming’.3

and Gothic, does not proceed, as one might expect, from one area to the next, but over large distances, say, from the Poitou to Westfalia. Gerstenberg’s grand sweeps lead him on to his main art-geographical divisions which he classifies, his ‘optische Zonen’, where he attempts to gather groups of formal characteristics in five vast bands reaching across the whole of Europe from East to West. To cite only one of them, the first, which comprises Iceland and England, where he points to the linearity in illuminated manuscripts and in timber-framed architecture, something that, indeed, Nicolaus Pevsner was to take up and declare an English national characteristic.7 Clearly, Gerstenberg’s booklet was no more than a series of apercus; it did not find much agreement and was chided for its ‘macro’ approach.8

It must be noted that Gerstenberg’s text, in the tradition of most pre WWI German academic art history is quite free from chauvinistic overvaluations of German art. As one may expect, that was to change during WWI. The real beginning, it was frequently claimed later, came during the height of the war, with Emile Mâle’s claim that German art always imitated and never invented. The German art historians were, of course, deeply hurt, but their immediate answer was, on the whole, cautious, and may still be taken as intended to demonstrate their international knowledge.4

As mentioned at the beginning, academic art history constituted itself by, among other factors, the way it bypassed direct evaluations of artistic merit. In a Wölfflinian formal analysis one could, indeed, bypass the old notion of the genius as innovator by means of a new art historical argument in which ‘stylistic innovation’ was no longer necessarily tied to high artistic values. Neither did a ‘typical’ example of a period style have to be a work of the highest artistic merit. Kunstgeographers frequently emphasised that their ‘Raumstil’ differed categorically from the ‘Zeitstil’. The latter, by its very nature, was transitory, while the former’s mode of existence was one of permanence. As a corollary, the issue of artistic could not be so easily bypassed as with the Zeitstil. But the logic of the absolute value of a Raumstil remained complex. Two constellations seemed to offer themselves. In 1913 Gerstenberg’s aim was to extol the virtues of German Gothic, its intrinsic, high artistic value, which had gained an independence from its sources in France. In his Kunstgeographie of 1922, however, Gerstenberg maintained that for his art-geographical divisions not the outstanding works of art are normally decisive, but that one needs to look at ‘a common optical basis ... [of] average buildings ...’.9 Thus Kunstgeographie became essentially divided into two varieties: one with an agenda of extolling, or, at least, defending the high art value of works of a region or nation when they were felt to be contested or not sufficiently recognised, as in the aftermath of Mâle. This branch developed particularly during the 1930s and the early 1940s when especially Wilhelm Pinder associated himself to some extent with German Nazi propaganda and concluded the book with a tautology (in terms of Kunstgeographie), claiming the ‘the whole of German art [to be] a Sonderleistung [a special achievement]’.10

Yet one still had to wait for the formulation of the geography of art as a methodological issue; in Gerstenberg’s book of 1913 we still deal with one geographical fact, so to speak, German late Gothic. But nine years later Gerstenberg brought out a small book: Ideen zu einer Kunstgeographie Europas. He begins with bluntly posing the question. ‘There has so far been little concern for the geographical distribution of art on the surface of the earth’. A basic search was now on to find that which caused, or helped explain, the geographical diversity of art. Gerstenberg makes clear that this cannot be politics. Categorically, the borders of areas of art did not and do not coincide with political borders. They do coincide, Gerstenberg claims, with the natural geographical borders.5 Gerstenberg here turns to arguments which had been brought in by the ‘father of human geography’, Friedrich Ratzel, who was concerned with the way in which natural geographical conditions influenced ‘the essence and becoming (Wesen und Werden) of peoples and cultures’.6 Gerstenberg’s approach includes a number of propositions. His starting point is the natural formation of Europe: the sea might form a border area, but might also serve to connect cultures, as in the case of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea; neither did the Alps form an a strong borderline, while the Pyrenees did. Gerstenberg then points to the fact that the beginnings of the spread of a style, such as Romanesque 3

K. Gerstenberg, Deutsche Sondergotik. Eine Untersuchung über das Wesen der deutschen Baukunst im späten Mittelater, Munich, 1913 (new edition Darmstadt 1969), pp. XI, pp.135-55; cf. P.Frankl, The Gothic. Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, Princeton, 1960, pp.680 ff. 4 E. Mâle, L’Art allmand et l’art français du Moyen-Age, Paris, 1917; E. Mâle in Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, 1916, pp.387-403, 429-447, 1917, pp.43-64; for the German replies see Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, 1917, pp.127-73. 5 K. Gerstenberg, Ideen zu einer Kunstgeographie Europas, Leipzig, 1922, p.16. 6 F. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, Vol. I (3rd edition), Stuttgart, 1909, pp.127 ff.

7

N. Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, London, 1956. P. Pieper, Kunstgeographie, Berlin, 1936, pp.16, 19. Gerstenberg, Ideen zu einer Kunstgeographie Europas, Leipzig, pp.1617. 10 W. Pinder, Sonderleistungen der deutschen Kunst, München, 1942, 1944; cf. M. Halbertsma, Wilhelm Pinder und die deutsche Kunstgeschichte, Worms, 1992. 8 9

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The other approach, that of the more intensely searching methodologists, was crucially different; they were precisely not out to extol the art of one group above that of others, but, to the contrary, writers tried and let several groups appear equal. In that context it seemed advisable to avoid the identification of major styles, or of major artgeographical units, with major political areas, that is, with nations and their associated discourses of superiority. The geographical areas on which interest focussed were either larger than nations, as with Gerstenberg in 1922, or smaller than nations, namely regions. It was the latter issue which gained considerable importance in German art historical investigations and to which the remaining part of this contribution is devoted.

the climate either. In fact, with Pieper, natural geography plays hardly any role. ‘Not the givens of earth, climate, race, tradition ...’.13 Pieper’s main geographical variable is, instead, the character of the inhabitants of the regions. His key factor is the diversity of the German tribes (of the Stamm, or the Volksstamm) and what he sees as the profound differences between them, even the ‘Wesensgegensatze (differences in essence) des deutschen Menschen’. For this diversity, as such, an explanation will probably never be found.14 Pieper’s instrumentarium includes, first of all, a Riegl kind of ‘kunstlerisches Müssen’, an artistic urge.15 There is then a racial-biological notion of different facial types (though this remains, Pieper says, ‘difficult to prove’) and he cites a remark about the continued occurrence of Riemenschneider’s ‘Franconian face [physiognomy] of the Würzburg region’. Crucial, however, are the traits of physiognomic expression (ausdrucksphysiognomische Merkmale). To cite only one of his pairs of contrasts: Westfalian man demonstrates ‘uprightness and firmness’; a Swabian’s mood is characterised by ‘letting himself be absorbed in Swabian mysticism combined with a placid [yet] tender calmness’.16 ‘In some specially fortunate cases it actually appears possible to take on a firmly established form for a geographical style’, for instance with the case of the contrast between ‘Swabian horizontality’ and ‘Nuremberg verticality’.17 Finally, there are, ‘even clearer to grasp’, geographical divisions in the choice of certain subjects. Although iconography is generally prescribed by the church which acts on a European scale, and thus can hardly come under Raumstil, nor Zeitstil, a few cases of a regionally specific iconography can be cited, such as the fourteenth century Swabian groups of Christ and St. John sitting next to each other, with one of them leaning his head on the shoulders on the other, sculptures, which in turn, of course, should relate to the already cited kind of Swabian mysticism.18

II The chief representative was an otherwise little-known art historian in Westfalia, Paul Pieper.11 It may come as a surprise to many when we read from a German academic in 1937 a decided goodbye to the notion of ‘national styles’: the national styles, German, French, Italian ‘still appear to me to be cast too widely and cannot serve as starting points for a scientific method’.12 Pieper’s book Kunstgeographie of 1936, is devoted to the division of Germany into regions. As such, of course, this division is not at all a new idea, in that Germany had almost since Roman times been considered a country of divers tribes something that the Germans today call federal. Pieper’s book is for the most part devoted to methodological discussion. As one would expect it at that time in Germany, the key term continues to be ‘style’. It seemed easy to subcategorise that term. Pieper’s ‘Raumstil’ (which should, of course, not be translated as ‘spatial style’, but as ‘geographical style’) worked in complex ways with, or against ‘Zeitstil’. Pieper acknowledges grudgingly the ‘superiority’ of Zeitstile, their greater explanatory power. There are a great number of further subcategories: the style of the individual artist, the style of a ‘School’ - in the French sense of école de such and such - as well as the style of a guild or a workshop. For Pieper Raumstil must be clearly distinguished from all the latter subcategories. He also maintains that the style of an artistic centre and the way this radiates into its surroundings is not the same as Raumstil; the latter covers the whole of a region, although one can never expect its borders to be very distinct.

Here Pieper’s methodological ground begins to shift. ‘Raumstil’ becomes something in which that which is ‘expressed’ takes a primary role. Pieper states that ‘form may more easily be determinable as a Zeitstil...contents more easily as a Raumstil.’19 It was claimed that the essence of a Raumstil is that it bridges several Zeitstile, which penetrate the area from outside - a point made much more strongly by another ardent Kunstgeographer, Albert Brickmann.20 The delicate problem was that these regional

As has been hinted at before, ‘geography’, as such, does not yet seem to explain much. Pieper tried hard to focus the question: which geographical factors influence works of art? Like Gerstenberg, Pieper opts against a relationship between art and political areas, but, unlike Gerstenberg, Pieper does not take into account the shape of the land or

13

Pieper 1936, pp.17, 18. Pieper 1936, pp.23, 25. Pieper actually found it hard to cite works that gave a comprehensive explanation of the culture of the German tribes. He criticises the most notable work in its field, the multivolume J. Nadler, Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stamme und Landschaften, 3rd. edition Regensburg, 1932, for its lack of rationale (Pieper 1936, pp.22ff.). 15 Pieper 1936, p. 60. 16 Pieper 1936, p.60. 17 Pieper, 1936, pp.64-66; Pieper 1937, p.107. 18 Pieper 1936, pp.64-5. 19 Pieper 1936, pp.65-6. 20 A. Brinckmann, Geist der Nationen. Italiener - Franzosen - Deutsche, Hamburg, 1938. 14

11

P. Pieper, Kunstgeographie. Versuch einer Grundlegung, Berlin, 1936 (cited as ‘Pieper 1936’); P. Pieper, ‘Probleme der Kunstgeographie’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistegeschichte, 1937, 1, pp.92-117 (cited as ‘Pieper 1937’). 12 Pieper 1937, p.95.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies characteristics had to show a sufficiently special form to differentiate themselves from other regions, but they also had to be of a sufficiently general character to provide a constant through many centuries, when they were refracted through a number of Zeitstile.

way art historians insisted on a narrow definition of art, so far away from today’s opening out of art history towards material and visual culture. Would it not suit the project of tracing strong regional differences, so Pieper’s rhetorical question, if we turned towards folk art? In fact, Volkskunst may be said to have carried on with a largely taxonomic study of differences which had been current in so much earlier art history. But for Pieper this was not an option: ‘it certainly does not appear possible to recognise at all the contrasts between regions, in their full mental and psychic depth, through folk art and folklore studies’.26 This factor of staying within the realm of high art itself meant that a strong artistic evaluation is ever present, at least implicitly. It may always lead to a tacit recognition of the superiority of an individual artist’s influence over a Raumstil. But for his beloved period, the late Middle Ages, Pieper tries hard to postulate a balance of individual and society: ‘During the Middle Ages even the greatest art, and in particular the greatest artist, was rooted in the tribal (völklicher und stammlicher) community’ - whereby ‘völklich’ is obviously something different from ‘Volkskunst’. Pieper at one point even maintains, in a have-your-cake-and-eat-itmood, that ‘especially the highest creations appear specially characteristic for a Raumstil’.27

One realises that Pieper’s instrumentarium for a new Kunstgeographie stood on unsafe grounds. Pieper severely undermined the geographical argument by homing in on historical factors, such as that well-known characterisation of the late medieval set-up in Northern Europe: artists and craftsmen were in a balanced situation: bound into the world of their guilds, yet free enough to look out for influences from elsewhere.21 It was, furthermore, a time when individuals’ names were, as yet, barely known and we can thus assume much greater ties within the ‘tribal characteristics’ that surrounded them. It was the ‘free’ artists of the Renaissance who brought an ‘end to the Raumstile’. Moreover, Pieper limits himself very largely to figural sculpture. Architecture, in his opinion, is not a suitable candidate for Raumstil, as it has so often been held to be conditioned chiefly by the material of the area.22 As already mentioned, Pieper opts against material reasons wherever he can. Pieper’s perhaps over-cautious reflections on Kunstgeographie of 1936/7 did not find much direct response and application. German art history continued after WWII with some interest in Kunstgeographie; especially in the regional issue. In the new Federal Republic and after the fall of Nazi pan-German nationalism, the preferred word was Kunstlandschaften (whereby Landschaft has more the sound of the ‘paysage’ of French geographers, rather than of ‘landscape’). In 1965 the medievalist Rainer Hausherr cited a new work by Pieper about Westfalian art which, in Hausherr’s formulation, came to the conclusion that ‘“the Westfalian” does not exists as an art-geographical component of style’.23 Hausherr again took stock of the Kunstgeographie movement and found it wanting in almost every sense. Virtually all characterisations, whether concerning form or content, simply proved too vague.24 In 1984 Lars Olof Larsson held the problem to be ‘unsolvable’.25

III We may conclude that we have little time today for these early twentieth century German dilemmas, for questions such as: Should one try and raise the profile of German art as a whole, or should one stress that countries’ regional diversities and qualities? One has to be aware of the ways in which at that time, that is, until the 1920s, even the most revered of all German art historians, at least as far as his work on German art was concerned, Georg Dehio, ultimately held German art to be a provincial version of that of France and Italy. One of the underlying aims of Pieper’s attempt at a regional differentiation was to keep the notion ‘provincial’ at bay: ‘One would do well to avoid the term “provincialisation” as regards the deflection of a Zeitstil in various geographical areas, even in those instances where there is clearly a lowering of quality’.28 Likewise, Dehio and most others of his generation kept stressing a strong pattern of provincialisation within Germany itself, namely form from west to east. Pieper warns: ‘We must not see the disposition of Raumstile from West to East merely as a mirror of waves of influence which take their origins in the West.’29

We must return, once again, to the issue of artistic evaluation and its relationship with academic ‘wertfreie Kunstgeschichte’. It was maintained above that among the major methodological stances of art history in those decades it was the geography of art which remained most closely concerned with making artistic value judgments. Such judgements were, first and foremost, implicit in the

Two major concerns were foregrounded here, the instruments of Kunstgeographie and the problem of artistic evaluation. Today, in an art history which is more preoccupied with arguing about processes than with contemplating phenomena, it cannot be a primary task to pinpoint sets of ‘Raumstile’. Altogether, the term style appears less and less useful. To describe - as static givens

21

Pieper 1936, p.51. Pieper 1936, p.67. 23 P. Pieper, Das Westfälische in Malerei und Plastik, Der Raum Westfalen IV, 3, Münster, 1964. See R. Hausherr, ‘Überlegungen zum Stand der Kunstgeographie. Zwei Neuerscheinungen’, Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter, 1965, pp.351-72, (p.360). 24 R. Hausherr, ‘Kunstgeographie - Aufgabe, Grenzen, Möglichkeiten’, Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter, 1970, pp.158-171. 25 C. O. Larsson, op. cit. note 2, p.181. 22

26

Pieper 1936, pp.50-51. Pieper 1936, p.53. Pieper 1936, p.70. 29 Pieper 1936, p.73. 27 28

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- specific mental or formal characteristics of the producers of art, of a ‘tribe’, or of any European region, would seem a tricky undertaking today. One might, however, in this context, point to a certain kind of humanism in Pieper’s subtle deliberations, on the ways the artist acts as an individual and within his or her group. What does intrigue us today, however, is what one may call the ethics and politics of artistic evaluation, i.e. its manifestation in the issues and problems of local judgement vs judgment from outside. The fact is that the processes of heritage protection and appreciation have raised the stakes of evaluation - although the evaluation may not necessarily be the high-art artistic one of the earlier art historians in their contemplative stance. Today, the issue may be seen rather as that of the locals paying for ‘their’ heritage and then expecting it to be appreciated by the tourist from outside. We may still meet with the scenario of an academic or a critic from a long way away arguing for a new kind of wider attention to be given to a work or art, or a group of works, which were hitherto only evaluated by the locals with limited knowledge. Conversely, the locals’ high praise of one of their possessions may meet with scepticism from outside. The issue of the juxtaposition of the regional or the provincial to the supra-regional or global may assume greater importance than ever before.

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Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600 Rodney Palmer Introduction This paper is the fruit of a World Art Studies Research Fellowship awarded by John Onians in 2000. Fellows were asked to consider the art of more than one continent in this case Europe and South America. I will analyse how representations of statuary orders in Jan Vredeman de Vries’ Caryatidum (Antwerp 1565) and Serlio’s Books on Architecture were interpreted in Spanish America. Because of the relative lack there of extant examples of European art and architecture, sixteenth-century Spanish America is ideally suited to evaluating the reception of European print imagery. One looks forward to lengthier enquiries into how (not just European) print culture travelled and was transformed in at least three continents at any given time. Here, Andean Spanish America provides a relatively vast initial case study.

caution should always be exercised in discussing the ‘source’ which were often in fact sources, for any given early modern American artefact derived from European engravings. This potential variation and complication of the received European influence was but the first of several stages in the passage of imagery from one culture to another. This paper will examine the bases for distortions of European influence in the patronage and manufacture of each sillería, by re-examining the contractual evidence for each. It will consider how the received influence was transformed, largely due to the American cognitive bases of each sillería’s respective ‘carver’ - as the makers of both sets of choir-stalls are labelled for now, their social status between artists and carpenters being an issue in the historiography of both sillerías.

Naturally, this paper considers the methodology of World Art Studies as it is currently evolving. World Art Studies embraces a variety of methods, from the most traditional to the most innovative. In counterpoint to John, but with the same worldwide vision in mind, an enlightened kind of empiricism is here advocated. Traditional methods, notably analysis of patronage, are deployed. This article is intentionally provisional, insofar as the innovative worldwide approach to which it aims to contribute will best be realised through collaboration. This is exactly what Levon Chookaszian and I have had in mind since August 2000 when he was a participant from Armenia, and I a keen lurker on the fringes, at the Summer Institute of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia. Levon and I would welcome hearing from any would-be participant in our project on the Worldwide Travel of Print Culture in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.1 Here, of the innumerable interfaces between artists working in Spanish America and their European sources, only two are considered at any length.

This enquiry will address a longstanding and as yet unresolved disagreement among historians of colonial Spanish American visual culture: the extent to which the differing but persistent deviations from the European canon which the new continent inherited from the old can be explained, as many Latin American investigadores have claimed, by the endurance of indigenous aesthetics, or, as European and North American scholars, notably George Kubler and Santiago Sebastián, have preferred, as deviations mainly due to inferior craftsmanship in the new continent. Here, the view that Precolombian iconographies survived in colonial art will be entertained, and it will be argued that the European canon was transformed when borrowed in Spanish America, owing to local artists’ cognitively and not just technically diverse backgrounds. For this argument to deliver, it should be explained why an article on the apparently unrelated matter of the influence of European engravings on artistic design in early modern Spanish America is precisely the space in which to consider the survival of local iconographies.

Twentieth-century scholarship revealed that the sillerías (sets of carved seats) in the Cathedrals of Sucre, Bolivia, and of Tunja, Colombia, are largely informed by engravings in architectural manuals and in pattern books, especially Serlio’s Fourth Book and Vredeman de Vries’ Antwerp 1565 Caryatidum.2 The aim is to reconstruct the variables within and around the European influence on each. The first point to be made about these and other artefacts derived from engravings concerns a variable endemic to printed imagery. The same designs were replicated in different engravings and books, due to which

In a thought-provoking article on the influence of European engravings on ‘similar and simultaneously different’ art in early modern ‘New Spain’, or Mexico, Jorge Alberto Manrique argued that sixteenth-century Colonial art in New Spain was distinguished from its European models not by the survival of indigenous influence, but by ‘mis-readings’ of its engraved sources.3 The suggestion of ‘incorrect’ or ‘mis’ readings recommends itself for its acknowledgement of a cognitive basis to the transformations to which Western style was subjected when transposed to Spanish America. However, Manrique’s attitude to any cognitive gap is unduly negative, and rather than presume incorrect misreading of

1

Would-be participants should contact [email protected] or [email protected] J. de Mesa & T. Gisbert, Escultura Virreinal en Bolivia, La Paz, 1972, p.244 on motifs from Sagredo and Serlio in the Sucre sillería; S. Sebastián, La ornamentación arquitectonica en la Nueva Granada, Tunja, 1966, p.54, on motifs from Jan Vredeman de Vries’ Antwerp 1565 Caryatidum in the Tunja sillería. 2

3

J. A. Manrique, “La estampa como fuente del arte en la Nueva España”, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 50, 1982, pp.55-61, p.55 on the ‘similar y simultáneamente diferente’ character of art in New Spain, p.57, contrasts ‘tequitqui’ with ‘mala lectura de los modelos’.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies the source whenever a colonial Spanish American artefact differs significantly from its European source, ‘re-reading’ is here preferred. The latter term provides a more equitable basis for assessing different American adaptations of European form. Both uninformed ‘misreadings’ and conscious re-readings of engraved source materials were compatible with indigenous elements also appearing in any given composition.

Alfred Gell’s anthropological perspective might well prove ennabling to such a future line of enquiry. In Art and Agency Gell questioned the perceived need for a different theory of art for colonized culture.6 Reading Gell, one becomes aware that analysis of colonial art has become in certain respects unnecessarily convoluted. For instance, Gell notices that historians of colonial art have to date fixed on ‘responses by indigenous people to the reception of their artistic production by [the colonizing] art world’.7 We can instead attempt to recover local responses to colonial art, by approaching any artefact as a ‘material index’ from which the viewer can make causal inferences.8 These inferences can be drawn by means of lines of enquiry such as the biographical and sociological, the latter as Gell points out dependent upon the existence of art institutions,9 regarding which earlier colonial art needs some defining. While patronising institutions existed, artistic ones such as academies did not; the social position of native artists in early modern Spanish America can only be inferred, from their art itself and from documentary evidence. Traditional iconographical and social approaches that have in the past informed art history can be innovatively revived as part of an anthropological approach in which the European sources for and colonial documentation surrounding the two sillerías in question are themselves part of the ‘material index’. While stimulated by the questions anthropology poses, where Gell’s anthropological theory of art stops short of aesthetic evaluation, in this paper I will evaluate degrees of mestizaje and mezclaje.

Acknowledging that ‘mis’ or re-readings of engraved sources and the survival of indigenous idioms are not mutually exclusive is almost to credit the concept of mestizo visual culture. Disagreeing with the application of the genetic term mestizo to the visual arts, Kubler reasonably pointed out its uselessness for defining relative degrees of influence, and preferred the clumsy but dialectally balanced ‘hispano-indigenous’.4 Mestizaje has for decades been recognised as helpful for describing and promoting Latin American art since Independence. Mestizo approximately means hybrid, but mestizaje, also punning on mensaje or message, is untranslatable. Thus, even though ‘hybridity’ is rejected as unhelpful by anglophone colleagues engaged in forgeing World Art Studies, such as Peter Brunt, in the context of Spanish American colonial artefacts we can test notions of mestizaje, while ‘hispanoindigenous’ nomenclature retains its usefulness. Sixteenth-century works that reveal little or no indigenous content may be distinguished by way of the term mezclaje, a neologism derived from a key source text for Spanish American colonial art, the Spanish-language editions of Serlio’s Third and Fourth Books, and especially the advocation therein of the mixture or mezcla of different architectural orders.5 In attempting to contribute to the development of World Art Studies, it might seem retrograde to be coining neoligisms that are tied to a single (albeit vast) continent. However mezclaje might in future prove applicable to Spain and her non-American dominions, notably the Philippines. Mezclaje is here suggested with the proviso that future enquiries into the worldwide travel of print culture consider it alongside Serlio’s initial mistura, anglophone mixture and so on.

Historical and physical similarities of the sillerías at Sucre and Tunja The two sillerías have previously been mentioned in the same breath, because they are contemporary with each other, and both are among the earliest securely datable examples of the application of ‘Mannerist’ European motifs to the decorative arts in Spanish America.10 The remote ecclesiastical centres of Chuquisaca (present-day Sucre, Bolivia) in Charcas, a southern province of the Peruvian viceroyalty, and of Tunja, in central northern Nueva Granada (present-day Colombia), have both been interpreted as leading American centres of ‘Italian Renaissance’ style.11 Historiographers of Tunja have questioned whether Tunja can really be termed ‘Renaissance’,12 and the same can be asked of Chuquisaca,

For now, demonstrating the fruitfulness of the invitation to examine two continents at once, in addition to colonial Spanish America being ideally suited to the analysis of European print imagery, an enquiry into the influence of European engravings is precisely the place in which to evaluate particular qualities of Colonial American art. Doing so allows us to measure European input on the one hand, and on the other mis- and re-readings of it, both of the latter sometimes affected by the indigenous American heritage. The two sillerías here considered will define two points in the matrix of mestizaje and mezclaje.

6

A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford, 1998, p.1. Ibid, p.8. 8 Ibid, p.13. 9 Ibid, p.7. 10 Summa Artis: Historia General del Arte, vol. XXVIII: S. Sebastián, J. de Mesa & T. Gisbert de Mesa, Arte Iberoamericano desde la colonización a la Independencia, Madrid, 1992, p.72, p.75, figs.79-80. 11 De Mesa & Gisbert 1972, p.40 on the Italian Renaissance character of the visual arts in later sixteenth-century Chuquisaca, relative to nearby Potosí and other centers in the Peruvian viceroyalty. E. Marco Dorta, “La Arquitectura del Renacimiento a Tunja”, Revista de Indias, IX, 1942, pp.463-513; J. M. Morales Folguera, Tunja: Atenas del Renacimiento en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, Malaga, 1998. 12 S. Sebastián, “¿Existió un renacimiento arquitéctonico en la Nueva Granada?”, El Tiempo (Bogotá), 14 August 1966 cit. C. Ortega Ricuarte, Diccionario de artistas en Colombia, Bogotá, 1979, pp.91-92. 7

4

“Encuestra sobre la significacion de la Arquitectura Barocca Hispanoamericana”, Boletino del Centro de Investigaciones Historicas y Esteticas, 1, Jan. 1964, pp.19-42, especially p.30. 5 S. Serlio, transl. F. de Villalpando, Tercero y Quarto Libro de Architectura , Toledo, 1552, fol. XIIIv ‘esta mezcla o mixtura … es muy agradable.’

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both the Tunja and the Sucre sillerías being, for reasons very much connected with the European illustrated books from which they derive, ‘Italianate Mannerist’. Both the Sucre and the Tunja sillerías were instigated by Spanish clerics as part of larger architectural and artistic programmes informed by the European canon.

prominent in the humanist circle around Castellanos and whose name recurs in the documentation for the sillería,17 and Isabel de Leguizamón, presumably related to Juan, among whose legal papers the contracts for the Tunjan sillería are preserved.18 Juan de Leguizamón succeeded Juan de Castellanos as mayorduomo of the Cathedral fabrica in the later 1590s, and adopted the Italianate artistic taste of his predecessor who in 1587 had brought the Roman painter Angelico Medoro to Tunja, where Medoro worked for some eleven years.19 Castellanos’ continuing interest in the mayordomía of the Cathedral emerges from his will.20 He certainly had a stake in the exactly contemporary new portal,21 and it has been hypothesised that he supplied the quatrain incorporated into the vescoval chair of the silletería.22 Alongside Castellanos, Juan Vargas was a key patron of Tunjan humanist culture, and the allegorical frescoes in his house just around the corner from the Cathedral drew on the same Flemish source as the silletería, Vredeman de Vries.

By the end of the sixteenth century wooden sillerías de coro abounded in Spain,13 and would at the time, as they have since,14 have been considered a typical Hispanic artefact. The two Andean sillerías here analysed are among the earliest Spanish American examples. Both are of imported wood. That at Sucre is of cedar, a Spanish import from Panama. The Tunja sillería is of walnut. Originating from Persia and the Caucasus, walnut was a prized material for Spanish sillerías. Walnut was the adamant choice of the patrons of the Tunjan sillería.15 Compared to established Andean materials such as ceramic, metal and textiles, wood carving expressed European agency. Their similarities established, the best way forward is to discuss the two sillerías in turn, first Tunja then Sucre, in both cases preparing the ground by considering their social and economic contexts, and summarising some of the engraved sources for each, before assessing their respective visual characteristics.

Leguizamón’s supervision of the building and decoration of Tunja Cathedral was distinguished by the construction of its portal, begun in the same year as the silletería by the Mallorcan Bartolomé Carrión.23 The Palladian derivation of the ‘monstrous’ equine capitals on the portal is generally accepted.24 However, the same capitals had previously appeared in Serlio’s Fourth Book25- a reminder that the same imagery was replicated in different sources. The overall character of the façade of Tunja Cathedral makes it most likely that the capitals are derived from Palladio.

Tunja Late sixteenth-century Tunja was as manifestly built and decorated on the basis of European engravings and books as was any other Latin American centre at any historical moment: in Tunja Flemish, French, Spanish and Italian engravings informed architecture, painting and sculpture. While two Italian painters are known to have worked in late sixteenth-century Tunja, in the fields of architecture and sculpture the Tunjan pattern was that European engraved source materials were chosen by a circle of Spanish humanist patrons, and interpreted with varying degrees of success by local artisans.

The contract between Leguizamón and Carrión for the portal reveals that a sketch was demanded at the outset,

17

Ibid, p.259 for the signing of the March 1598 contract in Juan de Vargas’ office, p.262 for Vargas’ signature on the 30 April 1603 ratification of payment for the silletería. 18 Ibid., p.257 for the location of the Tunjan documentation among the papers of Isabel de Leguizamón (Archivo General de las Indias, Seville, Santa Fe 141). 19 J. Rueda & F. Gil Tovar, Historia del Arte colombiano, 4 vols, Bogotá, 1976, vol. 3, pp.795-97 on the activity of Medoro (b. Rome c.1565) at Tunja from 1587 to 1598. 20 R. Vargas Tamayo, “Testamento del beneficiado Joan de Castellanos”, Repertorio Boyacense, V, 52, June 1919, pp.171-94: p.175. 21 R. Vargas Ugarte, Ensayo de un diccionario de artífices coloniales de la América meridional, Lima, 1947, p.64, for Vargas Ugarte ‘ortogando la fianza’ of the 1598 commission. 22 U. Rojas, Escudos de Armas y inscripciones antiguas de Tunja, Tunja, 1939, p.157. 23 Ortega Ricuarte 1979, pp. 91-92, Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, XVI, Leipzig, 1997, p.616 for Carrión (Mallorca 15?? - ?Cusco 1616). For reproductions of the portal of Tunja Cathedral see Marco Dorta, 1942, p.471 fig.4, S. Sebastián in Summa Artis XXVIII, p.264 fig.300, J. Monastoque Valero, Guía Turística e Histórica de la Básilica Metropolitana de Santiago el Mayor de Tunja, Tunja, 1989, p.14. 24 Summa Artis XXVIII, p. 84, for Palladian influence at Tunja; p.79 figs.84 & 85 for the capitals at Tunja cathedral and the Palladian engraving from which they derive. 25 S. Serlio, Regole generali di architetura (Libro Quarto), Venice, 1537, fol. LXIIIr, and in subsequent Italian and Spanish editions.

The Tunja sillería (sometimes called a silletería because consisting of only nine seats) was commissioned in March 1598 by Padre Juan Leguizamón, mayorduomo of the Cathedral, from the ‘master carpenters’ Francisco Velázquez and Amador Pérez,16 both of Villa de Leyva, an agricultural colony and spiritual centre some fifty kilometres from Tunja. Leguizamón was answerable to, and able to draw on, the intellectual and material resources of three parties: Juan de Castellanos, chronicler and ‘Cura Beneficiado’ of Tunja Cathedral for forty-five years from 1561 until his death in 1606, the royal scribe Juan Vargas, 13 E. Orduña Viguera, Arte Español: La Talla Ornamental en Madera, Madrid, 1930, pp.36-110 discusses 21 sillerías of the 1400s, pp.110-285 on 24 sillerías of the 1500s. 14 P. Quintero Atauri, Sillerías de Coro en las Iglesias Españolas (1908), 2nd ed. Cadiz, 1928, p.17. 15 E. Marco Dorta, Fuentes para la historia del arte hispanoamericano, II, Seville, 1960, pp.257-62 for documents relating to the sillería, p.257-9 for that of 1604 citing the initial contract of March 1598, signed by Juan de Leguizamon, Juan Vargas’ secretary and the carvers: p.258: ‘todo lo qual harán de palo de nogal y no de otra madera’. 16 Ibid, p.258 for the ‘maestros carpinteros’ Velázquez and Pérez.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies and referred to as work progressed.26 It is unclear whether the overall design of the walnut sillerías was similarly established and monitored. However the discourse surrounding the portal is certainly revealing of contemporary Tunjan attitudes. The portal is described as being of ‘buena arquitectura’, on account of the good proportions both of and between its members.27 If the portal had been built in Europe the combination of Composite order capitals with a Doric frieze would have attracted comment as eccentrically original but not as blandly ‘good’. In terms of the classical ‘language’ of architecture, the Tunja portal carefully replicates classical vocabulary but ignores the grammatical agreement between the orders. However, notwithstanding his grammatical liberties, Carrión’s portal achieves the syntactical harmony of classical architecture.28 Carrión’s thorough understanding of his European sources and, because of this, his free treatment of them, exemplifies mezclaje. In documents concerning the redecoration of the presbytery of Tunja Cathedral around 1600, the previous ‘capilla mayor’ was deemed ‘very improper and deficient’, being ‘of a very antique, coarse, Order, no [longer] used’.29 From this rhetoric one infers that Palladio’s and Vredeman’s designs of the 1560s and 1570s were adopted on account of their modernity.

Leguizamón in turn by Castellanos and/or Juan Vargas, the frescoes in the latter’s house, begun in 1587 and still in progress during the manufacture of the sillería, being entirely derived from European engravings, including an ornamental cartouche by Vredeman de Vries.31 The silletería consists of nine freestanding chairs, one for the archbishop of Nueva Granada, and eight for other members of the Cathedral chapter. Each of the eight capitular chairs has an accompanying escaño or kneeler. Although not in the initial contract, the escaños are mentioned in Leguizamón’s 1603 agreement to the final payment to Velázquez and Pérez.32 The escaños, generally ignored in the secondary literature on the silletería, will here be considered. The silletería will be unpacked first by considering its distinctive supports and their European source; secondly by describing its heraldic content; thirdly by discussing its subsidiary decorations. The lateral supports of all nine walnut chairs are loosely but recognisably derived from the left hand example in plate 15 of Vredeman’s Caryatidum, the essential similarity being the scroll pattern of the lower two thirds, the chairs also retaining, in a schematised form suitable to furniture, the aquiline claws naturalistically represented in the engraving. Vredeman’s Multitude of Caryatids or Athlantids of Many Forms, Suited to Any Order of Architecture You Like. First Century Artistically Excogitated for the Use of Candidates of This Art had been published in Antwerp in 1565.33 Vredeman’s Caryatidum had already informed a series of caryatids now preserved at the Museo de San Domenico, Quito; these, if Sebastián’s dating of them to the1580s is correct, are the earliest surviving Spanish American artefacts informed by Vredeman’s Caryatidum.34

Last in the hierarchy of agents of the Tunja silletería were the ‘master carpenters’ from Villa de Leyva, whose employment almost certainly depended upon the Leguizamón family connection with Villa de Leyva, where Isabel de Leguizamón owned a hacienda.30 The employment of craftsmen from the remote provincial town was very likely economically-motivated, in accord with Castellanos and associates’ financially cautious patronage. The fact that, as the frescoes in Castellanos’ and Juan Vargas’ own houses are universally believed to have been, the sillas were executed by indigenes (who at this stage we should posit as Soria did of the artists at Juan Vargas’ house, that they might have been Creole, mestizo or Indian) determines the local flavour, notwithstanding the derivation from European engravings, of their finished appearance. Even if the engraved sources were selected by the artisans, not their patrons, given Villa de Leyva’s geographical and cultural position relative to Tunja, Velázquez and Pérez would almost certainly have acquired their sources in Tunja. It is much more likely that they were directed to them by their patron Leguizamón, and

The quiteño carver responded idiosyncratically to Vredeman’s pattern-book, fashioning four quite different columns (fig.1), one woman, two men and a 31 M. S. Soria, La Pintura del Siglo XVI en Sudamérica, Buenos Aires, 1956, pp.15-43, Rueda & Gil Tovar, 1976, III, pp.786-95, Morales Folguera, 1998, pp.171-238, on the 1587-1605 frescos in Juan de Vargas’ house, and their print sources. G. Kubler and M. S. Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions 1500 to 1800, Harmondsworth, 1959, p.317, on the Vredeman-influenced detail of the Tunjan ceiling. 32 Marco Dorta, 1960, p.261. 33 Caryatidum Vulgus, Termas Vocat Sive Athlantidum Multiformium Acquemlibet Architecture Ordinem Accomodatarum Centuria Prima in Uusum huius Artis Candidatorum … Excogitata P. de Jode, Antwerp, 1565. The Flemish version of the title essentially duplicates the information of the Latin one while making explicit the orientation of the work to artisans (hantwerkers), among whom stonecutters (Steenhowers), Scrinwerkers and Glasserwers. The phrase ‘Centuria Prima’ is approximate. The only example of the Caryatidum in London, the 1870 facsimile, contains sixteen engravings, each representing six statuary supports, i.e. 96 in all. However, Kubler and Soria (p.372, n.39) mention Plate 19 (as influencing the architecture of Pedro Noguera’s seventeenthcentury stalls in Lima), so the edition known to them apparently contained at least 114 images. 34 S. Sebastián, “Notas sobre la arquitectura manierista en Quito”, Boletín del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas y Estéticas, I, Jan. 1964, pp.11320: p.117, fig.60.

26 Marco Dorta, 1942, pp.470-74 on the portal, especially p.473 for the traza. 27 V. Fraser, The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru 1535-1635, Cambridge, 1985, p.127, for the relative proportions between bases and capitals, architrave and cornice constituting ‘buena arquitectura’. 28 S. Sebastián, “La influencia de los modelos ornamentales de Serlio en Hispanoamerica”, Boletín del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas y Estéticas (Caracas), 7, Apr. 1967, pp.30-67, p.33, disagrees, describing the portal as syntactically perverse. 29 Marco Dorta, 1942, p.467: ‘muy improprio y defectuoso…orden my antigua, tosca y no usada’. 30 G. Colmenares, Historia económica y social de Colombia, 1537-1719 (1973), Medellín, 1975, p.192.

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hermaphrodite. None is actually copied from Vredeman’s series, the hermaphrodite for instance combining elements from two of Vredeman’s bearded prototypes, and from a hermaphrodite support with a male (but monkey-like and beardless) face and pronounced semi-circular breasts.35 Martín Soria suggested, as Sebastián subsequently agreed, that the quiteño sculptor’s free use of his source, in the light of his own understanding and imagination, are in the best tradition of fantastic Mannerist art.36 When we come to examine the Chuquisaca sillería, I will argue that it is a more intricate Mannerist artefact than the quiteño fragments, the imaginative qualities of which are openended and not, in the very best tradition of Mannerist art, referential to artistic practice and to themselves.

nor in art has a prototype yet been identified for the pattern on the lower part of the backboard, hibiscus-like flowers growing from an arabesque vegetable design. (fig.7) While the stylised arabesque of its design is European in appearance, its flowers seem exotically tropical. Many subsidiary surfaces of the Tunja sillas are decorated with floral motifs. Essentially the same flower with four larger and four smaller petals, apart from its stamen resembling a passion flower, is carved in the lateral spaces below the seat of the Archbishop’s chair, and on the outside of each of the eight further sillas (fig.7), and a closed variant of the same is adapted to the vertical outer spaces of the escaños. (figs.8 & 9) No evidence comes to mind to support Marco Dorta’s description of these flowers as ‘plateresque’.38 Whether or not sourced from European print culture, the flower used to decorate the walnut chairs at Tunja is certainly an early example of what would become a characteristic form of early modern wood carving in Nueva Granada, being found on a pair of doors in the Museo del Arte Colonial at Bogotá (fig.10), and on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century carved ceilings in the churches of San Ignacio and of the Candelaria in Bogotá.39

Apart from the scroll pattern in the lower two thirds, the Tunjan supports depart from their Flemish prototype, their faces being female in accord with the conventional association of the Ionic order. The Ionic volute differs in the engraving, where it runs from behind the neck and head to the forehead, and in the choir-chairs where it spirals forwards to the ears. (fig.3) Notwithstanding their Flemish source, these supports are distinctly non-European in appearance (fig.4), due to having been carved by Americans. Unless they adopted their Hispanic surnames, Velázquez and Pérez were not Indian; however, given the colonial norm of conquistadores marrying indegenes it is very likely that they were mestizo, and as such could access the Muisca visual culture of Boyacá, the province incorporating Tunja and Villa de Leyva. Artefacts such as the Muisca votive figure now in the Museo del Oro at Bogotá were made throughout the sixteenth century (fig.5); without insisting on too close a formal comparison between the scrolls at the ears of the silletería supports and the spirals either side of the votive figure’s head, Muisca representations of the human form may well, subliminally if not consciously, have affected Velázquez and Pérez’ formulaic, straight-mouthed heads, an issue to which this enquiry will return when addressing the several other humanoid figures incorporated into the silletería. (figs.8 & 12)

The front surfaces of the escaños, like the accompanying chairs, display the Tunjan archbishopric coat-of-arms. (fig.11) Each escaño is articulated by four elongated supports, consisting of human heads, straight pilasters with foliate decoration, and clawed feet. The supports on the front of each escaño have female heads (figs.8 & 11), and those on the back bearded male heads (fig.8), for which Vredeman’s Caryatidum included several possible examples.40 The most influential image of a male-andfemale couple of architectural supports, are the herms that frame the title-pages of early Venetian editions of Serlio, faithfully replicated on the title-pages of all three sixteenth-century Spanish-language editions.41 (fig.13) The male and female figures of the escaños and the female figures on the Tunja sillería avoid the nude torsos of their European sources. By so doing they conform to a similar norm to that which prevailed against the nude in sixteenthcentury art in New Spain,42 and indeed the quiteño caryatids were unusual in their explicit depictions of male, female and hermaphrodite anatomy.

Beneath its impressive canopy, the Ionic rolled brackets of which accord with the Ionic tenents below (fig.6), hierarchically the most important part of the silletería is the Archbishop’s seat. Below a Latin quatrain, attributed to Juan de Castellanos, which clarifies, in accordance with supporting documentation, that while Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero de Góngora was, as archbishop of Nueva Granada at the time of the completion of the Tunjan silletería, the first to occupy the chair, it was Leguizamón who ordered and bore the financial ‘weight’ of the work, the back of the archbishop’s chair is decorated with the arms of Guerrero y de Góngora.37 (fig. 7) Neither in nature

38

Marco Dorta, 1960, p.87. Sebastián, 1966, pp.28-29, figs.15 & 17. On the the enrichment of borrowed European patterns with representations of local fauna: Sebastián, 1966, p.26, G. Mateus Cortes, Tunja: Guía histórica del arte y la arquitectura, Bogotá 1995, pp.33 & 54 on the incorporation of local plantain flower motifs into the Serlian seventeenth-century roof decorations of Santo Domingo and Santa Barbara, Tunja; for floral decorations in the carved colonial decorations of Nueva Granada, see Sebastián 1966, pp.105-17 “La flora en la talla barroca Neogranadina”. 40 Vredeman de Vries, Caryatidum 1565, plate 2, fourth from left, plate 6, second and fourth from left. 41 Serlio 1537, Venice 1540; S. Serlio, transl. F. de Villalpando, Tercero y Quarto Libro de Architectura, Toledo, 1552, 1563 & 1573. 42 X. Moyssén, “Tecamachalco y el pintor indígena Juan Gerson”, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, XXXIII, 1964, pp.23-39: p.37 on the omission of Adam and Eve from Gerson’s biblical cycle and the nude, banned by the Council of Trent except where necessary, and rare in Spanish art, as a taboo in colonial painting. 39

35 Vredeman, Caryatidum… 1565, plate 6, second and fourth from left for bearded prototypes, plate 9, right-hand caryatid for Vredeman’s hermaphrodite. 36 Soria, 1956, p.104; Sebastián, 1964, p.117. 37 Monastoque Valero, 1989, p.35 for the inscription and Spanish translation.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies While the overall structure of the Tunjan silletería is articulated in European terms of the Ionic order, and its dominant Latin inscription and heraldry are also explicitly Europhile, the design as well as the realization of the Ionic supports is characteristically indigenous, and the floral decorations add to the local flavour. The Tunjan silletería therefore exemplifies implicit hispano-indigenous mestizaje. Such implicit mestizaje can be compared to explicit mestizaje, for instance the survival of the potbellied Inca fertility goddess ‘Pachamama’ in cusqueño stone figure sculpture of the later sixteenth century. The Peruvian example to which attention is here drawn (because it predates the artefacts that primarily concern us) is the balcony at the corner of the Casa del Almirante, Cusco. (fig.14) It is noteworthy that this prime instance of mestizaje was carved from local stone. While the formal solution of scrolls on the statue’s shoulder and an animal face on its base may be derived from Vredeman,43 the cusqueño face is that of a puma, revered in Incaic Cusco, which indexes the swollen belly of the female outer face of the caryatid as almost certainly an allusion to Pachamama. Peruvians, perhaps helping us to ‘recapture the ways of seeing which artists of the period implicitly assumed their public would bring to their work’,44 are quick to recognize both here and in the seventeenth-century sillerías of Cusco and Lima Cathedrals. Implicit as it may be compared to the survival of Incaic iconographies in early modern Peru, and Aztec ones in Mexico, the Tunjan silletería does make palpable its own local mestizaje. This will emerge more clearly in counterpoint to the Sucre sillería, aspects of which have been described as mestizo but infact exemplify mezclaje.

Hidalgo suggests a higher social rank than Pérez and Velázquez, and a lower probability that he was mestizo. The surviving documentation in the Archivo Arquidiocescano at Sucre, concerning the sillería, mentions no traça (preparatory design) for the work, but that one may in fact have been required is intimated by that asked of ‘Jose’ (Giuseppe) Pastorello, and approved by the deputees of the Cabildo, in advance of his 1604 contract for the retablo at Sucre.48 There is nothing to suggest otherwise than that the conceptualisation of the work, including the choice of sources, was the carver, Cristobal Hidalgo’s. Hidalgo adapted a number of engraved sources, but the only one from which he copied a motif directly was Serlio (figs.22 & 23), and this is the moment to raise the matter of Serlian influence in Spanish America. The Hispanic predilection for Serlio over any other architectural author is partly due to his pedagogical method based on illustration, and undoubtedly also depends on Serlio being, in Vaughan Hart’s words, the architect bestsuited to ‘Imperial ambition’.49 This largely explains Villalpando’s translation beginning from the Third Book, Serlio’s repertory of triumphal arches. In Central and South America, the triumphal arch scheme, taken from Serlio’s treatise, was repeated in many, arguably ‘nearly all’ monumental church façades,50 and soon symbolised Spanish dominion. All three Spanish-language editions of Serlio were of the Third and Fourth Books only. The reception of the Fourth Book, in which Serlio demonstrates his anthropomorphic sense of the Orders, is especially revealing of the paradoxes of Serlian impact in America. Sebastián’s judgement, that ‘due to Serlio’s work classical culture flourished, even though it was in good measure of anticlassical sentido’,51 begs the question how far this anticlassical sentiment was sown in the books themselves, and how far it was a Hispano-American deviation. The answer is both.

Chuquisaca-Sucre As at Tunja, Italianate taste flourished at Chuquisaca where, analogous to the presence of Medoro at Tunja, the Italian Mannerist painter Bernardo Bitti spent two productive periods in the late 1500s.45 No chuquisaqueño humanist to compare with Castellanos or Vargas at Tunja emerges from surviving histories. Building and decorating projects in Chuquisaca Cathedral were communally administered by the Cathedral’s Cabildo, or Council.46

De Mesa and Gisbert characterised Hidalgo as a humble carpintero. Here it will be argued that Hidalgo was not a lowly artisan servilely executing received ideas, but in the course of executing the Sucre sillería became (Gellian selfagency) a self-conscious artist. This interpretation of Hidalgo’s role will be supported by returning briefly to the published and unpublished documentation for the

The sillería was commissioned in 1595, from Cristobal Hidalgo, whom Harold Wethey deemed Spanish-born on account of his style.47 However, the name ‘Hidalgo’, meaning minor noble, was widely conferred in sixteenthcentury Spanish America, and it is likely that our carver was a first or second generation immigrant. The name

48 Marco Dorta, 1960, p.224, for the stipulation that the retablo at Sucre should be ‘de la formma(!) y manera que está dibujado en la traca que para ello tiene hecha, firmada de su nombre y de los dichos señores diputados…’. 49 Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture Volume One: Books I-V of ‘Tutte l’Opere d’Architettura et Prospettiva’, transl. and ed. V. Hart & P. Hicks, New Haven, 1996, “Introduction”, pp.xi-xxxv, p.xxxii. 50 La dispersion del manierismo (Documentos de un coloquio), “Estudios de arte y estética” XV, Mexico, 1980, C. Martínez Marín, “Commentario” pp.107-12, p.109 on the Serlian triumphal arch plan repeating itself in ‘casi todos’ Spanish American church façades. 51 Sebastián, 1967, p.31: ‘Por su obra impresa la cultura clásica tuvo un florecimiento, aunque fuera en buena parte de sentido anticlásico.’

43

Vredeman, 1565, Tav.12 right-hand caryatid. 44 Gell, 1998, p.2. 45 Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, XI, 1995, pp.261-62 on the presence of Bitti (Camerino, Ancona, 1548 – Lima, 1610) at Chuquisaca in the later 1580s and again c.1600. 46 J. García Quintanilla, Historia de la Iglesia en la Plata, Tomo IV: Historia del Cabildo Metropolitano (1582-1799), Sucre, 1999, on the Chuquisaqueño Cabildo. On Cabildos, see J. Preston Moore, The Cabildo in Peru under the Hapsburgs: A Study in the Origins and Powers of the Town Council in the Viceroyalty of Peru 1530-1700, Durham N.C., 1954. 47 H. E. Wethey, Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru, Cambridge Mass., 1949, p.179.

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commission. The really compelling evidence of Hidalgo’s personality, however, is his expression of it in the sillería, the self-referential element of which, to date overlooked, is an invitation to consider the whole sillería as a coherently orchestrated work of art.

seven including that of the Archbishop, and the lower of twenty - of the Sucre sillería survive as described in 1639.61 Symptomatic of cedar’s lack of local resonance, the wooden structure of the sillería is unfortunately hidden by white paint and gilt, and the whole transposed from the nave to the choir. The focal point of the Sucre sillería is the Archbishop’s seat, the backboard of which displays the papal tiara and keys (fig.15), twenty-two of the further twenty-six backboards incorporating spaces for oval canvases (much retouched and not considered here), the two next to the papal seat an Italianate vase design (fig.16), and the two over the doors abstract, oval based designs. (fig.17) This upper level of seats is articulated by columns between each pew. (figs.15 & 16) These columns have been unconvincingly related to the balustered candlestick in Juan de Arfe’s 1587 De varia commensuración.62 While Arfe’s suggestion of balustered supports for chapels may have corroborated the use of balustered columns for the Chuquisaca sillería,63 the columns themselves are an improved re-reading of the woodcut of a balustraded column in Diego de Sagredo’s Medidas del Romano (fig.18),64 the carved supports being of slenderer, more elegant shape than their engraved prototype. Hidalgo’s use of Sagredo is legible in the upper half of the supports: an acanthus-leaf pattern below a tapering section of fluted column, topped by a Composite capital. The lower sections of Hidalgo’s column depart from their Spanish source in a manner revealing of Hidalgo’s intelligently flexible approach to his engraved sources. Sagredo’s suggestions of a spiral-fluted cylinder resting on upsidedown Ionic scrolls and a cup-like base (which hardly fit the upper half) are abandoned in favour of simple bases and fluted shafts cabled according to their low position. Just as the fluted lower sections match those at the top of their respective shafts, the bulbous vegetable shapes above them complement the acanthus-leaf sections from which they are separated only by unobtrusive bands, Hidalgo perhaps also having borne in mind Sagredo’s illustration three pages on of vertically symmetrical balustered columns. Hidalgo’s balustered columns are surmounted by a Doric frieze with rosette metopes (figs.15 & 22), which De Mesa and Gisbert suggested was also informed by Sagredo.65 However, such a widespread solution as the rose-andtriglyph Doric frieze was widely reproduced. Of the books

Hidalgo was indeed first heard of as a carpintero, when in 1595 he was paid only a little over 450 pesos for his numerous works in the Cathedral that year, which included a tabernacle for the ‘main altar’, suggesting that at the time he was valued as a mere artisan.52 Still in 1595, Hidalgo was paid an initial 300 pesos for the sillería, a further 60 pesos going to the ‘carpenter and carver’ Alonso Román, of whom more below.53 Hidalgo was himself referred to as an ‘entallador’ in an unpublished document for 1601 and again when the sillería was valued in 1602.54 Hidalgo was paid more than 4000 pesos for the sillería;55 even taking into account the difference between the respective pesos of Nueva Granada and Peru, this is comfortably more than the 730 gold pesos paid for the Tunja sillería.56 A more accurate point of comparison for the 4000-plus pesos paid to Hidalgo for the Sucre sillería is the sum of 8000 pesos paid to ‘José’ or Giuseppe Pastorello for his ornate retablo of 1604-08 in the same church.57 Revealingly of how Hidalgo’s stature had grown in the twelve years since 1595, in 1607 he was called upon to value Pastorello’s retablo.58 The architectural context of the Sucre sillería takes some reconstruction, overwhelmed as the sillería now is by the Cathedral’s late seventeenth-century colossal Corinthian order structure. Chronicles of the bishopric of Charcas narrate that the original structure had been falling down since the 1570s, and was rebuilt from 1599,59 when the sillería was already under construction. The reconstruction of circa 1600, as much informed by as informing the sillería, was described by Pedro Ramirez del Aguila in his 1639 history of Charcas as single-naved, with striated Ionic columns.60 Contrary to Wethey’s claim that its gables and lower stalls are later, the two levels of pews - the upper of twenty52 De Mesa & Gisbert, 1972, p.66 for the 1595 documents recording payments of 343 pesos, plus 78 for materials, to ‘Cristóbal Hidalgo carpintero’, and of 110 pesos for his tabernacle for the altar mayor. 53 De Mesa & Gisbert, 1972, p.243, for the 1595 payment to ‘Alonso Román carpintero y entallador.’ 54 Archivo del Cabildo Eclesiástico, Sucre, Libro de Actas No. 1, fol.237, for the agreement to evaluate the sillería completed by Hidalgo ‘entallador’; see also De Mesa & Gisbert 1972, pp.243-44. 55 J. García Quintanilla, Historia de la Iglesia en la Plata: Tomo III, Templor, conventos, monasteros, Orfelinatos, Congregaciones Religiosas, etc. (Desde 1539 a 1963), Sucre, 1964, p.18. 56 Marco Dorta, 1960, p.261. 57 Marco Dorta, 1960, p.238. De Mesa & Gisbert, 1972, pp.63-66 for Pastorello (Villa de Briga (Ge.) 1573-1609) active at Chuquisaca 160407. 58 De Mesa and Gisbert, 1972, p.245. 59 R. Querejazu Calvo, Historia de Chuquisaca, Sucre, 1987, p.158. 60 P. Ramirez del Aguila, Noticias politicas de Indias. Y Relacion Descriptiba de la Ciudad de la Plata Metropoli de las Provincias de los Charcas (1639), J. Urioste Arana ed., Sucre, 1978, p.144: ‘el edificio…con columnas jónicas estriadas…de una nave.’

61

A. de Herrera y Toledo, Relación eclesiástica de la santa Iglesia Metropolitana de los Charcas (1639), J. M. Barnadas ed., Sucre, 1996, p.80. 62 J. de Arfe, De varia commensuración para la esculptura y architectura, Seville, Libs. I (geometry) & II (anatomy) 1585, Libs. III (bestiary) & IV (architecture) 1587, see F. Íñiguez, introduction to the Valencia 1979 reprint p. 34 on its publishing history. Arfe 1587/1979, Lib. IV, fol.33r for his ‘blandón abaulastrado’. 63 The ‘blandón abaulastrado’ appears in Arfe (as above) Lib. IV, chapter IV, fols. 32v. - 36r., ‘pieças de capilla’. 64 D. de Sagredo, Medidas del Romano, Toledo 1526 (repr. Valencia 1976), gathering C, fol. Ir. 65 De Mesa & Gisbert, 1972, p.244 and n.31 for the suggestion that Hidalgo’s frieze is derived from D. de Sagredo, Raison de architecture…, Paris, 1542, p.44. It is unlikely that Hidalgo would have used the translation of a book written in his own language. Sagredo 1526/1976, gathering D fol. [VIII]r for the rosette metope from which the French illustration was certainly, and Hidalgo’s possibly derived.

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more clear-cut is their critique on Serlio’s discussion of the gender of the Ionic, or Matronal order. Even beneath the obscuring whitewash they would lack any feminine sensuality. This asensuality is only partially explained by any technical inability to represent the female nude; rather, it is largely conditioned by the prurient conditions of artistic production in sixteenth-century Spanish America, which we saw reflected in the Tunjan silletería, Hidalgo resorting to the same chaste scrolls-for-bosoms solutions as Velázquez and Pérez had for their figures on the shoulders of the capitular chairs. (fig.12)

This frieze is most interesting for its unconventional relation to the supports below it. As in Carrión’s Tunjan portal, the Composite supports are combined with a Doric frieze. Such anti-classical mixing of the orders is advocated in the Libro Quarto.67 Although it should not be excluded a priori that Hidalgo ‘mis-read’ his sources, and arrived accidentally at his anti-classical solution, such a conclusion is foreclosed by Hidalgo’s masterly comprehension of his source materials, as described herewith.

Responding to Serlio’s account of the Ionic order as ‘both robust and tender’,73 and accentuating the Ionic order’s dual sexuality, the joker among the chuquisaqueño tenents is Hidalgo’s single smiling male figure (fig.21), perhaps a self-portrait. The decision to include one male in an otherwise female series is a thoughtful and amusing compromise between the quiteño carver’s eclecticism and the unadventurous all-female series at Tunja. The strapwork on the chest of Hidalgo’s male support alludes both to the Flemish-influenced cartouches on the lower sillas (figs.24 & 25), and to the patterns on the canopy above the upper sillas (fig.22). As Sebastián first noticed, the latter is taken from one of Serlio’s garden designs.74 (fig.23) De Mesa and Gisbert interpreted this original ornamental touch as revealing of the particularities of American architecture and of mestizo style;75 that is, by present criteria, mezclaje. However, I agree with De Mesa and Gisbert that ‘this distancing from the function of things and changing the intended purpose of things’ is a Mannerist characteristic.76 In the same description of the Sucre sillería, De Mesa and Gisbert considered the decoration of these soffits and the oval-based pattern on the horizontal plinths at shoulder height on the level of chairs as marginal to the whole, and by Alonso Román’s hand.77 Either or both might plausibly have been carved by Román, but surely they were conceived by Hidalgo; far from being marginal, both are integral to the play on related strapwork motifs in different zones of the sillería. The allusion to the two sets of strap-work decoration elsewhere in the Sucre sillería on the torso of Hidalgo’s self-referential figure shifts our attention beyond the strapwork designs themselves and their sources, to the management of them in this instance.

De Mesa and Gisbert identified Hidalgo’s supports for the upper seats of the Sucre sillería as deriving from Serlio’s illustration of fireplace of that Order.68 (fig.19) In fact, Hidalgo derived only his capitals from Serlio’s Ionic fireplace, and his free interpretation of Serlio considered the couple on the title-page of both Spanish and Italian editions of the Libro Quarto. The striated lower sections of Hidalgo’s supports are not prefigured in Serlio. Juan de Arfe had illustrated a Corinthian male tenent with a striated pilaster tapering estípite-like from the waist.69 Hidalgo’s herms compare to the fourth figure from the left in Plate 1 of Vredeman’s Caryatidum (figs.2, 20 & 21); both Vredeman and Hidalgo incorporate albeit slightly differing acanthus-leaf patterns, possibly on account of their separate interpretations of a common source. The European example most closely resembling Hidalgo’s supports is the engraving in Vredeman’s Artis Perspectivæ, of Ionic order herms with capitals above their heads, Ionic scrolls in place of bosoms and estípite-type pilasters below the waist.70 However, Vredeman’s Artis Perspectivæ was itself derived from a cosmopolitan ‘variety of sources’,71 and Hidalgo’s tenents are with good reason located within the Serlian tradition.72 Their possible sources, Serlian and other, are legion; far 66 Arfe 1587/1979, Lib. IV, fol. 7r, for the rosette-metoped Doric frieze, Idem Lib. IV, Titulo Segundo, ‘del las pieças de Iglesia’, fol. 24r for the rosette as possible metope possibility on a Doric anda; Serlio 1540, IV, fol. XVIIIr, Serlio 1552, IV, fol. XXv, for a floral Doric metope. 67 On the combination of Rustic and Doric orders, Serlio 1537/1540, IV, fol. XIv: ‘la quale mistura, per mio aviso è molto grata’ = S. Serlio, transl. F. de Villalpando, Tercero y Quarto Libro de Architectura, Toledo, 1552, IV, fol. XIIIv ‘esta mezcla o mixtura … es muy agradable.’ 68 De Mesa & Gisbert, 1972, p.245 for Hidaldgo’s response to Serlio’s Ionic Order figures (Serlio 1537, 1540, fol. LXVr [for XLVIr] ; Serlio 1552, IV, fol. XLVIIIr). 69 Arfe 1587/1979, IV, fol. 19r. 70 Thieme-Becker IX, p. 378, on J. and L. Doetechum’s engraving in ‘Ioan. Fridmannus Frisius’ [Vredeman de Vries], Artis Perspectivæ plurium gentrum elegantissimæ Formulæ, multigenis Fontibus, nonnul[l]isq. Hortulis affabre factis exornatæ, in com[m]odum Artificum, eorumq. qui Architectura, ædificiorumq. com[m]ensurata varietate delectantu[r], Antwerp [1568]. The tenents here described adorn the central tempietto. 71 The above title translates “The most elegant formulæ of many different nations for the Art of Perspective, from a variety of sources…”. 72 Sebastián, 1967, pp.33 & 61.

Striated Ionic pilasters frame oval-centred cartouche patterns on the backboards of the lower twenty seats (fig.24) - a typology disseminated by Vredeman de Vries

73 Serlio, 1540, IV, fols IIIr-v “L’autore a li lettori”, fol. IIIr: ‘la Ionica…partecipa del robusto, y del dilicato’; Serlio 1552, IV, fols IIIIv-r “Sebastian Serlio … Al lector”, fol. IVr ‘la Ionica…tiene del robusto y delicado’. 74 Sebastián, 1967, p.51. Serlio, 1540, IV, fol. LXXVr, top right. Serlio 1552, IV, fol. LXXVIv, top right. 75 De Mesa & Gisbert, 1972, p.245. 76 Ibid., p.245. 77 Sebastián, in Summa Artis XXVIII, p.73.

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Rodney Palmer: Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600 and his Flemish contemporaries.78 If there is one area of the Sucre sillería that differs from the rest, on account of the stunted, unclassical proportions of its Ionic pilasters, and its overall crude simplicity, it is the low set of stalls. If any part of the whole should be attributed to another hand, i.e. Román, it is this. However, it was customary for lower pews or orden inferior of sillerías, for the choir, to be much plainer than the dignitiaries’ seats above.79 At Sucre, the lower level of stalls participates in the playful Mannerist strategies of the whole. These strategies include the many reiterations of the (itself typically Mannerist) oval shape in the sillería, on the backboards of the lower pews, on four of the upper backboards, and on the gables above the upper seats. All these patterns participate in the international Mannerist strap-work theme, the humorous culmination of which, the reproduction of Serlio’s garden design as a strap-work motif, is itself echoed on the male tenent - the self-referential element in and key to the Sucre sillería, which makes explicit Hidalgo’s play on gender.

cognitive, and not just technical. I have argued that the figures on the shoulders of the Tunjan walnut chairs intimate Muisca cognition of the decorative human figure. Hidalgo’s understanding of the Serlian invitation to innovate has long been recognised, and is reconfirmed by the self-referential male caryatid at Sucre, and the allusion in the same to the Serlian coffering. The two sillerías can be evaluated relative to each other and to other contemporary Spanish American responses to the same European sources, as follows. The Tunjan sillería evidences mestizaje, of an implicit kind compared to Pachamama iconography in Peru. The quiteño caryatids respond to Vredeman’s graphic demonstration of the effectively limitless possibilities of the statuary orders, as engraved, and, to quote the title of Caryatidum, ‘excogitata’ or thought out for the use of the artisan. Hidalgo, like Carrión, cogitated on the textual theory as well as on the images in the European books at his disposal, and especially on the mindfully mixing the orders, in the hispanic spirit of mezclaje. The above distinctions can be shown thus:

Conclusion The bases of the distortions to the European sources for the choir-stalls at Sucre and Tunja were in both cases

MESTIZAJE

MEZCLAJE

iconographically explicit mestizaje

implicit (formal) mestizaje

loosely innovative

rigorous interpretation of source text and image

Caryatid at Casa del Almirante

Tunja sillería

Quito caryatids

Sucre sillería

Tunjan portal

source: ?Vredeman

source: Vredeman

source: Vredeman

sources: Serlio, Sagredo, Vredeman Arfe?

sources: Serlio?, Palladio

artisan: American

artisans: American

artisan(s): ?

artisan: Creole/European?

artisan: European

material: stone, local

material: walnut, imported

material: wood, imported

material: cedar, imported

material: stone, ?

These findings are offered as a framework for future work on Colonial American aesthetics and, more so, with a view to evolving strategies for evaluating worldwide responses to print imagery.

78 De Mesa and Gisbert, 1972, p.245, unable to trace the pattern’s source, drew attention to the Vredeman cartouche published by G. de Jode c.1565 and reproduced by Soria in relation to the frescos in Juan Vargas’ house. Rather than a having a single prototype, the strapwork oval with circular strapwork shapes at its cardinal points is generically derived from several Flemish examples, including a 1554 cartouche design by Cornelis Floris (R. Berliner, Ornamentale Vorlage-Bläter des 15 bis 18 Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1925, Plate 160; R. Hedicke, Cornelis Floris und die Florisdekoration: Studien zur niederländischen und deutschen Kunst im XVI Jahrhundert, Berlin 1913, Taf. VIII, fig.1), and Vredeman Ornament Design 5 (T. A. Rigges, Hieronymus Cock Printmaker and Publisher, PhD Yale 1971, New York & London, 1977, Fig.93). 79 Quintero Atauri, 1928, p.22.

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Fig.1. Carved and gilt estípite supports, c. 1580(?), Museo de S. Domingo, Quito (from Sebastián 1964)

Fig.2. J. Vredeman de Vries, Caryatidum…, Antwerp 1565, Plate 1 (from E. Forssman, Saule und Ornament…, Stockholm 1956)

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Fig.3. Sillería, Cathedral, Tunja, Francisco Velásquez and Amador Pérez, side view capitular chair, walnut, 1598-1603 (photo author, with permission of the Bishop of Tunja, rephotographed Michael Brandon-Jones)

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Fig.4. Sillería, Tunja, frontal view of arm of capitular chair, with partial view escaño (as Fig. 3)

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.5. Muisca votive figure, Museo de Oro, Bogotá, gold, 8.4 cm high, c. 700-1600

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Fig.6. Sillería, Tunja, side view of archbishop’s chair (as 3 above)

241

Fig.7. Sillería, Tunja, frontal view of arm of archbishop’s chair (as 3 above)

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.8. Sillería, Tunja, side of capitular chair, detail (as 3 above)

Fig.9. Sillería, Tunja, side view of escaño (as 3 above)

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Fig.10. Pair of doors, Museo de Arte Colonial, Bogotá, cedar, c. 1600? (photo author, rephotographed M. Brandon-Jones)

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Fig.11. Sillería, Tunja, frontal view of escaño (as 3 above)

Fig.12. Sillería, Tunja, capitular chair, detail of shoulder (as 3 above)

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Fig.13. S. Serlio, transl. F. de Villalpando, Tercero y Quarto Libro…, Toledo 1552, title-page

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Fig.14. Casa del Almirante, Cusco. Balcony at corner of Calles Córdova del Tucumán and Ataud, before 1581 (photo author)

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Rodney Palmer: Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600

Fig.15. Sillería, Cathedral, Sucre, Cristobál Hidalgo with Alonso Román, upper pew, view of focal chair with Papal insignia, cedar (painted nineteenth century), 1595-1602 (photo author, with permission from the Cabildo of the Ecclesiastical Museum and Cathedral, Sucre)

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Fig.16. Sillería, Sucre, upper pew, backboard with Italianate vase motif (as above)

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Rodney Palmer: Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600

Fig.17. Sillería, Sucre, upper pew, backboard with central oval pattern (as 15 above)

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Fig.18. D. de Sagredo, Medidas del Romano, Toledo 1526, gathering C, fol. Ir.

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Rodney Palmer: Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600

Fig.19. S. Serlio, Tercero y Quarto Libro…, Toledo 1552, IV, fol. XLVIIIr

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Fig.20. Sillería, Sucre, upper pew, female caryatid (as 15 above, rephotographed M. Brandon-Jones)

Fig.21. Sillería, Sucre, upper pew, male caryatid (as above)

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Rodney Palmer: Adaptations of European Print Imagery in two Andean Sillerías of circa 1600

Fig.22. Sillería, Sucre, soffit (as 15 above)

Fig.23. S. Serlio, Tercero y Quarto Libro…, Toledo 1552, IV, fol. LXXVIv, top right

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Fig.24. Sillería, Sucre, lower pew.

Fig.25. Sillería, Sucre, lower pew, detail.

254

Fibre and Line: from Spin to Span Victoria Parry significant organizations of space”.3 Given the insistence on textile references in Bourgeois’ drawings and other work, which frequently refer to a childhood surrounded by tapestries and their restoration, there may be a suggestion here that the secreted thread is drawn (literally) from memories, of textile history and personal history, as well as referencing more conventional physical gestures. This thread drawing does not lose sight of fibre as a medium of notation and above all it emplaces the maker by twists and turns into the spaces and places of the environment. The ‘drawing’ of lines is fundamental to the action involved in spinning; for all its fastidious behaviour the spider aptly demonstrates the nature of the hinge between the making of thread and the delineating of space.

Louise Bourgeois’ mantra I Do, I Undo, I Redo, at the heart of the ecstatic opening of the Tate Modern, in the theatrical ‘re-done’ turbine hall of contemporary artistic practice, is cause for textile celebration.1 These telescopic spindles, with their twisting stairway threads, are themselves turbines, not only of Bourgeois’ own spiralling retrieval of a textile rich identity but also of a contemporary consciousness. Turbine, from the Latin turbo, is that which spins or twirls around, not only as in a whirlwind, but also as in a child’s spinning top, or a reel or spindle. The act of spinning is re-staged in a double twist of turbine spaces as visitors assume the role of thread, drawn into and around the spindles one at a time. Private and public are intertwined and separated by turns, and, as the lone participant-viewer ascends or descends the stairs and faces the orchestra of mirrors they are alternately closed in and open to the gaze of others. Bourgeois has created not only monumental spindle-telescopes to look at and by which to be looked at, but also a labyrinth to enter. The towers engulf, dwarf and temporarily imprison the visitor in an industrial sublime reminiscent of Piranesi. But they themselves are in turn dwarfed by Maman, that “fastidious … fiddly, over rational” spider, “tricoteuse …with her ever more precise and delicate invisible mending” who “never tires of splitting hairs”.2

Fibre has often been called upon to describe and delineate the texture and perception of space, as have spider’s webs. In the Imagines of Philostratus, a painting of Penelope’s loom is compared to a painting of spiders weaving webs in the doorway of an abandoned house. Philostratus draws attention to painting (a kind of drawing?) as spiderweaving, and to the “significant organizations of space” which, as Bourgeois suggests, can be drawn (from the web): Now the painter has been successful in these respects also: that he has wrought the spider itself in so painstaking a fashion, has marked its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature – all this the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth. And he has woven these delicate webs for us. For look! Here is a cord forming a square that has been thrown about the corners to be as it were a cable to hold the web, and to this cord is attached a delicate web of circles, and tight lines, making meshes, running from the outside circle to the smallest one are interwoven at intervals corresponding to the distance between the circles.

It’s ironic that here, in this public place where textile and architecture open into and reflect one another, the material of textiles is vestigial; textiles have been deferred to sign systems and symbolic references which are not of their making. Textiles are essentially absent. The material fabric, thread or stuff, on which textile culture significantly depends, and of which spinning is a formative process, is physically redundant, retrievable only in terms far removed from those which evidence its existence as a material practice. This is not to diminish Bourgeois’ remarkable achievement, indeed it alerts us to the stuff which has been formative in her personal life and creative output, as well as figuring the agency of textiles within the mainstream of cultural practice, but it does lay bare a complex relationship between the body, textiles and architecture.

This architecture of threads begins, for the spider (as for Bourgeois and for the painter), with the sense of secretion from the body of the maker, hence “as the spiders spew out their yarn they let it down to the pavement”.4 It is here, in this secreting or spewing, that fundamental co-ordinations of line and space are determined. Consideration of the example of hand-spinning, and of the preparation of fibre and thread, may help to flesh out this suggestion.

This complexity, which, as explored here, attempts to ground a perception of space in the activity of making thread, is one with which Bourgeois is familiar. “What is drawing?” she asks. It is “a secretion, like a thread in a spider’s web…a knitting, a spiral, a spider web and other 1

I Do, I Undo, and I Redo (1999-2000), were installed, with Mamam (1999), in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern, May – December, 2000. This essay, in an earlier form, was given as a lecture at the symposium, ‘The Texture of Space’, accompanying an exhibition of Japanese textiles, Textural Space, on tour in the UK, 2001. 2 Louise Bourgeois, ‘Ode à ma mère’ in Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 192397, Marie-Laure Bernadac & Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Violette, London 1998, p.327.

3

Louise Bourgeois, Desenhos, Rio de Janeiro 1997, quoted by Marina Warner ‘Nine Turns Around the Spindle: The Turbine Towers of Louise Bourgeois’, Louise Bourgeois, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 2000, p.18. 4 Philostratus Imagines, II, 28 (‘Looms’), Arthur Fairbanks, trans., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & William Heinemann Ltd., London 1979.

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Fibres are characteristically hollow, in the manner of veins.6 Their microscopic structures (so fine and delicate as to elude observation) reflect the vein-like patterns of flesh and of the body’s interior. “We are”, explains Jennifer Bloomer “tubes within tubes (continuous outerinner surfaces) with intricately articulated interstices. Systems of cells are woven into a dense textile, filling the spaces between inside and outside surface”.7 Fibre is constituted not only by matter but also by interstices which facilitate passage from the visible through to the invisible and from matter to the immaterial. It is also subtle, literally subtilis, sub tela, translating as below or secretly hidden within the cloth or the weave.

An examination of the once ubiquitous activity of handspinning may result in reflections which concern not only perception but also a wider domain of cultural history. Textiles, for which hand-spinning long served as a major component, are not only a medium of fabrication; they may also justify consideration as a mode of entry into a way of knowing. The implications for perception arising from the preparation of thread from fibre, particularly concerning relationships between tactility and vision, have received little attention; subsequent use of such thread as a medium of cultural expression (or exploitation) and as a tool for the articulation of space have been much discussed, but each in different contexts, so that they have not always been seen to impinge upon one another.

With such rich identification it is not surprising that fibre constitutes a means of expression, as a material form (as in a textile medium), as a medium of notation, and as “a phase of symbolic investment”8. In an Eighteenth century personification, (J.B. Boudard, Pensées, 1766, (fig.1), a shorn woman with wings sprouting from her baldness holds a tangled skein of hair, her thoughts, in her hand. Her hair, secreted as strands of fibre from her body, has become, by osmosis, an object of reflection with which she in touch.9 Here, fibre is as if as light as a thought, or perhaps, as the Kogi say “thoughts are threads and the strand we spin is our thought”;10 in the same way that the spider secretes silk, the body secretes the threads of its own making, not only literally as with hair, but also vicariously through its relationship with fibre.

In substituting the notion of fibre for that of textiles, it is possible that the sense of rawness and open-endedness of ‘fibre’, which is less resolved than the term ‘textiles’, may allow less regulated interpretations to unfold. Compared to textiles, the notion of fibre is more at home inside the body; it transgresses the boundaries of flesh. It is the stuff of sensibility, of the senses, of the nervous system, of thought and imagination. It is thus present even when absent from view. It is also ‘invisible’ in a cultural sense because the technologies and interpretations associated with it have often been suppressed and/or exploited, thus it is or has been the stuff of prison and factory labour, of female labour, of agricultural labour and it can be trivialized or excluded in cultural contexts.

The preparation of yarn and the activity of spinning have associations that are soothing, meditative and rhythmical. The actions might even resemble the pleasures of milking, of drawing pleasure from the delicate capillaries of the

Fibre and fibres, singular and plural, are often interchangeable. Fibre is versatile stuff, long associated with textile traditions as well as being widely accepted as a term of reference in scientific and biological contexts. Technically speaking, fibres (fibrae), are bundles of fine, flexible, linear filaments, whether mineral, vegetal or animal. As well as being characterized by a linear, strandlike propensity, the thread formations of fibres, composed of fibrils or fibrillae, also refer to the root-like appearance and structure of intricately dividing and sub-dividing capillary vessels or veins. They are radical in a physical sense and in connotation; thus roots divide into more roots not only in textile fibres and within the body but also, as in ‘moral fibre’, referring to the physiological and philosophical disposition of human behaviour. “I am all fibre”, as Louis says in The Waves5. This intricate, fibrilliferous interrelationship, combining proliferation and unity, also articulates fundamental patterns of complex organization (and potential disorganization) of space. Both the interiority of the body and the texture of space can be configured, perhaps simultaneously, through the fibrous medium of textiles.

5

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Wool, which is similar to hair, is an animal secretion. Walter S. Bright McLaren describes how “it must not…be supposed that a fibre of wool is a solid structure forced through the skin in the form in which it is afterwards seen. The papilla…is composed of a great number of very minute cells containing fluid, which is obtained from the blood…As they force their way through the cuticle, the fluid evaporates from those at the outside, causing the membrane which forms the cell to collapse; and thus the fibre is created by all the fluid in those cells evaporating, and their walls shrinking in, and forming a hollow stalk or fibre, which is round or oval because the cells shrink simultaneously as they are projected through the skin”. Spinning: Woollen and Worsted, Cassell & Company, London, Paris & New York, 1884, pp.2-3. 7 Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, Yale University Press, Newhaven & London, 1993, p.144. 8 Marcelin Pleynet, “Thetic ‘Madness”, Tel Quel, 65 (Spring 1976), reprinted in The Tel Quel Reader, edited by Patrick French & RolandFrancois Lack, Routledge, London & New York,1998, pp.204-213. 9 Deleuze describes the formation of the narcissism of the ego as “not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfilment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else…It produces itself or ‘draws itself’ from that which it contemplates”. Contemplating one’s own hair with one’s own hands may thus be a precursor of objective reflection, but it is reflection nevertheless. The idea that the ego ‘draws itself’ is analogous to the spinning process. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Athlone Press, London, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, p99. 10 Quoted by Cecilia Vicuña, ‘Quipoem’ (trans., Esther Allen) in The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña, edited by M. Catherine de Zegher, Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium & Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, Hanover & London, 1997, p.98.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Harmondsworth, 1964, p.9.

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rolag-breast, or of music making on the strings of a lyre. (fig.2) The teasing, carding and combing which transform the tangled locks into smooth bundles in preparation for the fine line that is to follow, require skilful practice. The practical guide tells us that it is important in carding to “stroke the fibre and to draw it out straight. The carders should just brush against each other, the two layers of hooks merely whispering past each other”.11 This caressing of fibre enables vestiges of interior life to traverse the boundaries of the body. The correlation of this is that in looking at and touching fibre, as in the textiles in which we envelop ourselves or which we view as sculpture, the internal body receives and reflects a material, perhaps maternal, presence.

The mediation of a material, as in the example of spinning, provides a fitting parallel or extension to the crossing over of fibres that results in the chiasm as described by Merleau-Ponty. Through meticulous handling, fibre is in direct contact with sensation and is thus discriminating of the body’s interiority, preceding and conditioning the eye as organ of vision, preparatory to consciousness and to constructions of the body’s relationship with space and matter. Commenting on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis, Catherine Vasseleu claims that without touch, seeing would not be possible, and that although all the senses can be imagined as “a flesh of organic mirrors” it is tactility which figures as the primordial sense of the body’s interiority.14

The movement of the intertwining and crossing from the fleshiness of the prepared fibres to the distinctiveness of the coiling thread articulates, amongst other indicative patterns, a distinctive relationship between touch and vision. This relationship, which in today’s culture of visual overkill can be deemed a necessary focus of attention, is highlighted in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in ways which may throw light on the activities in question.12 Merleau-Ponty considers the notion of flesh as a place, a place where both subject and object coexist through what he calls an intertwining of sameness and difference, an intertwining that occurs through tactile palpitation, as when one hand holds the other (of the same body) so that the hand:

These claims of internal nuance, embodied activity and extension are supported by the many myths and narratives in which spinning is associated with ontogenesis and the coming into being of order. Not only the completed thread, which famously replaces the eyes as the means to ensure safe exit from the labyrinth, but also the preparation of yarn has been imbued with associations which suggest the preparatory stages or coming into being of reflection. Thus when Artemidorous, in the Interpretation of Dreams claims that “all the auxiliary operations in preparation for the weaving of cloth signify major concerns, a great tangle of matters”, he intimates an empathy between fibrous material and susceptibility of the intricate workings of perception. As well as physiological and psychological characteristics, social and political behaviour may also be reflected in the movement of fibre from raw to cooked, rough to smooth or disorder to order. In Aristophanes’ drama, Lysistrata uses the metaphor of raw fibre to justify her plan for resolving disorderly affairs of state “as one does with raw wool washed in a bath, after removing the sheep dung, on a bed you have to poke out the bad ones from the city and take out the prickles”. The affinity between fibre, fabric and metaphorical expression is itself a sign of the intricate and transformative contribution of textile processes to culture.15

while it is felt from within, it is also accessible from without…it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it… . This crossing over of sameness and difference, of one hand to another reflects, in intimate form, a crossing over from the tactile to the visual. As in the intercrossing of the fibres of the optic nerve at the base of the brain, he refers to this intertwining as a chiasm (from chiasmus) and as a “double touching” that forms the basis of perception by establishing a consciousness of the relationship between the body and things and between the body and space. Thus it is the sensing of the body as a place, as a medium of location, which causes and actively directs a relationship with the world such that “things are the prolongation of my body and my body is the prolongation of the world, through it the world surrounds me”.13

The complex processes of sorting, of separating and then uniting, moving from relatively tangled, messy, matted fibres to an orderly thread or fabric, require methodical discipline and invention. The necessary skill might be described as metis (from Metis the mother of Athena), deriving from the concept of measure not only in the sense of calculation but also as rightness. Ann Bergren, exploring aspects of the feminine in architecture, suggests that metis, used of both weaving and building, is “the power and product of ‘transformative intelligence’ – the 14 Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, London & New York, 1998, p.57. 15 Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams, 3.36. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 565-570. Both are quoted in John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, 1996. For a further account of spinning and narrative, see Marta Weigle, Spiders and Spinsters: Women and Mythology, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1982.

11 June R. Lewis, From Fleece to Fabric, Robert Hale, London, 1983, p.45. 12 I refer in particular to “The Intertwining – The Chiasm”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty/ The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1968, pp.130-155, and to “Working Notes” in the same. 13 Ibid. p.255.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies mental and material process common to every techne, to the work of every artisan”. She refers to the “shapeshifting” of metis as the “turning” that links opposites, “manifest in the reversal and the circle, in weaving, twisting, and knotting, and in every joint”.16 There are reverberations here with the ideas of Merleau-Ponty, of a movement outward from the body that proceeds by twists and turns, articulating space in terms of measure and reflecting an embodied sensation through the shapeshifting handling of fibre. An emergent form of measure may be said to go hand in hand, literally, with discrimination of the properties of fibre developed for the production of thread.

Spinning involves forming “a constant trickle of overlapping fibres”18 into a line by stretching, drafting and twisting, drawing out or attenuating, the ideal being an alternating of drafting by stretching and drafting by drawing. Drawing a line is fundamental to the act of spinning, perhaps testified by the origin of the word line, from linum, flax or linen. Elizabeth Wayland Barber believes that the drawing out or drafting is more central in defining the notion of spinning than the twirling, twisting action of the thread and coil. She says that the root of the word “had much more to do with the notion of drawing out or stretching from one place to another”, thus confirming specific affinity with the visual notion of “span”. In pursuit of line as length and distance, Barber gives the example of “the hand spinners of India” who “were able to stretch a single pound of cotton into well over 200 miles of thread”.19 The fingers of Indian spinners have been described as possessing an ‘acute’ sense, a word more frequently used to denote a function of sight.

Spinning requires patient concentration, a kind of mnemonic rhythm or energy without interruption. Transforming the partly ordered rove into a measured thread is a disciplined performance which frames the body through space and time. It also keeps the body balanced between the weak tension of the rove and the tautness of the thread; as the line emerges it takes on tension in both senses, as a stretching (tensing) of the body as well as a tautness in the fibre. Typically the long drawn out history of thread suggests a passage through generations continuously moving towards ever finer, ever smoother, more homogenous, longer, more economically attuned lines, uniform in diameter and roundness. It becomes increasingly desirable, as spinning is turned to industrial advantage, to avoid the slubs, knibs, sfaldarsi, lousiness and ravellings, as indicated in an early 20th century Italian laboratory study of silk for industrial production.17 (fig.3)

Line, rooted in the twisted fibres of flax, is an archetypal means of measuring length, breadth and depth, a means of calculating space and claiming space for sight. In the Old Testament context of the vision of the Temple of Jerusalem, God appears to Ezekiel as a man carrying a line of flax and a reed as measuring tools. The notion of thread as instrumental in the articulation of space is familiar also to the Renaissance, particularly to Alberti, who not only discusses threads in terms of drawing an object but also in describing architectural space.20 He implies that line is thread, so that “more lines, like threads woven together in a cloth, make a plane”. Thread-like lines are also the invisible rays that extend between the eye and the plane, so that “we can imagine those rays to be like the finest hairs of the head…tightly bound within the eye where the sense of sight has its seat”. He says that nothing will be more helpful than to imagine a veil of threads placed between the eye and the thing seen because this veil, which is like a series of parallel intersections, is “always the same thing in the process of seeing”. This invisible veil of threads marks a passage from the tangible, spun line to the concept of line and space implicit in the noble, geometric ideal that has served to regulate an abstract perception at the expense of tactile sensibilities.

For a very long time a considerable number of people, women (mainly) of all classes, were engaged in spinning, on a regular or daily basis. It has been argued that fundamentals of thread formation are well known by at least 15000 BC, perhaps 5000 years earlier, and in many parts of the world spinning by hand or with spindle is not uncommon. Lines of thread, rolled and twisted between the palms of the hands, or thumb and forefinger, or between the hands and the thighs, (mouth and feet can also be involved) were the product of seemingly never-ending activity (as if time as well as space is measured through the process) the world over. The right hand and the left hand are both involved, one to guide the prepared, roughly parallel fibres, the other to guide the emerging line (the drafting zone) by drawing and twisting simultaneously, and with some speed, to keep the tension required to hold the twist in place. The richness of terms of measure that refer to the body - palms, fingers (digits), hands and feet – may derive in part from the activity of spinning.

The difference between the intimate tactility of fibre and its potential as a means of abstract spatial representation is demonstrated in the drawings of Abraham Bosse, a disciple of the seventeenth century engineer and mathematician Girard Desargues. In his illustration of the allegory of touch, (fig.4), Bosse ‘relegates’ the tactile to the sensuous 18 Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, W.W. Norton & Company, New York & London, 1994, p.35. 19 E. J. W. Barber, Prehistoric Textiles, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 41 & 43. 20 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1970, Book 1, p.44, p.46; Book 2, pp.68-69. Alberti’s use of threads in the representation of space and objects is analysed in detail in William M. Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight, Da Capo Press, New York, 1975.

16 Anne Bergren, “The (Re)Marriage of Penelope and Odysseus: Architecture, Gender, Philosophy”, Assemblage, 21, MIT Press, Cambridge, August 1993, p.8 17 Sir T. Wardle, Divisibility of Silk Fibre, Manchester & London, 1908. The text by Wardle also includes an Italian laboratory report on silk fibres.

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Victoria Parry: Fibre and Line: from Spin to Span innuendo of the textile-rich bedroom.21 In his architectural diagrams, however, including those after Desargues, he demonstrates ways in which the relationship between the body and objects or built space can be served by an intervening materialization composed of lines which culminate in thread-like loose ends. (figs. 5 & 6) These loose threads, drawn taut in the space between eye and object, are present either at the point of the eye (where they suggest the interior process of vision) or at points of reference on the face of the object. There is an understanding here of the tactility which is implicit and fundamental to vision, of the fact that our eyes touch that which they see, as if sight is a prosthetic extension of haptic sensibility.

give way to the pain of spinning all day for less than a living wage. Spinning became a “life-long bodily habit in the sense of habitus…a work technique that imposed an order upon the body”.23 In northern Europe, by the time Alberti was writing, a female prison might be referred to as the spin-house or spinning house, a house of correction where, according to the diarist John Evelyn, “incorrigible and lewd women are kept in discipline and labour”. The imaginary, labyrinthine web of threads is also a prison, reminiscent of Piranesi’s Carceri or the interior spaces of Bourgeois’ contorting mirror twists. Twists and tangles lead to snares, often suggesting a difficult, frustrating and undesired effect of thread behaviour. In the story of Theseus and Ariadne it was the byways and passages of the architectural labyrinth which provided the potential for entanglement, whilst the thread, rolled into a neat ball, enabled Theseus’ safe exit onto firm ground. Labyrinths and straightened threads are necessary to one another just as thread is prone to get us lost in order to enable us to find the way. Tangled or irregular threads have been used by artists such as Eva Hesse and Marcel Duchamp to subvert notions of order and authority (fig.7); there is a suggestion here, as in the work of Bourgeois, that the ordered patterns of culture and behaviour need to reflect their fibrous roots from time to time, to acknowledge that spinning, as noted by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “is one of the primary processes through which nature is made into culture”.24

Fibre which is opaque is used to represent space which is transparent, in the manner of light. Vasseleu describes the texture of light as a fabrication which is “at once the cloth, threads, knots, weave detailed surface, material, matrix and frame”, thus: “In its texture light is a fabrication, a surface of depth that also spills over and passes through the interstices of the fabric…it is both the language and material of visual practices, or the invisible interweaving of differences which form the fabric of the visible”. The tactility of light thus becomes known through a veil (fabric) similar to that described by Alberti but the threads also constitute a perception which is an extension of fibrous texture, of a physical presence which can be grasped simultaneously by hand and eye. Tactility becomes, “an essential aspect of light’s texture where texture refers not only to the feeling of a fabric to the touch, or the grasping of its qualities but also to the hinges or points of contact which constitute the interweaving of the material and ideal strands of the field of vision”.22 The preparation of fibre, from rough to smooth and from multiple strands to a unitary thread, exemplifies the texture of sensation which unifies as well as divides the senses of touch and sight. It is in this space of texture, where spin becomes span, that fibre can be said to describe and articulate a way of knowing, as a non-verbal language through which the material world may be made known. ********* The traditional preparation of raw fibre can be an exacting undertaking. As a repetitive task, spinning regulates, and as with many other textile processes, takes its toll on the body, especially where economic and industrial output is prioritized. The pleasures of textures and fireside yarns 21 The inscription, in translation, reads “ Even though love is born from a beautiful object/ The eye alone a lover can never fulfil/ Because he can succeed in providing the ultimate pleasure/ To his mistress only by touch”. For discussion of Bosse’s contribution to architectural representation (although not the thread association) see Alberto PérezGómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, from which the translation is taken. 22 Vasseleu, op.cit., p.12.

23

Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.105. 24 Jones and Stallybrass, op.cit., p.116.

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Fig.1. J. B. Boudard, Pensées, 1766 .

Fig.2. A Bedouin woman spinning, Oman.

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Fig.3. Bunches of fibrillae in the brin of degummed silk.

Fig.4. Abraham Bosse, Le Toucher

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Fig.5. Abraham Bosse, Les Perspecteurs, from Abraham Bosse’s Maniére universelle de Mr. Desargues 1648.

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Fig.6. Abraham Bosse, ‘Demonstration of perspective distortion’, from Moyen universel de pratiquer la perspective sur les tableaux ou surfaces irrégulières 1653.

Fig.7. M. Duchamp, One mile of string, New York, 1942, exhibited in ‘First Papers of Surrealiam’.

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Artifacts and Freedom Marty Powers Introduction Artifacts define scales of human value. Perhaps this is why, in both ancient China and in Greece, we find the act of creation itself compared to the work of crafting. Plato compared God to a potter; Zhuangzi (jwahng dz, fourth third century B. C.) compared nature to a carver. The reason for the analogy seems obvious: just as a craftsman shapes materials, so does God shape matter to so as to define the qualities of things. But could it be that there is more to the comparison than that? After all, when craftsmen shape materials, they do not merely distinguish one thing from another; they apply standards as well— some material is better than others, some shapes more beautiful than others. Craftsmen must attend to standards because the artifacts they make go to the “better” sorts of people; if not gods, then perhaps nobility, or if not nobility, then at least to the wealthy.

the needs of all creatures; in winter, it would carry out “executions.” Moreover, like the nobility, nature exhibited the most exquisite figures to delight the eye. Despite all this, nature was fundamentally different from the world of ceremony. Nature, you see, lacked a consciousness of moral hierarchy: My master (you ask)? My master? (My master, [natural process]) smashes (the bodies) of all creatures (in winter) without pretending to administer justice. It dispenses generosity to all ages (every spring) without pretending to be benevolent. It is older than antiquity, yet does not pretend to be old. It overspreads the heavens and sustains the earth; it carves and fashions the forms of all creatures, yet does not consider this any feat of skill. It is in the contemplation of this that (my spirit) soars.3

Plato was very much concerned with standards. It was God himself who shaped the unchanging “paradigm,” a perfect form that could serve as a standard for all others: “A craftsman of anything will only produce something beautiful if he makes it after the pattern (paradeigma) of something which is always the same. If he makes it after something which came into being he will not achieve beauty.”1 John Onians explains: “For Plato this is the reason why God when making the universe makes it in imitation of himself. Since he is spherical and eternal the universe is made by him in the same shape.”2 This is one expression of Plato’s famous theory of ideal forms—truth and beauty are eternal, while transient forms are unreal. God imposes a formal standard against which human worth can be measured—if a sphere is perfect, then everything else is more or less a mistake. Among humans too, some are more perfect than others, and so it was the nobility who set the standard for humanity. Crafting presupposes and defines a scale of human worth.

It is easy to miss the rhetorical punch here. This section of Zhuangzi’s argument had opened with an exposé of misguided justice. The protagonist in the scenario is a shattered man named Yi Erzi. Blinded and disfigured by the justice of “sage” King Yao, he seeks instruction from a the recluse Xu You. Xu You’s opening remarks give full play to the scenario’s irony: Why have you come to me? Since Yao has branded you with his “humanity and justice,” and cut off your nose with his views about “right and wrong,” along what (conceivable) path could you now enjoy yourself in free wandering, gaping at the wonders of (natural) transformation? 4

 How should personal freedom be conceivable in a world split in two by “right and wrong”? But Yi Erzi replies that, though encumbered to be sure, still he would like to wander a bit on the edges. Here the irony gets uglier as Xu You reveals how King Yao, in his wisdom, also had Yi Erzi’s eyes gouged out. Deprived of sight, how should he enjoy the beauty of colored or engraved artistry? In such ways Zhuangzi exposes the hypocrisy of a ceremonial system which preaches “benevolence” yet perpetrates cruelty.

The question of standards was on Zhuangzi’s mind as well—ceremonial standards and the moral categories that justified social hierarchy—but Zhuangzi was not content with the status quo. Mindful that beautiful ornaments (figs.1 & 2) distinguished the nobility of his time, Zhuangzi admired a kind of crafting devoid of moral hierarchy, posing natural “shaping” as an alternative to artifacts produced in courtly shops. Natural process offered an alternative because, superficially, it performed some of the same actions as the nobility would perform in ceremony. In springtime, nature magnanimously supplied

The same irony informs the creation story just cited. By asserting that nature acts unconsciously, Zhuangzi eliminates the option of seeing in the “creator” a standard 3

Zhuangzi jishi, ed., Guo Qingfan, 4 vols., Beijing, 1961, pp.281-282. Translation consulted James Legge, translator, The Texts of Taoism, 2 vols., The Sacred Books of the East series, ed., Max Müller, vols., XXXIX-XL, reprint ed., New York, 1962, I, p.256. 4 Zhuangzi jishi, ed., Guo Qingfan, 4 vols., Beijing, 1961, pp.281-282. Translation consulted James Legge, translator, The Texts of Taoism, 2 vols., The Sacred Books of the East series, ed., Max Müller, vols., XXXIX-XL, reprint ed., New York, 1962, I, p.256.

1

John Onians, “Idea and Product: Potter and Philosopher in Classical Athens,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 4, no. 2 (1991), p.68. See also John Onians, Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age: The Greek World View, 350 - 50 BC, New York, 1979, p.9. I freely acknowledge here the inspiration provided for me by John Onians’ lifelong search for the common language of shape and meaning. 2 Onians, “Idea and Product,” p.68.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies for human worth. This destroys the possibility of basing social hierarchy on a natural scale of perfection. In keeping with this, Zhuangzi subverts the traditional role of craft in maintaining social hierarchy, for he finds the aimless “carving” of nature a more wonderful object of enjoyment than the finest products of human artifice. Of course, it was the rarity of human artifice that made it a suitable scale for human worth. Since nature’s wonders are everywhere available to all, Zhuangzi’s “carving” could hardly be used as a prop for an artificial hierarchy. While Zhuangzi and Plato exemplify two possible extremes of interpretation, both share a presumption that the beautifully shaped products of crafting are a natural site for fundamental claims about human worth.

groups. This is called their natural freedom…In the age of perfect virtue, men lived in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family. How could they know among themselves the distinctions between gentlemen and commoners?6 From the reference to “gentlemen and commoners” it is obvious that “groups” refers to hierarchical social divisions, in this case, hereditary divisions. The basis of the author’s critique of is the fact that all people are equal in their ability to provide for their own material needs. Guo Xiang’s third century commentary elaborates, explaining that all people universally—or naturally—have the capacity to farm and weave. This then forms the basis for “releasing/fang” them to look after themselves without government interference. Thus “they were released and naturally were one/equal and so did not form groups. This is called ‘natural freedom.’”7

There are two facets to this problem: the first is the matter of personal agency and how it is defined and apportioned. The second is the mapping of that agency onto a visual scale in artifacts. In Zhuangzi’s time, social agency was mainly the prerogative of the nobility. This social fact would have been emblazoned on their clothing and implements, from a man’s hat to the design of his carriage. The insignia of noble birth would have been marked with the highest levels of artistry: regular, disciplined, finished in execution and intricate in detail. It was, in fact, conspicuously regular yet intricate form which distinguished aristocratic ornament from the plain cloth of ordinary men. There was a geometry of stature in ancient China, and it made use of the fact that regular patterns are statistically rare in nature at macro scales.

It need hardly be said that “freedom” here is not to be construed as constitutionally protected freedom, but it does refer to an intrinsic personal liberty in the sense that individuals are construed as their own agents without interference from government. The view that human groups evolved over time from an unranked social structure to a ranked one is not unique to this text. One finds it in the book attributed to Shang Yang and in the Guanzi.8 In these latter texts the primitive condition is not regarded in utopian terms but rather as a kind of “state of nature” from which ranked social institutions eventually evolved. What is unusual in the Zhuangzi passage is the fundamental critique of class difference as an institution. Not only does the author deny a hierarchy between noble and common; he even denies any basis for assigning higher status to people vis-à-vis animals! From this perspective, while the people’s ability to provide for themselves is construed as natural, the existence of nobility is anything but natural. It is to be explained as an unfortunate consequence of the history of specialized knowledge and technical skills. Just as trainers learned to whip horses into line, just as craftsmen learned to hack materials into shape, just so did the ruling members of society learn to control behavior through ceremony:

Of course it was precisely this regular geometry which Zhuangzi and his followers treated as problematic: Therefore if the raw material had not been assaulted, who could have made an intricate sacrificial vessel from it? If the natural jade had not been despoiled, who could have made handles for libation cups from it…If the five colors had not been confused, how should ornamental figures have been formed?5 It isn’t that Zhuangzi and followers were partial to messiness; they simply understood all too well the relationship between crafted artifacts, ceremony and social privilege. Their understanding of this equation comes forth clearly in a passage which takes to task various kinds of experts, specifically horse trainers and craftsmen. Such men impose regularity on previously unshaped things only through the use of force. Such a state of affairs contrasts sharply with the utopian society the author imagines for the remote past:

But when the learned men appeared, strutting about in the practice of humanity, parading about in the practice of propriety, then the world began to be confused. These men were wanton in their performance of music and excessive in their performance of ceremony. It was then that the world began to be separated into classes.9

According to my idea, those who knew well how to govern mankind would not behave this way. The people had their regular and constant nature. They wove and made themselves clothes. They tilled the ground and got food. This was their common ability and virtue. They were all one in this (ability) and did not form themselves into 5

6

ZZ, 10, pp.334-6; Legge, I, pp.277-8. ZZ, 10, pp.334-5. 8 See Xue He & Xu Keqian, Xianqin faxue sixiang ziliao shizhu [elucidation and commentary on materials for pre-Qin legal thought], Jiangsu, 1990, p.11. 9 ZZ 10, pp.330-6; Legge, with minor changes, I, pp.277-8. 7

ZZ, 9, p.336; Legge, I, pp.277-8.

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“Strutting” and “parading” serve as synecdoche for the artifice of all ceremony, which is the object of critical reflection here. The terms ren and yi are being used in their ceremonial sense precisely so as to criticize the social order of which they are a part. The term “classes” in Legge’s translation is merely implied. Of course the author was not speaking of “class” in a Marxian sense, but he was speaking of fixed, hierarchical, ceremonially constituted “social divisions.”

ornamental designs (fig.2) were the means of establishing a nobleman’s moral authority. For this author, the feudal identification of insignia with human worth represented the lowest stage in a historical process of decline from equality to hierarchy. Because Confucian morality was identified with sophisticated craft work, this author could blame courtly scholars and craftsmen equally for the rise of social hierarchy. The second facet involves the degree to which the geometry of ornament—the ways in which form is extended, enclosed or otherwise defined—interacts with the social geometry of the society which consumed it. This is a subtle issue, and I am at some pains to avoid falling into what T. J. Clark has called the “intuitive analogy” argument. I presume the reader would be bored with simple-minded comparisons between “rigid” styles and “rigid” social order, on the order of L. P. L’Orange’s theories of late Roman art. Nonetheless I have a nagging suspicion that suppositions about the geometry of personhood shape our lives in hidden ways, much in the manner of discourse or epistéme, but perhaps at an even deeper level of latency. This is why it is important to explore the matter, even if at times the attempt should seem clumsy.

Why does the author implicate humanity/ren and propriety in his critique of ceremony? What is the link between artifice and moral values? The link is class differentiation. As A. C. Graham put it: The stative verb ren, as it was inherited by Confucius, covers like English ‘noble’ the whole range of superior qualities distinctive of the man of breeding. Granting that it is coming [in Confucius’ time] to mean ‘human, humane’ rather than ‘noble’, it may be convenient to stay with ‘noble’ as the ad hoc equivalent...being nearer to the older meaning, it suggests the sort of concept which Confucius is narrowing in the direction of benevolence.10 By the time this Zhuangzi passage was written (possibly third-century B. C.), the term ren certainly could mean “humane,” but the author’s interest in the ceremonial system suggests that he is calling upon its older, feudal sense. A comparable ambiguity surfaces in a passage in which Xunzi (3rd c. B. C.) equates the quality of humanity/ren with the ranking function of ceremonial design:

Picturing Social Geometry A tenth century artist once defined the act of painting— hua—as “the drawing of boundaries”—hua—same character, different meaning. Even today this character illustrates in its very form the idea of “boundaries,” the division of empty space into well-defined regions. Our author had hit upon something fundamental about visual organization. As John Onians once observed, “there is a general parallel between our internal intellectual activity and our external human interventions in nature. The process of organizing our basic mental relation to any phenomenon through a series of concepts is similar to that involved in the marking of the earth with frontiers and boundaries. A direct parallel between the naming of a concept and the making of a physical mark on the ground is that name and mark both permit the concept to be shared.”13

(The former) kings determined some to be honored (lit., beautiful) and some to be demeaned (ugly); some to be rich and some to be poor; some to enjoy ease and others to labor. They did not do this out of a wanton/yin fondness for beauty. They simply wished to express their humane/ren designs/wenand to communicate the social ordering (required by) humanity/ren.11

 Ceremonial designs are ren because it is with such designs that one assigns levels of nobility. For Xunzi, “humanity”/ren refers to that quality by which a lord graciously imposes class distinctions upon his people so as to prevent those injustices generated by competition for resources.12

For our Chinese author the link between boundary and identity also ran deep. By “drawing boundaries” this tenth century artist meant distinguishing the characteristic features of one thing from another. If the defining feature of a pine is to be tall, then you should paint it that way; if the defining feature of a man is to be independent, then you should show him that way.14 To be an artist is to draw a line between what counts as a human being, tree, or dragon…and what doesn’t.

The author of the Zhuangzi passage above understood this affiliation between ceremony, music, feudal morality (ren) and social hierarchy. This explains why the Zhuangzi was able to identify the work of craftsmen, the practice of ceremonies, feudal morality, and social inequality all as different species of artifice. For ceremonial officers,

13

John Onians, “Architecture, Metaphor and the Mind,” Architectural History, Vol. 35 (1992), pp.192–207, esp. p.194. 14 The artist cited is Jing Hao. For background, see Martin J. Powers, “When is a Landscape Like a Body?” Landscape, Culture and Power in Chinese Society, ed., Wen-hsin Yeh, Berkeley, 1998, pp.1-22.

10

Graham, Disputers, p.19. Xunzi,10.202-4; Knoblock, p.124. 12 Xunzi, 10, p.195. 11

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies The problem of deciding what counts as human is hardly unique to painters. As Robert Solomon observed, the answer to this question “is built into virtually every language, if not every philosophical tradition, oral and mythological as well as scientistic and epistemological; and in most cultural contexts, not excluding Europe and North America, to be a human being means to be a person much like us…”15 To be a person, even a “ruggedindividual” person, necessarily implies defining oneself in relation to a group. This is why, before an artist can even begin to represent, she must have at hand visual codes for defining how a single person fits into her environment. If one wishes to represent the “maker” of a vessel—or church, for that matter—does one show the artisan, or is his labor subsumed in the presence of the donor? If the artisan is shown, is he shown as the donor’s subordinate or equal? Is he drawn to the same scale or to a smaller scale? No artist can avoid such decisions.

Consider another argument: “All men are of themselves different from others and each self walks independently amidst the crowd. This is what is meant by ‘independent in activity.’”17 This author sees persons as singular, separate from others yet, as in the first argument, no individual is absolute. Each recognizes the existence of the crowd, but the crowd, in this case, is an amorphous mass. Each unit moves independently and uniquely within that collectivity. No higher level boundary defines the nature of that mass. This statement might be visualized as in figure 6. In each example, the logic of the argument is one with its geometry. But why should accounts of self in society so easily map onto graphic diagrams? One consideration may be that humans tend to think in spatial terms. Recent research in cognitive psychology suggests that simple spatial configurations such as “inclusion” may lie at the very root of basic semantic relationships, such as possession.18 More broadly, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that spatial metaphors are all but universal in the articulation of values. One type of cognitive stratagem they analyze is labeled “orientational metaphors.” Orientational metaphors are spatial frameworks that organize “a whole system of concepts with respect to one another.” Such metaphors operate over a broad range of expression because they impose systematic consistencies. If more is up, then down is less;19 if “in” is private, then “out” is less so. In each case a range of values is defined by spatial consistencies inherent in the geometry of the orientational metaphor. Could it be that the bond between person and vision runs deeper than the link between “my love” and “a rose”? Is figure/ground only one of many possible metaphors for self, or is the protagonist/environment dialectic as inescapable in society as the figure/ground dialectic in vision?

In visual art, such questions cannot be resolved without creating form, and that requires distinctions. Some artists distinguish one person from another by means of clearly bounded shapes (fig.3); others provide smooth transitions between regions (fig.4), as if to stress a figure’s interaction with its environment. Some will arrange figures in an explicit hierarchy (fig.3); others will opt for subtler relations. (fig.4) It is even possible to define persons without figures at all, as in the use of feudal insignia or livery. (fig.2) Even in these cases, visual differences between patterned regions still distinguish one type of person from another. No matter how the problem is solved, if a design is to signify a person, the configuration encoded in the design must map onto person/society structures intelligible for the artifact’s viewers. In a word, neither artist nor thinker can avoid puzzling over how individual persons fit within a larger whole. One and Many It is tempting to think that some “drawing of boundaries” underlies constructions of personhood whether or not the diagram is made explicit. Consider the following description of a proper “self”: “Good social institutions are those which conduce the best to civilize man, take from him his absolute existence, to give him a relative one and transport self into the common whole; so that each particular, no longer thinking of himself as one, but as part of the whole.”16 This argument, by an American author of the 18th century, implies a definite spatial calculus, with wholes and parts, boundaries and subsets. Persons should not construe themselves as independent entities on a vacant ground. Instead, though they act as singular entities, they should still occupy some useful position within a larger whole. Cast into visual form, this social ideal could be configured as in illustration 5.

It occurs that the visual character of personhood might result in part from the practices of ordinary vision, where assigning an identity requires picking some object out from an undifferentiated ground. Vision in vertebrates— especially predators—requires “picking out” contours and separating them from surroundings. Without this capacity, our ancestors would surely have starved to death, as would we. This simple fact might furnish a perceptual prerequisite for assigning identity, for assigning an identity in vision is an act of judgment requiring thought. Thirty years ago Rudolf Arnheim showed that “direct observation, far from being a mere ragpicker, is an exploration by the form-seeking mind, which needs to understand but cannot unless it casts what it sees into manageable models. The earliest models are those

15 Robert C Solomon, “Recapturing Personal Identity,” in Roger Ames, ed., Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, New York, 1994, pp.78. 16 Robert Bell. Cited in Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: the Protestant Origins of American Political Thought, Princeton, 1994, p.105.

17

Zhuangzi jijie, 11, p.392. Ronald W. Langacker, “Reference-point Constructions,” Cognitive Linguistics 4-1 (1993), pp.1 -38. 19 George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, 1980, p.14, p.25, pp.56-9, p.127. 18

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Marty Powers: Artifacts and Freedom suggested by appearance itself.”20 Arnheim was speaking not only of vision, but of epistemology. It is not just “seeing” but also “knowing” that requires models: “Unless an image is organized in forms so simple and so clearly related to each other that the mind can grasp them, it remains an incomprehensible, particular case.”21

everything. In the painting she stands alone, the contours of her body clearly dividing her person from her surroundings. These contours are filled with a pattern of arabesques which equally distinguish the nature of her person. You see, the Countess possesses uncommon honor by virtue of noble rank, and it is that honor which appears in the form of colored brocade. Her personal status is further articulated in the forms of three ladies-in-waiting who stand at attention behind her. Facing her, two men kneel, bearing witness to her authority. Each attendant appears as a duplicate, one like the other. Only the Countess stands separate, her independence enhanced by contrast with a blank ground.

If figure/ground dialectics insinuate protocols for constructing identities both in Chinese and in European texts, then an art historical perspective might well shed light on the matter.22 The core question would be whether, or to what extent, accounts of identity, person and self were expressed in visual terms in early society.

Does this mean that the Countess was being portrayed as an individual, in the sense that she drew her authority and her sense of self from within? One would tend to doubt it. The weight given to inheritable rank in the hierarchy of this painting suggests a concept of personal worth founded on biological transmission signified in conventional forms, as opposed to individual accomplishment. Yet, clearly, the Countess stands there, on a blank ground, separate and unique. How should we explain this paradox?

Art and Social Geometry Did social geometry develop as a convenient metaphor in discussions of society and individuals or, historically, did rhetorics of self evolve together with representations of persons?23 One way to illustrate the problem would be to examine some historical artifacts. Let us try two images from Han dynasty China, each proclaiming a different ideal of what it means to be a worthy being. In figures 3 and 4, six figures occupy the mid-level on a banner designed for the funeral services of the Countess of Dai (d. ca. 170 B. C.).24 Above await the officers of heaven; below lies the earth with its chthonic menagerie. This places the Countess’ portrait roughly in the center of

Rather than explain, let’s muddy the waters with another puzzle. In figure 4 we see a detail from the side of a lacquer painted box dating roughly a century later than the Countess’ banner. The box was an item of personal use belonging to someone boasting considerable wealth, but not necessarily noble birth.25 Light reflected off the box reveals a deep, purple hue, not quite black. On top of this ground an artisan painted swirling forms in two, separate colors: dull, purplish gray and brilliant, shiny vermilion. The gray is so close in saturation to the ground that it is all but impossible to discern except at close quarters, yet the shapes delineated in vermilion appear complete and round only when seen together with the gray. Both sets of shapes consist of little more than irregular lines with shared trajectories. These lines, deftly stroked in viscous lacquer, wiggle and turn unpredictably. No two lines are identical, yet most share a common character. As a result, the vermilion marks constantly shift “identity,” now flowing together as a stream, now reassembling into some vaguely familiar shape.

20 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, Berkeley, 1971, pp.278-79. More recently, Daniel Sperber & Deirdre Wilson, in Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford, 1986, pp.46-50, set out the basic thesis that humans process information with an active view to identifying features relevant or meaningful to them, but the thesis requires most of the book to explore. They also present a thoughtful critique of the failure of semiotics on pages 3-9. I am grateful to Randy LaPolla for this reference. 21 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, Berkeley, 1971, p.274. 22 There is a long history of art historical contributions to the larger question of identity and image. Both the Gestalt psychologists and E. H. Gombrich have associated ornament with some sense of order underlying cognition. For Gombrich’s review of the problem, see his Sense of Order, New York, 1979, Introduction. One might have thought that structuralist and post-structuralist analysis would contribute to such questions, and so it has. In the second volume of this study, Norman Bryson’s views on the dialectics of selfhood will contribute much food for thought. Another recent study relating spatial and conceptual categories in interesting ways is Louis Marin’s To Destroy Painting, Mette Hjort, trans., Chicago, 1995, especially pp.45-64. 23 Recent studies, of course, suggest that “metaphor” is not simply metaphor. The cognitive role of metaphor has been explicated and popularized by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, “Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language,” The Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 8 (1980), pp.453-486. George Lakoff & Mark Johnson identify several species of spatial metaphor, including “orientational metaphors,” spatial frameworks that organize “a whole system of concepts with respect to one another.” Such metaphors operate over a broad range of expression because they impose systematic consistencies. If more is up, then down is less. See George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, 1980, p.14, p.25, pp.56-9, p.127. See also Hoyt Alverson, “Metaphor and Experience: Looking Over the Notion of Image Schema,” in James W. Fernandez, ed., Beyond Metaphor: the Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, Stanford, 1991, pp.94-117. 24 For more on the Mawangdui banner, see Jeffrey K. Riegel, “A Summary of Some Recent Wenwu & Kaogu Articules: Mawangdui Tombs Two and Three,” Early China 4 (Fall, 1975), pp.10-15. For the banner’s design and iconography, see Wu Hung, “Art in a Ritual Context: Rethinking Mawangdui,” Early China 17 (1992), pp.111-44.

In the pictorial conventions of the time, most of these shapes would have been read as swirling clouds, but upon closer inspection, some swirls possess sufficient uniqueness to suggest a more specific identity. At the far left, a magpie extends its long tail while raising the head as if to chirp. In the center is a slender, nimble humanoid with feathers and a horn. This is the “immortal” often mentioned in the literature of the time. Thin and light from eating morning mist, immortals live forever, riding the gyrating streams of clouds. At first sight, this immortal might have been mistaken for a swirling cloud yet, by 25 For details, see Martin J. Powers, “A Late Western Han Tomb near Yangzhou and Related Problems,” Oriental Art XXIX, no. 3, (Autumn, 1983), pp.275-290.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies ethnocentric.”29 T. J. Clark, in his seminal essay “On the Social History of Art” (1973), lost no time in disclosing the ahistorical nature of such comparisons: “I do not want the social history of art to depend on intuitive analogies between form and ideological content—on saying, for example, that the lack of firm compositional focus in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans is an expression of the painter’s egalitarianism.”30 Clark’s analysis of political process provided an alternative means of linking social practice and visual style, a method firmly rooted in history.31

bringing to these patterns the proper interpretative frame, we readily distinguish him from his surroundings. Why were immortals portrayed so differently from members of the nobility? For some, such decoration may have suggested a wish for long life, but in the literature of Classical China immortals and dragons could also serve as metaphors for a distinct ideal of personhood, one appropriate to a talented man of independent disposition. Their freedom from fixed form and fixed locus—the unmitigated absence of borders—endowed such images with a geometry perfectly opposite that which informed the lives of the nobility. The latter, after all, were bounded on all sides by ceremonial decorum.

Another alternative can be found in the work of John Onians, who has explored the art of ancient Greece and Medieval Europe in search of cognitive categories common to both mind and vision—attitudes toward matter, proportion, time or space.32 In his studies, logical relations informing literary tropes such as allegory or metaphor provide common ground between art and thought. This method, too, is historically based and, like Clark’s sociological approach, has the advantage of providing documentary checks discouraging self-serving analogies such as those bemoaned by Washburne and Crowe.

The Politics of Social Geometry If the construction of personhood can—indeed must—be expressed the drawing of boundaries then, as in our Han dynasty examples, different dynamics of personal prerogative could be systematically encoded into pictorial style. As it happens, the suspicion that style may somehow “reflect” different systems of social constraint has been around for some time. As early as the eighteenth century, Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw in Egyptian and Greek art different levels of artistic potential. The bodily movement of figures in Egyptian art was obviously more restricted, whereas the figures in Greek sculpture move more freely. Winckelmann extended this observation in such a manner as to identify the more naturalistic Greek style with political freedom.26 To this extent Winckelmann’s theories may offer one of the earliest examples of the intuitive analogy argument in art historical writing. In such arguments, artistic style and what I am calling “social geometry” are arranged in a one-to-one relationship. Unfortunately, there are two problems with this approach to the history of art: (1) Such analogies almost always involve a non-sequitur; the presence of morphological resemblance in no way signifies a logical relationship. Following this mode of reasoning, one might argue that Han dynasty artists conceived the Countess quite literally as an independent individual, even though history would suggest otherwise. (2) In every case known to me, including Winckelmann’s, the argument is patently self-serving.

With more sophisticated models available, intuitive analogy arguments have become rare in art historical writing, but this does not mean that self-serving accounts of “alien” cultures have gone the way of the dinosaur. Even today, students of comparative culture do not hesitate to offer broad, ahistorical contrasts between essentialized ethnicities, and when they do, the geometry of the argument is often one with its logic. Robert Solomon recently reviewed the cliché’d contrast between “Asian” and “Western” selves as “interdependent” versus “independent.” “Interdependent” and “independent” of course describe a spatial arrangement in which a protagonist—a figure—relates to some kind of environment—a ground. According to a study by Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, the Western self, like the figure of the Countess (fig.3), is atomistic, standing isolated and alone, but the Asian self is embedded in a suffocating matrix, or so the story goes. Solomon questioned the “so-called Western view of the individual as an independent, self-contained, autonomous entity who (a) comprises a unique configuration of internal attributes. . . and (b) behaves primarily as a consequence of these internal attributes.”33 In particular, he found the “distinction between ‘independent’ and ‘interdependent’ construals of self…overly simpleminded and only clumsily applicable to the hardly homogeneous societies mentioned by Markus and Kitayama.”34 Solomon is not the only

The intuitive analogy argument appears again in the work of Ruskin,27 and by the first half of this century theories relating society and style could get quite literal, as when L. P. L’Orange argued that late Roman art, like late Roman society, was fundamentally “rigid.”28 Dorothy Washburn and Donald Crowe, in their review of anthropological approaches to visual style, discuss this and other such theories, characterizing them as “simplistic and

29

Washburn & Crowe, Symmetries of Culture, p.33. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Princeton, 1973, pp.10-11. 31 Clark, Image, p.11. 32 John Onians, Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age: the Greek world view, 350-50 BC, London, 1979, pp.105-12, pp.143-46, pp.155-60. I freely acknowledge here the inspiration provided by John Onians’ lifelong search for the common language of shape and meaning. 33 Robert C. Solomon, “Recapturing Personal Identity,” in Roger Ames, ed., Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, New York, 1994, p.22. 34 Solomon, “Recapturing Personal Identity,” p.23. 30

26 Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven, 1994, pp.34-6; pp.54-60. 27 See E. H Gombrich, Sense of Order, New York, 1979, pp.43-5. 28 For discussion and critique see Dorothy K. Washburn & Donald W. Crowe, Symmetries of Culture: Theory and Practice of Plane Pattern Analysis, Seattle, 1988, p.33.

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skeptic. Classic assumptions about personhood have recently come under fire from the field of sociology as well. Harrison White’s study of “identity and control” explicitly seeks to deconstruct: Two myths [which], I have rhetoric of social organization. person as free-standing entity. society as an embracing whole. culture, and to this day they science.35

spaces filled with emanations of the sun and the air of the heavens.36 Kepler’s discovery of the heliocentric cosmos is usually treated as a purely scientific matter. It took a scholar of Arnheim’s breadth to recognize that Kepler’s understanding of nature was shaped by a perceptual model further informed by religion. True, he overthrew the notion of the earth as center of creation, but he retained the idea of a world dominated by God, a Creator whose conscious designs were expressed in natural order. For men of his age, social order, science and religious dogma were not easily distinguished.

argued, characterize the One is the myth of the The other is the myth of Both myths permeate our still permeate our social

The myth White criticizes takes the default condition of ordinary vision—figure on a ground—as model for person. Once the geometry of the myth is exposed, it emerges as another intuitive analogy argument: the “Western” individual corresponds to a free-standing figure against a blank ground even though, paradoxically, that freestanding figure sits within a larger whole shaped by a higher-level boundary.

Kepler’s cosmic geometry was easily translated into social geometry. Stephen Toulmin refers to a coherent order informing nature and society as a “cosmopolis” and reexamined the social and ethical implications of the heliocentric cosmos from this perspective. In a subtle critique of the standard “rise-of-science” narrative, Toulmin revealed how biases about the social order could inform choices in the realm of “science.” According to Toulmin, contemporaries of Newton would have found it “fitting that a Modern Nation should model its State organization on the structures God displays in the world of astronomy: the Roi Soleil, or Solar King, wields authority over successive circles of subjects, all of whom know their places, and keep their proper orbits.”37

Vision and Theory White did not comment on the perceptual practices which seem to inform either the myth of the free-standing individual or that of society as embracing whole, but he did note that these models had a long history in EuroAmerican thought. To find an articulate account of the historical impact of perception upon thought, it is better to turn to the field of psychology. In Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim demonstrated again and again the spatial character of fundamental accounts of the world:

In the eighteenth-century the order of concentric circles was more than just a happy metaphor—it was science. As such it left its mark on the early evolution of the social sciences. Tzvetan Todorov observed that Jean de La Brueyère, writing in the late seventeenth century, understood “social groups as concentric circles, each of which reflects or tempers the preceding one, contributing nothing radically new: the people imitate the city, which imitates the court, which imitates the prince; there is certainly no escape from centralization here.”38 The prince, as the source of moral and social standards, contains agency in himself. The rest of the people obtain more or less of this depending upon their distance from him. Commenting on a similar spatial paradigm, Toulmin shows how the concept of inert “mass” seemed right and natural for Newton’s contemporaries because the lower orders, the masses, were not thought capable of agency. Instead, like matter, they needed to be moved and directed by some higher power.39

When Galileo visualized the planets as rotating not under their own power, but rather as being driven by an initial impulse, perpetuated through inertia, his perceptual image was no longer that of Aristotle. And it was this image of causal event that he described in his theory of inertia. Arnheim’s thesis continues to challenge students of history and art, for it suggests that visual paradigms inform our construction of knowledge deeply, even to the point of shaping the evolution of science: Johannes Kepler...says that the central point is the origin of the circle and gives birth and form to the circumference. Correspondingly he sees all the mobile powers of the planetary system as concentrated in, and issuing from, the energy of the centrally located sun....Characteristic of the ease with which the meaning of visual models moves back and forth between the spiritual and the physical is Kepler’s view that the image of the Trinity is manifest in the astronomical cosmos. God is personified in the sun, the source of light, motion and life; the Son appears in the shell of the fixed stars, which reflects the sunlight like a concave mirror; and the Holy Ghost dwells in the

In early modern Europe the geometry of concentric circles could define both nature and society because theories of each were informed by an order graphically expressed in concentric circles. The geometry of the model was also its 36

Arnheim, Visual Thinking, p.281. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York, 1990, p.127. 38 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans., Catherine Porter, Cambridge, 1993, p.7. 39 Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p.121. 37

White, Identity and Control, p.287.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies positioning the self agonistically in relation to society, but we should not overstate the case: while Tao’s poems sometimes ridicule the nobility, it isn’t obvious he plans to disenfranchise them. He himself, after all, was a scion of a noble clan. Likewise, though he often asserts his own values in opposition to those of convention, he does not associate such acts with the term ziyou.

logic. In Arnheim’s terms both theories could be understood as generated from a common perceptual model. Hierarchy, after all, is a requirement of vision. Objects of greatest interest occupy the center of the visual field, with objects on the edges being, quite literally, peripheral. In the model Toulmin describes, agency was conceived as situated in the center, with both physical energy and social agency diminishing according to fixed rules.

Ziyou is the term currently used to translate “liberty,” and many have been taught that it was coined only in modern times expressly for that purpose. This, in fact, is not the case. One of the earliest writers to thematize ziyou was the Tang poet and social critic Bai Juyi. In two poems entitled “Accommodating My Own Will,” Bai associated ziyou explicitly with Tao Yuanming:

The heliocentric model offers a familiar and well-studied example of a more general phenomenon that is the real focus of my interest in this essay. It figures a moment in the evolution of personal agency in which the great mass of individuals was still conceived as incapable of selfdetermination. As inert matter depended upon some higher agency to be moved, so was the common man and woman dependent, in fundamental ways, upon men who possessed intrinsic, inherited authority. Although for most men, self may have been particulate, but it was a particle contained within and shaped by a higher level boundary.

For ten years I traveled, Always hungry, always cold. For three years I was Remonstrance Officer; Bearing the shame of not speaking freely. Although I had wine, I could never freely drink; Although there were hills, I could never freely roam. Why did I lack career ambition? Tethered and tied, I had no freedom/ziyou…

There is nothing uniquely European about the dynamics of the situation. In China, too, geometry could figure agency. This much seems evident from the fact that, on both ends of the Eurasian continent, the collapse of inherited status required the abandonment of traditional spatializations of personhood. In Europe, the Great Chain of Being did not survive the Enlightenment attack on aristocratic privilege; in China, meandering clouds became a symbol of personal agency at the very moment the nobility lost their grip on culture. Let me end this essay with a brief vignette of this important moment in Eurasian history.

That last couplet echoes Tao’s “Coming Home” poem. Bai regards public office as a form of bondage, as did Tao, but what Bai gains by leaving office is ziyou rather than ziran. For him ziyou implies speaking freely about government. Bai underscores the political dimension by inserting an allusion to the Han dynasty maverick Zhu Yun, later immortalized in a large painting now in the Palace Museum, Taipei, which portrays him in a moment of antiimperial defiance. In the passage referred to, Zhu accused high ministers of occupying their offices like corpses, doing nothing to merit their salaries. What they should do instead is to speak freely as Zhu does. Criticizing freely, of course, was Bai’s job as Remonstrance Officer, but he didn’t feel free to criticize until he left office.

The Shape of Freedom A hypothetical history of China’s discourse of personal agency might begin with Zhuangzi, but surely the most influential exponent of the cause during the medieval period was the then obscure poet Tao Yuanming. Far from famous in his own time, Tao wrote a small body of consistently cantankerous poems calling for an expansion of the limits of personal agency. Perhaps the most famous of these is that in which he explains why he left public office to return to his modest estate. The entire argument is framed in binary terms with freedom and naturalness on one side, and bondage and artifice on the other: “Since it was I, myself, who set my soul in bondage, why should I remain discontent and sorrow alone? I know now the past is beyond repair, but the future is still before me.”

In another poem Bai complains of people who seek wealth and honor, “Toiling away for their body’s pleasure/ In failure or success never free/ziyou… .” Addressing a friend who studied hard to make the grade, he upbraids him still because “You never dared to protest/yi or roam freely/you/ Still a puppet of your reputation.” Again, protest is somehow tied to the concept of ziyou, along with the ideal of personal freedom conveyed in the term you, “roam freely.” “Roam freely” comes from the Zhuangzi of course, and connotes personal freedom in opposition to official controls.

And so Tao abandoned rank, salary, and all the blandishments of city life. Knowing that readers might wonder at this, his preface explains: “Why did I do it? By nature I love what is natural/ziran.” But what did he mean by “natural”? “I have never been one to suit the world against my own wishes. Though stricken with hunger and cold, to go against myself would only make me sick.”

By the late 11th century leading literati like Su Shi had turned Tao into an avatar of political independence. After being exiled to Huangzhou for political criticism, Su Shi wrote a series of improvisations on Tao Yuanming’s “Coming Home” poem. In his preface to that collection, Huang Tingjian made the political thrust of Su’s poems perfectly clear:

The demands of society and convention are construed here as artificial, while “natural” signifies the space of personal agency. Tao had created a powerful framework for 272

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Now you’ve been exiled to Lingnan, though the Prime Minister wanted you killed. You’ve eaten your fill of Huizhou rice, and thoughtfully matched Yuanming’s poems. Pengze (Yuanming) was a man for the millenium; Dongpo (Su Shi), a scholar for all ages. Although they retired for different reasons, their personal style is much the same.

is based upon a logical dialectic informing discourses of personal freedom on both sides of the Eurasian continent: personal prerogative is quite simply the absence of predictability. If my behavior is predictable, then my actions obey some structure of relations external to my self. If, on the other hand, I can exercise my own will, that willfulness will reveal itself as behavior sufficiently random to be ascribed only to my own agency. Xin summarized this relationship succinctly:

The heroism of this act was immediately appreciated in the capital, where it became the rage to improvise either on Tao’s poem or on Su Shi’s. Paintings of the theme also were popular.40 The Freer scroll on this theme seems to date from this period and suggests that, by the 12th century, Tao himself, along with his imagery of clouds, hills and gardens, had been incorporated into the tradition of painting as a topos for ziran—naturalness. The artist opens the scroll with Tao just about to arrive home. (fig.7) This moment of liberation is visualized in the figure of Tao himself, his scarves, as the poem says, “flapping freely in the wind,” here represented with undulating curves. Likewise, at ease in his garden, Tao let’s his eyes gaze into the distance, “watching carefree clouds creep up from mountain caves.” (figs.8 & 9) The Song artist conveyed Tao’s sense of unconstrained agency by using archaic cloud forms which visually meander freely. (fig.10) This image was highly charged. Centuries earlier Bai Juyi had concluded his poems on “Accommodating My Own Will” with none other than that image of floating clouds:

There never was a fixed place for ever-wandering clouds. If I could be like clouds, that would be real freedom ziyou. To put it another way, ziran as “naturalness” is equivalent to ziran as “spontaneity,” the other common English translation for this term. Over the centuries Chinese artists found many ways to convey an artist’s willfulness in paint, from the use of dishtowels for painting to Dong Qichang’s unbelievable compositions, but the most persistent of these was the ambling meander, the wandering path of natural vapor which, as Zhuangzi put it, “carves and fashions the forms of all creatures.” This erratic path offers us one instance of a spatial paradigm, a set of spatially-defined relationships in which geometry is at one with the logic. Kepler’s solar model offers yet another, and history offers many more examples from both sides of the Eurasian continent. Though the forms may differ, all such paradigms hold in common the capacity to define, and therefore direct, the basic conditions of human agency.

Its hard to use wood from twisted trees, Floating clouds follow their own will. Free from care, my person and this world Shall evermore forsake one another. Of course the Song artist must have been aware of Tao’s discourse of naturalness/ziran, but the artist could draw upon a richer rhetorical arsenal than had been available to Tao. To judge from a work by Xin Qiji (1140-1207), a 12th c. literatus could take it for granted that his audience would associate Tao and his image of meandering clouds with ziyou. Xin’s poem ends: Come home and rest; Rest, and come home. Must you be a duke before you’re called a man? There never was a fixed place for ever-wandering clouds. If I could be like clouds, that would be real freedom ziyou. Like Bai, Xin links ziyou not only to personal freedom, but to a political concept, the notion that a man’s dignity does not depend upon inherited status. The visual sign for that condition was ever-wandering clouds, a condition expressed in the meandering forms of cloud designs. To understand the Song artist’s rhetoric we need not revert to an intuitive analogy argument. The use of visual form here 40 See Martin J. Powers, “Garden Rocks, Fractals and Freedom: Tao Yuanming Comes Home,” Oriental Art, v. XLIV (Winter, 1998), pp.2838.

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Fig. 1 Drawing of a shield from Baoshan.

Fig. 2. Detail of fig. 1.

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Fig. 3. Detail of an image of the Countess of Dai from Mawangdui Tomb #1 near Changsha, Hunan. Hunan Provincial Museum. After Changsha mawangdui yihao han mu, 2 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1973), plate 76.

Fig. 4. An immortal spirit climbing a cloud. Detail of a lacquer painted box from a tomb at Huchang, near Yangzhou, Jiangsu. First century B.C. Yangzhou Municipal Museum.

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Fig. 5. Conceptual diagram of a statement by Robert Bell.

Fig. 6. Conceptual diagram of a statement by Guo Xiang.

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Fig. 7. Tao Yuanming returning home in a ferry. Detail of a handscroll illustrating the return of Tao Yuanming. Song dynasty. Courtesy of the Freer/Sackler Galleries of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Fig. 8. Tao Yuanming in his garden. Detail of a handscroll illustrating the return of Tao Yuanming. Song dynasty. Courtesy of the Freer/Sackler Galleries of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

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Fig. 9. Tao Yuanming in his garden. Detail of a handscroll illustrating the return of Tao Yuanming. Song dynasty.

Fig. 10. Clouds emerging from mountain caves. Detail of fig. 9.

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Milan and Troy in 1510 Richard Schofield

I. TRADITIONS ABOUT MILAN In 1510 Francesco Gritti, Cesare Cesariano’s cousin, completed his manuscript history of the Trojan war which includes a description of the rebuilding of Troy by Priam; since Gritti departed in certain important ways from his romance sources when he described the new city, it is worth investigating whether his account is related to the mediaeval and renaissance traditions of writing about Milan and to the Quattrocento literature about ideal cities, and particularly whether we can establish a connection with Cesariano himself.1

for example, the Versum de Mediolano civitate mentioned the circuit of walls (‘celsas habet opertasque turres in circuitu’) and its nine main gates, and the city was occasionally compared with Jerusalem.5 Bonvesin da la Riva, writing in 1288, announced that Milan had no equal in the world and deserved to be called a second Rome; he maintained that the city had six, not ten, principal gates, and ten pusterle, a total of sixteen; it had no system of artificial drains or cisterne because it had natural springs which kept it clean - a statement later contradicted by Galvano Fiamma; but it was also circular and provided with surrounding canals. In an extraordinary passage, Bonvesin analyses the name of the city, MEDIOLANUM. Its world-wide fame was demonstrated by the fact that it begins and ends with an M, a letter which is wider than all others; M also stands for a thousand, the highest number that can be expressed by a single letter, and signifies that Milan had existed from the beginning to the end of a millenium (seculum) as one of the most perfect cities. In the middle of MEDIOLANUM are O and L: O symbolises its circularity and therefore perfection in relation to all other cities; the height and length of the letter L indicate the extent of the glory and nobility of the city; finally, the name MEDIOLANUM contains all five vowels and therefore, like the city itself, lacks nothing.6 By

The mediaeval tradition assures us that Milan was perfectly circular, as were many other cities in the middleages, and included a double ring of walls, a surrounding canal and many gates and pusterle (minor gates), the number of which varied from writer to writer2; and indeed these characteristics very roughly reflected the reality of the mediaeval city.3 Classical authors did not say much about Milan but at least Ausonius in the Ordo nobilium urbium, VII mentioned the walls and hinted at a comparison with Rome; ‘Et Mediolani mira omnia copia rerum, innumerae cultaeque domus, facunda virorum ingenia et mores laeti, tum duplice muro amplificata loci species, populique voluptas, circus et inclusi moles cuneata theatri; templa Palatinaeque arces opulensque moneta et regio Herculei celebris sub honore lavacri; cunctaque marmoreis ornata peristyla signis, moeniaque in valli formam circumdata limbo. Omnia quae magnis operum velut aemula formis excellunt nec iuncta premit vicinia Romae.’4 The defensive walls were often commented on;

Colombo, ‘Milano “secunda Roma” e la lapide encomiastica dell’antica Porta Romana’, Archivio storico lombardo, 83, 1956, pp.148-69. In general, W. Hammer, ‘The Concept of the New or Second Rome in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 19, 1944, pp.50-62, esp.p.60 and P. Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity. The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought, Cambridge, 1993, p.20ff; the fundamental collection of mediaeval and renaissance material about Roman Milan is in G. Mompeglio Mondini, La tradizione intorno agli edifici romani di Milano, Milan, 1943. 5 Milan as Jerusalem; J. le Goff, ‘L’immaginario urbano nell’Italia medievale (secolo v-xv)’ in Storia d’Italia, Annali 5, ed. C. De Seta, Turin, 1982, pp.13-34; A. Rovetta in “La dimora di Dio con gli uomini” a cura di M. L. Gatti Perer, Milan, 1983, pp.105-8. Text and commentary on the Versum de Mediolano in A. Colombo, ‘Il “Versum de mediolana (sic) civitate” dell’anonimo liutprandeo e la importanza della metropoli lombarda nell’Alto medioevo’, in Miscellanea di studi lombardi in onore di Ettore Verga, Milan, 1931, pp.69-104 and G. B. Pighi, ‘Versus de Verona, Versum de Mediolano civitate’ (Studi pubblicati dell’Istituto di Filologia Classica, Università di Bologna, 7), Bologna, 1960, p.145ff. 6 Bonvesin, cit. note 4, pp.68, 60 & 66; the explanation of the name MEDIOLANUM is on p.186: ‘Ex ipsius interpretatione vocabuli cognoscitur civitas nostra. Incipit enim MEDIOLANUM ab M et in eandem litteram disinit; in ipsius medio due sunt littere, scilicet O et L. Per M primum et ultimum, quod ceteris elementis est latius, significatur Mediolani glorie latitudo dilatate per orbem terrarum in principio et fine. Per M quoque intelligitur millesimus numerus, ultra quem non est simplicis numeri simplex vocabulum; et sic perfectum simplicitatis dat intelligi numerum; per quod quidem significatur quod Mediolanum a principio usque ad seculi finem connumeratum est et connumerabitur in perfectarum numero civitatum. Per O, quod est una littera de duabus in meditulio dictionis, cuius est forma rotonda et perfecta, ceteris dignior atque pulcrior, datur intelligi eius rotunditas et pulcritudo et dignitas et perfectio. Est enim civitas nostra rotunda ad litteram et pulcra et super alias civitates perfectior. Per L vero significatur eius nobilitatis et glorie longitudo et etiam altitudo, quoniam usque in finem, beate Marie virginis

1

Here I present a rapid outline of only those aspects of the rich literary and architectural traditions which seem to be relevant for making comparisons with Gritti’s Troy. For an introduction to mediaeval writers about Milan, J. K. Hyde, ‘Mediaeval descriptions of cities’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 48, 1965-6, pp.308-40. 2 The difference between a porta and a pusterla was explained by Galvano Fiamma in his Chronicon extravagans: A. Ceruti, Chronicon extravagans et Chronicon maius auctore Galvano Fiamma, Turin, 1869, p.34; ‘Et conveniunt in hoc omnes porte principales, quod quelibet altrinsecus habet duas turres a destris et sinistris. Pusterle autem sunt que sub una turre coangustantur…omnes porte principales sunt duplices…porte principales dicuntur porte, sed pusterle due etiam dicuntur porte…omnes porte habent duas pusterlas a dextris et sinistris’ (similar material in the Chronicon Maius, pp.285-7). 3 Ideal and real Milan; F. Sinatti D’Amico, Per una città. Lineamenti di legislazione urbanistica e di politica territoriale nella storia di Milano, Todi, 1979; L. Gambi & M. C. Gozzoli, Milano, Torino, 1982; P. Boucheron, Le Pouvoir de Bâtir. Urbanisme et politique édilitaire à Milan (XIV-XV siècles), École Francaise de Rome, 1998, p.71ff & passim. 4 The idea that Milan was a second Rome – itself often illustrated as circular - was expressed in these famous verses once inscribed on the Porta Romana, which were quoted by Bonvesin, Fiamma and Benzo with reference to Milan and by Opicino in reference to Pavia. ‘Dic homo qui transis, dum porte limina tangis; / Roma secunda, vale, regni decus imperiale, / Urbs veneranda nimis, plenissima rebus opimis. / Te metuunt gentes, tibi flectunt colla potentes, / In bello Thebas, in sensu vincis Athenas’; Bonvesin de la Riva. De magnalibus Mediolani; Meraviglie di Milano, ed., P. Chiesa, Milan ,1998, p.164, & p.237, note 139; see A.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies contrast the Opusculum de situ civitatis mediolani omits any consideration of the circularity of Milan and says that it acquired its name because it lay ‘in meditullio’ between the Ticino and the Adda.7

birds, fishes and various creatures. Benzo also talks of the origins of the church of S. Ambrogio and describes the bronze serpent and the relief of Hercules with club in hand. Apart from providing detailed classical origins for a number of the chief surviving religious institutions of the city, he also tells us that the city had 365 towers (one for each day of the year) and 6 gates, but not that it was circular; according to Benzo, the walls were shaped like a lion – like Rome.10

Galvano Fiamma’s voluminous writings added much detail to existing accounts of Milan; for our purposes we may note his detailed but self-contradictory attempts to explain the dimensions of the rings of walls, the diameter of the city and the distances between the gates.8 It is important for our discussion that in the Chronicon extravagans he also mentions the drains; ‘Cloace fuerunt voragines subterranee patentes, muro civitatis infixe, per quas tempore ymbrium aque pluviales reciperentur, ne murus aquarum impetu destruetur’; and, fascinatingly, he comments on the social divisions of the city as they were in 1199; ‘Prima et nobilior pars civitatis fuit pars valvasorum et cathaneorum, vel capitaneorum et vassallorum sive vallisinorum’…then lists the top people; but the working people were also divisible ‘In processu temporis isti artifices divisi sunt in duas partes, quia illi vivunt de emptionibus et venditionibus absque opere manuali, dicti sunt populus, ut mercatores et homines medio modo se habentes inter divitias et paupertates. Illi autem qui operunt de opere manum suarum, dicti sunt “credentia”, eo quod credendo multa dampna sustinuerint a nobilibus, et isti tales sunt becharii, farinarii, calcifices, sutores et huius similes homines’…each group having their own political leaders. His account, however, speaks only of political, not physical divisions within the city, though obviously they would be implied by such fractures in society.9

These traditions about Milan flowed through the Quattrocento and into the early Cinquecento. No author read Benzo as assiduously as Donato Bossi; writing in the Chronica Bossiana of 1492, he constitutes a perfect index of what a highly placed and well-connected Milanese humanist believed, or liked to believe, about the classical origins of his city. He tells us, for example, that (c. 15r) the names of Milan’s six gates were derived from the names of classical deities: thus, he decides, reasonably enough, that the Porta Iovis was named after Jove and the Porta Orientalis after the Sun, but, by some bizarre etymological conjuring, that the Porta Romana was named after Apollo, the Porta Ticinese after Saturn, the Porta Vercellina after Venus and the Porta Comensis after Juno.11 It was M. Claudius Marcellus who rebuilt Milan after its third destruction with walls around it, circular towers and six gates (23r-v).12 Map-makers who illustrated Milan had few doubts about how to show the city either and Milan was never lionshaped, as Rome occasionally was, but almost invariably circular. Two maps survive in the Ambrosian MS of Galvano Fiamma’s Chronicon extravagans; the first on f. 46v shows the city with two, and the second on 93v, one circuit of walls.13 On 46v Fiamma includes the inner circle built by Massiminianus and the mediaeval circuit later replaced by improved gates, towers and crenellated walls.14 The inner, Roman walls have six gates; the outer has six gates and ten pusterle, sixteen in total. (fig.1) By contrast the Paris MS of Fiamma’s Manipulus Florum of c. 1340 provides circular plans of Milan (1r), as well as of Lodi, Mantova, Parma, Pavia, Piacenza, Tortona, etc, but also a unique hexagonal plan of Milan on 8r with the six major

The encyclopaedist Benzo of Alessandria, writing around 1320, developed in detail the legends connecting contemporary and ancient Milan. In Benzo we find, for example, the details of the relationship of the city to Noah, the fact that it was founded 1960 years after the flood and 590 after the destruction of Troy. For the first time Benzo gives us details about the Trajanic palace which gave S. Giorgio in Palazzo its name, the Roman baths, the arena which gave the Corte Arenga its name; the fact that S. Lorenzo was originally a Temple of Hercules with a statue of that hero on a throne made of ivory; he remarks on the sixteen columns of the atrium clad in gold and carved with

10 J. R Berrigan, ‘Benzo d’Alessandria and the Cities of Northern Italy’, Studies in Mediaeval and Renaissance History, 4, 1967, pp.125-192 includes an edition of the text of the Chronicon in MS Ambrosiana B 24 inf replacing that of L. A. Ferrai, ‘Bentii Alexandrini de Mediolano civitate opusculum ex Chronico eiusdem excerpto’, Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano, 9, 1890, pp.15-36; the lion shape of Milan is mentioned on p.154; ‘Fertur eciam quod ad leonis formam et sub ascendente astro Leonis murum civitatis fundaverunt, latitudinis xxiiii pedum, altitudinis lxxiiii…. Lion-shaped Rome; P. Jacks, cit. note 4, p.54ff. Full bibliographical information on Benzo in P. Tomea, Tradizione apostolica e coscienza cittadina a Milano nel medioevo, Milan, 1993, pp.108-9. 11 Similar list in Fiamma’s Chronicon Extravagans (Ceruti, cit. note 8, pp.33-4). 12 Milano, Biblioteca Trivulziana, Incunabulum A 28. Biography of Bossi by S. Peyronel, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 13, Rome, 1971, pp.298-9. 13 Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, A 275 inf. Gambi & Gozzoli, cit. note 3, p.5ff. 14 L. Beltrami, Un documento dell’anno 1479 relativo al progetto di un secondo giro di mura intorno Milano, Milan, 1893.

et beati Ambrosii et aliorum sanctorum religiosorum precibus et meritis, perseverabit eius alta nobilitas et gloria, Deo dante’. Boucheron, cit. note 3, p.79ff. 7 L. A. Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, I, 2, Milan, 1725, p.205 A. 8 P. Tomea on G. Fiamma in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 47, Rome, 1997, pp.331-8. G. Fiamma, ‘Opusculum de rebus gestis ab Azone, Luchino et Johanne Vicecomitibus’, ed. C. Castiglioni, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 12, part 4, Bologna, 1938, pp.8-9 & 26 for the minute measurements of the walls of Milan; similar material in A. Ceruti, Chronicon extravagans et Chronicon maius auctore Galvano Fiamma, Turin, 1869, p.13 (descriptions of walls); pp.17-8; pp.33-41 (gates and the idols on them); pp.285-7 (the distances between the gates). Cf. Galvano Fiamma. Manipulus florum. Cronaca milanese del Trecento: capitoli CLXXIII-CCXXI Federico Barbarossa e Milano, ed. R. Frigerio, Milan, 1993, pp.96-8. 9 Cloace in the Chronicon Extravagans, Ceruti, cit. note 8, p.31. Social divisions in the Chronicon Maius, pp.304-7.

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Richard Schofield: Milan and Troy in 1510 gates (cumana, nuova, orientale, romana, ticinese, vercellina) and six pusterle, twelve gates in all as at Jerusalem.15

Leonardo’s interests in urban planning produced various results; he illustrates roughly rectangular cities in MS B as well as nearly circular or polygonal lay-outs like that for Cesare Borgia in Cod. Atl. 48r-a. He produced a view of Milan on Cod. Atl. 199 v (formerly 73v-a), c.1510 which is roughly circular and includes the inner ring and eight gates, which he names (S. Ambrogio, Cumana, Giovia, Ludovica, Nova, Rensa (= Orientale), Ticinese, Vercellina) and the distances between them. In this case there seems no reason to think that this is a project rather than a depiction of what exists.21 But for our purposes the notes and drawing on Cod. Atl. 184v (formerly 65v-b), dated by Pedretti to c. 1493 are of particular interest.

Other maps of the city survive from the Quattrocento: three of them dated between 1450 and 1470 can be found in editions of Ptolemy’s Geografia, and seem to derive from an archetype of c.1420.16 These differ from Fiamma’s in that they have no indication of the inner circuit of walls, but they do show Milan as circular, which fits with the tradition of showing Rome as circular or nearly so: eg. the famous view by Taddeo di Bartolo in the chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena of 1413-4, and the view of Rome ordered by Branda da Castiglione in the Chapel of S. Giovanni c. 1435 in Castiglione d’Olona and others.17 The early Cinquecento Milanese tradition can be exemplified by an illustration in Tristano Calco’s MS Historiae patriae liber primus (Ambrosiana A 188 inf).18 The plan on f. 5 shows Milan as it was founded. It is absolutely circular, with the Duomo in the centre and, strikingly, nine gates with nine roads radiating to them from the Duomo.

Tutti i popoli obbediscano e so’ mossi da’ lor magnati. E essi magnati si collegano e costringano co’signori per due vie; o per sanguinità o per roba sanguinata; sanguinità, quando i lor figlioli sono, a similitudine di statichi, sicurtà e pegno della loro dubitata fede; roba, quando tu farai a ciascun d’essi murare una casa o due dentra alla tua città, della quale lui ne tragga qualch’entrata. E trarrai di dieci città cinquemila case con trentamila abitazioni, e digregherai tanta congregazione di popolo, che a similitudine di capre l’un adosso all’al stanno, empiendo ogni parte di fetore, si fanno semenza di pestilente morte. E la città si fa di bellezza compagna del suo nome e a te utile di dazi, e fama etterna del suo accrescimento. La città di Lodi farà la spesa e trarrà il premio ch’una volta l’anno dà al Duca. Quel forestiero che arà la casa in Milano, spesse volte accaderà che, per istare in più magno loco, esso si farà abitatore della sua casa. E chi mura ha pur qualche ricchezza, e con questo modo la poveraglia sarà disunita da simili abitatori; e se essi…e dazi cresceranno e la fama della magnitudine. E se pure lui in Milano abitare non vorrà, esso sarà fedele per non perdere il frutto della sua casa insieme col capitale.22

But there is another tradition which seems relevant - that of architectural writers who brought other elements into play in a series of schemes for ideal cities. The treatment of ideal cities in Filarete, Alberti, Leonardo, Fra Giocondo and Cesariano, some of them stemming from Vitruvius, has been examined in great detail many times19; some of these schemes are useful in this context because they include elements that coincided with the Milanese mediaeval tradition and, as we shall see, with Gritti’s description of Troy. Vitruvius (1, 5, 2ff) says that towns should not be square nor have projecting angles so that the enemy can be seen from several sides; towers should be round or polygonal (1, 5, 5); and in Book 1, caps. 6, 7, 8 and 13 he imagines his ideal town as an octagon with circular towers at the corners, the form taken over by Fra Giocondo, Philander and Barbaro. Alberti does not have a preferred form, but says the circular city was the most capacious, like Jerusalem, according to Tacitus (4, 3); in a lengthy passage in 5, 1 about how to avoid civic turmoil, he tells us that in some cities there were circles of walls with the poor inside and the nobles outside; and in 7, 1 other divisions were advocated with separate zones and streets for foreigners and citizens of differing rank.20

Three points arise; [1] the drawing, which illustrates a section of the city in the form of truncated and curved cone, suggests that the whole city was conceived as circular and was to include both concentric and radial divisions. This was certainly a project of some kind for part of Milan; real topographical indications are given: he notes the Porta Romana and the Porta Tosa or Vittoria, and the word ‘giessa’ which may refer to S. Pietro in Gessate or may mean simply ‘chiesa’.

15 A. Rovetta, ‘Un codice poco noto di Galvano Fiamma e l’immagine urbano trecentesco milanese’, Arte Lombarda, 1993, 2/4, pp.72-78: see particularly p.78, note 8 for the oscillating number of doors and pusterle in the mediaeval tradition. 16 Gambi & Gozzoli, cit. note 3. 17 C. W. Westfall, In this most perfect paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the invention of conscious urban planning in Rome, 1447-55, Pennsylvania State University, 1974, p.85ff. Jacks, cit. note 4, p.44ff & p.118ff (Alessandro Strozzi’s plan of Rome of 1474). 18 Calco; A. Petrucci in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 16, Rome, 1973, pp.537-41 and A. Belloni, ‘Tristano Calco e gli scritti inediti di Giorgio Merula’, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 15, 1972, pp.283-328. 19 P. Marconi & P. F. Fiore in La Città come forma simbolica. Saggi sulla teoria dell’architettura nel Rinascimento, Rome, 1973. 20 Leon Battista Alberti. On the Art of Building in Ten Books, tr. N. Leach, J. Rykwert & R. Tavernor, Cambridge Mass., pp.102, pp.117-9 & pp.1912.

21

J. P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, London, 1970, II, no. 1016; cf. Windsor 12641, c.1505 (at left), 19115 and 12681 (decagonal Florence); C. Pedretti, ‘Il “Neron da Sancto Andrea”‘, Raccolta Vinciana, 18, 1960, pp.65-96; and id., ‘Leonardo’s plans for the enlargement of Milan’, Raccolta Vinciana, 19, 1962, pp.137-147; Boucheron, cit. note 3, p.538f. 22 Il Codice Atlantico della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, ed. A. Marinoni, III, Florence, 1975, pp.31-2.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies [2] Inherent in the plan is the paranoid but realistic notion, shared by Alberti, that the Lord has to keep the rich and powerful under control. This can be done in two ways: (i) by marriage between the family of the lord and the powerful; (ii) by letting magnates build one or two houses in the city and deriving the profit from that property: thus the lord has two types of hostage.

which the present author does not pretend to possess - is probably a prerequisite, so what follows must be taken as provisional and tentative. However, a few secure points soon emerge, of which the most important is this; Gritti’s narrative is highly dependent on the immensely popular Historia Destructionis Troiae almost certainly written by Guido Delle Colonne between 1272-87, itself based, but with many additions and subtractions, on Le Roman de Troie by Benoit de Sainte-Maure. The description of the rebuilding of Troy comes in Liber V of Guido’s narrative.26 Here I give Francesco Gritti’s text, and have underlined the passages which he copied, paraphrased or transposed from one section to another when he adapted Guido’s text.

[3] Although the thought is obscurely expressed, their can be no doubt that the poor, who are herded together like goats and sow the seeds of plague, will be separated from the rich and in some way dispersed. Taking the drawing and the written comments together makes it likely that Leonardo had in mind separate zones for nobles or the rich generically like those which Ludovico il Moro had started to build in Milan in the area near S. Maria delle Grazie, and the Piazza in front of the Castello Sforzesco, as well as in Vigevano.23

[49r] Videns itaque rex Priamus tantum populum congregatum, iussit denuo urbem rehedificari et convocati fuerunt innumerabiles fabri et multi in huiusmodi arte marmoreis lapidariisque cellaturis peritissimi ac ingeniosi architecti et lapicidae27; confluunt multae naves ex diversis provinciis onuste lapidibus marmoreis; alii e montibus altissimis diversa saxa et magnos lapides per altissimas rupes concavant, eos ad Troiam reducunt. Et ita civitas ipsa principium suum sumpsit anno post creationem mundi 3,972 et ante Christi adventum 1,227; omnes itaque operi se accingunt, alii situm ipsius urbis secundum Priami preceptum designant eumque arari iubent et metam illi imponunt; nonnulli magnas foveas magnosve aggeres conficiunt. Arcem Priamus designat in eminentiori loco ipsius situs, illam postmodum metiuntur architecti et sic continuo et festinanti processu struebatur ipsa urbs mirabili arte et ingenio. Portas decem in ea errigi fecit marmoreas, quae his nominibus

The salient points outlined above are these; a long-lasting local tradition affirmed what the fabric of the city itself roughly suggested, that Milan was circular, had two rings of walls and a varying number of gates and pusterle: architectural writers, of course, created ideal circular cities, and two of them, Alberti and Leonardo, suggested ways in which the Lord could keep his eye on potentially treacherous nobles and separate the poor from the rich to avoid the spread of disease and no doubt for other reasons. We can now add another Milanese text to this series. II: FRANCESCO GRITTI’S TROY Sergio Gatti discovered the MS of the Opus troiani belli of 1510 written by Francesco Gritti, a notary and cousin of Cesare Cesariano. Embedded in this Latin prose account of the Trojan War is a fascinating description of the rebuilding of Troy by Priam (Lib II, cap. viii).24 Not surprisingly, Cesariano knew of this work and, commenting on the phrase ‘non mancho le guerre troiane’ on c. 117r of his edition of Vitruvius, says ‘de le quale difusamente il poeta Homero et anche Virgilio et altri poeti et hystorici hano scripto, così etiam il consanguineo mio Francesco Gritti nostro patricio al meglio ha potuto si à narrato in idioma latino con magno commentario assumpto da molti autori gravissimi epse hystorie et pugne troiane.’25

26 Le Roman de Troie par Benoit de Saint-Maure, ed. Leopold Constans, 1, Paris, 1904, lines 2963-3041 for the restoration of Troy; 3041ff; Priam’s palace; 3099f for the great chamber; 3139ff for the names of the gates (Antenoridas, Dardanides, Ylia, Ceca, Tymbrea, Trojana) and the walls, taken over with more additions than subtractions by Guido. Guido was very popular, and many editions in Latin and in translation were published in the late Quattrocento; see Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, 6, Leipzig 1934, coll. 793-807 and G. Carlesso, ‘La fortuna della “Historia destructionis Trioae” di Guido Delle Colonne e un volgarizzamento finora ignoto’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 157, 1980, pp.230-51 with bibliographical notes on the translations. Biography and the problem of Guido’s authorship of the Historia by M. Beretta Spampinato in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 28, Rome, 1990, pp.32-36. Text: Guido de Columnis: Historia destructionis Troiae, ed., N. E. Griffin, Cambridge, Mass., 1936, p.46ff. English translation in M. E. Meek, Historia Destructionis Troiae: Guido delle Colonne, Indiana University Press, 1974 for an account of Guido’s relationship to Benoit; still fundamental for Colonna and Benoit is E. Gorra, I testi inediti di storia troiana, Turin, 1887, p.108ff. MS illustrations of Benoit and Delle Colonne discussed by H. Buchtal, Historia Troiana. Studies in the History of Mediaeval Secular Illustration (Studies of the Warburg Institute, 32), London-Leiden, 1971. Francesco probably used the most recent edition of Delle Colonne’s Historia published at Strasburg in 1489, although it is difficult to be sure. 27 Guido, ed. cit. note 26, p.46; ‘Hinc est quod quesitis undique fabris et peritis in hedificandis artibus et marmoreis celaturis, lapidariis et doctissimis architectis omnis generis, marmora nativis diversismode insignita coloribus mirabiliter coegit instruere’.

There has been no study of Gritti’s MS, and a knowledge of the immense romance tradition about the Trojan War 23 Most recently R. Auletta Marcucci in Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, 1998, p.24ff; Boucheron, cit. note 3, p.591ff. 24 S. Gatti, ‘Nuovi documenti sull’ambiente familiare e la prima educazione di Cesare Cesariano’, Arte lombarda, 86/7, 1988, 3/4, p.187194; Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS D 164 inf., fols 49r-57r for the description of Troy; dated 1510 on fol. 1r. 25 C. Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de architectura libri dece…, Como, 1521. The remark about a ‘magno commentario’ presumably refers to a series of additional sections of narrative derived by Gritti from authors other than his main source. Without a full examination of the whole text it is difficult to say whether this is true; certainly Gritti enriched his account of Troy with elements taken from Virgil, and probably Ovid; but whether we can go further and say that Cesariano had read Gritti’s MS is another matter (see below).

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Richard Schofield: Milan and Troy in 1510 marmorarii, classicarii34, plumbari, figuli, lapidicide (sic), pistores, aromatori, fabri lignarii, fabri ferrarii, bibliote35, caligarii, capiciari36, argentari et minores nummulari, lecticarii, tabernarii, aucupes, cupedenarii, lanii, caetarii, sartores, piscatores, sutores, barbitonsores, funarii, manicarii et denique omnes qui mechanicas artes exercebant in locis suis commodis primavere statuit; demum ludi magistri in triviis stationes suas elligerunt, geometre, musici, rhoeterici, astronomi, aritmetici, dialetici, rabule et ceteri omnes digniores superioribus37. Erat deinde Xanthus fluvius38 qui per medium ipsius civitatis perfluebat et perhenni cursu habitantibus multa confovebat commoda, ex monte Ida scaturiens; et constructa fuerunt in littore ipsius fluminis quattuorcentum molandina pro victu necessaria et multi rivuli ex principali alveo exibant, in ingressu ipsius urbis, qui ipsam purgabant ab omni immonditia, decurrentes per multos latentes conductos circumquaque per ipsam civitatem39. Regalis vero alveus eggrediebatur urbem [sic] inter portam Sigeam et portam Sceam, qui postea perfluens per illam regionem non procul coniungebatur Simo[ent]i

vocatae fuerunt: prima nanque mare respiciens dicebatur Sigea28, secunda Scaea29, tertia Apollinis, quarta Palladis, quinta Orientalis, sexta Idea30, septima Dardanida, octava Tymbria31, nona Arcis, decima Maritima, et quaelibet ipsarum fuerat bellicosis firmata turribus marmoreis in quibus diverse imagines deorum celatae et sculptae erant. Fuit enim huius ambitus passuum [49v] triginta millium et erat tota rotunda facta per iustam mensuram cuius diameter erat passuum (blank: about 1,000). Necumquam legitur urbem tante magnitudinis pulchritudinis et similis speciei conditam fuisse32 [....], fuit nanque duplici muro circundata, pars cuius interior lateritio, exterior quadrato lapide marmoreo structa erat; et primus murus a terra usque ad superficiem hedificatus erat cubitorum altitudine sexaginta, secundus autem supereminebat precedenti decem cubitorum. Ita ut hostiles insultus non timeret et crassitudine brachiorum sex ut contra arietum incussiones prevaleret; quingentae autem circum ipsos muros structae extabant turres fortissimae, altitudine cubitorum centum inter ipsas portas paribus spaciis admodum ellevatae; eratque murorum superficies incrustata lapidibus, ornatae aedes in ea erant magnifice et formosis hedefitiis fabricate que civitatem ipsam adornabant asseriturque nullum hospitium nullasve aedes in ea fuisse structas cuius sumitas non esset altitudinis cubitorum quinquaginta et per maiorem partem maiores cubitorum sexaginta33; que supra muros ab agris cerni possent vici omnes ampli et expaciati; fuerunt ergo mathematicarum [sic] artium stationes ellecte in quibus operarii per certa loca distinctim quottidianis operibus et venerabilibus [50r] artificiis infundebant: hic nam aurifices artem suam exercere iubebat rex Priamus, hic pictores sedem suam elligebant, hic carpentarii, specularii, armorum dealbatores,

34

Sic: Delle Colonne provides ‘classicularii’ which is glossed in Du Cange as σαλπιστηs, trumpeter; perhaps ‘classiarii’ was meant, though its seems strange to sandwich either trumpeters or marines between marble and lead workers. 35 I am not sure what this word means, or what lurks beneath; ‘bibliotecarii’ seems pretty unlikely. 36 = capitiarius ?; Du Cange (s.v. capitium) gives; ‘capitiarius, capicerius, dignitas et officium in ecclesiis et monasteriis’, and so too Niermeyer and the Mittellateinisches Wőrterbuch; though why it occurs between ‘caligarii’ and ‘argentari’ I cannot imagine. 37 Guido, ed. cit. note 26, p.48; ‘Per plateas enim ipsas mechanicarum artium locate fuerunt proprie stationes, in quibus earum operarii, per certa loca distincti, cotidianis operibus et venalibus artificiis insudabant. Hic enim architecti manebant, hic pictores, hic statuarii, hic marmorarii, hic lecticarii manebant; hic canicularii, hic quadrigarii, hic lignarii, hic mularii, hic deauratores albini qui statuas et ymagines in auro pingebant, hic argentarii, hic dyatretarii qui calices conficiebant ex vitro, hic errarii, hic fusores qui campanas ex metallo fundebant, hic signarii, qui sigilla formabant, hic fabricarii qui camiscias suebant et bracas, hic fusarii qui ferreo inferro fusos extenuant muliebres, hic perticarii, hic libratores, hic figuli, hic aurifices, hic plumbarii, hic specularii, hic pelliparii, hic fulones, hic carpentarii, hic tignarii qui vehicula scilicet rotis volubilibus sociabant, hic dealbatores armorum, hic balthearii seu pantalarge qui opus deaurati eris in frenis apponunt, hic classicularii, hic fabricenses, hic gineciarii, qui textores appellantur, hic geometre qui iugera rusticarum terrarum numero dividebant, hic baphi, qui pannos lineos et laneos in multo colore tingebant, hic pistores, hic tabernarii, hic cerarii, hic arilatores, quos mercatores vulgariter appellamus, hic argiroprate, id est distractores argenti, hic et alii plures qui venales artes mechanicas artes exercebant.’ 38 A river in the Troad; Virgil, Aen., 1, 473. 39 Guido, ed. cit. note 26, p.48; ‘Per medium autem civitatis ipsius quidam fluvius, Xantus nomine, decurrebat, qui, dividendo civitatem in geminas partes equales, perhenni cursu habitantibus in civitate ipsa multa comoda conferrebat. Nam constructis iuxta ripam ipsius innumerabilibus molendinis, molendina ipsa ad vitam habitantium frumenta concussa in farine pulverem usibus convertebant. Hic etiam fluvius per meatus artificiose compositos et subterraneas catharactas per latentes ductus aquarum neccessaria fecunditate decurrens civitatem ipsam ordinatis incursionibus mundabat, per quarum lavacrum congeste immunditie purgabantur’.

28 Epithet of a promontory in the Troad; Virgil, Aen., 2, 312; Ovid., Met., 12, 71. 29 The western gate of Troy in Virgil, Aen., 2, 612; 3, 351. 30 From Ida, the mountain near Troy; Virgil, Aen., 2, 801; 10, 158 etc. 31 Epithet of Apollo, who had a temple in the town of Thimbra in the Troad; Virgil, Aen., 3, 85. 32 Guido, ed. cit. note 26, p.46; ‘Nec ante fundationem eius aut postea nunquam legitur condita civitas tante magnitudinis, tante pulcritudinis, aut similis speciei’. 33 A collage of phrases and sentences from Guido, ed. cit. note 26, p.47; i. Of the walls; ‘…quorum superficies erat marmoreis incrustata lapidibus in variorum diversitate colorum ut intuentium aspectibus blandirentur’; ii. ‘…Quelibet portarum ipsarum bellicosis fuerat firmata turribus per latera et in celaturis marmorearum imaginum circumquaque decorata’; iii. ‘Infra vero civitatem eandem instructa fuerunt infinita palatia et in ea infinite domus civium formosis hedeficiis fabricate, …’ iv. ‘Pro certo enim asserunt nullam domum, nullum hospicium in civitate Troye fuisse constructum cuius illud quod minoris depressionius extiterat supra terram saltem erectum in lx cubitorum altitudine non fuisset, totum etiam marmoreis firmatum lapididibus in mirificis ymaginum ferarum et hominum celaturis’.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies fluvio40, qui irrigans agros vicinos versus meridionalem plagam lacum conficiebat optimis abundantem piscibus, et ambo simul intrantes mare portum conficiebant navium multarum capacem, ad cuius dexteram partem erant multi portici varis [50v] columnis et marmoreis lapidibus fulti tendentes a civitate usque ad litora maris. Situs vero diversis aliis fluminibus fontibusque irriguos agros habebat fertiles et glebem maximam ubertatem. Fuerunt quoque stationes in ea [scil. ‘urbe’ or ‘civitate’] optimatum et nobilium virorum segregate a populo et in medio ipsius civitatis fuit errectum quoddam templum ad honorem Iovis mirabili arte et ingenio fabricatum aureis columnis circum circa decoratum; item aliud templum nobilissimum dicatum Apollini apud quod structa fuit quaedam turris altissima ad honorem deae Palladis, que erat altitudinis brachiorum quattuor centum intuitu quidem mirabilis marmoreisque incrustata lapidibus, ubi multe statuae deorum dearumque collocate erant. Item aliud templum Neptuni apud portam Tymbream quod sustentabatur sedecim fortissimis columnis in quo erat constructe quattuor portae aureate, una orientem respiciens, alia meridiem, alia occidentem et quarta septentrionalem plagam, que singule decem gradus marmoreos habebant pro ascensu et descensu et in medio ipsius templi erat pinnaculum valde ellevatum in cuius acumine fixa erat statua Neptuni tota aurea. Multa quoque alia templa erecta fuerunt et multa palatia ac magnificae aedes tam pro civibus quam pro externis regibus et principibus. Arx autem que fuerat regis Laomedontis funditus fuit deiecta et iterum in superiori eminentiori loco rehedificata; hic inerat speculum totius civitatis. Hanc pro sua statione nobilis Priamus ellegit, erat nam adornata quattuor fortissimis turribus [57r] et in medio erat alia eminentior omnesque specule huius arcis erant fulte quadratis quibusdam crystalinis fulgentibus, ita quod admodum intuentium aspectus permulcebat [....]”.

Thus far, Francesco’s account appears to be merely a somewhat simple-minded adaptation of a popular romance narrative; yet there are a number of divergences from Guido’s text that are striking and may prove interesting to the historian of Renaissance town-planning. These divergences cannot be found in the execrable accounts of the war of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan, which were well-known to Benoit de Sainte-Maure and Guido Delle Colonne, nor, it would seem, in other romance accounts of the adventures of Aeneas and other Trojan heroes.42 We may note the following. Delle Colonne quite clearly implies that Troy was square, since he says that it was a three-day journey long and equally wide; ‘fuit autem huius secunde Troye ambitus longitudinis trium dierum et latitudinis coequalis.’43 He also says that it had a circuit of walls 200 cubits high with six gates (Dardanides, Timbrea, Heleas, Seca, Troiana, Antonorides) and a number of towers; but he makes no mention of an inner circuit.44 Conversely, Gritti states unequivocally (i) that Troy was circular with a circumference of 30,000 passus; and (ii) that it was equipped with a double circuit of walls, the inner sixty cubits high and the outer seventy (or viceversa); and it had ten gates which he identifies, retaining only the names Dardanis and Timbrea from Guido. It may be that the reason for these changes was that he was thinking of Milan, where he and his readers lived, since the whole weight of the tradition of mediaeval writing and map-making up to Leonardo and Tristano Calco’s illuminator insisted on two main characteristics: its circularity and the fact that it had a double circuit of walls.45 Colonna’s account gives a long list of those who worked in the city with separate areas allocated to them, and indeed this was evidently a topos in the romances46: but he gives magnetic – so as to disarm attackers, presumably by making them and their weapons stick to the walls. 42 Daretis Phrygii de Excidio Troiae Historia, ed. F. Meister, Leipzig, 1873; Dictys Cretensis Ephemeridos Belli Troiani Libri, W. Eisenhut, Leipzig, 1958. 43 Guido, ed. cit. note 26, p.46. 44 Guido, ed. cit note 26, p.46. 45 Unfortunately for our argument, however, one must note that (i) while Guido said that Troy had six gates, just like Milan, Gritti says it had ten; he took over two from Delle Colonne (Dardanida, Tymbrea); he added three from Virgil (Sigea, Scaea, Idaea); and of the five others, one was required by his mention of the port (maritima), three are made up (apollonis, palladis, orientalis, arcis), with only one (orientalis) corresponding to a Milanese gate; and (ii) the dimensions he gives for the walls are very different from those used by Galvano Fiamma when describing Milan; see note 8. 46 For example, Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, ed. 2, ed., W. Roach, Paris, 1959, pp.169-70, lines 5758-5776: ‘Et esgarde la vile toute / Pueplee de molt bele gent, / Et les changes d’or et d’argent / Trestoz covers et de monoies, / Et voit les places et les voies / Toutes plaines de bons ovriers / Qui faisoient divers mestiers. / Si com li mestier sont divers, / il fait elmes et cil haubers, / Et cil seles et cil blasons, / Cil lorains et cil esperons, / Et cil les espees forbissent, / Cist folent dras et cil les tissent, / Cil les pingnent et cil lese tondent. / Li un argent et or refondent, / Cist font oevres riches et beles: / Colpes, hanas et escűeles / Et joiaus ovrés a esmaus, Aniax, çaintures et fremaus.

Francesco follows Guido Delle Colonne in the following respects: the summoning of the experts to plan and build the city, the great number of towers, the lofty buildings 60 cubits high with their rich revetments, the various parts of the city set aside for the tradesmen enabling our authors to embark on a long list of such craftsmen, the presence of the river Xanthus flowing through the middle of the city with its tributaries cleaning it out by means of underground channels.41 40

A river in the Troad; Virgil, Aen., 1, 100; 1, 618; 6, 88. Some of these elements were topoi in the romance tradition; see G. D. West, ‘The Description of Towns in Old French Verse Romances’, French Studies, 11, 1957, pp.50-9. Benoit’s description of Troy may owe something to the description of Carthage in the Eneas, which included the wonderful detail that the walls were not only multi-coloured, but 41

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Richard Schofield: Milan and Troy in 1510 no indication that poor should be separated from the rich and powerful with regards to where they live in the town.

mentioned in the romance literature about the Trojans, it seems that Francesco knew nothing of it; and indeed there seems to be no particular reason to think that he ever looked at non-Latin verse sagas about Troy.49 But ports do form an important element in the Renaissance tradition of writing about architecture and the genre descends from Vitruvius’s description of that at Halicarnassos.

Gritti, following Guido, also allocates the various workers and professionals to different areas; ‘omnes qui mechanicas artes exercebant in locis suis commodis..statuit’, with various other ‘magistri’ in better areas, a type of division already implied by Fiamma’s description of milanese class-divisions. But, like Alberti and Leonardo, Gritti also provides for the separation of the optimates and nobiles viri from the populus, and this idea, as well as the mediaeval tradition about Milan and Ludovico Sforza’s activities in Milan in the 1490’s may lie behind his inclusion of the double-ring of lofty walls, which he presumably envisaged as concentric.47

Vitruvius says (2, 8, 11) that Mausolus built his palace near a natural harbour, which was curved like a theatre, and that a forum was placed at the lowest level along the harbour-front. At the middle of this natural amphitheatre was a wide street and the mausoleum. At the top of the citadel was a temple of Mars, with a colossal acrolithic statue of the deity; to the right was the temple of Venus and Mercury, and on the left, Mausolus’s palace (2, 8, 13). Even though there is nothing particularly vitruvian about Gritti’s vocabulary when he mentions his port, they seem to share two generically similar elements – a forum, presumably arcaded, and a series of temples.

Conversely, we cannot be absolutely sure that Gritti derived the notion in some way from Leonardo, or from Ludovico’s practice, because the social divisions of cities are very likely to have been a literary topos; and in Renaissance architectural practice the idea of providing separate zones for noble supporters of the local potentate was widespread (eg. at Ferrara and Vigevano).48

But can we establish more than a generic connection between Gritti’s port and the architectural writers of the Quattrocento? In general, there seems to be no way of associating Gritti’s adjustments to the romance tradition with Filarete’s descriptions of ideal cities, which he usually draws as circles with two inscribed squares giving an eight pointed star, or his descriptions of ports50; and the only element that Filarete’s ports have in common with Gritti’s is that they both include porticoes - a fixture in renaissance reconstructions – though in a different position relative to the sea; Filarete’s form a curve following the sea-front, whereas Gritti’s many porticoes were at the right of the port and led from the sea-front back to the city. Nor does Gritti’s account seem to owe anything to Francesco di Giorgio (and it would be surprising if it did); his drawings in the Cod. Magliabecchiano II. I. 141 include a curved portico along the sea-front on fol. 86r, great symmetrical arcades leading off at right angles to the sea front on 86v and he illustrates an inner harbour and centrally placed porticoes on fol. 8751; unfortunately Francesco di Giorgio’s description of ports in the Senese S. IV. 4 excludes the most important element in Gritti’s description, the temple.52

A further important variation in Gritti’s text from Delle Colonne’s lies in the fact that the main canal, the Xanthos, (mentioned by Guido), joins with the Simois (not mentioned by Guido) to form a port where they reach the sea. To the right of Gritti’s port were many columniated, marble arcades leading from the city to the shore. At the port of Tymbrea there was also a temple dedicated to Neptune and supported by sixteen powerful columns; it had four golden doors facing north, east, south and west, each with ten marble steps; in the middle of the temple was a lofty pinnacle with a statue of Neptune made of gold. From this description it is clear that the temple of Neptune was columniated square with a door on each of the four facades; it is unclear, however, whether Gritti envisages a temple of 4 x 4 columns per side, which would in fact have required 12 rather than 16 columns; or a temple of 16 x 16 columns, which would have required 60 columns. Nor is it entirely clear whether Gritti is alluding to two ports or one because after mentioning the confluence of the Xanthos and Simois at the sea and the arcades, he sets off on another subject, then returns to a description of the temple of Neptune at the port of Tymbrea.

Since Cesariano actually mentions his cousin’s account of Troy, we may now ask whether we can find any trace of it in his edition of Vitruvius of 1521. Bramante is likely to

Obviously Gritti was not thinking of Milan in this case; and it is striking that neither Benoit nor Guido refer to a port at Troy; and with respect to Carthage, the other port

49 For example, the description of Carthage in the great French romance about Aeneas, written 1155-60, appears to have nothing in common with Francesco’s city (Le Roman d’Eneas. Il Romanzo d’Enea, ed., A. Petit & A. M. Babbi, Paris-Rome, 1999, lines 294-405). 50 Drawings of cities; Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete. Trattato di architettura, a cura di L. Grassi & A. M. Finoli, Milano, 1972, II, pl.6, 7 & 23. Descriptions of ports; I, p.343 & p.397ff; drawings of ports on II, pl.80 & 118. 51 Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Trattati, a cura di C. Maltese & L. M. Degrassi, Milan, 1967, 2, tav. 309, 310 & 311. 52 Maltese, cit. note 51, 2, p.485ff. A. Bruschi, ‘Bramante, Leonardo e Francesco di Giorgio a Civitavecchia’ in Studi bramanteschi, Roma, 1974, pp.535-566 for those three architects’ designs for ports.

47 The statement that ‘Multa quoque alia templa erecta fuerunt et multa palatia ac magnificae aedes tam pro civibus quam pro externis regibus et principibus’ is ambiguous, since it is not clear that the temples and palaces were constructed for the use (i) of both citizens and foreign dignitaries or (ii) that separate temples and palaces were built for the citizens and the foreign dignitaries. 48 Another variation by Gritti on Guido’s account lies in the fact that he describes a number of temples that Priam built in Troy; a Temple of Jove with surrounding gold columns; a temple of Apollo in which, bizarrely, there was a great tower 400 braccia high dedicated to Athena; and the Temple of Neptune at the port.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies have known about Francesco di Giorgio’s thinking about ports in the 1480’s53; Cesariano called Bramante his preceptore and certainly knew him before he, Cesariano, left Milan in the 1490’s54; Cesariano returned to Milan in the ‘teens of the Cinquecento, and would have had time to peruse Gritti’s MS while he was putting together his translation and commentary on Vitruvius. But we have no way of knowing whether Francesco Gritti, a notary, could have known anything of Bramante and the other architects’ thinking about ports before the conclusion of his MS in 1510.

aqua sunt machine concatenantes portum (fore-ground left). Reliqua sunt hospitia et menia urbis Alicarnassi a natura munita et montibus et mari’. Here again, as we examine each of these elements, there is no trace of the influence of Gritti’s Troy on Cesariano; Cesariano sticks to his task of illustrating Vitruvius’s text in great detail without extraneous elements; he does not add a Temple of Neptune or the many arcades leading from the city to the port which Gritti includes; and Cesariano’s temple plan bears no relation to that of Gritti’s Temple of Neptune. The impression is thus that Cesariano decided to ignore Francesco Gritti’s account of Troy.

Cesariano’s plan on fol. 26v implies a circular city or perhaps a vast polygon with 32 facets; the internal structure is radial, like that of Tristano Calco, and shows no sign of double-walls. In his commentary on 26r Cesariano provides for ‘li canali seu aquiducti che intro scorreno purgano epsa civitate vel oppidi tanto coperti quanto scoperti signato C sopra li quali sono li cursi seu arcuati volute si como in la nostra civitate mediolanense si pon vedere’ which, unfortunately are not marked on his woodcut; and Gritti talks of ‘multi rivuli…qui ipsam purgabant ab omni immonditia, decurrentes per multos latentes conductos circumquaque per ipsam civitatem’. Can we connect these hidden canals with either Leonardo’s drawings for canals in MS B or with Cesariano? Unfortunately we are in difficulty here too; we cannot argue that Gritti’s hidden canals were derived from Filarete or Leonardo’s schemes in MS B, for example, and that they then influenced those of Cesariano, because in fact they are not only present in Guido Delle Colonne’s Troy, but were already part of the Milanese historiographical tradition; Galvano Fiamma noted that ‘statuit etiam [Azo Visconti] quod per civitatem fierent cloace subterranee ubi colarentur domorum stillicidia et non fieret lutum per stratas civitatis.’55 Furthermore, Cesariano does not illustrate or speak of a single great river going through the city like Gritti’s Xanthus nor is there any trace of the social division of nobles from populace present in Leonardo, Alberti and Gritti.

III. CONCLUSION The significance of the description of Troy by Francesco Gritti for historians of Renaissance urbanism is that it seems to make Troy like Milan in two respects: both were circular and had two rings of walls; and Gritti’s Troy also incorporates what was presumably a Renaissance topos about social divisions recorded by Alberti and Leonardo which may reflect Ludovico Sforza’s urban activities in the 1490’s as well as a port with porticoes, a form in which Quattrocento architects were particularly interested, although in detail Gritti’s arcades have little in common with Filarete or Francesco di Giorgio’s. It may be, of course, that further investigation of the relationship of Gritti’s account to the romance tradition may reveal that some of the divergences from Guido Delle Colonne’s account were derived from different romance sources; but this seems very doubtful since the impression is that his most important source by far was Guido who, like him, wrote Latin prose, not Italian or French verse – to which he was able to add material from Virgil; and even if some of the divergences were part of the romance tradition, it would remain remarkable that three of them coincided with the flourishing traditions about Milan (circularity of the city, double walls, separation of the rich from the poor), and a fourth (the interest in ports) probably came, in some way, from architectural writings in the Quattrocento. However, all doubts and hesitations aside, a surprising, but definite result of our investigation is that Gritti’s Troy cannot be securely tied in any way to Cesariano’s treatment of either cities or ports.

Cesariano’s celebrated illustration of the port at Halicarnassos on 41v and the commentary on 42r tells us of the following structures (fig.2); ‘A. domus regio (at left); B. emporium seu platea ampla latitudine ubi forum constituitur (lower centre); C. Martis fanum, in medio cuius est Mausoleum idest monumentum Mausolei (centre); D. est ignographia eius fani et Mausolei fundamenti (top right); E statua colossi quae ακρολιθον dicunt (top centre); F. Salmacidis fons (middle right); G. Veneris fanum (middle-ground right); H. Martis fanum (middle right); KL. portus gradualis (foreground); MN. litus et emporium (foreground); O. portus secretus latens sub monitibus (not marked); P. domus custodie portus in 53

Bruschi, cit. note 52. R. V. Schofield, Gaspare Visconti, mecenate di Bramante, in Arte, committenza ed economia a Roma e nelle corti del Rinascimento 14201530, a cura di A. Esch e C. L. Frommel, Turin, 1995, pp.297-330. 55 Galvano Fiamma, Opusculum de rebus gestis…, cit. note 8, p.20: and the line quoted from the Chronicon extravagans in the text above. 54

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Fig.1. Map of Milan from Fiamma’s Chronicon extravagans

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Fig.2. Cesariano’s port at Halicarnassos

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Archaeologies of art: contributions to World Art Studies Robin Skeates Upper Palaeolithic, remains as strong today as it did over 20 years ago, when World Art Studies was in its infancy.1

Contemporary archaeological approaches to art are extremely varied, reflecting the diversity of archaeology as a discipline today. Different archaeologists include a wide selection of material culture under the heading of art, ranging from rock engravings to engraved bones, cave paintings to painted pottery, and wall plaster to plastered skulls. They also examine such material within a variety of time-scales and geographical regions, and through a diversity of methodological practices and theoretical perspectives, each with its own specialised terminologies. The parameters of this paper are, then, potentially enormous. That said, some major approaches and themes can be identified, particularly within the Anglo-American literature relating to prehistoric archaeology, with which I am most familiar. One of the aims of this paper is, then, to introduce and evaluate these major areas of contemporary research, as clearly and concisely as possible. Another aim is to highlight some of the current questions being raised by archaeologists in relation to the study of art. A further aim is to point out the potential contribution of aspects of current archaeological thinking about art to a reinvigorated study of World Art.

A much-publicised recent contribution to this area of inquiry is Steven Mithen’s book, The Prehistory of the Mind: a Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science.2 Mithen defines the earliest ‘art’ as either representational, as in the case of the ivory statuette of a man with a lion’s head from Hohlenstein Stadel in southern Germany, or providing evidence for being part of a symbolic code, as with the V-shaped signs engraved on limestone blocks in the caves of the Dordogne in southwest France.3 He situates the appearance of this first art at the transition between the Middle and Upper phases of the Palaeolithic in Europe, dated to between around 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, and coinciding with the harsh environmental conditions of the height of the last Ice Age.4 Mithen then explains the origins of this art with reference to the evolution of the Early Human mind. He argues that the cultural explosion of the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition was brought about by a series of evolutionary developments: (1) the selectively advantageous switch from a social language to a more complex general-purpose language, that included snippets of language between females and males about food and hunting; which (2) triggered the acquisition of a new consciousness of the non-social world; which (3) led to the development of full cognitive fluidity between the formerly separate domains of technical, social and natural history intelligence; which (4) brought together the previously separate cognitive processes of the mental conception of an image, intentional communication, and the attribution of meaning; which (5) led to the creation and use of visual symbols and the making of art.5

None of these tasks are aided by the fact that archaeologists rarely define the term ‘art’. Instead, they tacitly acknowledge its difficulties by placing it in inverted commas. ‘Art’, however, does not defy definition; it is just that definitions of it depend upon one’s particular perspective. Therefore, for the purposes of this paper, and as a social archaeologist, I define art as those made objects that are intended to be visually expressive and stimulating. The term ‘visual culture’, which has recently gained widespread (although not total) interdisciplinary acceptance, usefully complements and broadens this definition with the belief that such objects also comprise an integral part of the mental and cultural processes through which people construct themselves. In doing so, ‘visual culture’ highlights not only the manufactured (‘artefactual’) nature of art, but also its embeddedness in dynamic human processes.

Mithen’s model is ambitious and original, in that it places the earliest art in Europe within a grand synthesis of recent interdisciplinary research on Early Human evolution. However, by no means all specialists subscribe to the theory of the modularity of the brain, with the latter characterised by separate ‘domains’. Also, like previous searches for the origins of art, Mithen’s study is fundamentally flawed by its preoccupation with ‘origins’, which imply a predetermined evolutionary sequence leading to the art of the present, and by its regional focus on the art history of Europe. World Art Studies should surely be investigating a global alternative to such ‘origins of art’.

What follows is a discussion of six key approaches and themes: (1) the search for the origins of art, (2) the analysis of production processes, (3) the cognitive-processual approach to the use of symbols, (4) the iconographic analysis of artforms, (5) the interpretative approach to the symbolic and structural meanings of material culture, and (6) the critical approach to visual representation in archaeology. The paper ends with a further exploration of the term ‘visual culture’, and urges archaeologists to develop their interpretations of the long-term transformations of art-forms.

1

e.g. D. Collins & J. Onians, ‘The origins of art’, Art History, 1.1, 1978, pp.1-25; J.E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion: an Enquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion, 1982. 2 S. Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: a Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, 1996. 3 Ibid. p.155. 4 Ibid. pp.151-2, 157. 5 Ibid. pp.162, 178-94.

The search for the origins of art The desire to identify and explain ‘the origins of art’, especially amongst scholars interested in the European 289

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies catenary curves and other geometric forms), or as iconic images that derive from the subject’s mind or culture (in the case of therianthropes, ‘monsters’ and ‘realistic’ animals). They suggest that these images were produced by shamanic artists who harnessed visual hallucinations as part of a religion centred on altered states of consciousness, the seeking of visions in dark caves, and a concept of animal power.

The analysis of production processes Studies of the production of material culture, traditionally marginalised as a specialist field in archaeology, are currently witnessing a resurgence in prehistoric studies in two quite different directions. The reconstruction of chaînes operatoires (or ‘operating chains’) characterises the recent development of sophisticated accounts of the practical and conceptual processes involved in techniques of production, particularly by archaeologists drawing upon a French tradition.6 A chaîne operatoire is conceived of as, ‘an ordered train of actions, gestures, instruments or even agents leading to the transformation of a given material towards the manufacture of a product, through major steps that are more or less predictable’.7 In studies of flint knapping, for example, chaînes operatoires have been reconstructed through the refitting of flakes collected during meticulous excavations, and by experimental knapping. In this way, it has been possible to identify at least eleven basic technical stages involved in the production of Magdalenian flint blades: extending from the procurement of the raw material, through to its assessment, the preparation of a core, the production of blades, and the eventual discard of the worked core.8

This model successfully places the production of art at the interface between the human mind and social practice. However, commentators have recurrently questioned the universality of the authors’ claims, particularly given their reliance on the regional rock-art sequence of the FrancoCantabrian area and just two ethnographic studies of the San and the Shoshonean Coso.11 Here lies another lesson for World Art Studies, which must recognise that universal generalisations provide no panacea for the great complexities facing us in prehistoric art. The cognitive-processual approach to the use of symbols Moving from production to consumption, an approach which attempts to take the interpretation of art one step further is offered by contemporary ‘cognitive-processual archaeology’, which represents an attempt to enlarge the scope of ‘processual archaeology’ by focussing on social and cognitive aspects of past societies.12 An important component of the cognitive-processual approach is the examination of the ways in which symbols were used in the past, particularly to cope with aspects of experience such as design, planning, measurement, social relations, supernatural relations, and representation.13

Such accounts provide useful descriptions of technical processes, but they are limited in that they tend to separate those processes from other social practices and beliefs. Anthropological studies of small-scale societies remind us that, ‘Technological activities prove to be socially constituted in that all aspects of technologies, from craft specialisation to the details of the “chaines opératoires” used in flint knapping, are embedded in a seamless material and social web’.9

This approach has been applied to the art of a wide range of prehistoric societies around the world. Cognitiveprocessual studies of European Upper Palaeolithic art, for example, have emphasised its functional role in the storage, retrieval and transmission of social knowledge and of practical information about the natural world and its exploitation, particularly about how to cope with subsistence crises in an uncertain world.14 Richard Bradley has likewise argued in his book, Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe: Signing the Land,15 that rock art could have been used by later prehistoric societies

The ‘shamanic approach’ of David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson avoids this problem. They have developed a cross-cultural model, based upon neuropsychology and ethnographic analogy, which seeks to explain how and why the art of the Upper Palaeolithic was produced.10 They argue that key elements of Upper Palaeolithic art can be identified, with reference to laboratory and ethnographic research, either as geometric ‘entoptic’ images that derive from the universal human nervous system (in the case of dots, grids, zigzags, nested

11

P.G. Bahn, H.G. Bandi, R.G. Bednarik, J. Clegg, M. Consens, W. Davis, B. Delluc, G. Delluc, P. Faulstich, J. Halverson, R. Layton, C. Martindale, V. Mirimanov, C.G. Turner, J. Vastokas, M. Winkelman & A. Wylie, ‘Comments’, in J.D. Lewis Williams & T.A. Dowson, 1988, pp.217-45. 12 C. Renfrew & P. Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, 1991, p.405. 13 C. Renfrew, ‘Towards a cognitive archaeology’, in C. Renfrew & E.B.W. Zubrow, eds., 1994, p.6. 14 e.g. C. Gamble, ‘The social context for European Palaeolithic art’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 57.1, 1991, pp.3-15; S.J. Mithen, ‘Ecological interpretations of Palaeolithic art’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 57.1, 1991, pp.103-14; 1996, pp.170-4; c.f. M.A. Jochim, ‘Palaeolithic cave art in ecological perspective’, in G. Bailey, ed., Hunter-Gatherer Economy in Prehistory: a European Perspective, 1983, pp.212-9. 15 R. Bradley, Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe: Signing the Land, 1997.

6

e.g. C. Karlin & M. Julien, ‘Prehistoric technology: a cognitive science?’, in C. Renfrew & E.B.W. Zubrow, eds., The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology, 1994, pp.152-64. 7 Ibid. p.164. 8 Ibid. p.155, Fig. 15.1. 9 R.W. Preucel & I. Hodder, ‘Material symbols’, in R.W. Preucel & I. Hodder, eds., Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: a Reader, 1996, p.301; c.f. H. Lechtman, ‘Andean value systems and the development of prehistoric metallurgy’, Technology and Culture, 25.1, 1984, pp.1-36; M.A. Dobres, ‘Gender and prehistoric technology: on the social agency of technical strategies’, World Archaeology, 27.1, 1995, pp.25-49. 10 J.D. Lewis Williams & T.A. Dowson, ‘The signs of all times: entoptic phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic art’, Current Anthropology, 29.2, 1988, pp.201-45; J.D. Lewis Williams, ‘Wrestling with analogy: a methodological dilemma in Upper Palaeolithic art research’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 57.1, 1991, pp.149-62.

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as a ‘language of signs’, which played a role in the organisation of land use by communicating symbolic messages that defined access to productive resources in the landscape. For the Neolithic and Copper Age of Europe, Colin Renfrew has also highlighted the ownership and display of conspicuous and valuable material commodities by people for the expression and development of social status.16 He suggests, for example, that the copper and gold objects found in a series of rich graves in the Varna cemetery in Bulgaria were used as new vehicles for the expression of personal prestige and ranking. In a similar way, Timothy Earle has emphasised the use of iconography to legitimise systems of inequality and control in the complex chiefdoms of Mesoamerica.17 He argues that specific materials, objects, styles and religious symbols served to distinguish ruling élites, to identify them with the supernatural, and to mask their domination as part of a religiously sanctioned world-view.

artforms, is provided by Tim Taylor in his article, ‘Flying flags: icons and power in Thracian art’.21 Drawing upon Erwin Panofsky’s ‘iconographic’ and ‘iconological’ approach,22 Taylor examines 10 vessels and pieces of armour of silver and gold that exhibit similar repoussé scenes of drinking and hunting, which were found in fourth century BC Thracian burials in Romania. These were probably used as ‘prestige goods’ in the social context of élite hunting, feasting, exchanges and mortuary ritual. He notes that the basic structure of the iconography revolves around a dichotomy between men, horses and predatoranimals as opposed to vegetative motifs and prey-animals; and that the materials, functions and iconography of these objects formed a self-referential system, in which hunting scenes appear on drinking vessels and drinking scenes appear on hunting gear. He then argues that craftsmen created this specific art style to suit the purposes of the Getic princes, by depicting their favourite pursuits and reflecting their image.

The cognitive–processual approach represents an improvement on processual archaeology, particularly in the way that it has converted to, and now preaches, its critics’ ‘post-processual’ message that material culture plays an active role in the reproduction of social relations and concepts,18 and this has led to the development of some stimulating new accounts of the social role of prehistoric art. However, it remains essentially a functionalist approach, and as such it tends to over-simplify and underinterpret the potential complexities and dynamics of peoples’ involvement with art and material culture. It also tends to promote a rather fixed conception of society. Thomas Dowson’s criticisms of functionalist approaches to Palaeolithic rock art are pertinent:

From an archaeological perspective, this approach represents a fruitful confluence of interests between art history and archaeology. In particular, it adds some methodological rigour to the study of prehistoric art, at the same time as facilitating the identification of the iconographic subject matter and compositional structure of decorated artefacts. However, it could also be regarded as over-descriptive and still too functionalist – with art simply reflecting the image of an élite. The interpretative approach to the symbolic and structural meanings of material culture In contrast to the previously discussed approaches, contemporary ‘interpretative archaeology’ revels in the complexities of art and material culture in attempting to interpret its symbolic and structural meanings. Its proponents, who began by coalescing under the critical banner of ‘post-processual archaeology’, have been active participants in the development of an inter-disciplinary theory of material culture over the last 20 years, and have also produced a series of challenging new studies of prehistoric art. The sophistication of the interpretative approach demands that I devote a relatively large amount of space to outlining some of its key concepts and to examining examples of its application in practice.

‘one is left with the impression that the often vast painted and engraved panels are nothing more than a kind of manual on how to be a happy Palaeolithic hunter, and in some cases, a dutiful Palaeolithic gatherer.’19 ‘An approach that ignores the physical experience of looking at the images, an experience that played on intense exploration and ambiguity, merely misrepresents the art.’20 The iconographic analysis of artforms Another approach, which attempts to integrate more fully the manufactured style and practical function of prehistoric

The interpretative approach rests upon the assumption that not only is material culture ‘meaningfully constituted’ (i.e. that it is organised by socially-embedded concepts that give it meaning and influence the way in which it is used), but that it also plays an active role in the structuring and reproduction of social relations and concepts.23

16 C. Renfrew, ‘Varna and the emergence of wealth in prehistoric Europe’, in A. Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 1986, pp.141-68. 17 T. Earle, ‘Style and iconography as legitimation in complex chiefdoms’, in M.W. Conkey & C.A. Hastorf, eds., The Uses of Style in Archaeology, 1990, pp.73-81. 18 e.g. I. Hodder, Symbols in Action, 1982; C. Renfrew, ‘Mind and matter: cognitive archaeology and external symbolic storage’, in C. Renfrew & C. Scarre, eds., Cognition and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, 1998, p.3. 19 T.A. Dowson, ‘Rock art: handmaiden to studies of cognitive evolution’, in C. Renfrew & C. Scarre, eds., 1998, p.69. 20 Ibid. p.71.

21 T. Taylor, ‘Flying flags: icons and power in Thracian art’, in I. Hodder, ed., The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings, 1987, pp.117-32. 22 E. Panofsky, Iconogrpahy and Iconology: an Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art, 1955. 23 e.g. Hodder 1982; Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, 1986; ‘Symbolism, meaning and context’, in I. Hodder, Theory and Practice in Archaeology, 1992, pp.11-23; c.f. D.

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animals are common sources of, and foci for, material metaphors through which many cultures are ordered and understood. These symbolic and structural meanings have increasingly come to be interpreted with reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice.30 The meanings of material culture are regarded as being actively constructed ‘in practice’: grounded in the rarely discussed, routine, day to day, interactions of individuals and their ‘phenomenological’ experiences of the material world. Common meanings still exist, but only insofar as members of society experience common practices. The current aim of interpretative archaeology is, then, ‘to search for Bourdieu’s habitus’ (i.e. the socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures, which produces individual and collective practices).31

The search for symbolic meanings is not a simple task, in that it is recognised that much material culture does not have a specific meaning, and that its meaning can be ambiguous, multiple and even contradictory.26 This requires archaeologists to consider alternative readings of the same evidence.27 It is also recognised that the meaning of material culture can change according to the context in which it is being interpreted and according to who is making that interpretation. This problem is tackled by the use of a ‘contextual’ and ‘hermeneutic’ approach to the changing meanings of material culture. In this, the detailed definition of the ‘context’ of an object is regarded as essential. The term ‘context’, here, refers to the interweaving and associations of that object in particular historical and spatial situations, and to the perspective of the contemporary archaeological analyst.28 In practice, this approach involves identifying the network of patterned similarities and differences in relation to the object being examined, with reference to its temporal, spatial, depositional and typological dimensions. It is in this web of associations that the local symbolic meanings of material culture are thought to be found.

Examples of the application of the interpretative approach to the study of early art and architecture are steadily growing in sophistication and expanding in range, matching the growing maturation and influence of the approach, but as yet all of them are restricted to European prehistory. Here, I shall critically examine a variety of case-studies, ranging from the art of the Palaeolithic to that of the Bronze Age, and drawn from publications produced throughout the last 20 years. Palaeolithic art The work of Margaret Conkey in the early years of 1980s provides an example of one of the first applications of a structuralist approach to the art of the Upper Palaeolithic,32 following the pioneering work of André Leroi-Gourhan in the 1960s.33 Her analysis focussed on over 1200 engraved bones and antlers from Magdalenian sites in Cantabrian Spain, dating to between around 15,000 and 12,000 years ago. Through a careful analysis of the structure of these artforms, she was able to identify some recurrent stylistic features, including the careful selection of raw materials and surfaces to be decorated, the merging of form and decoration, the use of three-dimensional space as if it were flat, and a lack of boundedness in designs. She then claimed that these were important principles of symbolic conceptual organisation and that they provided structural clues to the meaning of Palaeolithic art. She also claimed that certain stylistic features of these artforms might have been encoded with group-specific attributes, and used to indicate and maintain boundaries around and between social groups.

At the same time, interpretative archaeologists argue that in order to understand fully a set of symbols it is necessary to go beyond them, and to search for the conceptual structures and classificatory principles upon which their symbolic meanings are based. In this task they have made use of both ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist’ approaches to the study of ‘structures’ (i.e. patterned sets similarities and differences) in the archaeological record. As part of this, they have sought to identify the culturallyspecific ‘metaphors’ that provided a conceptual means by which the objects, actions and social relationships of everyday life in past societies were connected and understood.29 More specifically, their attention has focussed not so much on linguistic metaphors but on material metaphors, which are thought to act subtly at an unconscious level, linking different cultural domains and constructing meaning, through peoples’ experiences of them. For example, the human body, the house and Miller, ‘Artefacts and the meaning of things’, in T. Ingold, ed., Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 1994, pp.396-419. 24 Hodder, 1992, p.19. 25 Hodder, 1986, p.122 26 e.g. C. Tilley, ‘Interpreting material culture’, in I. Hodder, ed., The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression, 1989, pp.185-94. 27 I. Hodder, The Archaeological Process: an Introduction, 1999, p.79. 28 e.g. Hodder, 1986, pp.118-46; ‘The contextual analysis of symbolic meanings’, in I. Hodder, ed., 1987, pp.1-10; 1992. 29 e.g. C. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, 1998.

30 P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977; Preucel & Hodder, 1996: pp.300-10; Hodder 1999: pp.75-7. 31 Bourdieu, 1977: pp.78-87; Hodder, 1986: p.121. 32 M.W. Conkey, ‘Context, structure, and efficacy in Palaeolithic art and design’, in M.L. Foster & S.H. Brandes, eds., Symbol as Sense: New Approaches to the Analysis of Meaning, 1980, pp.225-48; ‘Boundedness in art and society’, in I. Hodder, ed., Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, 1982, pp.115-28. 33 A. Leroi Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe, 1968.

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In retrospect, Conkey’s conclusions appear somewhat vague and incomplete. It is unclear, for example, how these symbolic artforms actually worked in practice. In response to this problem, a contemporary approach to Upper Palaeolithic images (fig.1) is to regard them as resources that were ‘actively negotiated in day-to-day social relations’.34

A more recent study to emerge from under the umbrella of Ian Hodder’s current theories and fieldwork, is provided by Johnathan Last’s article, ‘A design for life: interpreting the art of Çatalhöyük’.39 Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Last argues that the elaborate murals and mouldings found within the houses of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey should be regarded as symbolic resources whose significance was embedded within, and acted upon, the routinised social practices and experiences of the people who occupied those domestic spaces. The wall paintings, for example, may have provided a frame-like means of linking the living and dead to the physical space of the house, and, more specifically, may have marked years in the life of the household when human remains were buried there.

Neolithic houses Ian Hodder, as a central figure within interpretative archaeology, has contributed in many ways to the rethinking of Neolithic societies. He has argued, for example, that linear tombs represented houses in the Neolithic of north-west Europe.35 But his most ambitious study to date is represented by, The Domestication of Europe: Structure and Contingency in Neolithic Societies,36 which comprises an analysis of the Neolithic origins of farming and a settled way of life in the Near East and Europe, with particular reference to the material symbolism of houses, settlements and burials. He proposes that a specific set of symbolic concepts and practical activities relating to the home (characterised by mothering, nurturing and caring), which he terms the domus, provided a long-term structural metaphor and mechanism for the economic and social transformations of the early Neolithic, in which the wild (or nature) was domesticated (or made cultural). (fig.2) Then, over the course of the following millennia, as groups in settled villages engaged in greater competition over resources, Hodder suggests that the domus was overtaken by a new set of concepts based on the themes of male status display, hunting, warring, death and the wild, which he terms the agrios. In south-east Europe, he contrasts this new set of concepts with those of the domus, but in central Europe he identifies another conceptual structure, with an emphasis on boundaries and entrances, which he terms the foris.

Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments The megalithic monuments of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age north-west Europe (fig.3) have also attracted the attention of interpretative archaeologists, who have searched for the principles structuring both their material symbolism and the reproduction of society. An early example is provided by Michael Shanks and Chistopher Tilley’s paper, ‘Ideology, symbolic power and ritual communication: a reinterpretation of Neolithic mortuary practices’.40 Analysing the human remains deposited within five earthen and chambered long barrows in Wessex and the Cotswolds in southern England and in Scania in southern Sweden, they identified a number of structuring principles operating in relation to the spatial patterning of the human bones: (1) ‘An assertion of the collective’ and ‘a denial of the individual and of differences between individuals’ and of ‘asymmetrical relationships existing in life’, through the re-grouping of disarticulated remains; (2) ‘An expression of boundedness and thus the exclusiveness and solidarity of the local social group using the tomb’; (3) ‘An emphasis of distinctions between immature individuals and adults’; and (4) in, some English cases, ‘male/female distinctions’.41 Working from the assumption that ritual symbols can be used ideologically to legitimate the sectional interests of particular groups within society, by not only reflecting but also misrepresenting reality, Shanks and Tilley then suggested that ‘the principles according to which the human remains were placed in the tombs formed part and parcel of the reproduction of power relations, designed to secure the misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of these relations and secure the reproduction rather than the transformation of the social order’.42

To my mind, this book represents the most successful attempt made so far to interpret prehistoric symbolic and structural meanings, in that it perceptively identifies some coherent spatial and temporal patterns in the archaeological record, as well as eloquently interpreting them within a plausible framework of social dynamics. However, the book is not without its problems. For example, it overemphasises the classic structuralist nature/culture dichotomy, which may be a particularity of Western thought.37 It may also unjustly rarefy the house as the prime symbol of the Neolithic, at the expense of material metaphors such the human body or the axe.38 34

Dowson, 1998, p.75. I. Hodder, ‘Burials, houses, women and men in the European Neolithic’, in D. Miller & C. Tilley, eds., Ideology, Power and Prehistory, 1984, pp.51-68. 36 I. Hodder, The Domestication of Europe: Structure and Contingency in Neolithic Societies, 1990. 37 C.P. MacCormack, ‘Nature, culture and gender: a critique’, in C. MacCormack & M. Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture and Gender, 1980, pp.1-24. 38 c.f. J. Thomas & C. Tilley, ‘The axe and the torso: symbolic structures in the Neolithic in Brittany’, in C. Tilley, ed., Interpretative Archaeology, 1993, pp.225-324.

This paper valuably demonstrated to archaeologists that the human skeleton and body can provide a potent source of material symbols. However, in its ambitious use of a

35

39 J. Last, ‘A design for life: interpreting the art of Çatalhöyük’, Journal of Material Culture, 3.3, 1998, pp.355-78. 40 M. Shanks & C. Tilley, ‘Ideology, symbolic power and ritual communication’, in I. Hodder, ed. 1982, pp.129-54. 41 Ibid. p.150. 42 Ibid. p.151.

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the human groups that used the site (comprising two different hunter-gatherer moieties each subdivided into three clans), and the social relations between them. He also charted changes in these social relations over time with reference to the archaeological phasing of the carvings at the site. Tilley was the first person to recognise some of the limitations of his own structural analysis, noting that it might be regarded simply as a ‘descriptive interpretation of some aspects of carving form’, which ‘might be taken to represent a starting point rather than a finishing point for analysis’.48 He has consequently taken his interpretations further in a chapter of his more recent book, Metaphor and Material Culture,49 which examines the rock carving site of Högsbyn in western Sweden.50 Here, he argues that the metaphorical meanings of the depictions of the human body can only be understood fully with reference to their sequential arrangement across the landscape, and that in the Bronze Age they formed a narrative that was ‘read’ during the course of seasonal ritual processions that moved between the rocks in a south to north direction. He also suggests that this structural narrative encoded a process by which human social and sexual identity was established and linked to the passage of time.51

Despite their initial differences, both Julian Thomas and Christopher Tilley have continued to investigate the art and architecture of the megalithic monuments of Neolithic north-west Europe, and in a series of studies published in 1993 they both focussed specifically on the symbolic meanings and politics of visual display embedded in the forms and phenomenological experiences of these monuments.44 Thomas and Tilley argue that, as part of the reproduction of society and of privileged positions within it, physical and visual access to these monuments and to the symbolic resources that they contained was restricted, both by the form of the monuments and by ritual practice. Whilst their placing in often prominent positions in the landscape and their monumental exteriors invited and channelled public viewing and movement, only privileged members of society were granted access to their concealed interiors and to the secret knowledge that they contained. At West Kennet long barrow near Avebury in Wiltshire, for example, pots and dead people appear to have been withdrawn from circulation in the outside world and then hidden and re-ordered inside the tomb by a restricted group of people; whilst in Brittany decorated menhirs were broken up and hidden in passage graves.

Tilley has always recognised that ‘the meaning of material culture can never be objectified or exactly pinned down’ and that ‘any object has multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings’.52 He has even questioned LéviStrauss’ binary mythemic logic from a post-structuralist perspective.53 But in practice he has tempted archaeologists with some of the most explicit and elaborate interpretations of prehistoric symbolic meanings, using a structuralist approach that focuses upon the identification and interpretation of the unconscious structural logic encoded within material texts. (fig.4) I would suggest that this approach still shares much in common with the classic (as opposed to post-) structuralist approach of linguistics and social anthropology. This has been much criticised: not only for its reduction of everything to a pre-ordained structural formula and its easy assumption of universal binary oppositions, but also for its over-estimation of the analytical rigour of its method and the hardness of its datapatterns, its under-estimation of individual agency in perceiving and responding to symbolism in different ways, its weakness in accounting for historical change, and its under-estimation of the differences between language and material culture.54

Bronze Age rock art Christopher Tilley has also applied an interpretative approach to the Bronze Age rock art of Sweden. His first major attempt to do so is represented by his book, Material Culture and Text: the Art of Ambiguity,45 which comprised a study of rock carvings at Nämforsen in northern Sweden. Based upon the notion that material culture comprises a text to be read, one of Tilley’s aims was to identify and decode the structural logic of the carving site.46 He identified six key ‘design’ categories which he placed into two groups: one constituted on the basis of natural species differentiation (elk, fish, bird), the other in terms of differences between manufactured cultural objects (shoe sole, boat, tool). He then interpreted these categories and their relationships, drawing upon Claude Lévi-Strauss’ concept of totemic classificatory systems,47 as signifying

48

Tilley, 1991, p.114. Tilley, 1998. 50 Ibid. pp.133-73. 51 c.f. T. Yates, ‘Frameworks for an archaeology of the body’, in C. Tilley, ed. 1993, pp.31-72. 52 Tilley, 1989, p.191. 53 C. Tilley, ‘Claude Lévi Strauss: structuralism and beyond’, in C. Tilley, ed., Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics and PostStructuralism, 1990, p.55. 54 c.f. Preucel & Hodder, 1996, pp.300-4; L. Janik, ‘Rock art as visual representation – or how to travel to Sweden without Christopher Tilley’, in J. Goldhahn, ed., Rock Art as Social Representation: Papers from a 49

43 J. Thomas & A. Whittle, ‘Anatomy of a tomb – West Kennet revisited’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 5, 1986, pp.134-5. 44 J. Thomas, ‘The politics of vision and the archaeologies of landscape’, in: B. Bender, ed., Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, 1993, pp.19-47; C. Tilley, ‘Art, architecture, landscape [Neolithic Sweden]’, in B. Bender, ed. 1993, pp.49-84; Thomas & Tilley, 1993. 45 C. Tilley, Material Culture and Text: the Art of Ambiguity, 1991. 46 Ibid. pp.95-113. 47 C. Lévi Strauss, Totemism, 1963.

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Ultimately, whatever one’s views of the relevance of structuralist and post-structuralist theories in archaeology, the interpretative approach to the symbolic and structural meanings of art and material culture depends upon the availability of high quality archaeological data, with richly networked sets of similarities and differences. Most parts of the world do not yet have these, but the search for them surely remains a valid and useful goal for archaeologists.

reproduce the gulf between past and present, subjectivity and objectivity, rather than create an informed dialectic’.59 They, instead, discuss fully their use of ‘artworks’ to express the particularity of place in the Bronze Age and the present on Leskernick Hill in Cornwall, in a recent paper entitled, ‘Art and the re-presentation of the past’.60 Inspired by the work of contemporary landscape artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Christo, they have wrapped the Bronze Age stones found on the hill with materials such as fabric, cling-film and paint, and have photographed their shadows on the stones, as part of a process of trying to see the hill and its prehistoric architecture in a new way. In doing so, they may have helped to erode the distinction between art and archaeology. However, I would personally prefer this task to be left to professional artists. Mark Dion’s ‘Tate Thames Dig’ (1999), for example, has subjected the archaeological process to a thorough scrutiny within the context of a Tate Gallery exhibition in London, at the same time as raising the question of whether this is art or archaeology.61

The critical approach to visual representation in archaeology Allied to the interpretative approach is a critical perspective, in which more politicised archaeologists have begun to question the character of scientific archaeology and its purportedly objective representations of the past.55 The latter include visual representations, used to record and reconstruct archaeological remains. Michael Shanks, for example, has highlighted how photographs are often taken-for-granted in archaeology, being considered as a means of realistic recording and illustration, without consideration of the selections involved in their production and reproduction.56 Stephanie Moser and Clive Gamble have also shown how visual reconstructions of human antiquity (fig.5), intended to illustrate different theories about what happened in the distant past, have actually perpetuated a stereotypical story of our early ancestors.57 By employing a common set of now-questionable icons to depict the past – including clubs, animal skin garments, stone tools, long hair, hairiness, docile expressions, thick necks, stooped postures, flat feet, cave recesses (signifying wild places), and crevasses (signifying the gulf between them and us) – an image of perpetual struggle has been maintained, in which early humans are constantly challenged by the environment and by the beasts that inhabited it.

Towards an archaeology of visual culture The six different areas of contemporary research into the archaeology of art that I have discussed share more in common with each other than might initially appear evident. For example, Steven Mithen’s ‘ecological approach’ to Palaeolithic art, which ‘seeks to take a holistic view of Palaeolithic society’ and ‘to place the art into context by drawing links between as many patterns in the archaeological record as possible’62, comes surprisingly close to Ian Hodder’s ‘contextual approach’; and Colin Renfrew’s ‘cognitive-processual approach’ now explicitly acknowledges the value of Ian Hodder’s ‘post-processual’ concept of the ‘active role of material culture’.63 But there is still a need for further consolidation of the developments that have taken place in the archaeology of art over the last 25 years, particularly if archaeology is to contribute significantly to broader interdisciplinary debates.

Arising out of these critiques of scientific archaeology, archaeologists such as Shanks and Tilley are now experimenting with alternative forms of visual representation. Michael Shanks, for example, in his book, Experiencing the Past: on the Character of Archaeology,58 has attempted to revitalise archaeological expression by interspersing his text with what he describes as poetic imagery. This includes picturesque views and photomontages of ancient monuments and still-life juxtapositions of classical Greek pots and broccoli. Christopher Tilley, Sue Hamilton and Barbara Bender have criticised Shanks for his lack of discussion of these images, which, ‘No doubt contrary to Shanks’ intentions...simply

In this respect, I believe that contemporary ‘visual culture’ studies offer an important way forward for the archaeology of art, if not also for World Art Studies. Visual culture studies represent an emerging inter-disciplinary convergence of a variety of disciplines and methodologies, such as those of the New Art History, feminist art history, design history, architectural history, film and communication studies, cultural studies, and post-colonial theory;64 and archaeology has been included in its list of potentially contributing disciplines.65 59 C. Tilley, S. Hamilton & B. Bender, ‘Art and the re-presentation of the past’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6, 2000, p.40. 60 Ibid. 61 C. Renfrew, ‘It may be art but is it archaeology? Science as art and art as science’, in A. Coles & M. Dion, eds., Mark Dion: Archaeology, 1999, pp.12-23. 62 Mithen, 1991, p.104. 63 Renfrew, 1998, p.3. 64 e.g. J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972; S. Alpers, E. Apter, C. Armstrong, S. Buck Morss, T. Conley, J. Crary, T. Crow, T. Gunning, M.A. Holly, M. Jay, T. Dacosta Kaufmann, S. Kolbowski, S. Lavin, S. Melville, H. Molesworth, K. Moxey, D.N. Rodowick, G. Waite & C. Wood, ‘Visual

Session held at the European Association of Archaeologists Fourth Annual Meeting in Göteborg 1998, 1999, pp.129-40. 55 e.g. M. Shanks & C. Tilley, Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice, 1987; M. Shanks, Experiencing the Past: on the Character of Archaeology, 1992. 56 M. Shanks, ‘Photography and archaeology’, in B.L. Molyneaux, ed., The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, 1997, pp.73-107. 57 S. Moser & C. Gamble, ‘Revolutionary images: the iconic vocabulary for representing human antiquity’, in Molyneaux, ed. 1997, pp.184-212. 58 Shanks, 1992.

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Visual culture studies share much in common with contemporary archaeological approaches to art. The almost unbounded range of manufactured material studied by them is comparable. They both emphasise the centrality and embeddedness of the material and the visual in the cultural process, within which they are seen to actively participate in the production, reproduction and transformation of social meanings, values and relations. They both tend to apply a model of production, distribution and consumption to the study of material and visual culture, at the same time as trying to pin down the unstable meanings of signs with reference to their historical, spatial and social contexts. They share a contemporary interest in phenomenology, and in the structured and structuring role of material and visual culture in the practical and routine experiences of daily life. They both recognise the importance of individual perception, and are interested in the politics of spectatorship. They share a self-critical and politicised interest in deconstructing the history of scientific thought and its particular ways of seeing. They also share a concern over our own limitations to appreciate fully those images produced by cultural groups to which we do not belong. In this way, visual culture studies offer a useful arena within which the different archaeologies of art can now be consolidated.

And third, the archaeology of visual culture proposes that World Art Studies should be self-critical. Although we can still aspire to a guarded objectivity and anchor our interpretations to the physical artefacts that we study, we should remain aware of the social and historical contingency of our own ideas, including the ‘contexts’ that we create. In the increasingly complex world of visual experiences that we live in, World Art Studies will make a difference if it can help us come to a richer and more critical understanding ourselves. Postscript: a return to formal analyses? A first draft of this paper was presented to the Summer Institute of World Art Studies, held in the School of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia in the Summer of 2000. The Institute comprised an inter-disciplinary meeting of scholars drawn from around the world, who stayed together for a month to discuss art from the diverse perspectives of archaeology, anthropology and art history. One important and recurrent theme that emerged for me out of the non-archaeological sessions concerned the form of art objects. I increasingly came to believe that contemporary Anglo-American archaeological theorists have paid insufficient attention to developing interpretations of the long-term transformations of the form of elements of visual culture – something which archaeologists, used to dealing with extended historical time-scales, should be ideally placed to attempt.

That is not to say that visual culture studies do not also carry their own share of problems. In particular, by focussing attention on ways of seeing, visual culture studies have been accused of excluding the other human senses, including those of touch, smell and hearing, which also contribute to the way that art works.

Partial exceptions to the rule can, as usual, be found. An example is Dorothy Washburn’s symmetry analysis of decorated Neolithic ceramics from Greece and the Aegean.66 Based on the assumption that interacting groups tend to use similar symmetries to structure their designs and that groups that have little contact use markedly different design structures, she argued that changes over time in the design structure of ceramics found in the stratified deposits at Neolithic Knossos reflected the indigenous development of a local culture in the Early Neolithic, and the growth of interaction with neighbouring island groups in the Middle Neolithic. However, this approach can be criticised as an essentially descriptive analysis of artforms, and one that relies upon an oversimple and under-interpretative interaction model to explain potentially complex transformation processes.

Contributions to World Art Studies Despite these limitations, I would still suggest that a consolidated archaeology of visual culture offers us three ways through which the global study of art can be reinvigorated. First, it encourages World Art Studies to assert the power of the visual. We should not underestimate the fact that human experience is highly visual, and that artefacts play a subtle but active role in our mental and cultural processes. World Art Studies, as an interdisciplinary and global alliance, is well-placed to investigate this subtle human process.

My own research on prehistoric material culture in the Central Mediterranean region has also considered longterm transformations in the form and social value of various elements of visual culture. I have, for example, carried out a detailed examination of the later life-histories of prehistoric stone axes in the south-central Mediterranean region, focussing on their cumulative physical and conceptual transformation during the course of their production, circulation and consumption, within different

Second, the archaeology of visual culture demands that although World Art must be interpreted over the longue durée, it must also be interpreted in context. Although the meanings, values and functions of artefacts can be ambiguous, multiple and unstable, they are not entirely arbitrary, being constrained and structured within specific historical, spatial and social contexts. culture questionnaire’, October, 77, 1996, pp.25-70; J.A. Walker & S. Chaplin, Visual Culture: an Introduction, 1997; I. Rogoff, ‘Studying visual culture’, in N. Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, 1998, pp.14-26; N. Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, 1999. 65 Walker & Chaplin, 1997, p.3.

66 D.K. Washburn, ‘Symmetry analysis of ceramic design: two tests of the method on Neolithic material from Greece and the Aegean’, in D. Washburn, ed., Structure and Cognition in Art, 1983, pp.138-64.

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Robin Skeates: Archaeologies of art: contributions to World Art Studies historical, spatial and social contexts.67 But, still, much work remains to be done. In conclusion, I would suggest that new interpretative models relating to the long-term transformation of visual culture should now be developed by archaeologists working around the world. Ones, for example, which incorporate changes in social attitudes and beliefs towards different artforms and towards artistic innovation and tradition. A tall order, undoubtedly, but just one of the many stimulating challenges still offered by World Art Studies.

67 R. Skeates, ‘Animate objects: a biography of prehistoric ‘axe-amulets’ in the central Mediterranean region’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 61, 1995, pp.279-301.

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Fig.1. Group of incised Palaeolithic figures in Grotta Addaura near Palermo, Sicily: was their meaning was as actively negotiated in the past as it is today? (Author’s photograph.)

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Fig.2. Re-created Neolithic house at Passo di Corvo near Foggia, Puglia: was it the prime symbol of the Neolithic? (Author’s photograph.)

Fig.3. The Whispering Knights portal dolmen, Oxon: a public monument, but who gained access to its interior? (Author’s photograph.)

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Fig.4. Cup-and-ring marks at Roughting Linn, Northumberland: was this a text to be read? (Photograph: Sue Skipper.)

Fig.5. ‘A pottery workshop from the ground stone age’: is this an objective reconstruction or a stereotypical representation? (Reproduced from De Gregorio 1917. Photograph supplied by Cambridge University Library.)

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Du Cerceau and Hollywood David Thomson

formality into a drama for posterity. Access to courtrooms by television has wholly bridged the gap, and editing makes the concentrate, which is the stuff of theatre and film. Theatre and film at worst can only offer a second hand witness experience of sight and sound, and at best can aspire to moralise or corrupt the individual.

In film or television, what is a good or a bad script? We, non-media folk, will have heard innumerable times actors or actresses pronounce ‘I just loved the script’ or ‘When I read it, I had to have the part’. The hero or anti-hero of Sunset Boulevard (William Holden as male star with Gloria Swanson as female star of 1950), a screenwriter played by Holden drowning in the voluptuous cynicism endemic in the craft and art of hacks, says at one point, ‘Audiences don’t know anyone writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.’ Scripts of classic movies do get printed for very limited circulation, and usually appear decades after release of the feature, and serve more as curios for aficionados and students of cinema. Unlike the theatre with revivals and new productions, a film script is never taken as the wholesale framework for a remake, even where storylines are largely retained. Everyone who can read has been made to read a play at some time in their lives, because pure dialogue is held to be a root and branch of literature. For private meditation or the classroom Shakespeare, Molière or Brecht are authors, whose words act on emotions, prejudices and the mind’s eye.

As we edge towards an account of a minor event in Renaissance France, there are adages and commonplaces, which need to be addressed. There are many permutations, but it is broadly accepted raw material of a great work of fiction by an Austen or a Tolstoy is not in itself anything resembling the form and format for a play or film. On a very subjective level, there is the view, that second to tenth rate literature is more amenable for the film maker, producer and director. In terms of the epic, Gone With The Wind is no War And Peace, and in any Pantheon or Valhalla of writers Margaret Mitchell would be in a basement under any crypt, but in terms of film history their stories are equal parts of a Parthenon Frieze. To return to our core dichotomy, watching is not reading, and reading is not watching. And yet acting and performance by others, when successful, for the individual and for the individual in a mass can change lives. On the 4 August 1551, Henri II and the retinue of one to two thousand of the Court of France made their state entry to Orléans. The record of the event is a dowdy large octavo booklet written by François Corcher, and it was printed and published within weeks of the occasion, in which all the corporate and social components of the procession are inventoried. The title is La Magnifique Et Triumphante Entree De La Noble Ville & Cite d’Orleans, faicte au tres chrestien Roy de France, Henry deuxiesme de ce nom, Et a la Royne Catherine son espouse, le iiii iour d’Aoust M.D.L.I, Paris chez Jehan Dallier, Orléans chez Eloy Gibier. The guilds, corporations and ranks of civic and judicial dignitaries, militias and much besides are given their careful order of precedence. It makes a grindingly dull read, and yet this obsolescent report is the outline of a ritual and a performance designed to bedazzle, staged by one of the half dozen richest and most populous cities of the kingdom. The account is sparse and formulaic as literature, but it served as a complement in details for any who had attended or watched. A football programme is a souvenir for and after the event, which is not a record of the match nor the outcome. Corcher’s booklet is in the same bracket. It is highly likely, that it was largely prepared before the 4 August 1551, which would explain the total lack of illustrations of the architectural set-pieces designed for key-points on the route by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau.

Screenwriters and writing for the screen have never had the variegated public of dramatists for the stage. The interaction of theatre and film has been largely a one way traffic from Broadway to Hollywood or the West End to Pinewood. Almost uniquely, 2001 has seen Mel Brooks’ The Producers adapted very successfully from film to stage on Broadway. The Graduate by the wholly unfamous, one-only novelist and Brighton recluse Charles Webb with screenplay by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham is another rare case of Hollywood to the West End of London, with the commercial proviso of ‘A List’ American actresses taking Anne Bancroft’s part as the seductress. Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple and The Front Page both cut their teeth on the New York stage, and Simon is special in writing in ways which suit and bridge the gaps between live and recorded conditions of production. Perhaps the paradigm of movie wordsmith as well as a ‘belle-lettriste’ was Raymond Chandler, the master who turned the pulp novel into an art form. His ‘shamus’ Philip Marlow novels are richly discursive and descriptive of architectural tackiness and emotional decay of Los Angeles, and they have a life wholly separate from the scripts he fashioned for films. A stage play has a script, whilst at the same time it is deemed to have a text. Feasibly, an intermediary class of writing between script and text is the court report. On the page, official records of proceedings are as good as any genre in expunging any sense of presence or tension. The trials of Captain Dreyfus, Oscar Wilde or Al Capone needed press coverage to add the dimensions of atmosphere and observations on comportment of the main players to make a ritual and

If we accept that Corcher’s account has all the literary qualities of a faculty board’s agenda, the responsibility of 301

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies designation as a ‘theâtre’ may mean it was semi-circular. In the last lines of his booklet he recorded that all the architectural set-pieces of columns and arches had been ‘faict et conduict par maistre Iaques du cerceau’. Haste and uncertainty was a major factor in Orléans not being able to stage the Ciceronian and Vitruvian marvels of Lyon or Rouen with jousts, water combats, comedies and much besides, but the ‘échevins’ of Orléans had been prudent and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau was fortunate with cut timber and other unspecified materials in store, which were left over from the passage of the Emperor Charles V in 1539. It is certain this stock would have been the work of teams of carpenters and joiners in the employ of the crown, which under Francis I were the cream of their professions, and were famously adept for their speed and efficiency.2 These were men who, if they could not build Rome in a day, were capable of creating a gratifying illusion in a few days. Their technical and spiritual descendants rebuilt Rome twice during the twentieth century in the California desert for Ben Hur.

the ‘metteur-en-scene’ for a success was all the greater. As with successive blockbusters from Steven Spielberg the story in itself may be so-so, but a hit depends on new and more marvellous special effects. Ingenuity and inventiveness under pressure of time and money was the order of the days in early August 1551 in the microcosm of Orléans as it has always been in the macrocosm of Hollywood. The major sub-plot at a Royal Entry for the citizens of provincial cities was to provide a near ideal occasion for the submission of petitions about grievances of rights wronged and not settled, or for the renewal of privileges which had lapsed or were deemed moribund. Much could be at stake, which was a component in the real drama of the processional ritual for leading participants. In pomp and circumstance there was an expression of celebration and loyalty, which once it had been performed expected reciprocation. In this context, the audience (the citizens of Orléans) as cinemagoers were highly similar, attending in anticipation of being entertained and impressed by the star, the Monarch. His opinion was capital, but very unfortunately, there is not a single indication of any critique, good, bad or indifferent, throughout the whole period from any ruler of any Western European country, about the impact or impression of civic entry festivals on the thinking or policy of governments.

There are two signed engravings by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau and dated ‘Aureliae 1551’. The first in our sequence (fig.1) shows an elaborate pastiche of a Palatine based extremely loosely on ancient texts. The Arch of Constantine appears four times in the lateral pavilions, merely as a symbolic building block, in this huge, imaginary ensemble of reference and cross-reference. An idea of the imagined scale of this palatial forum can be gauged from the miniscule figure leaning over a balustrade in the second bay from the left of the upper arcaded loggia. It must be underlined, that there is no way to locate and identify this or other engraved compositions of 1551 with Henri II’s entry to Orléans. In all probability, the arches and columns for the event itself were rapid and simplified adaptations from his XXX exempla arcuum &c., which du Cerceau had published at Orléans in 1549. The Latin preamble of the title page is quite assertive about the artist’s independent mindedness, for he makes it clear to all, that some of the images are taken (not copied) from notable antiquities, whilst others are of his own invention. The second signed and dated engraving (fig.2) is of a wholly different type. It shows what may be imagined as a temporary facia for the facades of a group of town houses or for a stylistically outmoded public building. A comparison of the two may make sense, if the first is read as representing megalomanical ‘imperium’, with the second offering an idea of urban harmony and order. The first design is ancient, and the second is modern. It is one of the key themes and motifs of much sixteenth century French verse and prose to propagandise about the failures and vulnerability of Ancient Rome and the promise of the present and future to emulate and not to imitate the past.

François Corcher’s booklet is as much and as little needed for a film or documentary. Who did what, where and when is set out in regimented detail, and seemingly it was done on budget and on time. He warmed cursively to the order and discipline of the hastily assembled, gorgeously attired cast of amateurs, which would cheer the heart of any accountant or town clerk worried about meeting budgetary targets. A tight schedule was one of the unforeseeable circumstances of the event at Orléans in 1551, for the notice given for the arrival of the Court and its retinues of one and a half to two thousand was just nine days. The form and the order of the sites for Henri II’s entry to Orléans need not detain us, because an evocation or reconstruction would best be done on film or video with computer graphics. The complex, exotic, and lavish ‘triumphs’ for Henri II’s entries to Lyon in 1548 and to Rouen in 1550 were commemorated in published verse, prose and images to impressive effect for posterity.1 This might make the ‘livret’ for the Orléans entry all the more ignorable. In eighteen pages Corcher grinds through the order of precedence, which made up the procession, and note is made of the halts and something of the settings for orations and declamatory formalities. Seemingly, the most lavish of these set-pieces was an ‘eschauffault’ or ‘theâtre’ built at the southern approach to the bridge over the Loire, on which the Royal party watched the procession pass. Its

To muddy the waters further, there are two other large format, unsigned engravings by du Cerceau. (figs.3-4)

1

Denise Gluck : Les Entrées Provinciales de Henri II, in, L’Information d’Histoire de l’Art, 10e année, pp. 215-218. Also Margaret M. McGowan : The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France, New Haven & London 2000.

2

Anne-Marie Lecoq : Les résidences royales a l’épreuve des fêtes. Les courts-circuits du charpentier, in, Architecture et Vie Sociale &c., Jean Guillaume (ed.), Paris 1994, pp. 83-95.

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output of drawings and engravings of schemes for private houses, architectural accessories such as fountains or fireplaces and of purely fanciful châteaux were entirely studio productions. He was both maker and distributor at one in the same time. Vellum, like celluloid, is an ideal medium for projecting images, which transcend reality. In terms of permanence vellum, unlike nitrate stock which self-combusts or video which deteriorates, vellum does not burn easily. The prestige of the material seems to have ensured the survival of most or all of his finest drawings in considerable quantities.

They show palatial structures, which in the rich and abundant survivals of his unpublished drawings dateable to the 1550’s in his inscriptions would be labelled ‘palais’ or ‘logis’, ‘à l’antique’ or ‘selon l’antique’. The likely sources for these confections need not detain us here, but the design with three entrance arches (fig.3) is engraved with darkened voids, in a way which leaves no ambiguity. We are looking at a ‘scaena frons’ of an ancient amphitheatre. This was fertile ground for an architectural populariser, fantasist cum impresario such as du Cerceau, for such things could be read of, but none survived to dictate the ordering of a design. The considerable opus of du Cerceau’s unpublished, finely finished drawings on vellum will be revealed in an exhibition in Paris in the not too distant future, but it is worth emphasising Androuet du Cerceau was both a public and a private artist. He published wholly non-theoretical, illustrated pattern books of architectural and decorative design, and as a parallel career and unknowable scale and source of income he produced ‘de-luxe’ manuscripts of drawings on vellum in round numbers for a more select clientele.

It would be nice to collate straightforwardly the two signed and dated engravings with the solemnities of the 4 August 1551, yet we cannot and should not try to make them glue onto Corcher’s text or even interfoliate them into his dowdy booklet du Cerceau’s dramatic architectural images in our minds. Du Cerceau issued enormous amounts of things to look at with nearly no explanation. There is a working hypothesis around or about artists, who show much but who explain little or nothing. ‘Enjoy’ could have been his motto. With little or no proof, there should be little doubt the entry of Henri II at Orléans in August of 1551 put Jacques Androuet du Cerceau centre stage before the great and the good of the realm, but he was a man who wanted to be back stage. Herein lies a version of a nightmare for a documenter of art. The event pushed du Cerceau in front of the full attention of the whole spectrum of the most powerful in the realm. In Corcher’s view, what was achieved in the architectural set-pieces was immensely commendable given the circumstances. The engravings reproduced here seem to emphasise what might have been; in other words, they were to demonstrate du Cerceau’s greater potential. If this was the case, it worked. He published nothing under his own name after Orléans until 1559, when he had relocated to his ‘ville de naissance’ of Paris.4

The exemplar of this is the collection of 50 sheets in the Vatican Library, which has an autograph list of its heteroclite contents.3 Dateable to the late 1560’s, the Vatican collection is rich in designs for ‘scaena frons’ of two or three storeys into which, sometimes, he inserted staffage of men and of women gesticulating one to the other. This material seems to me to be looking for some sort of categorisation or general label which might be ideal, symposium architecture, designs of no time and no place might have been a cheer in times of the civil wars of religion. He peopled the shallow voids of windows or openings and of arcades to animate architectural compositions, which could never be mistaken, then or now, as building proposals. In this there is the key to an appreciation and partial understanding of the phenomenon of a self-styled architect, who did not or would not be involved in the design or building of built buildings. There is insufficient evidence for precisely how Jacques Androuet du Cerceau managed in a long life to carve a niche for himself in design allied with publishing. There is no record of his involvement in any later Royal or civic festival after 1551. All that can be found is of him serving as an almoner for Louis XII’s troublesome sister Renée de France at the Protestant stronghold at Montargis between 1565 and 1575.

Confidence and confidence in his timing were all important to him, which can or might be the pleasure and pain of an art-house director, rather than that of a technowizard journeyman on a Hollywood treadmill. After August 1551, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau had the perfect CV, but he was born several centuries too soon, and California was only known to Spaniards.

Analogy with film recommends itself again. His work on location were visits and surveying of châteaux, which formed a part but far from all of the materials for the two published folio volumes of Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France of 1576 and 1579. Otherwise, his prolific 3

Ilaria Toesca : Drawings by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau in the Vatican Library, in, Burlington Magazine, 1956, pp. 153-157, as well as Francesco Paolo Fiore : Palazzo e Tipologia Trionfale. Disegni inediti del du Cerceau, in, Psicon, 8-9, 1976, pp. 113-120. To which must be added Monique Chatenet & Sabine Frommel : Alla scoperta di Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, in, Il Disegno di Architettura, 2000, no. 21-22, pp. 16-25.

4

Françoise Boudon : Les Livres d’Architecture de Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, in, Les Traités d’Architecture de la Renaissance, Jean Guillaume (ed.), Paris 1988, pp. 83-95.

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Fig.1. A Palatine Fantasy or ‘scaena frons’, signed and dated Aureliae 1551. 295 x 458 cms. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale.

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Fig.2. A seven bay facade in hybrid ancient and modern idioms, signed and dated Aureliae 1551. 254 x 459 cms. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

Fig.3. An architectural collage or ‘scaena frons’, not signed or dated. Dimensions unknown. Getty Center.

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David Thomson: Du Cerceau and Hollywood

Fig.4. An architectural collage or ‘scaena frons’, not signed or dated. Dimensions unknown. Getty Center.

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World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime? Wilfried van Damme

I remember vividly the moment I first read John Onians’s 1996 Art Bulletin article, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art.”1 It was a beautiful late Summer’s day in 1997, and I was delighted by what I read. Here, on the glossy pages of a prestigious Western arthistorical journal, was an uncharacteristically fresh look at the visual arts, both in terms of the objects themselves (e.g., their materiality) and particularly in the way they should be studied (specifically, from a global and multidisciplinary point of view). As if from a Martian perspective, and with the combined stance of detachment and wonderment that may come with it, the author of this concise article proposed conceiving of the visual arts as worldwide activities and products of Homo sapiens. When looked at from this broad perspective, he observes, we have in effect only just begun in trying to study and understand them. The visual arts are thereby presented as phenomena, both in their rarefied and mundane guises, to which members of our species dedicate much of their time, skill and imagination, and which are in various ways integrated into the (daily) lives of human beings in whatever culture in time and space. What was offered here in succinct form, then, was a global, species-based, and multidisciplinary approach of a subject matter that, in contrast to its conventional aloof conception, is construed in a broad and demystifying manner. This appeared to me not only as unusual but also familiar. Indeed, I recall thinking that here is someone who is trying to do for “art” what I am trying to do for “aesthetics.”

Moreover, different as they may be in some respects, the approaches we suggest in trying to achieve this goal are in fact likely to be considered rather similar by the majority of today’s scholars in the humanities. Some of the parallels quite clearly arise from a shared conviction that the study of art and aesthetics is in need of an overarching framework that allows one to take a global perspective and to incorporate contemporary insights from a variety of relevant scholarly domains. Underlying the attempt to construe such a framework, or frameworks, there would seem to be a more basic shared conviction. According to this view, the study of art and aesthetics will progress (and be refreshed) once we take as our starting point the premise or observation that human artistic and aesthetic phenomena (whatever their more precise definition) ultimately concern experiences and activities of a particular type of organism. Like all other life forms, this organism or species is basically the product of biological evolution, brains and nervous system included. Humans’ biological heritage, being the result of effective gene survival over numerous millennia, then prepares individual members of our species to develop in interaction with particular environments (both physical, as emphasized by Onians, and sociocultural, as emphasized by myself). The recurring exigencies of this interactive development then co-direct affect human evolution (neurological or otherwise), influencing as they do the environmental selection of chance genetic changes. To be sure, this paper will not provide a systematic comparison of similarities and differences between Onians’s approach and my own, although I will point to both parallels (which would seem to dominate) and divergences (which should enliven and sharpen the discussion). Rather, and as befits a Festschrift I hope, it will deal chiefly with the way in which I have been variously inspired by Onians’s Art Bulletin article and by subsequent contacts with its author – contacts which have always been very pleasurable, but as I realized a fortiori while writing this piece, all too brief. This evidently makes this paper a rather personal one (and one in which it is hard to avoid the impression of self-importance, however misguided that impression).

The “I” of the preceding sentence may perhaps be characterized as an armchair anthropologist, with the addition of the qualifier “armchair” seeming especially appropriate in the company of a “field” art historian. This already suggests that, whatever commonalities we share, the methods and approach of Onians and myself diverge in several interesting ways. I think I may also speak for Onians when I suggest that, rather than viewing these differences as disturbing, it would seem more profitable to regard them as adding, in a complementary way, to the pluriformity of approach in trying to achieve a common goal. That goal may be circumscribed as gaining insight into artistic and aesthetic phenomena in human existence – into their origin, nature, creation, use and effect. In the light of present-day humanistic studies of art and aesthetics a shared goal like this is, perhaps not surprisingly, rare enough (two scholars who immediately come to mind as pursuing a similar objective are pioneers Ellen Dissanayake and Ben-Ami Scharfstein).2

World Art Studies Western art history not really being my field of study, I may perhaps be excused for not previously having read anything by Onians (although I was intrigued by the telling title of one his books, Bearers of Meaning, which had been pointed out to me by an architectural historian some time

1

John Onians, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996), no. 2, pp.206-09. 2 Ellen Dissanayake, What is Art For?, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988; Homo Aestheticus. Where Art Comes from and Why, New York: The Free Press, 1992; Art and Intimacy. How the Arts Began, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000; Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Of

Birds, Beasts, and other Artists. An Essay on the Universality of Art, New York: New York University Press, 1988. Scharfstein is presently revising and greatly expanding this book into what actually promises to be a series of monographs on art and artists in human cultures past and present.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies before). Also, this was the first time I came across the label World Art Studies. This label would soon prove to me its conceptual value as a succinct and evocative marker of a particular conception and approach of visual art. In the article’s title the label is followed by a reference to a New Natural History of Art, and the opening paragraph features a dolphin involved in art-like behaviour. It is thus immediately clear that World Art Studies refers not to world art studies (in the sense of the study of contemporary “international art”) but to world art studies. That is, the label appears to signal the global examination of visual art, conceived as a panhuman phenomenon with cross-species antecedents and parallels. The latter part of this characterisation would seem to correspond more accurately to Onians’s own favourite construal of visual art as an object of worldwide study, one that constitutes the subject matter of his New Natural History of Art. This conception of art does not necessarily coincide with the subject matter of World Art Studies as the latter is becoming institutionalised as a new field of study at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and elsewhere.

about which scholar we should in fact acknowledge as the driving force behind this transformation.5 What is World Art Studies? “[P]erhaps the greatest single advantage of the concept of World Art Studies,” writes Onians, “is that, since no one knows what it is, everyone can contribute to its definition”.6 Especially in the first paragraphs of his article Onians does provide his own contribution to typifying the idea of World Art Studies, albeit in a general and informal manner that leaves room for other and more specific characterisations. Onians’s views on the matter may be summarized by reference to three ways in which the Western discipline of art history, its traditional subject matter and approach, should be extended in order to develop into World Art Studies. Firstly, World Art Studies obviously comprises an extension in terms of the cultures whose art forms need to be considered, proposing that we examine the visual arts of all cultures in time and space. This spatio-temporal broadening of the field of research, as seen from within conventional Western art history, also entails that art scholars from cultures outside the West are invited to make their various contributions to our understanding of visual art as a worldwide phenomenon. These scholars may do so not only by providing insight into their cultures’ own art traditions, but also by putting into perspective Western arthistorical practices and the mostly local material they deal with.

The title of the Art Bulletin article clearly suggests indeed that in considering Onians’s approach to the study of art worldwide one should distinguish between the concept of World Art Studies and the idea of a New Natural History of Art. The latter he sees as one dimension of the more encompassing discipline of World Art Studies.3 It may in fact be safely assumed that he regards this New Natural History of Art as the foundation of the study of artistic activity worldwide. Although Onians’s name is rightfully associated with the inception of both World Art Studies and the New Natural History of Art, in the article concerned he does not in effect claim to be the originator of either. Even in the case of his New Natural History of Art, Onians gives credit instead to recent developments in the Norwich art history department, developments that were sparked by “the objects in the collection given to the university in 1975 by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury…[w]orks of art from all regions of the globe and from all periods.”4 It was the impact of these objects on both staff and students, Onians suggests, which brought about a transformation of the existing art history department, which changed its name to School of World Art Studies and Museology in 1992. Having had the opportunity to informally talk to some of the School’s staff and indeed its founders, there is no doubt in my mind

Secondly, as to the subject matter proper of a global examination of art, Onians proposes that we conceive of the object of research as “visually interesting material culture.”7 This may be considered a somewhat imprecise but in these initial phases also helpfully broad conception that allows scholars to include many different types of visual products into their analyses. Indeed, Onians makes it clear that we should focus not only on so-called high or elitist arts, but take account of visual creations that may be characterized as folk, popular or mass art. This makes perfect sense, of course, if one sets out to gain insight into the visual arts (or indeed “visual culture”) as a phenomenon in human beings’ existence. Thirdly, Onians suggests that World Art Studies draw on several disciplinary approaches in dealing with the visual arts worldwide. In addition to those traditionally applied in Western art history, he briefly mentions the advantages of applying the perspectives offered by anthropology, archaeology and cultural studies. What is missing in this enumeration are those disciplines which are needed to elaborate a New Natural History of Art, disciplines such as (evolutionary) biology, (neuro) psychology, and (human)

3

Onians regards the notion of a New Natural History of Art as “one element” in the “new broad discipline” of World Art Studies, a discipline, to put it differently, which provides “the context for writing a new natural history of art,” Onians, 1996, p.203. 4 Ibid., p.206. Also, in relation to a natural history of art, Onians observes that, “Neither the name nor the idea is new. The very first history of art known in Europe is presented by Pliny the Elder as part of his Natural History, a title which for him brings out the fact that many human activities require the processing of natural materials. […] His Natural History thus anticipates that proposed here in its concentration on the human engagement with the material,” ibid., p.208).

5

As to the origin of the concept of World Art Studies and the establishment of the School of World Art Studies and Museology, see also Onians’s introduction to the volume he recently edited, Compression vs. Expression. Containing and Explaining the World’s Art, Williamstown, Mass.: Clark Art Institute, forthcoming. 6 Onians, 1996, p.206. 7 Ibid.

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Wilfried van Damme: World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime? ethology. Although mentioned later in the article, Onians tends not to emphasize them in relation to World Art Studies.8

art and aesthetics (however prominent that nexus in effect remained at the conference). “Transcultural Aesthetics,” however, would seem an unfortunate label for this new scholarly enterprise. For one, it might cause confusion, especially in an interdisciplinary context, where “transcultural aesthetics” might be interpreted as dealing with the aesthetic evaluation of objects and events across cultural boundaries in time and space.

These three types of extensions are themselves in various ways interrelated and their integration into a new discipline should lead to new types of queries and analysis in the study of art. In sum, to quote from the poster announcing the Summer Institute in World Art Studies, organized by Onians at the University of East Anglia in August 2000: “World Art Studies embraces all approaches current in art history, anthropology and archaeology and promotes exchange and integration between them. It offers a larger framework, allowing new questions to be asked about the nature of artistic activity worldwide.”

In the early 1990s academic philosophy had faced a similar problem of naming some of its activities. Whereas Comparative Philosophy had traditionally focused on Western and Oriental traditions of reflection, scholars now suggested to incorporate into the “philosophical ecumene” the systems of thought developed in particularly African, Arabic/Islamic, Native American and Oceanic cultures. The label that would soon gain general acceptance in designating this new field was World Philosophy. Some of the scholars most actively involved in developing this new field also participated in the Sydney conference.10 Indeed, it may well be by analogy with the label World Philosophy that one co-convener of this conference, Grazia Marchianò, mentioned the term “world aesthetics” in her paper, using it as a synonym for Transcultural Aesthetics.11 Especially given the pre-existence of World Philosophy, the label World Aesthetics seemed an improvement vis-à-vis the designation Transcultural Aesthetics in concisely referring to something like “the intercultural study of philosophies of art and aesthetics,” although the label does have its drawbacks.12

Drawing Inspiration At the time I first read Onians’s Art Bulletin article, I was thinking about a subject for a comment on a conference I had participated in a few months earlier. In June 1997 several societies of “philosophical aesthetics” had convened the Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics at the University of Sydney. This was a historical occasion in that for the first time philosophers and other humanistic scholars, still mostly Western, gathered to explore the possibilities of studying philosophies of art and aesthetics from a global perspective.9 The conference thereby extended on previous endeavours to enlarge the study of philosophical approaches to art and aesthetics by taking into account various so-called Oriental traditions of reflection, in addition to Western thought. These endeavours had resulted in the creation of a small subfield that became known as Comparative Aesthetics.

It was while pondering these matters that I found out that now there was also such a thing as World Art Studies. It evidently shared with World Philosophy and “World Aesthetics” the commitment to study its subject matter while taking into account, in principle, all of the world’s cultures, past and present.13 Shortly after reading Onians’s

The existence of this scholarly domain and denominator may well have been the reason why the organizers of the Sydney conference decided to introduce a new label to signify the emerging field of study that envisages to go beyond the East-West nexus in considering philosophies of

10 I am thinking specifically of Eliot Deutsch (see, for example, his Introduction to World Philosophies, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), Kathleen Higgins and Robert Solomon (see, for example, their World Philosophy. A Text with Readings, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995). 11 Grazia Marchianò, “’Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Birds and Crabgrass Notwithstanding’: Some Auspicious and Realistic views on Transcultural Aesthetics,” Proceedings of the Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics (ref. note 9), pp.1-5 . 12 For one, in this connection the term aesthetics is used as shorthand for “the philosophy of art and the philosophy of aesthetics.” This not only means that it refers to more than “aesthetics proper,” but also implies that even if aesthetics would be held to signify the latter, the term becomes equated with “philosophical aesthetics,” whereas it could be argued that aesthetics might be better conceived of as a field of study whose subject matter may be approached from several disciplinary angles, including those provided by various types of anthropology, sociology, psychology and neuroscience. See also note 26. 13 World Art Studies, however, would not seem to have gone through an analogous intermediary phase of “Comparative Art History,” focusing on the art traditions of the West and the East; but see Lothar Ledderose’ notion of Weltkunstgeschichte, or World Art History, presenting a limited conception of the world as being constituted by the West and the East (“Kunstgeschichte und Weltkunstgeschichte,” Saeculum 40 (1990), pp.136-41). Far from attempting to outline the history of multicultural and eventually global thinking in the study of art, as seen especially from a Western standpoint, I may perhaps briefly observe that Ledderose was

8

Similarly, representatives of these and related disciplines were missing at the conference Compression vs. Expression. Containing and Explaining the World’s Art, which Onians organized at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in April 2000. Also, during Onians’s Summer Institute in World Art Studies (University of East Anglia, Norwich, August 2000), in addition to an introductory week on World Art Studies, one week was dedicated to art historical approaches, another to archaeological and yet another to anthropological approaches, but no week reserved for “biological” or even “psychological” perspectives on art as worldwide phenomenon – perhaps for reasons more practical than scholarly. Still, this would seem to underscore the observation that, in practical terms at least, we should distinguish between World Art Studies and a New Natural History of Art, however unfortunate such a distinction, in my view, and however against the grain, paradoxically, of what Onians would seem to try and achieve in his approach to artistic activity worldwide. 9 See Eugenio Benitez, ed., Proceedings of the Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics, Sydney: University of Sydney, 1997; also available at http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/Arts/departs/philos/ssla/ PacRim97. html. The conference was organized by the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, the British Society of Aesthetics, the Italian Aesthetics Association, and the Australian and New Zealand Association for Literature and Aesthetics.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies article - perhaps even the same evening - I knew I had found a subject for my comment: I would situate the nascent field of what I was then tempted to provisionally call World Aesthetics (using the term in a different sense than I do now) within a wider context of globalising tendencies in the humanities. More precisely, I would position World Aesthetics as bridging its sister disciplines of World Philosophy and World Art Studies.14

questions addressed in “World Aesthetics.” It might thus examine both the degree to which artistic practices influence art-philosophical and aesthetic thought and the extent and way in which particular views on the arts influence making and using visual art forms – such views as concerning their origin, nature, qualities, creation, functions and effects. It was, in sum, my intention to initiate close collaboration between these two nascent fields of study right from the beginning. This interchange could then also be beneficial, more fundamentally, in developing ideas on basic theoretical issues, with both disciplines facing similar conceptual, epistemological and methodological problems in dealing with the – comparative - study of artistic and aesthetic phenomena in a wide range of cultures.

The study of systematic reflections on matters artistic and aesthetic, whether in a given culture or comparatively, would evidently profit from its closeness to the study of systems of thought more generally. However, one might envisage the danger that “World Aesthetics” would thus become a mere subdivision of World Philosophy (thus perpetuating an ingrained Western academic tradition). As such it might well limit its attention to analytical and conceptual matters, local or beyond, and to the integration of reflections on artistic and aesthetic topics into larger frames of thought, again local or beyond. Concomitantly, Transcultural or World Aesthetics would face the risk of confining its attention to “specialists’” opinions and comments, whether in literate or traditionally oral cultures. It might thus, for example, neglect examining the relationships between experts’ opinions and the views on art and aesthetics of “non-specialists” in a particular culture (provided that such a distinction is valid in the culture concerned). Indeed, who are in fact concerned with formulating views on matters artistic and aesthetic in a particular culture (or whom do we focus on)? Does this include people who are themselves actively involved in making or using art forms, or is the formulation of such views seen as a relatively autonomous activity in a given cultural setting?

Contacting John Onians About a year after writing my comment, it became clear that its publication would be delayed for at least another year.15 This was somewhat of a disappointment since I was impatient to promote intellectual exchange among scholars pioneering global approaches in the study of art and aesthetics. Eager to start this dialogue, I decided to do something I had never done before: unsolicitedly send one of my papers to someone whom I did not know personally. So in November 1998 I mailed a copy of my comment to Professor John Onians, School of World Art Studies and Museology, UEA, Norwich. Some time later I received a very friendly and encouraging reply-written and sent from the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.16 Onians made several favourable comments on my paper, and expressed his curiosity as to how I had become involved in the unusual business of thinking globally on matters of art and aesthetics. In his open-minded letter Onians did also express his reservations as to my reliance on the verbal, whether in oral or written form, in trying to understand artistic and aesthetic phenomena. He emphasized his interest in “the biological basis of artistic activity,” and explained that for him “conscious expressions” are of much less importance for “the shaping of actual artistic activity” than is “the unconscious formation of the brain” by exposure to the physical environment. While pointing out that I may not be sympathetic to a biological approach to art, he enclosed a

This opening up of the field of inquiry might thus lead to a greater awareness of the relationships between reflections on art and aesthetics and the actual creation, evaluation and use of art forms. To what extent does the latter influence the former, and vice versa? In an attempt to ensure that “World Aesthetics” also examine this dimension of thinking on the arts and their qualities, I suggested that this new discipline would profit as well (as far as the visual arts are concerned) from a close association with World Art Studies. For the latter focuses on visual artistic activities and products in the same range of cultures that are the subject of World Aesthetics, and it also shares the guiding principle of ultimately studying its subject matter from the vantage perspective that a global framework provides. Conversely, World Art Studies could profit from the

15 The comment I wrote was be published in the so-called second edition of the Sydney conference proceedings, but for various reasons this updated edition – intended to contain revised papers, additional essays, comments and dialogues – never materialized. It was then suggested that I submit my paper for publication in the Sydney-based journal Literature and Aesthetics that would reach many of the participants of the 1997 Pacific Rim conference. The article did have to go through the normal procedure of peer reviewing before it could be accepted. This meant in practice that, if at all, the comment would not be published prior to October 1999. 16 Letter to the author, 19 February 1999.

one the participants and contributors (as was Onians) of the Twenty-sixth International Congress of the History of Art, Washington, DC., 1986, which had as its title, “World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity”; see Irving Lavin, ed., World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity. Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art, University Park / London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. 14 Hence the original title, “World Philosophy, World Aesthetics, World Art Studies.” Despite my protests, however, the editors of the journal where this brief comment was published decided to change its title, for euphonic reasons, into “World Philosophy, World Art Studies, World Aesthetics” (Literature and Aesthetics 9, 1999, pp.181-92).

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Wilfried van Damme: World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime? then unpublished paper titled, Neuropsychology of Style.”17

“Alberti

and

the

human physical attractiveness being carried out within an evolutionary paradigm. In fact, it would seem that “ethology,” as applied to humans, was actually being replaced by “evolutionary psychology,” emphasizing the bio-evolutionary background of human behaviour and the mental activity that precedes it. I must admit that it took me some time to get used to the evolutionary way of thinking. However, once its logic dawned on me it seemed clear that, in general outline, evolutionary thinking would provide a powerful – explanatory – framework for considering panhuman phenomena, including those in the domain of art and aesthetics. My early interests in the “biology of art and aesthetics” notwithstanding (until recently a small body of work indeed), I started to realize how much I, too, was the product of a “culturalist” academic tradition that shunned any reference to “innate predispositions” and the evolutionary processes of arbitrary genetic change and non-arbitrary environmental selection from which they result.19 Far from explaining everything, the present-day outcomes of these processes in Homo sapiens do ultimately provide the parameters within which human beings operate, however much “culture,” and especially the production of “knowledge,” has extended the range of human mental functioning. Also, our evolutionary history might well provide a basis for accounting for universal regularities that one may establish in examining human brains and bodies at work in varying physical and sociocultural environments worldwide.

I enjoyed reading this paper much more than Onians could have anticipated on the basis of my brief comment on the Sydney conference. To be sure, in a footnote to that comment I had emphasized the potentialities of applying ethological and evolutionary approaches to the study of art and aesthetics. That note was in effect, if not added, then at least elaborated upon in a late phase. This was largely the result of the fact that, at the time I was writing my comment, the philosopher Neil Roughley invited me to contribute an essay on aesthetics to an edited volume he was planning on Being Humans. Anthropological Questions of Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Roughley had read my book Beauty in Context. Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics (Leiden: Brill, 1996) which deals precisely with the – combined – themes of universality and cultural particularity, in reference to aesthetic preference. In his letter of invitation Roughley also expressed his interest in my interdisciplinary attempts to account for aesthetic universals by taking into consideration ethological views, among others. Indeed, for Beauty in Context, which is based on my 1993 dissertation, I had searched the literature on (cross-cultural) perceptual and cognitive psychology, human ethology and what was then tentatively introduced as neuroaesthetics, in an attempt to shed some light on what seem to be basic universal regularities in “aesthetic perception.”18

In his Alberti paper Onians does not talk about “evolutionary psychology,” but it seems clear that he considers human neuropsychology a product, however plastic perhaps, of evolutionary processes and their relentless logic. It is also interesting to find that he applies this “neuro-evolutionary” approach to human-made objects, a topic which evolutionary scholars have so far hardly touched upon, focusing instead (as far as visual aesthetics is concerned) on the human body, in addition to giving some attention to what are suggested to be universals in landscape preferences. Also in contrast to the majority of work in “evolutionary aesthetics,” Onians tries here to account for differences in preferred artistic style by referring to underlying neuropsychological processes that produce variation when operative in differing contexts or environments – in Onians’s case especially varying physical and visual environments, of natural or indeed human origin.

In truth, the results of my search for explanatory hints from these fields had been rather meagre, and in 1997 I had not followed the specialized literature for quite some years. If only since at the time I was in the fortunate position of a Postdoctoral Fellow (although I was supposed to be working on something else), I decided that for the Being Humans essay I would catch up on the literature in the various disciplines mentioned. I do not remember whether Onians’s 1996 article actually inspired me in this, but it must have added to my feeling that these days one simply cannot ignore what various forms of scholarship that focus on “biology” rather than “culture” might contribute to our understanding of artistic and aesthetic phenomena, especially as regards various types of universals herein. While going through the recent literature, I found that there was a rapidly growing body of cross-cultural research on

In my own paper, in addition to attempting an evolutionary account of what one may call transcultural aesthetic

17 John Onians, “‘Alberti and the Neuropsychology of Style,’ Leon Battista Alberti e il Quattrocento”, in Studi in Onore di Cecil Grayson e Ernst Gombrich, Florence, 2001, pp.239-750. 18 Although anthropologists at the time – seeing their traditional emphasis on cultural particularity enforced by postmodern claims of radical relativism – seemed to have decided that universals in aesthetics, or elsewhere, do not exist, aesthetic universals did seem to surface on the basis of a comparative analysis of empirical (indeed, verbalized) data worldwide; for a summary, see my “Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics,” in Being Humans. Anthropological Questions of Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed., Neil Roughley, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2000, pp.258-83.

19 At the time, two key figures in evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, had put their stimulating introduction Evolutionary Psychology. A Primer on the Internet, http://www.psych.uscb.edu/research/cep/primer.htm, 1997, and Steven Pinker had just published How the Mind Works, New York: Norton, 1997, the most comprehensive outline of hardline evolutionary psychology to date. Some time later Edward O. Wilson, the “sociobiologist” who had been much maligned in the humanities in the previous two decades, published Consilience. The Unity of Knowledge, New York: Knopf, 1998, another lucid and inspiring introduction to evolutionary thinking, including its application to human mental and social behaviour.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies universals (properties of stimuli that appeal to all human beings), I had similarly tried to explain – cultural – differences in aesthetic preference by invoking hypothesized universal, evolution-based perceptual processes – in my case emphasizing the role of differing sociocultural environments in engendering variation.20 I thought that Onians might be interested in this Being Humans essay, so in reply to his response I sent him a prepublication copy, together with a letter briefly outlining my scholarly background.

the idea of World Art Studies, I might then infer that I was being invited to elaborate on the relationships and future collaborations between these two emerging disciplines in the study of art and aesthetics worldwide. On the other hand, having read the Being Humans essay, Onians by then knew that my interests in aesthetics from a global perspective encompassed much more than the attention to “philosophies of art and aesthetics” worldwide. So was he in fact inviting me to give a paper outlining my views on the study of aesthetics from a global and multidisciplinary point of view?

Commenting on this essay, Onians was, on the one hand, again very complimentary in a cordial manner.21 Characteristically, as I have come to understand, he congratulated me on having systematically dealt with a “big problem”: “It happens all too rarely in the world I inhabit!” Also, he expressed his satisfaction that an evolutionary approach was used “as a way of breaking down the culture/nature divide, and particularly pleased that you acknowledge the importance of the emotions.” On the other hand, Onians did not hesitate to express his doubts. Thus, in commenting on my references to the modular vision of the mind – the brain seen as made up of functionally specialized neural networks (or networks of such networks) that have evolved to process information and generate behaviour that on average has been beneficial to survival and reproduction – he noted: “Personally I don’t like the ‘module’ image because I think it leads to a mechanical and simplistic as opposed to an organic and complex way of thinking.” Equally characteristically, in reference to my thesis that cultural differences in aesthetic preference can be related to cultural differences in sociocultural ideals, he observed: “Probably my greatest reservation is about the predominance of the role of social formation in the shaping of preferences. As you probably have gathered I think passive formation through exposure to the [physical] environment is of crucial importance and I hope to demonstrate this most clearly in my discussion of Greek art and culture which is seen as the triumph of social formation.” These reservations notwithstanding, Onians then generously invited me to “the big conference” he was organizing at the Clark Art Institute in April 2000. “It would be great if you could do something on world aesthetics.”

The latter was in fact what I had in mind.22 In Beauty in Context I had emphasized the sociocultural dimensions of aesthetic preferences and assessments, with some attention being given to the neuropsychological and ethological basis of aesthetic universals on the one hand and popular “philosophies of beauty” on the other. After completing that book, I had hoped to find time to elaborate on the latter topic, by further exploring systems of thought on aesthetic phenomena in various cultures. I therefore enthusiastically greeted the developments in philosophical aesthetics that led to the Sydney conference as timely. The subsequent introduction to evolutionary aesthetics had in turn rekindled my interest in the “biological basis” of aesthetic preference. Now it seemed the time was right to try and pull these various lines of inquiry together into a comprehensive framework that would tentatively provide the outlines of a systematic approach to aesthetics worldwide. Onians’s invitation presented a welcome and appropriate incentive to do so. At the time I did not quite think of such an approach in terms of “world aesthetics,” although Onians’s mention of the label in his informal letter of invitation must have provided a temptation to do so. One thereby needs to consider that the article where I suggest we replace the label Transcultural Aesthetics by World Aesthetics had not yet been published. I therefore tended to suppress any suggestion (externally or internally) that I use the term in a way different to the one I had only just proposed. Instead, I was still inclined to think of the framework I had in mind as “an anthropology of aesthetics,” or perhaps more accurately, a “true anthropology of aesthetics.”23 The addition of the qualifier “true,” however ungainly, seemed ever more necessary since it was becoming increasingly clear to me that, whatever elucidations one would provide, by far the majority of scholars from various disciplines (anthropology included) tend to interpret the term “anthropology” not as referring to the study of humankind, but as designating the study of “non-Western, formerly called primitive cultures.” As a consequence, the label “anthropology of aesthetics” would most likely be

World Aesthetics What did Onians have in mind when he referred to “world aesthetics”? I never asked, presumably because not knowing the answer I would feel more free in writing my conference paper. On the one hand, it might seem plausible to assume that in his invitation Onians was referring to my comment on the Sydney conference, where I had suggested that we use the term World Aesthetics for the global study of reflections on the arts and their qualities. Since I additionally understood the meeting in Williamstown to be the first international conference on

22 Later, when I saw the final programme of the Williamstown conference, I considered that a paper on the study of philosophies of art and aesthetics worldwide might in fact have fitted better than one on a global and multidisciplinary approach to “beauty” and related aesthetic qualities and phenomena. 23 Compare “World Philosophy, World Art Studies, World Aesthetics” (ref. note 14), p.191.

20 See my “Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics” (ref. note 18). 21 E-mail correspondence to the author, 18 June 1999.

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Wilfried van Damme: World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime? interpreted in an interdisciplinary context as signifying the study of “non-Western” or even “primitive” aesthetics.24

At this point I should briefly observe that the approach I label World Aesthetics may be conceived as consisting of three dimensions or levels, all three of which should ideally be covered by an overarching framework from which systematically to examine aesthetic phenomena in human existence. On the most fundamental level, World Aesthetics needs to address questions concerning the evolutionary and neurophysiological basis of aesthetic experience in human beings. This is a field of study that is now being tackled rather intensively by various types of evolutionary scholars and neuroscientists. Attention should also be paid, on a second level, to the sociocultural dimensions of aesthetic phenomena, such as the sociocultural conditioning of aesthetic preference, the sociocultural significance of making and using aesthetic objects and events, and that of expressing aesthetic assessments. The integration of aesthetic phenomena into the fabric and dynamics of the sociocultural environment is a topic to be examined especially by contextually-minded scholars such as anthropologists and sociologists. The third dimension that World Aesthetics needs to deal with concerns the views on aesthetic phenomena that have been developed by the world’s various cultural traditions. The study of such views is now being undertaken by philosophers and other humanistic scholars of various cultural backgrounds, increasingly so under the heading of Transcultural Aesthetics. The three analytical dimensions or levels that I have briefly pointed out, moreover, are variously and intricately related and should therefore not be considered autonomously. In sum, World Aesthetics attempts to develop a framework that integrates various approaches to the study of aesthetic phenomena in the lives of humans, who are thereby construed as simultaneously biological, sociocultural and reflective beings.26

But what would be a proper alternative? In the paper I read at the Williamstown conference I avoided the problem of labelling the approach I suggested, simply titling my talk “Studying Aesthetics from a Global Perspective.” What lingered on, however, was the idea that “world aesthetics” would be quite an appropriate label for the global and multidisciplinary approach I am trying to develop – if only I had not recently used that label with a different meaning. A solution presented itself when it became clear to me that the suggestion to substitute World Aesthetics for Transcultural Aesthetics was unlikely to meet with positive response.25 This in effect enabled me to use the term World Aesthetics for the worldwide and multiperspectival approach I had talked about in Williamstown. Parallels? In December 2000, while reworking my Williamstown paper for publication, I told Onians that I had decided to mark the approach I suggest as World Aesthetics, dropping my former use of the label. Having observed that his mention of the term in the invitation had served as an inspiration, I noted that the label World Aesthetics seemed quite suitable since the type of perspective it promotes closely relates to that of World Art Studies, as briefly outlined in the Art Bulletin paper. Onians seemed rather pleased that he had provided some inspiration, but he did object to me seeing close parallels between the two approaches on the basis of his 1996 article: “You read too much into that paper,” he replied. When I suggested that the main differences probably lie in my attention to “social formation” and “reliance on the verbal,” Onians confirmed. Still, I think that the 1996 article does provide several points of connection, in addition, that is, to the more obvious ones having to do with advancing a global and multidisciplinary perspective on the related phenomena of art and aesthetics. (Also, in considering Onians’s reply it would perhaps be helpful again to distinguish between World Art Studies and the New Natural History of Art.).

Biased though I may be, I tend, to varying degrees, to see parallels between this perspective and that advanced by World Art Studies. Especially if one would conceive of the latter as World Art Studies-cum-New Natural History of Art, then it will be clear that, notwithstanding varying points of view on certain conceptualizations analytical tools and methodological approaches, in general outline there would seem to be an agreement that we need to take into consideration that human beings are fundamentally the neurobiological products of evolutionary processes. These processes have endowed our species with certain capabilities and predispositions, the analysis of which is of great importance for understanding art and aesthetics past and present.

24

I may in fact be called partly responsible for that. Although in Beauty in Context, one of the very few books available on the intersection of anthropology and aesthetics, I set out to develop a systematic anthropological approach to aesthetic phenomena worldwide, what struck me most once I had taken some distance, was how much that book, for various reasons, had become a study in “non-Western” (in the sense of African, Oceanic and Native American) aesthetics. 25 For, meanwhile a follow-up conference to the one held in Sydney was being planned (University of Bologna, October 2000) that appeared to retain the term Transcultural Aesthetics, as was apparent from both the title of the conference (Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics) and the titles and abstracts of the planned papers. In my own paper for that conference I therefore quite happily withdrew my proposal, while somewhat reluctantly complying with what seemed to be becoming the accepted use of Transcultural Aesthetics (“Transcultural Aesthetics and the Study of Beauty,” Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Grazia Marchianò and Raffaele Milani, Turin, Trauben, 2001, pp.51-70; also available at http://www.unibo.it/transculturality).

26 For more on this, see my “World Aesthetics: Outline of a Global and Transdisciplinary Approach,” in Compression vs. Expression. Containing and Explaining the World’s Art, ed. John Onians, Williamstown, Mass.: Clark Art Institute, forthcoming. The label “world aesthetics,” for that matter, may also be interpreted as designating a “universal” or “global” aesthetics that today would be emerging as a result of large-scale intercultural contacts – both on an “elitist” level (e.g., “international art”) and on a “popular” level (e.g., “pop music”). Although the latter sense of the term is not what I have in mind, the developments referred to are evidently proper topics of research within a global approach to aesthetic phenomena.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies As to the possible parallels regarding the importance assigned to the study of the sociocultural dimensions of art and aesthetics, I think we should first of all distinguish between the role of “social formation” in aesthetic preference, and the sociocultural dimensions of art forms more generally. Onians and I may disagree on the former,27 but I do not think that he would deny the reality or import of the latter. One gets the impression that Onians is especially interested in the “shaping of artistic activity” (and hence art style) and that he considers that the influence of various sociocultural factors on this process have received enough attention already – even unduly so in light of the importance he attaches in this process to human neurophysiology and exposure to the physical environment.28 This is of course not the same as depreciating the varied sociocultural dimensions that surround the making and use (or non-use) of art forms in various contexts, generating many interesting topics for intra- and intercultural analysis – from authorship and patronage to the religious or political use of art to censorship, and so on.

William James, who suggested over a century ago that scholars should try to make “the natural seem strange.” The quotation clearly demonstrates that taking a worldwide, comparative perspective might be instrumental in achieving that goal, in this case by putting into relief the making and using of art forms in a culture that in a sense is all too familiar to the investigator. To round off this brief consideration on the place of sociocultural dimensions in studying art forms, it may be pointed out that among the five leading questions for the Summer Institute in World Art Studies, Onians interestingly juxtaposed the following two queries: “How effective across the disciplines are cultural/ social/ideological explanations of artistic activity?” and “How effective across the disciplines are natural/biological/ecological explanations?” And most interestingly of all, the final question read (and I could not agree more): “How can current explanations be integrated and developed to create a larger theoretical framework?”32 Finally, a few words on the importance that one should, or should not, attach to verbalized views on artistic phenomena when in World Art Studies an attempt is made to understand these phenomena, including their place and role in sociocultural life. It seems quite clear that Onians does not consider the issue of examining reflections on art very central, indeed even observing that we have overvalued language or the verbal in the study of art. But then, in my reading at least, he does not seem to disregard the value of studying a culture’s views on art either.33 Thus, when pointing out how little knowledge on the world’s artistic traditions is actually available to art scholars, Onians notes: “Some art is known and talked about by local populations without their knowledge ever becoming accessible to Western scholars.”34 Onians would also seem to illustrate the importance of studying local views and attitudes towards art forms when he observes, “It is as important to understand why many Europeans disregard arts that they consider decorative, why many Chinese disregard painting that is not by literati, and why many other peoples disregard that which is old and so not functional within their social order, as it is to study the materials they neglect.”35

It must be said that although the “cultural dimension” of making and using art is in various ways mentioned in the 1996 article29, it does not receive much systematic attention. (But then again, that article would seem to be mainly concerned with presenting the outlines of a New Natural History of Art.) At this point I would like to seize the opportunity to quote one of my favourite passages in Onians’s paper, one that touches on the sociocultural use of art forms, but at the same time does much more: “The practice adopted by some Europeans of representing the faces of individuals on boards and canvases, using such media as egg or oil, and then fastening them to the inner walls of houses is just as intriguing and strange as the making and ritual destruction of a New Guinea mask composed of grass, blood, and feathers.”30 To this he adds that things even get more interesting “when the masks with which portraits are compared are those from villages not in the Sepik headwaters, but in the Swiss Alps.”31 This passage would seem to be an exemplary application of the inspiring advice given by the philosopher and psychologist 27 In the Beings Humans essay mentioned earlier I suggest that ultimately the role of “social formation” in aesthetic preference has an evolutionary, and hence “biological” basis. This is of course not the same as arguing, as Onians does, that aesthetic preference is formed by the physical or visual environment, but it does suggest that the “unconscious formation of the brain” is not limited to exposure to the physical environment but includes the sociocultural environment. 28 Onians observes, “The cultural context of art making, the way that it is influenced by educational, social, political, economic, religious, philosophical, technical, and other factors is comparatively well understood. Its basis in human physiology and psychology and the human relation to the natural environment is not,” Onians, 1996, p. 208. 29 In addition to the examples briefly mentioned elsewhere in the present paper, I may observe, for instance, that when discussing “the nature of the human relation to the material itself,” Onians notes: “All art involves some modification of material substances. The character of the material and the nature of the modification varies with time and place…The reasons why…are far from simple, including both cultural and natural factors,” Ibid., p. 207. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

32

The first two questions were: “How complete is our knowledge of art (including visual and material culture) worldwide from prehistory to the present?” and “What are the strengths and limitations of art history, anthropology, archaeology and related disciplines as frameworks for understanding art?” (as mentioned on the poster announcing the Summer Institute). 33 When I first read Onians’s article I was in fact quite attentive to the author’s opinions on this matter. For at the time, in addition to coming to grips with the possibilities and relevance of studying systematic views on art and aesthetics from a worldwide perspective, I was intent on the possible overlaps and future interactions between World Art Studies and Transcultural Aesthetics. 34 Onians, 1996, p.206. 35 Ibid. It is also interesting to observe that, when talking about “the need to write a history of art which is also a history of seeing,” Onians notes: “This should exploit both the records of visually based thought and action preserved in art objects and the data on visual response preserved in what we know of their use and in oral and literary testimonies relating to them”

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Wilfried van Damme: World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime? Within the broad conception of “aesthetics” and “philosophy of art” that I see as most profitable, it is indeed such local “talk about art” that may be considered a proper subject matter for studies in Transcultural Aesthetics. These conversations about art forms may be systematized locally, or not (with a lot of grey areas in between, of course). In the latter case, to pursue this simple dichotomy for analysis’ sake, studies in Transcultural Aesthetics may record such conversations about art and attempt to uncover implicit assumptions and patterns of thought in them (as well as contextualize these data and analyses in their wider local setting of thought and practice). In the former case, when views on the arts are systematized locally, we are dealing with what most contributors to Transcultural Aesthetics are more likely to regard as a more appropriate subject matter for their examinations. Indeed, some philosophers define a culture’s “aesthetics” (actually meaning its “philosophy of art”) as consisting of local “talk about talk about art,” in the sense of the more or less abstract and methodic analysis of conversations about art forms.36 In that case, then, Transcultural Aesthetics could be seen as an endeavour to record, analyze and compare such more explicit local systems of thought on the arts and their qualities. In its analytic and comparative guises, Transcultural Aesthetics might then be characterized as “talk about talk about talk about art.”

Meanwhile, anthropologists (together with art historians examining the arts of those cultures traditionally studied in anthropology) have amassed a wealth of information on making and using visual art forms in a variety of cultures outside those known more intimately by most Western art scholars (namely Western cultures, and to some extent perhaps also those of what is conventionally called the East). Although far from comprehensive and primarily concerning present-day cultures and those of the recent past, these data should then of course be taken into account in addressing (or indeed, may serve as an inspiration in asking) the “big questions” that are invited by taking a worldwide perspective on the visual arts. However, rather than being concerned with such questions, the majority of contemporary anthropologists dealing with the visual arts tend to emphasize cultural particularity and the intricacies of local contexts (of which there is no end). Today, “global dimensions” would by and large seem to be of concern to “the anthropology of art” only when considering the role of art forms or material culture in (re)defining relationships between human societies at a time of increased intercultural contacts. Still, in addition to providing rich contextual data on an impressive variety of local art forms, anthropology’s engagement with conceptual, epistemological and methodological issues in dealing with various cultures worldwide may be instrumental in developing theoretical frameworks from which systematically to advance global approaches in examining art, or indeed aesthetics.

So it would seem that whereas Transcultural Aesthetics, in its quality of emphasizing reflections on “aesthetics,” might contribute to World Aesthetics, it might also, in its quality of focusing on “the philosophy of art,” contribute to World Art Studies, by examining the world’s various traditions of (talk about) talk about art. Indeed, the attention to conversation on art by local populations, Onians argues quite explicitly, is part of “a review of the total potential field” that we are in need of as a “necessary first step” in developing World Art Studies.37

For it will be clear that, however in effect over-due, we have only just begun in trying to construct such frameworks. This is a feeling that plainly pervades the views and activities of Onians, who sensibly prefers at this stage to ask questions rather than provide answers. One advantage of this embryonic phase is that in trying to develop frameworks one may profit from discussions taking place within various emerging disciplines that are equally concerned with trying to formulate global approaches to artistic and aesthetic phenomena. We have seen that Onians would seem to consider these various new developments open-mindedly while at the same harbouring a healthy scepticism. The latter applies not only to perspectives that in his view rely too much on the verbal, but also holds for certain aspects of nascent approaches that are more closely related to his New Natural History of Art, approaches such as those associated with

Future One of the things that struck me about Onians’s Art Bulletin article was the fact that it took a “classical” historian of Western art (indeed, one who has published widely on the classical orders in Western architecture) to prominently promote a global perspective on the study of the visual arts. One would have thought that prior to Onians at least some anthropologist (anthropology after all meaning the study of human beings) would have provided the outlines of a systematic approach to examining the visual arts worldwide. But none has – clearly a missed opportunity for anthropology.38

of anthropology as dealing solely with social phenomena (and addresses only a limited number of questions regarding art even within these confines). Also, in the revised edition of Art as Culture. An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art, Westport, Conn., London: Bergin & Garvey, 1999; orig. edition Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1985, Evelyn Payne Hatcher has added two chapters which provide openings to a global perspective on the study of visual art. A similar opening is already found in art historian Arnold Rubin’s posthumously published Art as Technology. The Arts of Africa, Oceania, Native America, and Southern California, completed and edited by Zena Pearlstone; Beverly Hills, CA: Hillcrest Press, 1989, a book that is indeed for various reasons worth reconsidering from the perspective of presentday developments in World Art Studies. The same applies to Scharfstein’s Of Birds, Beasts, and other Artists (ref. note 2).

(adding that, “By documenting the visual choices and responses of our predecessors, the history of art can tell us, as experiments with modern men and women can never do, about the history of visual experience”), ibid., p. 207. 36 Compare H. Gene Blocker, The Aesthetics of Primitive Art, Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993. 37 Onians, 1996, p.206. 38 More recently, Alfred Gell published Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, which has a global scope. Gell, however, entertains a limited conception

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies contemporary evolutionary thinking. It seems nonetheless clear that according to Onians studies of the arts that are in one way or another inspired by evolutionary perspectives (or which take a sociobiological or biosocial approach) will be invaluable in the future development of a broadly conceived World Art Studies.39 Evolutionary and related studies of the arts, not limited to the visual arts, would now seem increasingly to draw the attention of a variety of scholars.40 The confrontation of their models and hypotheses with the data already available on the visual arts in various human cultures will no doubt further the development of systematic global approaches to artistic activity.

addition to whatever differences they may highlight or reveal, such analyses would focus as well on any similarities or regularities that might turn up. In many humanistic circles these days, a focus on – underlying – commonalities in human cultures appears to be regarded as simply not done. In conjunction with the arguably misguided criticism that any “universals” are but Western hegemonistic constructs and projections, one of the reasons for this would seem to be that this is an age, especially in the USA, of emphasizing cultural differences, particularly with reference to groups of people that from the point of view of the West’s self-proclaimed “centre” are considered “peripheral” – or which in an intracultural sense are dubbed, very hegemonistically indeed, “marginal.” (This stress on cultural differences should of course not be interpreted in the old cultural relativist sense of holding that these cultures are different but ultimately equal, but in the contemporary postmodern-PC sense of emphasizing that these cultures are – nominally – equal but above all different.) As another prominent participant of the Williamstown conference observed in commenting on my own paper, by drawing attention to commonalities in aesthetic phenomena worldwide, I was not respecting the “otherness of the other.”42

Onians’s emphasis on art’s grounding in our evolved neuropsychology may well explain some of the opposition his approach encounters among colleagues in his own field, Western art history. Apparently not many scholars in this discipline are willing to accept that humans are in the final analysis biological beings that are the products of evolution (or are prepared at least to concede that humans’ evolutionary history profoundly affects our making, using and perceiving visual art forms – or, for that matter, music, dance, and narrative). But even when the neurobiological basis of artistic activity is de-emphasized, the idea of studying art from a global perspective is not always greeted with enthusiasm among Onians’s colleagues.

When a methodic global perspective is applied to artistic and aesthetic phenomena, one is likely to establish both differences and various types of commonalities. In any systematic approach, an attempt should then be made to account for both diversity and similarity. In the case of cultural differences, this may include the effort to see if these differences result from a phenomenon’s systematic relationships with environmental variables (both sociocultural and physical). One might thus uncover commonalities underlying or engendering differences – structuring principles or recurring processes that like any other regularities one should then try to explain.

Thus, at the Williamstown conference one prominent art historian said something to the effect that the whole idea of World Art Studies is “neither feasible nor desirable,” and his seems not an isolated case. This is not to imply that these Western art historians are against a more “inclusive” art history, one that, on a descriptive level, takes into consideration the visual arts of those cultures that have traditionally been disregarded in the Western discipline of art history (although one may safely assume that a good many Western Art historians only grudgingly accept that the visual creations of “primitives” are deserving of the label “art”).41 Such a “multiregionalistic survey approach,” however, is not the same as trying to develop and apply a methodic worldwide perspective on the arts, one that is more analytically oriented and implies the attempt systematically to raise questions, develop concepts and methods in dealing with these questions, and suggest explanatory models in order to account for any patterns that might surface in one’s examinations.

Be this as it may, the basic idea of casting a global glance at artistic and aesthetic phenomena is of course blatantly simple. It is in fact so simple that, in my experience, educated lay persons find it only natural to expect that academic fields which tackle the phenomena of art and aesthetics from a systematic global perspective actually do exist these days. Well, not quite. (Imagine a Western mammologist announcing that some of her colleagues are proposing that from now on scholars study not only those mammals that roam about or have roamed about in European field and forests, but examine all mammals, from all corners of the world, in the present and the past.)

Indeed, resistance against worldwide analyses of art and aesthetics might well be geared at the prospect that, in

There are no doubt many reasons why the simple idea of advancing systematic global approaches to art and

39

Compare also the “ethological” perspective in Onians’s “’I wonder …’ A Short History of Amazement,” Sight and Insight. Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians, London: Phaidon, 1994, pp.11-33. 40 Some of these analyses are carried out under the heading of Biopoetics; see Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, eds., Biopoetics. Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, New York: Paragon House, 1999. 41 Examples of such more inclusive art history surveys are Hugh Honour and John Fleming, The Visual Arts. A History, New York: Harry Abrams, 1999; 5th edition, and Marilyn Stokstad, Art History, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prenctice Hall, 1999.

42 I was reminded at the time of psychologist and anthropologist Paul Ekman, whom a few extremists in the 1960s even called a “fascist” and, believe it or not, a “racist” for demonstrating that people all over the world tend to express basic emotions by the same facial expressions; he, too, was being accused, besides the point of course, of thus not respecting the particularity of non-Western cultures (cf. Pinker, How the Mind Works [ref. note 19], p.366).

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Wilfried van Damme: World Art Studies and World Aesthetics: Partners in Crime? aesthetics meet with resistance or even hostility among today’s scholars. We have seen that if such approaches include attention to humans’ evolutionary past, then one has to deal with widespread aversion to any form of thinking which suggests that humans are animals, however special in some regards. Also, I have already hinted at the paradigmatic emphasis (particularly in anthropology and cultural studies, but spilling over in art history) on cultural specificity or uniqueness, to which should be added accompanying ideas of cultural solipsism and incommensurability. There are of course other reasons as well, varying from academic overspecialization (which generally discourages asking “big questions”) to preoccupation with ideologically motivated topics (usually reflecting contemporary societal concerns, as interpreted by an intellectual elite), even including intellectual laziness and lack of adventure (often disguised as scholarly prudence and thoroughness). Rather than elaborate on this matter (which, however instructive, is not very constructive), may it suffice here to refer to the philosopher Ben-Ami Scharfstein. During a plenary discussion at another recent conference, Scharfstein made a few succinct remarks in view of the antagonism toward intercultural comparative approaches to art and aesthetics.43 In addition to a more general narrowmindedness, he argued that such antagonism would seem to arise from pure ignorance, fear of the unknown, and the fashionable doctrine of extreme cultural relativism. He concluded that we therefore have to be “ruthless” in advancing a globalist perspective. For all his prudence, John Onians may well agree.

43

Forntiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics, Bologna, October 2000 (for the proceedings, see note 25). Interestingly, compared to the Williamstown conference, the Bologna conference could be characterized as both more multicultural in terms of its participants and less anti-globalist in terms of its participants’ attitude.

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Bearer of a Slightly Different Meaning: The Pilaster as Feminine Presence John Varriano In practice and in theory, the free-standing column has traditionally been the canonical element in the taxonomy of Classical architecture. Although its deepest roots may be grounded in botanical allusion, the column’s remarkable survival though the ages was predicated on its associations with the human body.1 The anthropomorphic analogy manifests itself most explicitly in the caryatid porch of the Erectheum in Athens and the now-lost portico of the Persian slaves in Sparta, monuments commemorating Greek victories in the Persian wars.2 Together, these and a handful of other Greek structures clearly acknowledge gender as an essential human element in their narrative naturalism. Most Greek architects, however, were reluctant to make natural mimesis their aesthetic goal, avoiding anecdotal narrative and distancing themselves from the arts of figural representation. The explicit depiction of the human figure would remain a minor topos in later Roman and Renaissance architecture while the anthropomorphic paradigm grew stronger through its reliance on metaphor.

its prescriptions concerning décor. In our own day, John Onians has elaborated upon these very themes in Bearers of Meaning, proposing in the introduction that classical structures carry psychological as well as formal meanings.3 More than merely suggesting structural stability, ‘posts, pillars, and columns have been critical in resolving other uncertainties and anxieties,’ a point he later goes on to exemplify in his appraisal of the Parthenon. Evoking the zeitgeist of the fourth century, he sees the upright measured character of the building as reflecting the manly strength and discipline of the Athenians themselves. Embodied in the distinctive configuration of its Doric colonnade is the notion of a well-drilled phalanx of soldiers marching in step, with the warriors and the temple of the protective deity together united in preserving the freedom and prosperity of the city. Accordingly, the militaristic masculinity of the Parthenon found its complement in the elegant Ionic temple of Artemis at Ephesus, itself an expression of the effeminacy of the Ionians.

A decisive moment occurred in the sixth century B.C. when, like Eve springing from the side of Adam, the Ionic order emerged from the Doric. Given the extraordinary standardization of Greek architecture, the mark of individual character was quickly established for these two orders, the one stolid and unembellished, the other slender and elegant. Although there are no contemporary sources that tell us how the early Greeks understood or responded to the two orders, the first-century B.C. Roman author Vitruvius is very clear on the matter of anthropomorphic gender distinctions. In his Ten Books of Architecture (IV, 1), Vitruvius affirms that ‘the Doric column exhibits the proportions, strength, and beauty of the body of a man,’ the Ionic ‘the delicacy, adornment, and proportions characteristic of a woman,’ and the Corinthian child of these two ‘the slenderness and prettier adornment of young maidens.’ Earlier, in a discussion of ‘The Fundamental Principles of Architecture’ (I, 2), Vitruvius cites among the necessities of décor that ‘temples of Minerva, Mars, and Hercules be Doric, since the virile strength of these gods makes daintiness inappropriate;’ temples of ‘delicate divinities’ like Venus, Flora, and Proserpine be Corinthian; and temples dedicated to Juno, Diana, Bacchus ‘and the other gods of that kind in keeping with the middle position they hold’ be Ionic.

Perhaps the logical outgrowth to this way of thinking was the eroticization of the classical orders. This is nowhere more obvious than in the erection of colossal phalloi in place of columns throughout the Greek-speaking world.4 It took the imagination of the Renaissance to carry the notion forward to the point that carnal desire became the motive that attracted Poliphilo, the hero of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, to the many classical buildings he encountered in his pursuit of the elusive Polia.5 At the beginning of the book, ‘a sweetly composed’ columnar portico brings his innamorata to mind, he eventually finds her in the Corinthian Temple of Venus Physizoa, and their love is finally consummated before the heptagonal Fountain of Venus on the island of Cythera. For the sensitive Poliphilo, the experience of architecture is purely phenomenological and its seductive powers are as magical as they are transformative.

3

J. Onians, Bearers of Meaning, The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988. 4 Hersey, The Lost Meaning, p. 52; W. Burkert, Greek Religion, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1985, pp.527-292. By the end of the Republican period, a number of small individual columns had been erected throughout the Roman Forum in commemoration of various male victories or achievements, a notion subsequently monumentalized in the colossal columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. 5 The Hypnerotomachia was first published in Venice in 1499 in an edition illustrated with 172 woodcuts. Two recent studies are especially relevant to the discussion here: A. Perez-Gomez, ‘The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning,’ in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, V. Hart & P. Hicks eds., New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1998, pp.86-104; and R. Stewering, ‘Architectural Representations in the Hyperotomachia Poliphili (Aldus Manutius, 1499)’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 59 (2000) no. 1, pp.6-25.

Architectural treatises since the Renaissance have accepted this basic paradigm even as they questioned the limits of 1

Writing in the second century A.D., Pausanias described the first Temple of Apollo at Delphi as being a hut made of laurel trees; see G. Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, Cambridge & London, The MIT Press, 1988, p.14. 2 J. Rykwert, The Dancing Column; On Order in Architecture, Cambridge & London, The MIT Press, 1996, pp.129-138, and Hersey, The Lost Meaning, pp.69-75.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies functional or clear iconographical importance, they lent an air of civility and graceful finish to the structures they adorned. The presence of pilasters on both the exterior and interior of the Ara Pacis suggest their further association with peace and prosperity just as the robust columns and half-columns of triumphal arches are expressive of more bellicose ideals.

The libidinous associations of the classical orders continued into the seventeenth century where they occasionally provoked moral censure among Puritan critics like Sir Henry Wotton whose 1624 Elements of Architecture attributed a rather different persona to the Corinthian order than the ‘virginal’ one adduced by Vitruvius. In his eyes, the order was ‘lasciviously decked like a Curtezan,’ a natural sign of the slack morals of ancient Corinth itself.6 Few modern critics- and, to his credit, not John Onians- have advanced this allusion further, although Tzonis and Lefaivre have gone so far as to suggest that ‘if one leans against a column on a summer afternoon, it really can make the heart quiver, the skin tighten, the cheeks flush, breathing quicken.’7

Pilasters also proliferate in later Roman Imperial architecture as columnar consorts in important sacred or commemorative structures. Such pilaster ‘responds,’ as they are known, still mitigate the polemical or ponderous tone of a monumental structure while serving the more practical function of orienting the columns to the wall behind. On the Arch of Constantine, for example (fig.1), the pilasters draw the columns into axial alignment, playing a role in the overall composition that is at once steadying and deferential.

Perhaps by the very nature of the corporal analogy, architectural theorists from the time of Vitruvius have always focused their discussion of the orders on the freestanding column as the true embodiment of the classical system. When pilasters are mentioned, which is rare, they are usually described with little or no concern for their expressive or iconographic efficacy. Vitruvius himself acknowledges their existence in only two circumstances, the first serving as antae on the exterior of very small temples or facing the cella walls on the inside of larger ones (III, 2), or in even more limited roles in private houses (VI, 7). The second citation comes in his account of the Basilica at Fano, a building whose design he credits to himself (V, I). In this now-lost structure Vitruvius has the pilaster (which he calls the parastatica) playing a suitably subordinate role, relegated to a position inside the aisles, well behind and smaller than the colossal columns that dominate the atrium.

Given the presumption of anthropomorphism underlying the classical orders, one can only wonder if ancient viewers were inclined to view column and pilaster relationships as analogous to the roles of gender. The basis of the analogy would be the apparent differences in physical size and strength as well as contemporary standards of social behavior expected of men and women.9 Vitruvius says nothing about this, however, and neither do Renaissance theorists who develop his essential ideas about décor. Architectural treatises from Alberti to Palladio typically speak of pilasters only in technical terms, never as bearers of any significant expressive meaning. Their latent ‘femininity’ would not be acknowledged until the time came that the dominant cultural sensibility itself turned feminine.

The pilaster owed what importance it had in the ancient world to the Roman propensity for walled structures that could be stylishly embellished but inexpensively constructed. In Vitruvius’s own day- he retired about 33 B.C.- pilasters had already become a popular, if unremarkable, form of architectural ‘decoration,’ but by the second century A.D. they occasionally came to be handled with real creativity. The articulation of paneled pilasters on the curved exterior walls of the Tomb of Philopappos in Athens of 116 A.D. was, in fact, deeply prophetic of their use many centuries later in the Rococo period.8 More conspicuous in antiquity, however, were the canonically correct pilasters that adorned the upper stories of secular buildings like the Flavian amphitheater and the Markets of Trajan in Rome. While these were of no

Renaissance and Baroque architects, while all but ignoring the pilaster in theory, often found a place for it in practice. Even after Alberti confirmed the column as the main ornament of architecture in his Ten Books of Architecture (completed before 1452), he relied exclusively on the pilaster in each of his subsequent commissions. The logic of doing so is evident on the facades of Palazzo Rucellai, San Sebastiano and Sant’Andrea. That logic, as Rudolf Wittkower was the first to point out, was based on Alberti’s recognition of the inherent incompatibility of the three-dimensional column with the flat facades of most Renaissance buildings.10 The pilaster must have struck Alberti as the only effective compromise between the ideals of classicism and the conventions of modern construction.

6

Sir Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, London: John Bill, 1624, p.232. See also, V. Hart, ‘From Virgin to Courtesan in Early English Vitruvian Books,’ in Paper Palaces, pp.297-318, especially pp.314-15. 7 A. Tzonis & L. Lefaivre, Classical Architecture, The Poetics of Order, Cambridge & London, The MIT Press, 1986, p.37, where it is also suggested that the very nomenclature of the classical genera indicate a ‘certain degree of erotic content,’ with names like ovolo and apophyge, not to mention gola and Lesbian cymation. 8 The tomb is illustrated by W. L. MacDonald, The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Vol. II, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1986, fig. 132.

To judge from the frequency with which pilasters were applied to the fronts of Renaissance buildings, the disjunction between theory and practice was considerable. In addition to the reasons Alberti failed to articulate in his 9

N. B. Kampen, ‘Gender Theory in Roman Art,’ in I Claudia, Women in Ancient Rome, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, 1996, pp.14-25. R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, New York, Random House, 1965, pp.33-73.

10

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separatist vision in another book, Le Trésor de la cité des dames, in which she went on to reaffirm a social order in which women remained subordinate to men while in all modesty still performing indispensable roles in society.13

treatise, there may have been other advantages as well. Pilasters cost less than their columnar brethren, and applied to buildings in an urban setting, better preserved the planar contours of existing Medieval and Renaissance streetfronts. This is nowhere more evident than in the work of Palladio, who consistently adjusted the projection of the orders to suit site conditions, employing pilasters principally on the facades of palazzi fronting the narrow streets of Vicenza.

The analogy between the reticent nature of classical pilasters and the ideal traits of women seems to have been acknowledged in painted representations of architecture long before it was acknowledged in words. As Renaissance painting developed, images of the Virgin increasingly came to include pilasters rather than columns when architectural settings were called for. The association with domestic virtue was evidently the link that joined the two in pictures like Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Virgin in Santa Maria Novella or Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi in Washington. The presence of pilasters in both works affirms the mildness and meekness of the Marian archetype. Conversely, scenes depicting more active, masculine behavior such as Ghirlandaio’s adjacent Massacre of the Innocents, or subjects carrying polemical secondary messages like Titian’s Pesaro Madonna, were provided with columnar furnishings. Where both columns and pilasters appear in the same sacred space, as in Mantegna’s S. Zeno Altarpiece or Giovanni Bellini’s S. Zaccaria Altarpiece, the pilasters remain in the chamber of the Virgin while the columns form part of the frame that extends into the space of the spectator. Accordingly, one of the elements that makes Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck so chilling is the presence of the prominent colonnade in the picture’s background.14

The application of the classical orders to the exteriors of domestic buildings presented a special challenge to architects and patrons in Renaissance Italy. For the most part, the precedents for all’antica design comprised public buildings with few surviving prototypes for private construction.11 Cosimo de’Medici’s legendary rejection of Brunelleschi’s lost model for the family palace at S. Lorenzo may never be explained, but the likely presence of the orders may well have fueled his suspicion that the design was, in the words of Vasari, ‘too grand and sumptuous.’ The absence of orders on the exterior of the Medici palace subsequently built by Michelozzo- a building whose design was to become the standard in Florence- suggests the possible discomfort that attended the use of such forms in domestic architecture. When Alberti, to the contrary, adopted a classical vocabulary for the façade of Palazzo Rucellai, it was not the column but the pilaster that he chose for the job. His preference for the pilaster may reflect his sense of decorum as much as his respect for the planarity of the wall to which it was attached. To this way of thinking, the pilaster, being the most discreet expression of the orders, would give the least offense were questions of propriety to be raised. Whatever Alberti’s rationale may have been, the pilasters on the Rucellai façade did little to change the course of Florentine palace architecture. Significantly though, Alberti’s classicizing vision did leave its imprint on the facades of the private palazzi depicted in paintings of the ‘ideal city’ now in Urbino, Baltimore, and Berlin.12

The pilaster’s essential persona was not exclusively feminine, however, any more than the choice of order itself was always consistent with gender décor. This is nowhere more evident than in Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanze of the Vatican, where the display of the orders reflects the nature of the subjects depicted.15 The temple in the Expulsion of Heliodorus bristles with Corinthian columns, the order emblematic of material extravagance and the columns consonant with the forceful nature of the punitive theme. The architecture of The School of Athens, in contrast, displays the manly Doric but in pilaster form, as if to suggest not effeminacy but restraint and civility.

Although there is no direct evidence that the pilastercolumn relationship sounded metaphorical reverberations related to the Renaissance consciousness of gender, the notion of a feminized architecture on some level already existed. The construction of a ‘city of women’ was the main theme of Le Livre de la cité des dames composed in 1404-05 by the Italian-born Christine de Pizan. While the author is neither precise in her description of individual buildings nor especially conscious of architectural iconography, Reason and Rectitude are her architects and flamboyant ornament is everywhere viewed with suspicion. A few years later, Christine tempered this

Whether fashioned of masonry or paint, the orders were rarely rendered in unconventional ways during the Renaissance. Variant strains only appear in less conspicuous places, the traditional realm of the pilaster. Most of these involve shafts embellished with grottesche or other forms of all’antica relief, not the recasting of the genera in uncanonical mutations. But with time, pilaster mutations did occur, and ironically, these originate with Donato Bramante, the architect who did the most to revive the ideal virility of the free-standing column after its

11

See C. L. Frommel, ‘Living all'antica: Palaces and Villas from Brunelleschi to Bramante,’ in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, The Representation of Architecture, H. A. Millon & V. M. Lampugnani eds., Milan, Bompiani, 1994, pp.182-203. 12 R. Krautheimer, ‘The Panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin Reconsidered,’ in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, pp.233-57, dates the panels to the 1470s, more than a decade after Palazzo Rucellai was begun.

13

M. L. King, Women of the Renaissance, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, p.223ff. 14 The order of columns in the Madonna of the Long Neck is Doric as well, introducing an apparent double discrepancy in gender decor that makes the picture even more disquieting. 15 See Onians, Bearers of Meaning, p.248ff. on the choice of the orders.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies came to the use of columns, disposing them in fairly standard form throughout his career.18 But the legacy of Borromini, paradoxically, was both spatial (particularly in northern Italy and Central Europe) and planar, with his intricately worked wall treatments providing subsequent generations of architects with inspiration for experiments of their own.

renunciation (one might even say emasculation) by Alberti. He did this on the drum of the Tempietto by transforming the order into simple wall strips or lesene whose relief is, in turn, further reduced by paneled excisions, a motif already known in the ancient world, but forgotten in the centuries that followed. In the upper story of the Belvedere courtyard, Bramante introduced a second innovation when he grafted conventional pilasters over simple lesene to create a ‘bundled’ order, giving texture and variety to a long and otherwise monotonous elevation.

The pilaster gained special favor in the eighteenth century as its elegant yet self-effacing demeanor proved to be perfectly consonant with the changing values of secular and domestic life. Modestly-scaled residential buildings that in the past would have remained unembellished were suddenly afforded stylish facades thanks, in good part, to the rediscovery of stucco as a creative medium. Stucco already had played a similar role in late antiquity but had fallen out of favor during the middle ages and Renaissance. Inexpensive and infinitely flexible, it was Borromini’s revival of the medium that made some of his own caprices possible- one thinks of S. San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, for example- and which spurred Rococo architects in Italy and France in the following century.

Bramante’s modest innovations hardly challenged the essential rules of classical architecture and most sixteenthcentury architects were even more tentative in modifying the orders. Practice went hand in hand with theory as the treatises of Serlio, Vignola, Palladio and others systematically codified regole that never existed in antiquity. Only Michelangelo dared to rethink the basic premises of the classical paradigm, doing so, not surprisingly, with pilasters relegated to fairly discreet locations. The Laurentian Library vestibule, the upper courtyard windows of Palazzo Farnese, and the Porta Pia offer not the refinements of Bramante but invenzione which in Ackerman’s words, are ‘bizarre variations [reflecting] an anti-classical spirit surely calculated to shock the academicians.’16 Nevertheless, for major public commissions like the Capitoline Hill complex or St. Peter’s, Michelangelo adhered to convention, disposing pilasters and columns alike with classical purity.

A turning point of sorts came in the late 1720s with the construction of the Piazza di S. Ignazio in Rome, built by the Jesuits not for institutional purposes but as rental housing. Filippo Raguzzini’s architectural solution for what are probably the first multi-family apartment houses in Rome is spatially fascinating, eschewing as it does any semblance of axial planning or any deference to the ponderous church of S. Ignazio which it faces.19 Raguzzini further transformed the clusters of houses from the blocklike isole of traditional vernacular architecture into a pattern of gracefully arranged, gently curving wall planes trimmed with thin layers of stucco ornament. The etymology of this ornament originates with the classical pilaster, here attenuated and reduced to delicate wall bands that reinforce the edges of the shifting planes.

Michelangelo’s architectural novelties played a key role in establishing the permissive atmosphere in which Francesco Borromini would, in the next century, create even freer variations on the pilaster order. In two of Borromini’s commissions the results were public, conspicuously visible on the facades of Oratorian and Jesuit religious establishments in Rome. The Oratory of S. Filippo Neri (fig.2) was the seminal work of the two for it was there that Borromini first broke hierarchical distinctions by arranging pilasters as part of the overall embellishment of the wall rather than as a discreet order to which the wall defers. The Oratory façade, in effect, ‘deconstructs’ the pilaster in two ways, initially by leaving most of its Composite capital uncarved, and then by layering the surrounding wall planes so as to deprive the pilaster of its customary distinguishing relief.17 A decade later at the Collegio di Propaganda Fide, Borromini devalued the giant order of pilasters even further, displacing their classical genera and understating their presence relative to the oversized and fanciful window surrounds that press against them. Like Michelangelo, Borromini was more conservative when it

Few architects or patrons had the imagination or the means to emulate the Piazza S. Ignazio, but on a lesser scale, numerous individual case in Settecento Rome came to acquire graceful Rococo facades decorated with sprightly door and window surrounds and corners accented with delicate lesene. Relatively inexpensive to construct, such properties could be let for higher rents, a circumstance documented for apartments in the Piazza S. Ignazio and almost certainly a factor in the proliferation of the style elsewhere.20 Economic incentives may have played a certain role in the popularization of the pilaster and its lesser derivatives in Rome, but the delicacy of the order, so unlike the robust columnar constructions of the seventeenth century, was

16 J. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, London, A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1961, p.85. 17 However, In his Opus Architectonicum Borromini includes an illustration that shows a façade embellished with half-columns on the central bays of the upper story and lower-story capitals that are slightly more elaborated than those that were put in place. The elimination of such ornaments, Borromini explains in his text, was to ensure deference to the adjacent façade of the Chiesa Nuova, see Opus Architectonicum, Rome, Giannini, 1725, Pl.V & p.11).

18 However, one contemporary critic, Fioravante Martinelli, did note that the Doric columns of the Propaganda facade were without bases see, A. Blunt, Borromini Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1979, p.194. 19 D. M. Habel, ‘Piazza S. Ignazio, Rome, in the 17th and 18th Centuries,’ Architettura, 11 (1981) pp.31-65, especially p.61ff. 20 Habel, ‘Piazza S. Ignazio,’ p.62 & n.120.

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like J.-F. Blondel and T.-N. Loyer repeatedly use the word masculin to characterize the simplicity and purity of the column, leaving little doubt as to the gender of the ‘idle fancies’ and ‘frivolous ornaments’ of the recent past.26 Those frivolous fancies were, not surprisingly, personified by the pilaster- that ‘feeble idea of the column’- as the critic N.-M. Potain described it in his 1767 Traité des Ordres d'Architecture. The so-called ‘battle against the pilaster,’ as another critic put it, had by then become tied up with larger issues.27 If the Neo-classical preference for the column had begun as a matter of bon goût, it was sustained by the increasing passions for antiquity and cultural politics. By the end of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic ideals of the ancien régime were so closely associated with female patronage and the ‘unnatural’ influence of women that a program of ‘deactivated femininity’ became part of the revolutionary ideology itself.28 And it was then that the free-standing column came into its own as the stone embodiment of the new rational ideals. One need only look at Gabriel’s Petit Trianon at Versailles of the mid-1760s to understand how quickly and in which direction the stylistic winds had shifted. Elsewhere in Europe, the politics may have been different but the predilection for classical correctness was the same.

well attuned to the sensibility of the age itself. 1725, the year planning of Piazza S. Ignazio began, was the year Vivaldi wrote The Four Seasons, epitomizing the concept of continuo-homophony in musical composition. Rococo architecture shared some of the texture of contemporary music, particularly in its emphasis on a single melody relieved with incidental counterpoint.21 Architectural practice in France in the first half of the eighteenth century followed similar patterns, particularly in the decoration of private interiors. When the classical orders were called for, it was usually the pilaster that was found most acceptable, and then often ‘deconstructed’ and made part of a pattern of delicate wall paneling. Architects of the Régence and early Style Louis XV reveled in twodimensional designs whose classical origins are all but subsumed into complex decorative patterns. Jean Aubert’s interior of the Petit Château at Chantilly and Nicholas Pineau’s for the Hôtel de Maisons in Paris (fig.3) illustrate the practice perfectly. The critic Charles-Nicholas Cochin, writing satirically in Mercure de France in 1755, proudly acknowledged the extent to which ‘we have banished columns, or very nearly so...[and] we have accepted pilasters up to a certain point, that is to say whenever we have been able to denaturalize them by amusing capitals.’22

That the lowly pilaster could be elevated to so high a level of political and cultural concern in eighteenth-century France is an indication of the charged meanings it carried in Enlightenment thinking. The essential femininity of its demure personality had always been there, but it remained unrecognized until there came an age that was more conscious, and more wary, of the social and cultural implications that such architectural distinctions could bring to bear.

Notions of gender permeated the rhetorical and philological foundations of Italian art criticism since Michelangelo was said to have offhandedly dismissed Flemish oil painting as ‘womanly.’23 The trend intensified in the Baroque and Rococo periods, and as Paul Mattick has pointed out, ‘a striking feature of a number of central texts of eighteenth-century aesthetics is the use of descriptive terms associated at the time with masculine and feminine characters to classify art objects and types of such objects.’24 Although no one at the time seems to have designated the architectural fashions of the Régence and Rococo eras as feminine per se, a wealth of circumstantial evidence leaves little doubt that the sensibility of the period was generally understood in gendered terms. ‘Delicacy’ of taste, a key element in early eighteenthcentury aesthetics, is linked with ‘feminine beauty’ in Johnson's Dictionary (1747), although to be sure, it was a term subject to shifting and nuanced usage.25 Curiously, it was only in retrospect that gender assignments were applied to French Rococo architecture. Writing in the 1760s, early proponents of Neo-Classicism 21

M. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, New York, W. W. Norton, 1947. 22 S. Eriksen, Early Neo-Classicism in France, London, Faber & Faber, 1974, Appendix III, p.238f. 23 P. Sohm, ‘Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia’, Renaissance Quarterly, 84 (1995), pp.759-808, esp.pp.773f. 24 P. Mattick, ‘Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Constitution of Art,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (1990), pp.293-303. 25 On Johnson's equation of ‘delicacy of taste’ with feminine beauty, see G. Perry & M. Rossington eds., Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, Manchester & New York, Manchester University Press, 1994, Introduction, pp.1-3.

26

The remarks of Blondel and Loyer are transcribed by Eriksen, Early Neo-Classicism, Appendices IV & V, pp.255-66. Potain’s remark is transcribed by W. Hermann, Laugier and Eighteenth-Century French Theory, London, A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1962, p.247, where the expression ‘la guerre contre le pilastre’ is also excerpted from a letter of Louis Avril dated 1759. 28 On the relationship between gender and ideology in this period and related notions of ‘deactivated femininity,’ see A. Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, London, Thames & Hudson), 1997, passim. 27

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Fig.1. Arch of Constantine, Rome. (Author’s Photo)

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John Varriano: Bearer of a Slightly Different Meaning: The Pilaster as Feminine Presence

Fig.2. Oratory of S. Filippo Neri, Rome, façade. (From Borromini, Opus Architectonicum)

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Fig.3. Hôtel de Maisons, Paris, Salle de Compagnie. (From Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo)

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Finding Filarete: the Two Versions of the libro architettonico Valentina Vulpi

Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico does not fit well amongst other texts on the theory and practice of architecture. In comparison with earlier architectural writings − namely Vitruvius’ De architectura and Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria − Filarete’s book is very different in appearance, being written in vernacular Italian rather than Latin, in dialogue form rather than monologue, in 24 books rather than ten, and being illustrated. However, the most striking difference is that it has a narrative structure, and indeed a remarkably complicated one. The text covers not only architectural but also social, ethical, political and cultural issues relating to fifteenth-century Italy, and the content is conditioned palpably and intimately by the specific context of its creation.

the distinctive structure and unfinished state of the libro, together with helping to clarify the reasons for its creation. The best copy of the libro architettonico is the manuscript belonging to the Medici family, preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence (codex magliabechianus II.I.140).3 It can be considered the most complete example of the known manuscripts of the libro4 and is constituted by 192 large folios written on both leaves, divided into 25 books. Books One to Twenty-One constitute what is commonly considered the main body of Filarete’s work. Books Twenty-Two to Twenty-Four present a tract on the visual arts. In 1464 Filarete rededicated his book to Piero de’ Medici adding Book Twenty-Five, which deals specifically with the patronage of the Medici family both in Tuscany and in Milan. Apart from the last four books contained in the codex magliabechianus, it has always been assumed that the first twenty-one books of the libro architettonico were conceived by Filarete as a unitary project. In contesting this assumption, this paper is intended to present an assessment of the reasons why Filarete decided to become a writer and of the aspirations and hopes that he might have attached to his literary efforts. To this end it is necessary to examine briefly the content of the libro architettonico.

The difficulty of placing Filarete’s text within the same category as more canonical architectural writings has often led to its dismissal tout court. Alternatively, the attention of scholars has been directed mainly to topics of strictly architectural or art-historical interest. This has produced thorough examinations of some aspects, but often the many other themes that run through the libro architettonico have been left in the background or dismissed as futile.1 In particular, only few scholars have tried to place the libro within its specific context or have considered the reasons lying behind its creation.2

The dedication to Francesco Sforza5 celebrates him as a general and a ruler, while stressing the importance of practising architecture for true princes. In particular, Averlino emphasises the point that to build is not only a pleasure but also the duty of a good ruler, because his architectural activity has an impact on his subjects.6 From the dedication, it is possible to argue that for his fictional buildings Filarete expected an impact equivalent to that achievable through real ones. The general message for Francesco Sforza is that to practice architecture, whether fictional or real, is good and will help enhance his princely image.

In order to grasp its complexity, one must accept and analyse its narrative structure and the historical context within which the libro was written, as well as study it for what it can teach us of artistic practice generally. In particular, its significance cannot be separated from its specific meanings for the author and for its principal intended recipient, Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan. In this paper, I intend to show how a consideration of the text in its entirety and of the situations contingent to Filarete, facilitate the formulation of a new hypothesis that explains

The narrative starts at a banquet, where a group of noblemen are discussing the art of building. One of them says that, in his opinion, architecture is not as noble as it is thought to be and that knowledge of its theoretical

1

The only monograph on Antonio Averlino’s artistic career is still that by Lazzaroni, M., & Muñoz, A., Filarete scultore e architetto del secolo XV, Rome, 1908. For the libro architettonico, of great importance are von Oettingen, W. ed., Antonio Averlino Filarete’s Tractat über die Baukunst nebst seinen Büchern von der Zeichenkunst und den Bauten der Medici, Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte, N. F., III, Wien 1890; Tigler, P., Die Architekturtheorie des Filaretes, Berlin, 1963 and the introductions and footnotes in the English and Italian editions of the text: Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, facsimile of Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Ms Magliabecchianus II, IV, 140, transl. & intro. by John R. Spencer, 2 vols., New Haven & London, 1965; Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete Trattato di architettura, Anna Maria Finoli & Liliana Grassi (eds.), intro. & footnotes by L. Grassi, 2 vols., Milan 1967. 2 John Onians’ works on the libro architettonico are particularly important exceptions, see: “Alberti and Φιλαρετη. A Study in Their Sources”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 34 (1971), pp.96-114; “Filarete and the ‘qualità’: architectural and social”, Arte Lombarda, 38-39 (1973), pp.116-28; Bearers of Meaning. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Cambridge & New Jersey 1988, esp. pp.158-70.

3

All the references to Filarete’s text in this essay are to this manuscript. The Italian text is that established in Trattato di architettura Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967. 4 For the manuscripts and stemma codicum of the libro architettonico see Trattato di architettura, Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967, pp.CVII-CXXIX. 5 The codex magliabechianus opens with a dedication to Piero de’ Medici. However, the original dedication to Francesco Sforza can be inferred from other manuscripts and has been reconstructed in Trattato di architettura Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967, p.8, n.1. 6 Filarete was probably referring to the classical theory of Magnificence for which the public use of private wealth showed a lord’s moral aptitude to rule. The reward for practising Magnificence is glory or Fame, the celebration of the greatness of an individual in the present and future.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies principles is not essential for its practice. Another gentleman denies these points and, admitting his limited knowledge, expresses the desire to know more about architecture and its origins (b.i, f.1v). Responding to this ‘call’ the narrator, being the only practitioner of architecture present, refers the noble guests to his own writings on architecture. He divides the content of his book into three parts. In the first, he will consider the origin of measures and of buildings, their construction and maintenance, what knowledge is required by the proper architect and how he should be rewarded. This will be followed by the construction of a whole city, including the choice of its site and its layout, so that it will be beautiful and enduring. In the third part, he will reconstruct ancient buildings, which will make clear that the architecture of antiquity was better than that of the present, and that it should be revived.7

which are fortified. Forts built at strategic points further assure the security of the territory. Thus by Book Thirteen Sforzinda is basically complete: its layout, its major public and sacred buildings and even most of its private buildings are ready; in addition, it is furnished with magnificent buildings inspired by those of ancient Rome, and its territory is protected. Parallel to theoretical discussions and the building of the city, Averlino also develops other issues. Amongst the most important are discussions of the role of the architect and of the relationship between artists and patrons; the condemnation of ‘modern’ (i.e. Gothic) architecture and the praise of contemporary Tuscan architecture, for Averlino truly based on that of antiquity; and the architect’s efforts to convince his lord of the superiority of antique over modern architecture. The descriptions of trips around the fictional territory of Sforzinda and of various other events provide Filarete’s readers with amusing digressions from the strictly architectural discourse.

In the first two books, the narrator-architect discusses a series of theoretical issues and the basics of architecture. This convinces his lord, a thinly disguised Francesco Sforza, to employ him to build a whole city, significantly called Sforzinda, through which the principles argued by his architect can be put into practice. In the following books, Sforzinda takes shape in front of the readers’ eyes. In Books Two to Four, together with more theoretical issues, there are described the necessary preparations for the building of a city: from the choice of the appropriate site, to materials, to complicated foundation rituals to ensure security, longevity and prosperity for the city and its inhabitants. The first architectural structures to be erected are the fortifications: the city-walls and especially the Rocca built in Book Six. At the end of this book the son and heir of the lord becomes a pupil of the architect. Thus, another member of the Sforza family – the lord’s son clearly recalls Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the heir of Francesco − appears in a leading role. The following three books present a mix of theory and practice and are dedicated to the Cathedral and the Lord’s Palace, the most important buildings of Sforzinda. In Book Ten Sforzinda’s major public buildings, its other churches and its hospital are built, the latter based on Filarete’s own Ospedale Maggiore of Milan. These are followed by the building of private residences in the city distinguished according to the social status of their inhabitants. Then, in Book Twelve the architect satisfies the prince’s pressing request to create edifices inspired by those of antiquity, erecting a theatre and two circuses for the city, and in Book Thirteen they build four bridges, also inspired by Roman ones, some of

During one of these trips a suitable site for a harbour is discovered, where the lord also decides to build a coastal city. Book Fourteen starts with the building of this new city, which is entirely entrusted to the architect and the young prince. The layout is closely related to that of Sforzinda and work proceeds with the same improbable ease and speed (ff.101v-102r). However, during the digging of the foundation for the city walls some ruins and a stone box are discovered. The box contains various precious objects and a book covered in gold and written in Greek (f.101v), which is translated by the lord’s poet. The book had been written and left to posterity by a mythical King Zogalia with the intent of preserving the memory of his father Scofrance, of the kingdom that he had acquired thanks to his military skills and virtue, and of the magnificent city he had built. The latter, called Plusiapolis (Greek for ‘rich city’) had existed on the same site as the city of the harbour and its buildings were described and illustrated in the book. The lord decides to rebuild the city of Plusiapolis in all its opulent magnificence following the Golden Book ad litteram. From this point onwards, there is a double narrative: one of the past, described in the ancient book, and one of the present. However, the Golden Book presents many similarities with the events narrated in the first 13 books of the libro architettonico. Not only does it describe a magnificent city but also the protagonists are similar. In this fictional version of an already fictional narrative the characters are again alter egos of the real ones: a valiant architect, whose name is Onitoan Nolivera (anagram of Antonio Averlino), a generous and magnanimous prince, Scofrance (Francesco), and his noble son and heir, King Zogalia (Galiazo). In addition, in Book Fourteen Filarete provides a condensed but faithful history of Francesco Sforza and his father Muzio Attendoli, under the disguise of the royal dynasty celebrated in the Golden Book (ff. 103v-104v, 105v). For the Sforza and for himself, Filarete invents ancient doubles who were authors of wonderful

7

b.i, f.2r La prima conterrà l’origine delle misure e così dello edifizio, e donde derivò, e come si debbe mantenere, e delle cose opportune per esso dificio; e così quello s’appartiene di sapere a chi vuole edificare per essere buono architetto, e quello ancora contro ad esso si dee osservare...La seconda conterrà il modo e la edificazione a chi volesse fare una città, e in che sito e in che modo deono essere scompartiti gli edifizii e le piazze e le vie, a volere che fusse bella e buona e perpetua secondo il corso naturale...Nella terza e ultima parte conterrà di fare varie forme d’edifizii secondo che anticamente s’usava, e ancora alcune cose da noi trovate e anche dalli antichi imparate, che oggi dì sono quasi perdute e abbandonate. E per ragioni s’intenderà che anticamente si facevano più degni edifizii che ora non si fanno.

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architecture, but are nonetheless always fully recognizable as the real ones. From now on, the spatio-temporal movements from one dimension to the other are continuous, and often confused, with Filarete being able to create in his ideal present amazing buildings that emulate those described in the Golden Book, modelled on his own vision of antique architecture. It is through these ‘antique’ buildings that the lord of Sforzinda is finally convinced of the superiority of antique over modern architecture, and promises to mend his ways from then onwards (b.xvi, f.128v). An important role is also given to the lord’s poet, Iscofrance Notilento who, as the translator of the Golden Book, accompanies the architect and his lords for the remaining books of the libro. Behind him is easily recognizable Francesco Filelfo da Tolentino, the famous humanist and Greek scholar at the court of Milan, and close friend of Filarete.

historical source for courtly life in fifteenth century Lombardy; and so on. Considering the multiplicity of strands, it seems clear that Filarete’s buildings cannot be studied in isolation – in other words, without reference to the context of the libro. It has usually been assumed that the long libro architettonico was conceived as a unitary project, albeit with the subsequent addition of the three books on visual arts and the last one for the Medici. Filarete has often been criticised for poor syntax, erratic punctuation and the popular tone of his writing. Surprisingly though, it has not seemed incongruous that he was able to create and sustain an extremely sophisticated plot for the equivalent of 600 modern pages. While his literary efforts should be given greater recognition, I would nevertheless like to suggest that when Filarete started the libro, possibly around 14581459, the notion of Plusiapolis and, more generally, the last nine to ten books of the first 21 contained in the text known today, did not form part of his project. In my opinion, they were conceived and added at a later stage in an attempt to impress Francesco Sforza and his entourage, so that Filarete could recover his position in the court, which was growing increasingly precarious. This hypothesis is suggested primarily by the difference in tone and content between the first 13 books and the following eight, but is also supported by a series of discrepancies in the actual text. For the sake of clarity, I shall hereafter refer to the first 13 books as the first part of the libro architettonico and the following eight books as the second part. I shall also refer to a first and a second version of the text, in order to differentiate the state of the text before and after the decision to change radically the original plan.

In the following books up to the end of Book Twenty-One, various edifices of Plusiapolis are ‘rebuilt’, many of which are quite closely related to those already built in Sforzinda, while in this city too work continues on new buildings and various works of public utility. From Book Seventeen onwards, great attention is paid to the economic and social aspects of Sforzinda. Previously, in the first 13 books of the treatise, Filarete has written about the political and commercial activities of the city, and more specific aspects such as the organisation of the guilds and the duties of cities’ administrators, but he now becomes obsessed with political and social organisation. The narrative ends abruptly in Book Twenty-One, without a proper conclusion to either Sforzinda or Plusiapolis. Books Twenty-Two to Twenty-Four are only weakly connected to the rest of the libro. According to the text, Filarete wrote these books in response to an explicit request from the young prince and it has been suggested that they were really written for Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s artistic education.8 They are heavily based on Alberti’s Della pittura, of which they are a simplified version with more concrete examples. As already mentioned, Book Twenty-Five was added when Filarete rededicated the libro architettonico to Piero de’ Medici.

Differences in Content between the First and Second Part of the libro If one considers the three aims of the libro architettonico proposed by Filarete in the First Book,9 it is evident that they have almost entirely been achieved by Book Thirteen. By then he has considered the theoretical arguments mentioned, constructed a whole city, and rebuilt ancient buildings such as the circuses, the theatre and the bridges of Sforzinda. He has also built at least one of each of the buildings that he lists in Book Two, except for private buildings in the countryside.10 Despite the radical differences in structure, up to Book Thirteen the libro architettonico is substantially similar in content to the writings of Vitruvius and Alberti, in that it is meant to be a comprehensive exposition on architecture. Sforzinda and its buildings are realistic, in the sense that they could potentially be built in fifteenth century Italy (the Hospital was actually built), and are in fact much closer to the real

Thus in the first 21 books the libro presents three main stories relating to architecture: that of the architect, whose skill and inventiveness are celebrated; that of his patron, who is ‘awoken’ to the appreciation of architecture inspired by that of antiquity; and that of his son, who, having been properly educated by the architect, becomes a convinced follower of building ‘all’antica’. At the same time, there are three interleaved spatio-temporal levels: the historical level of Milan and the Sforza court, the ideal dimension of Sforzinda, and the archaic world of Plusiapolis. But the libro architettonico can also be read as a romance, or conversely as an architectural handbook; it can be used as a catalogue of buildings and of figurative motifs; as a biography of Antonio Averlino; as an

9

See above note 7. In b.ii, ff.9v-11r Filarete presents an exhaustive and coherent taxonomy of building types and explains his categorisation. Buildings are divided into three main categories or spezie ─ Public, Private and Sacred ─ and within each category are given a different degree of importance according to their function and the status of their inhabitants. To this, Filarete adds examples of buildings in each category effectively listing almost all the edifices that he will then build in Sforzinda. 10

8

Gambuti, A., “I libri del disegno: Filarete e l’educazione artistica di Galeazzo Maria Sforza”, Arte Lombarda, 38-39 (1973), pp.133-43.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies architecture of the time than some of Alberti’s buildings.11 What is unrealistic are the envisaged logistics, including the speed of the construction and the scale of the human and economic resources at the disposal of the architect. However, the narrative form and the author’s desire to celebrate Francesco Sforza determine these features. Although Sforzinda is an ideal city realised through unrealistic means, it is geared to the needs of a fifteenth century city and in many respects is an idealisation of contemporary Milan.12 Moreover, the other themes that emerge throughout the first part are mainly related to architecture, from the education of the patron’s taste, and the relationship between architect and patron, to the superiority of antique architecture over modern. In specific terms, the libro is a courtly homage to Francesco Sforza. More generally, though, the first part of the libro architettonico constitutes a coherent ‘architectural treatise’, closely linked to its time and dedicated to an audience ─ the noblemen of the opening banquet ─ interested in and willing to sponsor architectural projects, but not necessarily possessing expert knowledge. Filarete provides his readers with theoretical foundations and concrete examples. These make the libro also a catalogue of architectural typologies and decorative models by which the readers can be inspired when planning their own buildings, or in which they can find references to architecture that they know.

the city that the architect and the young prince were building on the coast. This was itself based on Sforzinda thus, the ancient Plusiapolis is intended as a ‘foreshadowing’ of Sforzinda. Some of Plusiapolis’ buildings clearly recall those described in the first part, although they are much richer, more complex and often fantastical. In the second part of the libro, there are no further discussions of architectural theory but, as already mentioned, the lord finally recognises the superiority of ancient architecture. The only discussion subsidiary to building is another description of the skills of the architect, this time read from the Golden Book and an account of how highly Zogalia valued and consequentially treated his architect Onitoan. Thus, the intent of the Golden Book is evidently to be a ‘foreshadowing’ of the libro architettonico itself and of its protagonists. Arguing that Sforzinda is built on the same principles as an antique city, the past corroborates the present. Despite the mingling of Sforzinda and Plusiapolis throughout the second part of the libro, the buildings for Sforzinda maintain a realistic character. Many of them are dwellings in the countryside, the only category of buildings slated for treatment in Book Two (ff.10r, 11r) but not executed in the first part of the libro. The aqueduct built in Books Nineteen and Twenty is also for Sforzinda and would have fitted well with the circuses and bridges of the first part. It can be argued that most of the buildings for Sforzinda actually belonged to the first version of the libro architettonico but were moved to the second part later, as confirmed also by discrepancies in the text, to be analysed next. A third group of buildings, both for Sforzinda and for Plusiapolis, is intended mainly as a celebration of the lord’s magnificence and of the architect’s inventive powers.13 Here, in particular, Filarete gives free reins to his fantasy, not worrying anymore about what is ‘buildable’ or about architectural decorum. Thus, as regards architectural themes, the second part of the libro architettonico is very different from the first, with both the theoretical aspects of building and the rules for its conduct put aside.

From Book Fourteen onwards the libro architettonico could not be more different. Despite the large number of buildings described up to Book Twenty-One, this section of the text is far from being an ‘architectural text’, even of the peculiar type to which Filarete had accustomed his readers. The sophisticated arrangement in the first part, through which Filarete presented his buildings according to their functions and status and within a coherent narrative, disappears completely. Indeed, it is often difficult to establish the functions and status of many of the buildings described, especially those copied from the Golden Book. Building works start in the new Plusiapolis following the examples described in the Golden Book while at the same time continuing in Sforzinda, in such a way that the narrative moves continuously back and forward and is often confused. However, a close analysis reveals similarities between the layout of ancient Plusiapolis and

By contrast, the last eight books are crammed with other issues which, having been only implicit in the first part, now attain primary importance, so that most of them constitute long digressions within the text. First, there is the explicit celebration of the Sforza through the history of Francesco and Muzio Attendoli and then through the references to their archaised ideal doubles. Under these disguises, the Sforza are also celebrated on most of the buildings inspired by the Golden Book. A second important theme is that of princely magnificence, expressed through some impressive public buildings for Sforzinda, such as the two schools, the Casa della Virtù e del Vizio, and the aqueduct. Some of these buildings are also the ‘pretext’ for addressing themes not directly connected with architecture. Thus, the building of the

11 E.g. Filarete substitutes Alberti’s curia and basilica with administrative buildings of his time such as the Palace for the Podestà, that for the Capitano del Popolo and that for the Guilds. 12 Various references to Milan can be found in the notes of both Treatise on Architecture, Spencer, ed., 1965, and Trattato di architettura, Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967. More specifically this theme has been pursued by: Dell’acqua, G. A., “Il Filarete e la realtà Lombarda”, in C.H.Smith & G.C. Garfagnini, eds., Florence and Milan: comparisons and relations, La Nuova Italia Editrice, Florence, 1989, 2 vols., vol.I, pp.223-37; Giordano, L., “Il trattato del Filarete e l’architettura Lombarda”, in Guillaume J., ed., Les Traités d’Architecture de la Renaissance, Paris, 1988, pp.115-28; Boucheron, P., “De la ville idéale à l’utopie urbaine: Filarete et l’urbanisme à Milan au temps des Sforza”, in T. Bonzon et al., eds., Idées de villes, villes idéales. Les cahiers de Fontenay 69/70, Fontenay aux Roses: E.N.S. Fontenay/Saint Cloud, 1993, pp.53-80; Idem, Le pouvoir de bâtir. Urbanisme et politique édilitaire à Milan (XIVe-XVe siècles), Rome, 1998.

13 This is the case, for example, of the monument to King Zogalia in b.xiv, and of the rotating tower in b.xxi.

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schools is transformed into the description of an ideal educational system that combines liberal and mechanical arts, which in turn gives rise to a detailed account of the administration of this system. Similarly, the Casa della Virtù e del Vizio is not just a building but the materialisation of ethical and philosophical principles. Finally, the long passages devoted to the administration and financing of the city, the laws for its citizens and the advice for its lords make Sforzinda a thoroughly ideal city. There are even laws for the lords, specifically those transmitted by Zogalia to his own son as a guide for his future as a ruler (b.xx, ff.168r-v). From being a book on architecture addressed specifically to the higher class, the libro architettonico has changed. It has become a text that flatters the Sforza at the same time as seeking to show them how the state is to be governed, in the manner of a proper speculum principum.14 Its more specific task is now to show the ideological potential of architecture, while the libro is offered as a propagandistic aid in legitimising the regime of Francesco Sforza.

or any other fifteenth century building. Features of this kind do not exist in any of Sforzinda’s other buildings but are present in the buildings of Plusiapolis. Indeed, one of the buildings described in the Golden Book, the palace with hanging gardens in Book Fifteen, is also placed in a labyrinth, has a very similar layout, and similar strongly symbolic references to rule such as those that characterise the Rocca of Sforzinda. As a whole, the latter belongs clearly to the kind of architecture described in the Golden Book. Thus, I would like to suggest that at least some of the Rocca’s peculiar features were added later to an initially standard fortification, that is, after Filarete decided to write a second part to the libro. The ‘fantastic’ character of the buildings of Plusiapolis was applied to the Rocca of Sforzinda in particular, because of its symbolic links with rule in general and with Francesco Sforza in particular.15 Proof of an alteration to the text lies in the fact that the position of the Rocca is unclear throughout the description of Sforzinda. In fact, different scholars have placed it in different areas inside and outside the city.16 Furthermore, in Book Two a high tower is mentioned that is to be built exactly in the centre of the main square of Sforzinda, which may be the antecedent of the Rocca’s tower (b.ii, f.14r). However, no further reference is made to this tower and in its place Filarete builds a fountain.

Discrepancies in the Text Because of the Change in the Original Plan The editors of the libro, in particular John Spencer, have rightly pointed out a series of inconsistencies in the text. From mistakes in the measurements of the various buildings, to changes in their position within Sforzinda, to the announcement of a certain topic that is then forgotten or reframed, and so on. There are many such mistakes in the libro, and they have usually been attributed to the deficiency of Filarete’s literary skills and to the lack of a final revision of the text. While this is partly true, a more plausible explanation for at least some of the inconsistencies of the libro is that, as suggested above, Filarete made a late decision to include Plusiapolis and to present it as an ‘antecedent’ of Sforzinda.

Further evidence of a change in the original text is the summary of the books so far written that can be found at the end of Book Eight (f.62v). Divergences from the actual content of the first six books suggest that Filarete reorganised them without correcting this passage.17 In the summary there is no mention of the first layout of Sforzinda in Book Two, despite its importance (ff.13r-14r); the fourth book is said to record the construction of the whole of Sforzinda, while it describes only the building of its walls; these are said to be built in Book Five which actually concerns the towers and gates of the city; the sixth book is said to deal with the layout of the city and the Rocca but in fact the latter occupies nearly the whole book (ff.37v-42v, 44r-v), while the layout of the city only takes three pages (ff.42v-44r). More generally, the transformation of the Rocca from a fortress to a symbol of

When considering the first part of the libro, one cannot help being struck by the fact that only one of the buildings of Sforzinda deviates from the realistic norm. This is the Rocca in Book Six (ff.37v-42v, 44r-v). Several of its features, especially at the beginning of its description, indicate that it was intended to be a fortification. However, others are fantastical and are in total contrast with the principles of military architecture. For example, the Rocca is placed within an enormous labyrinth, nevertheless crossed by a straight road, and has a central tower 365 braccia high and with 365 windows, numbers that Filarete explicitly refers to the days in a year. Its plan too ─ a square area divided into nine equal-sized squares, of which the four at the corners are open, while four identical buildings fill the four squares at the centre of each side, surrounding the above mentioned tower in a crossshaped layout ─ is most unlikely for either a fortification

15

The strongly symbolic overtones of some of the castles described in the libro architettonico are more understandable when considering a passage in b.ii, f.10r where Filarete makes an allegorical comparison between castles and lords. This passage, which is partially at odds with the rest of the text, might also have been a later addition. 16 While both Treatise on Architecture, Spencer, ed., 1965 and Trattato di architettura, Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967 place the Rocca outside the city, isolated from it and towards the South, Westfall, C. W., The Two Ideal Cities of the Early Renaissance: Republican and Ducal Thought in Quattrocento Architectural Treatises, Ph.D Thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1967, p.258 places the Rocca just inside the city near its walls, and Marconi, P., “I teorici d’architettura del Rinascimento: tradizione medievale e tradizione vitruviana”, in Marconi, P., ed., La città come forma simbolica. Studi sulla teoria dell’architettura nel rinascimento, Bulzoni Editore, Rome, 1973, pp.51-112, esp. p.63 in the centre of Sforzinda. 17 This was first noted in Treatise on Architecture, Spencer, ed., 1965, p.108, n.22, however Spencer attributed it simply to lack of final revision.

14

For the influence of this literary genre on the libro architettonico see esp. Lang, S., “Sforzinda, Filarete and Filelfo”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes, 35 (1972), pp. 391-7; Perotti, P., Prima di Machiavelli, Filarete e Francesco di Giorgio consiglieri del principe, Pisa, 1994.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies Francesco Sforza’s regime may explain why Book Six is the longest of the first 13 books of the libro.18

the translator announces that the Golden Book is going to describe the statutes of Plusiapolis, instead, the lord decides to build an arsenal in Plusiapolis, and an aqueduct and a hunting lodge in Sforzinda. Only after these buildings are completed are Plusiapolis’ statutes effectively described ─ from b.xx, f.163v onwards ─ but the text seems to carry on directly from that at f.157r. It has been noted that this might be a case in which a later addition was made in order to extend the treatise from 20 to 21 books.22 I would like to suggest instead that this is another case where material from the first version has been inserted into the new one. In particular, the aqueduct and the water system which Filarete devises respond specifically to the need to improve living conditions and productivity in Sforzinda and can be considered to have been inspired by the real Milan and its water system. The Hunting Lodge, too, probably comes from the first version, since it represents the category of a lord’s rural dwelling. To continue with the anomalies, Book Twenty does not have a proper ending. Book Twenty-One starts with a palace in a marshy place, again a building that can be linked to real events in Venice23 and may therefore belong to the first version of the libro. This book also terminates abruptly after only four folios, while all the other books are longer − between seven and eight folios in the first part and ten to 11 in the second.

The Rocca is certainly not the only ‘intruder’ in the first part of the libro. For example, it is likely that the bronzecovered book buried at Sforzinda’s foundation (b.iv, f.25r) was added after Filarete decided to invent the Golden Book, which could then become the ‘antecedent’ of the Bronze Book. Other possible additions are the personifications of Virtue and Vice on the covers of the above-mentioned bronze book and in the external loggia of the Casa Regia (b.ix, ff.68v-69r). They are indeed the raison d’être of the Casa della Virtù e del Vizio, which is built much later, in Book Eighteen. Moving to the second part of the libro, Books Fourteen and Fifteen are quite coherent and essentially present buildings from the Golden Book that are related to those of Sforzinda.19 Most of Book Sixteen probably belonged to the first version of the libro. At its outset, the narrative rapidly moves back to Sforzinda where the visit of the lord’s wife spurs the building of a Church outside Sforzinda, significantly based on Filarete’s Bergamo Cathedral. This is followed by a trip to an iron mine which is inspired by a real one in the territory of Piacenza, and upon which Filarete is accompanied by two real members of the Sforza entourage.20 The book concludes with a hunt at the villa of the gentleman Carindo ─ again a situation that seems to be inspired by reality and, more importantly, presents one of the promised private buildings in the countryside. Plusiapolis only comes up in this book apropos the effect that its rebuilt edifices had on the lord, finally convincing him of the superiority of antique architecture. With its references to reality, to Filarete’s works, to the original plan of the libro and to more general architectural themes, this is the book that, more than any other in the second part, resembles the contents and the atmosphere of the first part of the libro.

A more accurate philological analysis would probably reveal other occurrences confirming the hypothesis that there were two versions of the libro. However, there are already enough elements to sustain such a view, especially when considered together with the content of the second part of the libro architettonico and how it can be linked to Filarete’s need to recover Sforza’s patronage and favour. Thus, I would like to suggest that many of the ‘mistakes’ in the libro are, in general, due to the change of plan. In particular, with reference to the Rocca in Book Six and the buildings in Book Sixteen to Book Twenty-One, the libro is a sort of patchwork. This results from the attempt to integrate a whole set of themes in order both to embellish the work and to make it more palatable, as well as more interesting, for the Sforzas.

From Book Seventeen onwards the text is much more confused and presents many inconsistencies.21 For example, at b.xvii, f.140v Filarete writes that he will explain the project for the School for Poor Girls in the following book, but he actually starts this in the paragraph immediately following. At b.xviii, f.150v he indicates that he has reached the close of the book, but it actually ends at f.151v. Particularly telling is the fact that at b.xix, f.157r

Why Filarete Wrote the ‘libro architettonico’ A first issue to consider is why a sculptor turned architect should decide to write a book of this sort, or, more significantly, why he wrote anything at all. It cannot be denied that the case of Filarete is puzzling. Leaving aside Alberti, who was a professional writer with a scholarly background, the only fifteenth century precedents for the artist-turned-author are Cennino Cennini and Lorenzo Ghiberti. Neither of their texts has a narrative structure like the libro architettonico nor a comparable breadth of subject matter. Even after Filarete, the works of Piero della Francesca, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo can be safely considered as writings specifically

18

Book Six is nine folios long, while the other books are between seven and eight books. 19 For example, the Temples of Plusiapolis are based on Sforzinda’s Cathedral, while similarities can be found between the Royal Palace, the Castle-Lighthouse and a palace with hanging gardens in the outskirts of Plusiapolis and the Casa Regia and the Rocca of Sforzinda. 20 On this trip see Spencer, J., “Filarete’s Description of a Fifteenth Century Italian Iron Smelter at Ferriere”, Technology and Culture 4 (1963), pp. 201-6; Treatise on Architecture, Spencer, ed., 1965, p.217, n.5. 21 Most of the following incongruities have already been noted in Spencer, J., “La datazione del Trattato del Filarete desunta dal suo esame interno”, Rivista d’Arte, 1956, pp.93-103, who had used them to prove a lack of revision in books 17 to 21 due to Filarete’s loss of interest in the libro.

22

Treatise on Architecture, Spencer. ed., 1965, p.280, n.6. See Spencer, J., “The Ca’ del Duca in Venice and Benedetto Ferrini”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29 (1970), pp.3-8. 23

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devoted to the arts. The only cognate text is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, however, Francesco Colonna was not an artist.

between Alberti’s architect, mainly a designer of edifices, and Filarete’s one: a planner but also chief supervisor of the material execution of a building, right down to its details.27 These differences, and many others that can be traced when reading the text, reveal why he felt it necessary to produce another book on architecture so soon after Alberti’s. It is likely that Filarete wanted to confront what he considered Alberti’s shortcomings, but his text is not just a de facto critique – it is also highly original.

To add to the confusion, Leon Battista Alberti had written only a few years before the libro a treatise on architecture that was highly regarded and widely influential ─ as attested by Filarete’s text itself.24 However, right at the beginning of the libro architettonico we find evidence that Filarete considered the De re aedificatoria to be of limited use. Addressing the noble gathering at the banquet with which his book begins, Averlino apologises that his work is not as good as tracts by Vitruvius and Alberti. Nevertheless he expresses the hope that, being written in the vernacular and based on his own practice of architecture and other arts, it will please those who are not ‘so learned’ as those able to read the Latin works of his predecessors.25 Thus, despite their worthiness and elegance, the texts of Vitruvius and Alberti cannot reach the non-scholarly readers because they are in Latin. In particular, the ostensible setting of the banquet as a gathering of nobles seems to imply that the earlier authorities failed to reach the signori or noblemen, a social group whose members were not known for their learning but who were the most likely to engage in building projects. It is indeed the higher class that Filarete intends specifically to address with his work.

While Filarete does not openly criticise Alberti’s text, we know through documents that he found the reality of his own experience as an architect in Milan extremely dissatisfying. Indeed this experience can be considered as one of the main factors underlying his decision to write the libro architettonico. Filarete’s shift from sculpture to architecture was not unusual. Important artists such as Arnolfo di Cambio, Giotto, Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Michelozzo provided precedents. Having more affinities with the liberal arts, architecture was of higher status than sculpture and painting and thus much more attractive for practitioners of the arts. The libro architettonico fully reveals Filarete’s aspirations to such an elevation of status, which are clearly expressed in the affable relationship between the architect and the lord.28 It is well known that Filarete’s years in Milan (where he is documented from 1451 to 1465) were plagued by almost continuous problems. He was openly ostracized at the Castle of Porta Giovia, sacked from the Duomo’s workshop and effectively obliged to leave his own Ospedale Maggiore.29 Work promised by Sforza in Cremona did not materialise, and when the Duke acquired the Ca’ del Duca in Venice he appointed Benedetto Ferrini for its renovation.30 Only Averlino’s work at Bergamo Cathedral seems to have been carried out without problems, but having been destroyed in a later renovation of the church it cannot be fully appreciated anymore.31 Filarete was certainly responsible for the hostility of fellow practitioners whom he treated with disdain, while trying to impose the new Tuscan architecture in an area with a

Other occurrences throughout the libro architettonico reveal Filarete’s effort to approach architectural writing from a different perspective. Alberti first delineates the basic concepts of his arguments then enters into the general characteristics of the various themes, and at the end deals with specific details. By contrast, Filarete presents some general definitions at the beginning of the libro, but then mainly gives specific examples so that his readers can deduce the theoretical criteria from them. The theory of architecture is explained within the narrative and is put into practice in the buildings. This is also true of specific features, which are devised with much greater specificity than Alberti’s. We have to assume that, as with the use of the vernacular, Filarete chose this structure with the aim of being more understandable and entertaining. The same goal is served by the illustrations, which are completely absent in Alberti’s text. Amongst the other evident differences are the placing of his buildings into a specific urban context and the way in which buildings are classified.26 Scholars have also noted the differences

which the various buildings can be executed. This too is possibly a veiled criticism of Alberti. 27 On Filarete’s architect see Treatise on Architecture, Spencer, ed., 1965, pp.17-18, n.3; Trattato di architettura, Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967, pp.XLVIII-XLIX; Hollingsworth, M., “The Architect in FifteenthCentury Florence”, Art History, 7 (1984), pp.385-410, esp. pp.395-398; Long, P. O., “Openess and Empiricism: values and meaning in early architectural writings and in seventeenth-century experimental philosophy”, in Galison, P., ed., The Architecture of Science, Cambridge, MA., 1999, pp.79-103. 28 For two examples of ‘familiarity’ between the architect and his lords see b.v, ff.31v-32v; b.xiii, f.95v. 29 For Filarete’s years in Milan and the relevant documents see esp. Lazzaroni & Muñoz, 1908; Welch, E. S., Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan, New Haven & London, 1995. 30 For Filarete’s work in Cremona see Della Torre, S., “Artisti toscani a Cremona nel Quattrocento: Domenico da Firenze e il Filarete”, Cremona, 11 (1981), 3, pp.14-8; for the Ca’ del Duca see Spencer 1970. 31 On Bergamo Cathedral see Treatise on Architecture, Spencer, ed., 1965, p.213, n.2; Trattato di architettura, Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967, pp.460-1, nn.1-2; Pigozzi, M., “La presenza dell’Averlino a Mantova e a Bergamo”, Arte Lombarda, 38-39 (1973), pp.85-90.

24 Direct references to Alberti’s works, often accompanied by statements of high regard, are in b.i, f.1v; b.xxii, ff.173v, 174r, 174v. 25 b.i, f.2r ... perché non mi sono esercitato troppo in lettere né in dire, ma in altro più che in questo ho dato opera, per queste ragioni parrà la mia più presto temeriarità e prosunzione a volere narrare modi e misure dello edificare. Ma secondo volgare, e perché in questi esercizii mi sono dilettato ed esercitato, come in disegno e in isculpire ed edificare e in alcune altre cose e invistigare...Per questo ne piglierò ardire, ché ancora credo che a quelli che non saranno così dotti piacerà, e quelli che più periti e più in lettere intendenti saranno leggeranno gli autori sopradetti. 26 In particular, at b.ii, f.11r Filarete rejects the possibility of describing buildings in abstract while suggesting to his lord to build a whole city in

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies strong local tradition.32 However, most of his problems were also due to the peculiar conditions of Sforza’s patronage in Milan.33 Francesco Sforza managed to project an image of strong seigniorial control, placing his imprint on all of the most important buildings under construction in its capital. However, his authority was often challenged and in particular, the control over the city of Milan required a careful management of his relationship with the powerful patriciate and with other forces. The Duke’s protection and often imposition of Averlino in most of the above projects was certainly not welcome. Furthermore, Sforza attempted to force other institutions to pay the architect’s salary, at the Duomo and then at the Ospedale Maggiore, at the same time as considering him his own employee. Indeed, while Filarete was employed by the Deputies of the Ospedale, Sforza lent him to the Bishop of Bergamo for his Cathedral and sent him to Venice to work at the Sforza palace there. This kind of manipulation certainly did not contribute to the popularity of the Florentine.34

believe that the writing of the second part of the libro was realised after the situation at the Ospedale had precipitated. Therefore, Filarete’s troubled situation had direct consequences for the structure and content of the libro architettonico. However, before fully arriving at this conclusion is also necessary to look at the implications the libro possibly had for Francesco Sforza. The libro architettonico is not only dedicated to Francesco Sforza, it is actually written for him and concerns him. Sforza’s rise to the Duchy of Milan was one of the most remarkable events of the Quattrocento and opened a new stage of Italian politics. Sforza was the most important condottiere of his time, hired by all the major potentates.38 Despite not being one of the favourite candidates, Francesco managed to become Duke of Milan in 1450. His position, however, was constantly challenged and he was under almost continual pressure from external and internal enemies. Once he had gained de facto control of Milan, he was left with the need to legalise an illegal situation. He had to convince both his own subjects and foreign potentates that he was worthy of his position, even though he had manifest shortcomings. Apart from the lack of any explicit right of succession – his wife Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of the last Duke of Milan, had been expressly excluded from the succession – Francesco had been in the service of Venice and Florence, both traditional enemies of Milan. He had more or less forcibly taken control of the duchy and could be considered a usurper. Furthermore, he was not only a professional warrior, a mercenary, but also of common birth. In short, he had to convince his adversaries that whatever he had been, or had done in the past, he was nonetheless worthy of his position as Duke of one of the most important territories of Italy.

When comparing Filarete’s experience in Milan with the libro architettonico it is evident that his own ideal architect, a chief fully responsible for the design and execution of a building, is conceived as a counterweight to his negative experience. From the same reality, emerge his views on how the architect should be treated. Throughout the libro, Filarete does not spare veiled and carefully judged references to his mistreatments in Milan,35 and often blames the unskilled ‘builders’ who pretend to be on the same level as an architect of his rank.36 The libro architettonico allowed him to take revenge on his detractors and, more generally, to make claims for a greater consideration to be given to architects and their art. Considering this situation and the references to it in the text, it is evident that Filarete must have seen the libro architettonico – as initially conceived – as a way to show to Francesco Sforza the problems with his buildings and to explain how things really should have gone. At the same time, the book allowed Filarete to set the record straight and to show the superiority of his own ideas, ones that had been so ill-treated in Milan.

Filarete possibly thought that nothing would serve better than architecture to put Francesco Sforza on a par with the other Italian rulers. Through the libro architettonico, Francesco could realise in fiction the building of two cities that would act as symbols of Sforza grandeur. As a whole, the libro architettonico seeks to construct a specific image for Francesco Sforza. Together with his son Galeazzo Maria, he is a nearly continuous presence throughout the whole book, and both Sforzas actively participate in the process of designing buildings and their decorations. Francesco is presented as a lover of arts, a cultivated and à la page prince, not inferior to other more noble rulers of fifteenth-century Italy.

More specifically, for a number of years after his arrival in Milan Filarete received unconditional backing from the new duke, but in the years when the libro was in progress his protection at the Ospedale’s workshop was diminishing steadily. By 1461, Sforza had stopped backing Filarete, as is evident by the fact that the architect’s plan for the ceilings of his hospital was radically changed.37 Indeed, I

On the other hand, the references to Francesco and other members of his family in the second part of the libro are not limited to creating an image of them as patrons of the arts but have more evident propagandistic overtones. These are particularly evident in the inclusion of the stories of Francesco and Muzio Attendoli Sforza, and in the numerous references to Francesco’s outstanding military

32 See e.g. Salmi, M., “Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete e l’architettura lombarda del primo Rinascimento”, in Atti del I Congresso di Storia dell’architettura, Florence 1938. 33 Although the documents relating to Filarete’s troubled situation in Milan have been known for some time, it is only recently that his position has been better positioned within the larger context of Sforza’s patronage, see, Welch, 1995. 34 Welch 1995, p.154. 35 E.g. b.ii, f.9v; b.iii, f.16v; b.xv, f.113r. 36 E.g. b.i, f.2r; b.xv, f.115r. 37 Welch 1995, pp.154-156.

38

For Francesco Sforza see, Santoro, C., Gli Sforza, Milan 1968; Ianziti, G. Humanistic Historiography under the Sforzas. Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-century Milan, Oxford, 1988.

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ability especially in some of the buildings and their decorations in Book Fourteen.39 While Filarete was quite possibly influenced by panegyric literature, it is also likely that the stronger propagandistic tones in the second part of the libro were directly influenced by the contemporary cultural policy of Francesco Sforza’s chancery. It has been argued that amid the military and diplomatic efforts deployed by Sforza to secure his newly acquired rule there were also subtle and sophisticated techniques of persuasion, such as the production of an official written history of him and his family.40 Gary Ianziti has suggested that Francesco’s uncommon situation, both in terms of his precipitous rise to power and his need to legalise it, made history particularly valuable for the Sforzas. The period between 1457 and 1463, thus the same years as the libro architettonico, saw a proliferation of works on Francesco, some of which were possibly promoted by the chancery, others probably inspired by knowledge of the chancery’s project.41 Filarete was a close friend of Filelfo, who was directly involved in the production of Sforza’s history,42 and knew Cicco Simonetta, head of Francesco’s chancery and probably foreman of the project.43 It is likely then, that he knew of the chancery’s attempts to create a history favourable to the Sforza regime, and that this had direct repercussions on the second part of the libro architettonico. I would like to argue that, just as the moulding of contemporary history served to gain recognition for the de facto ruler of Milan, so Filarete’s writing was intended to achieve the same effect. While the libro provides the image of a cultivated and learned prince, in my opinion Filarete also envisaged his work as making a valuable contribution to Sforza’s ongoing efforts to establish himself as duke and his family as hereditary rulers of Milan. More than any other architectural treatise, Filarete’s enters into the realm of policy, using architecture to suggest to his lord how his state should be built and how it should be governed.44 Indeed, in the last few books in particular, the libro mutates from a tract on the practice of architecture to an exploration of the ideological potential of architecture.

unlikely that a possibly self-taught sculptor turned architect would have been able to conceive such a complicated work entirely by himself. The Role of Francesco Filelfo It is now accepted that Francesco Filelfo played an important role in the libro architettonico.45 At the centre of Milan’s cultural life for nearly 40 years, he was a prolific writer, a university lecturer, and the teacher of some of the duke’s children.46 During his lifetime, he was very famous and his works were widely read, although time has proven that far from being the great intellectual and outstanding poet he claimed, Filelfo was mostly an elegant entertainer and an able populariser.47 His most enduring legacy was in the impetus he gave to Greek studies in fifteenth century Italy. In the first half of the Quattrocento, he was one of the few Italian scholars who knew Greek, which he studied in Constantinople. This expertise helped to give him an important position in the humanistic world.48 He knew Filarete from at least 1447 and it is in one of his letters that we find the last known mention of Averlino, apparently on the verge of travelling to Constantinople.49 Over the years, their relationship remained stable and Filelfo always had warm words for Filarete, all the more remarkable given the humanist’s fickle character. Filelfo also dedicated to Averlino an affectionate poem in his collection De Iocis et Seriis.50 Specific references in the libro architettonico to Plato’s works have been explained in terms of the collaboration between Filelfo and Filarete.51 Thus, from the Critias might have come the idea of Plusiapolis, rich and opulent like Plato’s Atlantis, and from the Laws that of delineating the social, administrative and educational structures of Sforzinda. Together with Plato’s description of the rich edifices of Atlantis, Filelfo’s own knowledge of Byzantine architecture might have been influential. It can be seen as one of the main sources for Filarete’s use of rich materials,

So far, I hope that I have demonstrated that the libro architettonico as is known through the codex magliabechianus is the result of fundamental changes in Filarete’s original plan. Addressing the libro not only with reference to architecture, it is possible to see it as the result of many issues. Filarete deserves recognition for his ability to concoct a multiplicity of strands, while the text stands as an extraordinary source for the specific situation of Milan at the time, and of Filarete. However, it is quite

45 This is certainly one of the most important contributions of our addressee to the scholarship on Filarete. See esp. Onians, 1971, pp.105114; 1988, pp.159-162; see also Lang, 1972. 46 On Filelfo see Adam, R. G., Francesco Filelfo at the Court of Milan (1439-1481), Ph.D. Thesis, University of Oxford 1974; Francesco Filelfo nel quinto centenario della morte (Atti del XVII Congresso di Studi Maceratesi, Tolentino, 27-30 Settembre 1981), Padua, 1986; Robin, D. Filelfo in Milan. Writings 1451-1477, Princeton, N. J., 1991. 47 Adam, 1974, pp.194-7. 48 Onians, 1971, pp.112-4; Adam, 1974, pp.181-7. 49 See the letter of Filelfo to Antonio Trebano of 26th February 1447 in Lazzaroni & Muñoz, 1908, pp.110-1 in which Filelfo expresses his high regard for Averlino. On 30th July 1465, Filelfo wrote a letter for Filarete to present him to his friend Giorgio Amiroutzes, a doctor in Constantinople, text in Legrand, E., Cent-dix lettres grecques de François Filelfe, Paris, 1892, p.120. From this letter it has been inferred that Filarete intended to go to Constantinople. 50 Published in Picci, C., Il ‘De iocis et seriis’ di Francesco Filelfo, Varallo-Sesia, 1911, pp.77-81; republished in Beltramini, M., “Francesco Filelfo e il Filarete: nuovi contributi alla storia dell’amicizia fra il letterato e l’architetto nella Milano sforzesca”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Quaderni, s. IV, 1-2 (1996), pp.119-25. 51 Onians, 1971, pp.105-14; 1988, pp.159-162.

39 See e.g. the monument to King Zogalia, the temple dedicated by his father and the decoration of Plusiapolis’ bridge, all in b.xiv. 40 See esp. Ianziti, 1988. 41 Ianziti, 1988, pp.61-126. 42 Francesco Filelfo wrote the Sforziade, an epic poem on Francesco Sforza’s deeds between 1447 and 1450, and started an history of Francesco in prose, see Ianziti 1988, pp.61-70. 43 See the letter of Filarete to Cicco of 4th October 1452 in Lazzaroni & Muñoz, 1908, p.169; Welch, 1995, p.185. 44 Particulalrly significant is b.xx, ff.168v-169r where Filarete proposes a parallel between a wall and a realm, and between architects and lords.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies mosaics in particular, and other features that recur in his buildings.52

Filelfo found in Antonio Averlino an extremely receptive pupil, willing to accept his suggestions but also able to assimilate them and elaborate upon them with originality. Given that he had the background of a craftsman, it is likely that he was self-taught. Considering this background, Averlino reached a remarkable cultural level, combining learning with original thoughts and a language which, though perhaps not perfect, is fresh and highly expressive. By using his native Italian, he made connections between architectural theory and practice much more readily and clearly than any of his predecessors.58 When taking into account Filelfo’s role it is thus important not to consider Filarete just as a passive recipient of his friend’s culture. On the contrary, also Averlino’s sculptural works − from St Peter’s doors, to the small bronzes, plaquettes and medals − reveal knowledge of a large body of classical and medieval subjects, themes and references. Filarete’s achievements ought, then, to be considered admirable and impressive, while the libro architettonico stands as an incredible document to the collaboration between artist and scholar.

Another venerable source for Filarete’s ideas was possibly Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica.53 Diodorus is directly quoted by Filarete and his influence is apparent in various passages and even in specific buildings.54 The earliest books of Diodorus’ work describe the great architectural achievements of ancient kings, in particular those of Ancient Egypt. Thus, it has been suggested that these descriptions may well have had an influence on the grand proportions, the richness and the fantastical characteristics of many of the buildings described in the Golden Book. Diodorus also describes a mythical land, the ‘Island of the Sun’, and outlines the rules that govern its inhabitants’ lives. Both Plato and Diodorus may, thus, have inspired some of the more peculiar characteristics of the second part of the libro architettonico. What is important is that only Filelfo could have infused such themes into it, because they belong to Greek texts that were not available in Latin. Furthermore, the Golden Book, whose discovery can also be considered to hint at the influence of ancient writings, is unequivocally a Greek book. Thus, Filelfo can be regarded as responsible for a certain ‘Greek character’ in the libro architettonico. This might be linked to the desire to support and diffuse Greek culture precisely at the time when the Fall of Constantinople (1453) made it particularly pressing.55 His presence at Filarete’s side also helps to explain the strong influence of the specula principum and panegyric literature.56 We have seen above that Filelfo’s participation could also explain Filarete’s knowledge of the projected official history of Sforza. While Filelfo might have helped Filarete throughout the libro, it is particularly in the second part that his influence is strong. This is true to the extent that some of the issues presented can only be explained as results of his almost direct intervention.

Conclusions Through the study of internal evidence, the composition of the libro architettonico can be dated between 1458 and 1464. While the Italian editors of the text allow for a long period of composition between these two dates, John Spencer was of a different opinion. He has suggested a date lying between 1461 and late 1462 for the first 21 books, while dating the composition and addition of books 22 to 25 to the beginning of 1464 when Filarete had decided to rededicate the libro.59 For the main body of the work therefore, he has suggested a short period of hasty writing, as confirmed by the contradictions and mistakes he observed throughout the text. Instead, in my opinion the libro architettonico was started around 1458. The initial reasons were that Filarete considered Alberti’s De re aedificatoria too remote from the ‘needs of the market’ and wished to bring the language of Tuscan architecture to the old-fashioned Milanese. Furthermore, he wanted to demonstrate his superiority over the other architects working in Milan while at the same time flattering his patron. These were years in which Filarete was busy with Milan Hospital, Bergamo Cathedral and other works for the Sforza. Therefore, it is probable that the first version of the libro took two to three years, or was possibly written all at once and then left aside. What is clear is that the writing must have been fairly advanced if not nearly completed when Filarete decided to change his original plan and to use the libro as a way to regain Sforza’s favour. It is not possible to pin down exactly when Filarete decided to change his original libro architettonico. From the known documents it can be concluded that Francesco Sforza had stopped protecting Filarete at the Hospital by 1461. Thus the second part was possibly written after or around this date, when effectively,

Averlino’s admiration for Filelfo is evident throughout the libro,57 but especially from Book Fourteen onwards. Not only is he given the important role of translating the Golden Book, but he also becomes one of the main protagonists of the narrative. It can be suggested that his physical presence is not only a way of Filarete acknowledging his friendship with Filelfo but perhaps also a signal of full collaboration in the second part of the libro. Filelfo’s cultural advice can then be seen as extremely important in influencing the content of the libro. However, 52 See Rovetta, A., “Le fonti monumentali milanesi delle chiese a pianta centrale del Trattato di architettura del Filarete”, Arte Lombarda 60 (1981), pp.24-32; Idem “Filarete e l’umanesimo greco a Milano: viaggi, amicizie e maestri”, Arte Lombarda, 66 (1983), pp.89-102. 53 Grassi, L., “Diodoro Siculo nel Trattato del Filarete: un codice diodoreo nella biblioteca degli Sforza?”, Aevum 61 (1987), pp.53-58. 54 See b.xx, f.168r; ff.169r-v; b.xxii, f.176v. 55 Onians, 1971, pp.110-4; 1988, pp.161-162. 56 Lang, 1972. 57 Filelfo is quoted, with his real name, in b.xi, f.83v as the author of an inscription in the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan and in b.xii, f.87v as the one who explained to Filarete the meaning of some hieroglyphs.

58 59

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if not voluntarily, Filarete was more free from the direction of the Hospital’s works and above all when it became more urgent to regain Sforza’s favour. The idea of using the libro to this end may even have come from Filelfo, or perhaps Filarete asked his learned friend for help. Be that as it may, Averlino, in close collaboration with Filelfo, proceeded to write a further eight books and changed the first 13 so that a series of elements would then be ‘confirmed’ by the second part of the libro. He must have corrected most of the mistakes that the change created, but some slipped his attention. He also updated the references to contemporary artists, which indeed, as noted by Spencer, point towards 1461.60 However, this can be easily considered as the date of a general revision in combination with the new structure. Furthermore, not even this second version was finished, as proved by the abrupt closure of Book Twenty-One, by the increasing number of mistakes in the last four books and by the lack of a final revision of the whole libro. Although Spencer had a different opinion on the general composition of the libro, it is still possible to accept his well-proven suggestion that the first 21 books were written by the end of 1462.

Ultimately, the reason for the long oblivion of the libro architettonico was Filarete’s inability to transcend a strictly personal patronage relationship. His book was too specifically geared to Francesco Sforza and to his contingent needs to appeal to a wider audience. Significantly, the book seems to have been received with interest by rulers such as Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who had it translated into Latin,62 and Alfonso, Duke of Calabria and co-regent with his father of the Kingdom of Naples, who borrowed the Medici’s manuscript to have it copied, between 1482 and 1489.63 These instances confirm that in the fifteenth century the libro’s ‘political’ qualities were acknowledged, although apparently not particularly by Francesco Sforza. Unlike Alberti’s universalising De re aedificatoria, Filarete’s book, especially in its latest version, does not rise above its local specificity. While it can be considered fascinating for the deep insights it gives us into Averlino’s life and society this is also its weakness, given that its full appreciation was subject to the context that generated it. While the libro architettonico allows for different levels of reading, I hope that I have demonstrated how it can only be fully understood by considering it as the confluence of multiple, even contradictory, motives, ambitions and intentions. In essence, it had its ultimate basis in asserting two identities: that of Filarete as an architect, and that of Francesco Sforza as a ruler and as a learned patron.

Thereafter, the libro architettonico was left unfinished for some time until Filarete decided to add to it the three books on visual arts, but without either finishing or revising the previous 21 books. These three books are completely alien from the others and may have been written as an independent work,61 being crudely interpolated when Filarete eventually decided to give his book to Francesco Sforza. The only similarity is that they continue the fiction of a dialogue between the architect and the young prince. Thus, I would like to suggest that the addition of these books could be considered as a further attempt to ‘beef up’ the libro architettonico with extra material. In one text, then, Filarete presented both a book on architecture, government and the Sforza, and a book on visual arts. This must have seemed to him quite a bargain! However, the presence of these books signals further that Filarete’s situation in Milan was not improving. That Averlino’s attempts to market his book differently did not have any effect on Sforza is dramatically testified by his decision to rededicate the work to his old protectors, the Medici. He was evidently attempting to gain in Florence the favour that was eluding him in Milan. The added Book Twenty-Five is dated January 1464, which can be considered the final date for the composition of the libro architettonico as it is known through the codex magliabechianus. With its detailed account of the Medici’s architectural patronage in Tuscany and Milan it is again an attempt to make his book specifically appealing for its addressees, in the way that Filarete had fruitlessly tried with Francesco Sforza.

60

62 Beltramini, M., ed., La latinizzazione del Trattato d’architettura di Filarete (1488-1489), Pisa, 2000. 63 Trattato di architettura, Finoli & Grassi, eds., 1967, p.CVIII.

Ibid., p.100. Throughout the libro Filarete claims to have written other books, see b.i, f.1v; b.xix, f.153v; b.xxi, f.173r; b.xxiv, f.185v. 61

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies

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Unintended Consequences of Tourism: Kang Youwei’s Italian Journey (1904) and Sterling Clark’s Chinese Expedition (1908)* Cao Yiqiang Two men, one Chinese and one American, will figure in this lecture. Kang Youwei was born in 1858, and Sterling Clark in 1877. (figs.1 & 2) The former was a key figure in the intellectual development of modern China, and the latter the founder of this Clark Art Institute. Of course, they did not know each other, yet, though they would never have imagined it, one single historical drama determined their respective fates, and linked them together. Without this common link, not only would the theme of my lecture not make sense, but the Clark Art Institute would not have existed, nor therefore would this lecture which forms part of the scholarly programme sponsored by it.

for centuries separated us from the Western world would have been finally broken through. I often tell myself that we should not take all this simply for granted. It is for this reason that I think it is appropriate to dedicate this lecture to the memory of Kang Youwei and Sterling Clark whose actions have made this Institute, this academic programme and this occasion possible. In 1900, Clark was sent to Northern China to crush the Boxer Uprising. Paradoxically, this bloodstained conflict aroused his interest in the country. Eight years later, he led a scientific expedition to Northern China, the result of which was published in 1912, entitled Through Shen-Kan. Although he stated that the aim of his adventure in China was to conduct a scientific survey of Chinese geography, zoology and meteorology, he was attracted by some forms of Chinese art, particularly by a Buddhist statue of the Song Dynasty. So much so that he went out of his way to record it in his book:

This historical drama was directed, as it were, by Kang Youwei. In 1898, a year before Sterling Clark graduated from Yale University, Kang launched a Reform Movement, the first radical action ever taken by a Chinese Intellectual to change the country. The reform was crushed by the empress dowager, but although this movement only lasted one hundred days, its impact was far-reaching. One immediate reaction was the uprising of the Boxer forces, whose aim was to drive all Westerners from China. It therefore constituted a rebellion against the major proposal of Kang Youwei’s Reform Movement which was to strengthen China by adopting Western systems and ideas. Thus, while the failure of the Reform Movement forced Kang Youwei to flee China, the Boxer Rebellion brought Sterling Clark to China to fight against it. This was, of course, a painful chapter in human history, yet, I hope that I will not be suspected of being paradoxical if I claim that it is Kang Youwei’s failed Reform Movement and the resulting conflict between China and the West, in which Sterling Clark was involved, that have produced some wonderful cultural fruits from which we benefit today, and from which I myself have profited more than anyone else in this room. In his reform programmes addressed to the throne, Kang Youwei repeatedly emphasized the absolute necessity of sending princes, high officials and students to study in England and America. He was among the first thinkers in Chinese history to do this, and although this door was not fully opened until the 1980s, those like myself who are able to study and travel in the West owe much to him. For it would be unthinkable that, without his pioneering effort, the iron barrier that had

Here and there were larger statues of other deities; one of which, a beautifully carved figure of the Goddess of Mercy in a reclining attitude, called forth our special admiration, and considerable pains were taken to obtain a good photograph of this exquisite piece of work. There were evidences that the carvings and statues had been at one time coated with paint; but they look far better in their present condition we have no doubt. Here, I wonder whether it was his predisposed artistic taste that directed his attention to this exquisite Chinese statue or his zest for feminine beauty which is uniquely embodied in his collection that was intensified or even influenced by it. (figs.3 & 4) Surely, his involvement in the war against the Boxer Rebellion contributed as much as his terrible experience of the two world wars to his determination to find a safe home for his collection in Williamstown. While Clark was conducting a scientific expedition in China between 1908-9, Kang Youwei was still in exile, but this offered him the opportunity to travel around the world extensively. On 3rd May 1904, Kang Youwei arrived in Naples, where he began his projected journey through 11 European countries. In contrast to Clark’s expedition in China, the aim of Kang Youwei’s journey was highly political. As he said, “To observe politics is my special subject.” Thus, without knowing it, he became the first Chinese to participate in a ‘Grand Tour’ that had, ever since the late 16th and early 17th centuries, been a social and cultural phenomenon of European and then American life. Not only his itinerary (though it started in Italy which had usually been the climax of the Western Grand

___________________________ *

This is a lecture given as the First Clark Lecture in Williamstown in April 1998. Since it formed part of the scholarly project initiated by John Onians, I hope that it would not be inappropriate to print it here exactly as it was read as a contribution to this Festschrift for John. My late mentor Francis Haskell read the text and made some useful suggestions, for which I am very grateful.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies distinguish their sweetness and bitterness; to explore if they are suitable or not; to draw a prescription and pick up them and produce the remedy, let China take it, so that her healing will not be delayed.” No wonder that Kang Youwei would take one of the first things he happened to see upon his arrival in Italy to be a vindication of his duty: a bronze statue of Cavour in a park in Naples. To this statue Kang Youwei paid his respects, and wrote a poem, which both praised the exploits of his Italian hero, and expressed the historical and cosmopolitan dimension of the task which weighed on his own shoulders: to revive China; to restore her past glory. Of it the last lines read:

Tourists), but his purpose and its consequences conform to this practice as it had originally been conceived in the West. For, he clearly stated that his chief objective was to attain an understanding of the politics of European countries, their economics, geography and history. In the mean time, like all his European and American predecessors, in Italy Kang could not refrain from admiring the remains of her classical past. He stayed in Italy only for two weeks, but one of these was spent in Rome, where he was deeply struck by the survival of the ancient monuments that “spread all over the city” as well as so many works of art to be found in the museums and galleries. He was particularly fascinated by the mosaics and tapestries that he saw for the first time. It is therefore not surprising that the bulk of his Travel in Italy is composed of his accounts of Rome and Pompeii. Having completed his whole European tour, he immediately realized that he should have stayed in Rome longer, because when in Rome he had “a false idea” that everywhere in Europe was the same. “But by the time I had travelled through all of these 11 European countries,” he wrote, “it was brought home to me that none of them can be compared to Rome, and now I deeply regret my visit to Rome being too hasty.” Nevertheless, Kang Youwei would certainly reject our attempt to overemphasize the importance of his response to Italian art. This was not what he mainly intended. So before we undertake to discuss the unintended effects that his Travel in Italy has had in changing the whole course of Chinese art in the 20th century, we must try to follow his original intention.

The waves of the seas in the East and in the West are linked, Lingering, I am looking back, With sorrow, To thousand and thousand bygone springs. Kang Youwei did not only identify his political role with that of what he called “those European geniuses of recent times” whom he most admired, but also quickly recognized an analogy, which applied both to the past and the present, between Italy and China. This makes Kang’s Grand Tour unique, and widely different from that of his remote European, and, above all, his immediate American predecessors, who went to Italy chiefly “to admire the past and to scorn the present.” Whereas they looked to the classical world for aspirations and inspiration, Kang regarded modern Italy as a model for reforming China, despite the fact that Kang deplored its present social conditions and poverty, in the same spirit as did his many near American contemporaries, such as Hawthorne. For instance, he tells us that in Naples, “the tour guides...are terribly tricky,” that “the Italians are poor, cunning and there are lots of robbers,” and that he was troubled by beggars and scoundrels in the streets and at inns. “What I have seen here,” he summed up, “is a far cry from my dream of the wonderful voyage inspired by my reading at home.”

Despite his failure in the Reform, despite the fact that he had to endure his exile for another decade, his political ideal remained unshaken. He resolved to conduct this trip in order to “compare the West with China” and to discover political solutions to the problems which China was facing, in the hope that once circumstances permitted him to return to his miserable motherland he could be better equipped to effect his reform programme. He had literally felt that he was mandated by History to conduct such a mission. The opportunity for him to see “the new civilization that has risen in Europe just within a span of one hundred years in which I was born,” and the fruits of modern technology that made it possible for him to travel around the world, were, to him, in themselves a proof of this historical mission. Thus he wrote: “The sages of my China who had lived before me, wise and intelligent as they were, must have regretted that they did not have [my opportunity] and were confined to their own area.” “I shall”, he went on, aided by “the three marvelous modern tools for cutting short the vast territories: steam ships, automobiles and electric wires...travel around the lands, the mountains and rivers of all the countries on earth, and pick up, adopt and absorb what is good in their politics, religion, arts, customs and antiquities, and reject what is bad in them.” China was sick now, and so “Heaven may lament her illness, and consider that there may be some medicine that can restore her. It therefore asks me to collect the fruits throughout the world; to examine their nature, aroma and colour; to

However, unlike American travellers, Kang Youwei realized that all these problems were a tribute to the burden of the long tradition of Italy. It is far more difficult to revive an old nation than to build up a new one, and this inherent difficulty has been shared by all old nations on earth, because “old countries carry with them more old conventions” that resist change. With this observation, Kang Youwei commented that the North of Italy was more prosperous and civilized than the South, while the situation was the reverse in China. He admired Venice for what he saw as her past liberal constitution and success in commerce, praised Milan - which he called “a small Paris” - for its prosperity, wealth, and tidiness that is, according to him, “inspired and influenced by her neighboring Northern European countries;” he particularly noted its technical advance in the silk industry and recommended that these developments should be adopted to advance our own in the region of Jiangnan traditionally well-known for silk 342

Cao Yiqiang: Unintended Consequences of Tourism oppression, destruction and disunity. His ideal was to establish, by combining all the good features of all civilizations, a universal empire, as embodied in the title of his book, The Great Commonwealth. In this, so he envisaged, there are no nations but one big government that governs popularly elected regional governments, and yet individual human nature and welfare will be fully developed and their needs satisfied.

production. He also discovered many similarities between Italian and Chinese cities; for example, he tells us that the general impression of Naples reminded him of the city of Peking, and that Italy and Southern China shared similar geological features: beauty and serenity. He even went so far as to claim that the physical character of the Italian people was somewhat similar to that of the Chinese and their facial features to those who live in Huzhou. From all these points of view, he came to the conclusion that other European countries were too advanced to be caught up with by China: “Only Italy is our equal.” Only Italy can reveal to us the secrets of European modernization, “the sequence of its political evolution, the procedure of its reform that can be adopted by us.”

But Kang did not know that, while he was travelling through Europe, his political ideal, which at one stage influenced the young revolutionary Mao Zetong, had, in the minds of many people, including his former followers at home, become a traveller’s lost dream, an utterly outdated or even reactionary project. In China, violent revolution was already under way. There was little role for him in the future political arena. Still less could he have predicted that he was to exert a far-reaching influence in another field: the Chinese art world. However, I want to stress that this would not have happened if he had not visited Italy.

None the less, Kang pointed out that there was a general difference between Europe and China. He warned his reader not to worship the developed countries in Europe so blindly as to forget our own history and to lose our sense of independence. He reminds us of the fact that while the West had suffered a thousand year of darkness caused by wars, religious disputes, and national separations, China had to a great degree enjoyed two thousand years’ peace and unification. Reflection on this fact bolstered up his own confidence and optimism. “Now, in modernisation,” he claimed, “today’s China is only a few decades behind Europe. If our country begins to undertake a radical reform, she will be in a position to adopt European politics and arts so quickly as to make them her own possessions.” We shall see later that pride in his own cultural heritage was aroused again and again in his emotional encounter with the ruins of ancient Rome, which in turn enhanced his sense of mission. It would, however, be mistaken to confuse such sentiments with the kind of nationalist feelings that began to prevail in China among thinkers of his generation. On the contrary, Kang Youwei should be credited with having been the first Chinese whose views were truly cosmopolitan; he did not mean to measure the values of different cultures in terms of his own; he acknowledged their differences and independence, which he simply took for granted. Like some 18th century European thinkers of the Enlightenment, Kang had always endeavoured to discover and “collect” what may be called the universal goods through comparison and judgement; he has been rightly called one of the chief syncretists in the late 19th and early 20th century Chinese intellectual world, who tried to combine Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and Western Christianity, secular liberalism and even socialism into one system that he believed was good for human beings, and it was the purpose of his Grand Tour to study these. For him, a real sense of independence could only spring from an understanding of universality. Thus he maintained that “our countrymen must read Chinese books, and, at the same time, must travel to foreign lands.” One’s own culture can be appreciated all the better by contrasting it with others, and vice versa. Similarly, foreign cultures can only be properly absorbed when one maintains an independent spirit nourished by a deep understanding of, and strong faith in, one’s own tradition. He was a pacifist, opposed to any form of violence,

The sweeping consequences of his intervention come from a single comment made in front of Raphael’s paintings at the Vatican: “Chinese painting is shallow and desultory, it must be reformed too.” Liang Qichao once described the impact of Kang’s three famous books on politics on the Chinese intellectual world of the 1890s as “a hurricane” or “a mighty volcanic eruption and huge earthquake.” The effect of his verdict on Chinese art has proved to be no less destructive, though this was not intended by Kang himself. Together with his later variation that “Chinese painting of recent times is utterly debauched,” his remark has been widely regarded as a death sentence on Chinese painting, and was taken up by the radicals, such as Cheng Duxiu, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party, as a theoretical justification to “revolutionize” Chinese art, to replace Chinese tradition by rigid Western realism. In short, it can be suggested that the impact of Kang’s comments on the nature of Chinese art was as strong as that of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto on Western art that was to appear five years later. Not surprisingly, the Revolutionaries actually coupled Kang’s verdict with Marinetti’s Manifesto in their propaganda. If the Futurism advocated by Marinetti was the first collective attempt in the West to suppress history in the name of art, it can be said that the fire of artistic revolution in China unintentionally ignited by Kang Youwei was the first collective effort to destroy tradition in the name of progress. It is, however, a historical irony that Kang’s Travel in Italy which contains the first sparks of this devastating blaze, should have been condemned to obscurity. Serious scholars have dismissed it merely as a traveller’s “tale”, a lie which any travellers to remote lands may tell because the reader at home would be in no position to rectify it. It is of course not unreasonable to distrust Kang Youwei’s accounts, especially for those who know his general 343

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies he took a great number of photographs of the existing ancient monuments in China.

character of boldness, subjectivity, and often excessive imagination, and of his strong tendency to subject everything to his own ideas, systems and dogmas. Abundant examples can be found in his Travel in Italy to illustrate the accuracy of this characterization. For instance, he used his theory of the three stages that humanity has to pass through, the “Age of Disorder”, the “Age of Ascending Peace” and the “Age of Commonwealth,” as a yardstick for judging what he saw in Italy: he ranked Pompeii as a representation of the “Age of Disorder” because he believed that this historical stage could be characterised by the nature of its bathing practices. “Alas,” he wrote, “to have a bath is the common need of human body, how can we not have it? The barbarian does not take it, while in the Age of Disorder women and men do it together. In the Age of Ascending Peace, people have a different sense of shame from the Age of Disorder, and so woman and man do it separately. But in the Age of the Ultimate Peace or Commonwealth, every body becomes independent, and has his or her own freedom, therefore they return to the old custom of bathing together again.” For in Kang’s third age, every woman is every man’s wife; a woman is only permitted to live with a man for no more than one year and on expiration of the period she has to change her mate. So there is no moral danger in females and males bathing together. This kind of nonsense will certainly repel any serious reader of his Travel. The main literary device employed by Kang to help himself understand and describe what he saw, as well as to invoke his reader’s imagination, is a kind of superficial comparison that may disconcert us today. But what may particularly annoy his critics is his arrogance, occasional boasting and exaggeration, and the frequent contradictions to be found in his writing. He would boast that when visiting the Pope’s Palace he ran into four Cardinals who immediately recognized him as a Chinese nobleman and paid their respects to him; and that he intended to meet the Pope, but because of his own reluctance to bow to the Pope, he finally gave up his plans.

But unlike the majority of European visitors, Kang Youwei was not bowed down by the grandeur of Rome, as he believed that in glory and splendour it was no rival to our Qing-Han and Tang Dynasties, which nourished later nationalist sentiment. As we remember, Kang’s proclaimed objective was to investigate European politics, therefore he devoted many pages of his Travel in Italy to the history of Rome and such other cities as Florence, Venice and Milan, “the gain and loss” of their “evolution” in particular. Needless to say, his discussion was based on the rudimentary knowledge acquired from dubious sources. If what was intended by the author to constitute the substantial core of his investigation, or to use his own word “my specialization,” is so unconvincing to his critics, what can be said of his accounts of art? It soon becomes obvious to us that his knowledge of Greek and Italian art was so poor that not only did many well-known masterpieces entirely escape his attention, but also that he made many staggering mistakes. For example, he declared that Raphael was “the First Master,” the originator of oil painting (and, it might be also noted that later he was to go so far as to claim that Raphael adopted this technique from China via Marco Polo’s introduction of it to Italy). However, it is only fair to point out that Kang’s error derived from a famous remark by Xue Fucheng (1838-94) who was among the first Chinese to visit the West. The reason why Raphael, or more generally the school of Raphael, made such a special appeal to our earlier generations is easy to understand. For them, the grace, elegance and fluidity of Raphael’s style must have been a natural bridge enabling them to cross the wide river that have for centuries separated the territories of Western and Chinese art. Yet, as we shall see in a moment, Kang’s miscrediting Raphael with being the founder or discoverer of what we now call Renaissance art in every respect perspective, pictorial space and chiaroscuro - has had great significance for Chinese art history.

In Rome, so he tells us, “the gigantic bridges that lie in a vast field”, “hundreds of arches”, “the soaring ancient stone pagodas and obelisks,” “the ruined temples and wrecked lofty buildings that are scattered all over,” “the splendid churches that are unrivalled under the Heaven,” filled him with an unspeakably mixed feeling, nostalgic, melancholy and even tragic, and in the midst of them he could not help reciting again and again the famous lines by the Chinese poet Du Mu: “If there were four hundred and eighty temples in the Southern Dynasty, then how many high buildings and pavilions in the misty rain?” And while admiring all those that had survived from the past, Kang Youwei was deeply saddened by the irrecoverable loss or dispersal or disappearance of our own cultural treasures. So he sighed: “Looking back to the soil of China, there is nothing to touch and handle; no evidence of her civilization [has survived], [thinking of her] empty mountains and rivers, my heart is beating, my hands are shaking, what can I do with only the Great Wall?” Here, Sterling Clark would surely have disagreed with him, for

Despite his own regret at the shortness of his stay in Rome, we find that Kang Youwei spent a whole week in the city, hurrying through every principal museum, gallery and ancient monument, and the bulk of his Travel constitutes the record of them. His first day was spent in Pompeii, “one of the biggest antiquities in the world,” as he called it. He was struck by the mosaic decorations, the bas-reliefs, and, above all, the mural paintings, the colours of which, he was amused to see, “were so exquisitely fresh as if they had been painted yesterday.” In Pompeian painting he found some qualities close to Chinese painting. “On the walls of one room,” he wrote, “there were painted a large number of ducks, fishes and prawns. A bird was drawn with a few strokes, so with the birds among flowers. The flowers and plants were done spontaneously, without a taint of vulgarity, they are similar to the work of the Jiangshu and Zhejiang schools” in China. In describing Western painting Kang Youwei could still not break with 344

Cao Yiqiang: Unintended Consequences of Tourism radiate like an electric light” and the latter “the upper garments are stripped off, and the flesh and hairs are all true to a living person.” He thus likened them to the three supreme qualities of Chinese art: “the calligraphy of Wang Xizi, the poetry of Li Bai, and the verse of Shu Dongpo, which “are all like lotus flowers reflected in pure water.” In other words, Raphael combined in one person all the great aesthetic values, Western and Eastern, and, thus, perhaps represented a commonwealth of art in Kang’s final happy stage of human history. It is in front of Raphael’s paintings that Kang declared: “The painting of our country is shallow and desultory, far inferior to his, it must be reformed.”

the Chinese rhetoric that had been employed since the early 17th century. At first sight, there seems nothing extraordinary in his observation. Yet, if we recall for a moment that Kang had assigned Pompeii to the “Age of Disorder” in his three ages, the implications of his juxtaposition of the Jiangnan School with Pompeian painting are significant. What he was suggesting here is that what had been historically valued in China as the highest artistic qualities, namely the effects of “spontaneity” and “purity,” were achieved by an Age of Disorder in the West. As we remember, since the first meeting between Western and Chinese art in the 17th century, the Chinese had never used these two sacred terms to describe any Western works, though they recognized or even admired their faithful depiction and skills. After all, for the Chinese, it was these two qualities that had ultimately distinguished their own painting as a fine art, as compared with Western art which amounts no more than technique. It must have been for the first time that a highly cultivated Chinese scholar, painter and calligrapher had dared to desecrate their hallowed quality by applying them to Western art. What is more, in doing so Kang went on to deny their value in favour of “craftsmanship”. “If the people of my country could see these Pompeian paintings,” so he said, “they would realize that two thousand years ago the Romans had been capable of producing a work of spontaneity and purity. What is therefore difficult is faithful depiction and the high skills for achieving it. [Because it had striven for this aim,] European painting has made a step forward.” In contrast, “after two thousand years [the art of] our country still remains in the same state as that of the Romans, it is indeed shameful.” Clearly, in Kang’s mind, spontaneity was not so much an overflow of a highly cultivated spirit as a product of uncontrolled primitive impulse. For if the progress of art reflected the state of politics and other social factors, it must be keeping in line with these developments, and move shoulder to shoulder towards a common goal. But the impetus for this common evolution was the spirit of competition and rivalry, which stimulates constant changes. The European countries had this spirit, so “they develop, while we stop and make no progress. This is the difference between us.” The watershed that divides Western advancement and Chinese degradation in art is “the birth of Raphael.”

Thus, Kang discovered that the decline of his own artistic tradition exactly started at the time when Western art was brought to its perfection by Raphael. He wrote: The paintings in another room, executed by Raphael’s teacher, Perugino, are also quite good but somewhat rigid. That is because as a pioneer of a new school of art, it is difficult to be perfect. In the next room are...paintings which were executed around 1000 AD. Most of them are religious icons and they look solemn in gold, resembling paintings of the Buddha and bodhisattvas in China which are generally stiff and lacking in vitality...Indeed, before the birth of Raphael, all European paintings belonged to this category. All the paintings from that period that I have seen in the museums of other countries are the same. Therefore, I cannot help but marvel at the great achievement of life-drawing pioneered by Raphael...he was contemporary of the Ming painters Wen Zhengming and Dong Qichang. They were all great masters who changed the trends of art. But whereas Raphael developed oil painting and made it more precise and refined, Wen and Dong changed Chinese painting in the direction of yibi [freely expressive brushwork] which emphasized pure elegance and elusive feeling. As a result, the realistic tradition of the Song and Yuan Dynasties was lost. Whereas they [Western artists] strove for fidelity to nature, we Chinese painters aimed at being untrue to nature. It is because we have taken this opposite direction that we have degenerated. If one compares the masterpieces of our Song-Yuan periods with European paintings produced before Raphael, our Chinese painting is definitely superior, and unmatched by them. I have seen some Indian and Persian paintings in the Calcutta Museum, made more than a thousand years ago. They are extremely stiff and far worse than Chinese painting; Arabic and Turkish paintings are slightly better than Persian and Indian, but they cannot compare with works of the Song and Yuan masters. Therefore, when we discuss painting, four or five hundred years ago my country almost

Like most European Grand Tourists, such as Horace Walpole (to take only one example), Kang Youwei regarded Raphael as a personification of all the perfect qualities in painting; he paid homage to this “greatest painter on earth” by composing a long poem, and he was so deeply impressed by his grace, elegance, naturalness and sweetness, that, as he himself described, “whenever I visited a gallery I would give myself up to Raphael’s paintings,” and “was reluctant to leave till the bell rang for closing the door at four o’clock.” Before he left the Gallery he bought several reproductions of Raphael’s paintings. He described two works by Raphael in a little more detail: one is what he called “a self-portrait of young Raphael” and another “a portrait of his little brother.” The former is “bright and smooth like a jade, the two eyes 345

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies models, for which he was violently accused of being evil and of betraying art, must have been encouraged by Kang Youwei. For in contrast to the Greek and Roman sculptures he saw in the Vatican, “whose hair, bones and flesh are true to life, as are their veins...because only through their nakedness can their veins and other subtleties be vividly presented.” Kang pointed out that “Chinese sculpture is no good, because we have a strong sense of shame, and a fear of portraying a nude.”

occupied the first place. What a pity that it has not progressed since then! The rise and the flourishing of Literati art caused the decline of Chinese painting. This theory itself was of course not entirely new; in previous times there had been calls for the revival of a more solid and realistic TangSong tradition, but none of these precedents had had any significant effect. The force of Kang’s comment comes from this: his was the first attempt ever made to reverse the course of Chinese art history against a much wider background, gained through direct experience of the visual arts of all nations, and of Italy in particular. It is this thrust that underlies all the revolutionary ideas to be found in his popular Catalogue of the Collection of Paintings in the Myriad Trees and Grass Hall: his radical conclusion that “Chinese painting of recent time is utterly corrupted;” his attribution of this corruption to the misleading literati theories; his urge to revive the earlier mimetic tradition as a standard artistic form, regarding literati style only as one branch; and, above all, his new prescription for the future of Chinese art: “a combination of Chinese and Western.”

All these ideas to be found in his “travel tale” of 1904 were almost foreign to the Chinese world. But their novelty, ingenuity and vitality, and particularly his vision of new Chinese art and his revision of its history that are discussed above, have now inevitably been downgraded to the level of commonplaces or dogmas. But, the historical truth must remain undistorted, that, without the recognition of the arts as an index to the characters of a nation, as a means to educate the people, without the realisation of the link between art and economics and other material aspects, it would be utterly unthinkable that the iron wall that had for centuries divided in China the sphere of “the mere skill” from the sphere of “high art”, the fortification of “elite prejudice” against craftsmanship, would have finally collapsed; and hence the impassable boundary between Western and Chinese art.

Today, these issues are still being hotly debated in China, though Kang’s Travel in Italy is neglected. From a historical point of view, his travel accounts contain many new ideas which had never been raised by a Chinese: his acknowledgement that the visual arts of a country can not only “reflect the quality of its civilisation as a whole, but also bear an important relation to the development of its industry and commerce”; his call for conservation and preservation of national monuments and artistic treasures, for establishing museums, libraries and galleries in China, and for making national treasures, art and knowledge accessible to a wide public of different classes, rather than only to a small number of privileged people, emperors, princes, courtiers and elite, which foreshadowed the most influential project proposed by the great Chinese enlightenment thinker, Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940): “To replace religion by artistic education.”

Should we then regard Kang Youwei as a destroyer of Chinese painting, or to be precise, literati art, as scholars of Chinese art have unanimously asserted? Part of the answer can be sought in his Catalogue mentioned above. In it he did blame the elite aesthetic theories advocated by Shu Shi and Tong Qichang for misdirecting the course of Chinese painting, but he never attacked any specific paintings by scholarly painters. On the contrary, he expressed great admiration for them. And this respect is in fact embodied in his own paintings, such as the one he painted in 1927. No one can fail to see that this is typical of the kind of style that, according to his own definition, had corrupted Chinese art. Why did he himself not abandon or reform it? This question can only be answered by referring to the views concerning the future of Chinese politics, economics and culture that Kang Youwei tried to work out during his Italian tour. In this large framework, art is of course only a subordinate. It must fit into his political scheme and his general view of the development of human societies. He implied that the China of his time had declined from a higher stage into the “Age of Disorder,” while indicating that America had reached an “Age of Ascending Peace” and European countries were ascending towards it. That is why he repeatedly claimed that the stage reached by modern European art had already been reached in China many centuries earlier. Incidentally, Kang’s claim itself is at odds with the accepted theory that he advocated the Westernization of Chinese painting. Is it possible that he intended not so much to Westernize Chinese art as to modernize it on the basis of the Tang and Song tradition, that is, as he said, fuguyigenxin, meaning to renovate Chinese art by a return to the ancients? If so, it would be

What is more relevant to us is the fact that he strongly recommended that Chinese artists should be sent to study art in Italy; he regarded this policy as a practical measure for reforming corrupted Chinese art. It is interesting to note that Kang came to the conclusion from his own observations that since Italy was not in a position to develop her maritime power, “her demands can be rejected, but as to her painting, sculpture and architecture, we should send our people to study there, in order to enhance the quality of our visual culture.” It is well known that two of the leading figures of 20th century Chinese art, Xu Beihong and Liu Haishu were proteges of Kang Youwei who helped them to study in Europe in the early 1920s. Xu was to became the most formidable advocate of Chinese realism and the founding president of the National Art Academy, later the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, while Liu established the first art school in China to teach Western art. His introduction of the use of nude 346

Cao Yiqiang: Unintended Consequences of Tourism Song, Yuan and Ming periods. Among them there are the pieces I love exceedingly. Considering that I cannot see them now, I simply asked for the list of them to be sent to me...so that I can write a catalogue of my collection. Since the list of my Foreign collection is incomplete I have first undertaken the Chinese one...The winter comes earlier in Peking, my hands are frozen. Later, I shall write a catalogue of the foreign paintings and antiquities that I had collected during my trip round the world, so that those who are interested in them can have something to check.

interesting to note that Kang Youwei seemed to anticipate the recent challenge of the definition of modernity, i.e. the view that “modernization” means “westernization”, in our field. If one considers Kang’s view in connection with his Italian tour, one will find that what actually concerned him was neither modernization nor westernization of Chinese art, but its commercialization. This point is clearly emphasized both in his Travel and Catalogue. The words with which Kang Youwei concluded his influential preface to the Catalogue reiterate what he had said in his Travel: “Today, industry, commerce and everything else are related to art. If art is not reformed, industry and commerce cannot develop.”

Art became the last source of his pleasure, the last solace to his repeated political failures, the last refuge in his disillusionment. Some years before his death in 1927, he wrote in a postscript to a letter to a foreign friend: “I, an old man who...has rendered no useful service to the country and found no place on earth to bury his sorrow, manage only to make excursions into the heavens.” Judged from the inventory Kang compiled, both his old and new collections of Chinese paintings must rank as one of the best of this kind in the world, for it included a considerable number of masterpieces by great masters of various periods. Yet we do not know how they were dispersed. Kang’s original plan to investigate European politics ended up with an influential conception of Chinese art history, while his Catalogue can only serve as a faint memory of traditional Chinese painting, which Kang Youwei intended to revive under the reign of a constitutional monarchy modelled on the English system from which Americans like Sterling Clark benefited.

The literati aesthetic theories and art are harmful in so far as they have led to Chinese art being out of touch with these important fields, or even becoming the obstacle to their development. During his Grand Tour, Kang was impressed by how the visual arts could be of service to a wide public and fields, political, religious, economic, social and commercial, rather than being confined to a mere aesthetic enjoyment for a few. It is, I think, in this connection that the model that Kang proposed for the development of Chinese art, i.e. “a combination of Chinese and Western,” should be understood. Kang Youwei would certainly have regretted the unintended result of his art reform programme, that is to say, when he did not want to destroy, but revive traditional Chinese painting, he contributed, though unintentionally, more than anyone else to its final destruction. But he would not have regretted his decision to sacrifice his beloved elite art for his political cause, with which his American contemporary Sterling Clark would have sympathized. For without the security provided by a good constitution for social and economic developments Kang had fought for, art cannot be preserved. The different fates met with by Kang and Clark testify this truism. In May 1917, Kang re-entered the political arena, for the last time. He tried to restore Pu Yi, the last Qing ruler, as emperor. The attempt failed, and he had to hide in the American Embassy in Peking. It was during these long miserable months of confinement that Kang wrote his famous Catalogue. In October, he completed his book on a note of sorrow:

By striking contrast, barely one year before his death in 1956, Sterling Clark was able to complete the construction of this mausoleum-like Institute in peaceful and beautiful Williamstown. Thus, in it his excellent collection and his personal taste are perpetually enshrined. Today, The Clark Institute has developed into an organ not only for general education, but for scholarly research. How much would Kang Youwei envy Sterling Clark! But Kang knew that what ultimately secured his American counterpart’s realisation of his dreams in a democratic country had utterly failed him, in spite of his heroic struggles.

I have been confined indoors for half a year. I alone face the walls, and there is nothing else in the room. I wanted to ask to be sent the paintings I have collected, but I fear that they would be appropriated. Alas, I cannot take the risk to go out. I cannot secure my own life, how can I secure other things! However, I love painting by nature. Although my old collection was confiscated in 1898, during my round world travel I have collected several hundred European, American, Persian and Indian paintings, as well as several hundred Chinese paintings of the Tang, 347

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Fig.1. Kang Youwei, taken from the first edition, Travel in Italy. (Attribution of this photography is uncertain)

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Fig.2. Robert Sterling Clark in China (detail), taken from Through Shen-Kan. (Reproduced by courtesy of Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown)

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Fig.3. Goddess of Mercy in the Cave Temple at Yen-an Fu, taken from Through Shen-Kan. (Reproduced by courtesy of Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown)

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Fig.4. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Sleeping Girl with a Cat, 1880. (Reproduced by courtesy of Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown)

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Michael Conforti Director, Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, USA John arrived at the Clark Art Institute in 1997 on a two-year leave from the University of East Anglia to fill our newly created position of head of research and academic programs. He was charged with extending the Clark’s role as a center for research and higher education, using our resources to address needs in the field. I was surprised at how quickly John identified with the bucolic setting of the Institute, its extensive library, its personally chosen art collection and its close proximity to Williams College, an institution with a special history of training university and museum art professionals. He immediately expressed a vision for the character of our expanded activities. The symposia and conferences we have organized since 1998, as well as the visiting scholar program begun experimentally during John’s tenure and formalized by his successor, Michael Ann Holly, have reached a scale and impact never imagined prior to his arrival in Williamstown. Catalyzed by John’s intellectual breadth and curiosity, his characteristic “out of the box” thinking, his positive interactions with people of varying personality and professional association, the Clark has been successful in enhancing its role as a special site for discussion and advanced research in the visual arts. I thank John for his many contributions to the Clark as well as for his personal friendship, which I value highly and cherish deeply. John’s many admirers at the Institute join me in sending him best wishes on this important occasion.

Elisabeth de Bièvre Scholar at Large The first time my eye rested on John was in spring 1967 during a party at the American Academy in Rome. Leaning against a refectory table pushed to the wall I was observing the event. Next to me was a line of other un-detached women. At the far end arrived a slender young man of outspoken profile his demure reserve softened by long curly brown hair. He seemed determined to make someone talk, what ever the consequence, starting his luck with the woman at the head of the line furthest away from me. Her thoughts must have been on other matters or it was not her custom to respond to strangers for he soon moved on to the next without changing the gently inquisitive expression on his face, without showing any feeling about having been rebuked. The same scene was enacted with the second and so he slowly moved from one to the other evidently getting no unambiguous response from any of the women gathered, as if a plot of solidarity had been rapidly forged between them. It became clear that soon it was going to be my turn and I had to decide with whom to side, with the preoccupied members of my own gentle sex or with the unperturbed other. I decided on the latter and still do, because this particular other is open to listening to anybody in the world at any time, never judgmental or at lost to create a happening. ‘For the world is wide, with room enough for customs, tastes, principles, observances of every sort, which, once you set them in the society where they have arisen, always make sense…But, dear master, refrain from identifying them with universal commandments.’ (Candide) The ‘universal commandments’ Voltaire was eschewing may as yet with the help of new research of all sciences and humanities combined, be formulated in such a way that they will bring new insights into our understanding of mankind in its physical and spiritual dimensions in the universe.

Helen Boorman Research Centre, Norwich School of Art & Design, UK It is a summery morning in May but as usual very little light finds its way into the Arts Building basement, floor 01. This is where Fine Art and Music had its home in 1977, before the luxurious quarters of the Sainsbury Centre Building and the global ambitions of World Art Studies and Museology take their place. The lecture about to begin is by John Onians. I am eighteen years old and struggling to imagine what impact this knowledge will have on my life. 15 minutes am I riveted. As he talks John frequently turns to the board - looking at the image there with such intensity it is bound to reveal some hidden truth. Those clues make us later go in search of the things that for now seem just outside our grasp. What I am given that summer morning, for life, is a sense of the joy of discovery. The bus to Norwich swerves to avoid a cyclist. It is raining and the rider seems oblivious of rain and bus. The greencaped figure is like some exotic bird on those dull streets. I know immediately that it is John. I am invited to dinner. John will present some carcass which he will claim he has scooped off the road. There will be a ritual and we will all comply. A typically shocking association will be made between the dead beast and some trace of family history. John will show us the ‘hole’ from the kitchen to the earth below. 354

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Ian Campbell School of Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, UK It will have been the spring of 1975 when I first met John, having applied to do his Master’s course in Renaissance architectural theory. The interview consisted of a coffee and a wander round UEA, John not letting on that I was his first ever applicant (Mary Hollingsworth applied a few weeks later). I was hesitating since I had just been offered a place on the Barber Institute’s new M.A in English art and literature, where I was intending to build on undergraduate research on picturesque watercolours. John was dismissive of continuing to study English art, telling me I could do that any time, and that I needed an Italian foundation to my further studies. He persuaded me (so did the merits of Norwich versus Birmingham), assuring that that my little Italian and less Latin could be easily remedied by the following October. Working with John on the M.A. was immensely enjoyable, trying to follow the leaps of speculation and learning to challenge when his imagination outstripped his logic. He was a generous supervisor with his time and ideas, but also in his criticism. I still cringe when I look at my dissertation, examined by John and Howard Burns. When I later decided to do a doctorate, I asked John what he thought of the idea of doing a translation and edition of Scamozzi’ s Idea. Again, he was dismissive predicting I would be bored to death within a year, but offering no help to find another topic, saying that must come from me. Months later, I came up with the idea of working on Renaissance reconstructions of Roman temples. John was much more enthusiastic and was right in that it led me into all manner of obscure corners of the Renaissance and Antiquity. And that is where I still am a quarter of a century on, still wondering when I’m going to get down to my English watercolours.

Desmond Collins Researcher and prehistorian I first met John Onians about 1954, when we both chanced to be in the same form in the classical stream at Merchant Taylors School, Northwood. We did not really come to know each other well until a few years later when his passionate interest in historic buildings, and mine in archaeology and history, seemed to meet, and I helped him with transport for a small group of enthusiasts on visits to medieval churches and the like. He has always been ‘Johnny’ to me, because when I got to know his family I discovered that all six of them, without exception, were called by the diminutives of their names, and somehow this stuck and passed on to my closer friends. The enthusiasm for visits to historic buildings continued at Cambridge, and I found myself again transporting groups of people to National Trust houses in my old Bedford dormobile. (These were outings of the Cambridge University National Trust Centre, which Johnny had by then formed). The other thing I discovered at Cambridge was that Johnny was a dab hand at cooking, which was lucky because gastronomy was an obsession of mine. This skill came to be very propitious a few years later. He was by now studying at the Courtauld, and my flat in Belsize Square was so convenient, that he moved in for a while. Briefly, after I married, we were a ménage a trois, and I was delighted to find Johnny and Ann putting their heads together over the likes of boeuf stroganoff. I have never been able to compete with either of them since then on the cooking front – Johnny made the best béarnaise sauce I have ever tasted. Not long after, there was another amusing episode. In the later sixties I was asked to lecture to the Cambridge University National Trust Centre, but I was mistakenly billed as a founder member of the ‘National Trust’! – instead of the C.U.National Trust Centre. Apparently an aged member of this audience muttered in a quavery voice to Johnny and his youngest sister (who by then ran the C.U.National Trust Centre) “I didn’t know any of the founder members were still alive”.

Paul Davies Department of History of Art, The University of Reading, UK It was a sunny summer afternoon in the early 1980s when David Hemsoll first introduced me to John. David and I - both postgraduate students at the Courtauld Institute - were then gathering material at the Warburg Institute for the first of our articles when we bumped into John entirely by chance. He was keen to know what my research interests were and when I

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies told him that I was working on centralised planning in Renaissance Italy, I distinctly remember his enthusiasm for the project, a form of encouragement that postgraduate students do not forget. The conversation then turned to the orders, balusters and other things, and what struck me immediately was John’s delight, even eagerness, in questioning assumptions. It soon became clear that he regarded no received wisdom as too sacred. As we talked, he increasingly played the role of devil’s advocate, throwing out ideas to see where they would lead. The role of devil’s advocate can sometimes be intimidating but not when acted by John. He played it playfully. Even at his most provocative, his aim was to stimulate, to generate ideas and not to stifle. It was a conversation that I shall always remember.

Eric Fernie Director, Courtauld Institute of Art, UK I first met John in 1968, at the University of East Anglia. While he was making a preparatory visit following his appointment to the School of Fine Art and Music, John, his wife Elisabeth, my wife and I spent an idyllic late afternoon over a drink beside the Yare in the University Village. Since then John and I have been the firmest of friends. If I had to identify his most prominent characteristic I would pick out choosing to argue against the flow of received opinion, whether from a passing comment by a guest at a dinner table or against views on which our whole society seems to assume agreement, and with an attitude extending all the way from cocking a snook to engagement of the most serious kind. All of this was encapsulated on an occasion when we were travelling with a group of colleagues by train from Norwich to London on the morning following the Entebbe raid. John mounted a voluble and protracted denunciation of the operation because of the deaths of the Ugandan soldiers it had involved, in the process only just avoiding agitated intervention from other passengers. John has a miraculous ability to combine playing with ideas as if they were toys with an assessment of them which conveys the deepest moral sense.

Lauren Golden Department of Theoretical Studies, Norwich School of Art and Design, UK My own vignette could be composed of one sentence: ‘John certainly raised my eyebrow’. However, a sub-clause would have to be ‘on more than one occasion’. Such twitchings of the facial muscles certainly began in my first term as an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia in 1988, where I had embarked on a degree in Art History as a rather awkwardly placed ‘mature student’ at the age of 26 years. I had fought my way into FAM, as it was called then, in a rather tough interview with John Mitchell, where I had left, stating, “Don’t you dare turn me down without asking me to write an essay.” To my great fortune, John Mitchell did indeed meet my request, nay, challenge, and it was soon after I found myself sitting in a ‘prelims’ lecture by John on the building activities of Emperor Claudius. I think I can honestly say that this lecture was one of the weirdest intellectual experiences of my life. John’s conclusion, that Claudius built aqueducts because he dribbled, turned my concept of what academic ‘thinking’ included on its head. Even more frightening, was that his argument made incredible sense, although at the time, intellectually, I was not quite sure why. Sometime later in the prelim lecture course, he knocked all of the year sideways with his seminal exposition, ‘On how to listen to High Renaissance Art’. Again, there seemed to be another seemingly incongruous import to senses other than the eyes for Art and Art History. This lecture was discussed for many weeks afterwards in the UEA bar and various hostelries around the fine city. Now over ten years later, my photocopy of the paper “On how to…” from Art History has virtually every line highlighted! Due to these prelim peregrinations I decided to specialise in Renaissance art and architecture and later found myself charged to present a seminar on Pienza, for which John happily informed me there was no literature to be read (which I later learned to be untrue) and handed me a small picture pamphlet and merrily said, “just look at the buildings”, which being an obedient student I duly did. After considerable peering, scrutinising, use of a magnifying glass and much enforced raising of the eyebrows, I came to the conclusion that the buildings in Pienza were a musical chord. This delighted John and then later, on reading Bearers of Meaning I discovered why. This method of research has stayed with

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Sir Ernst Gombrich OM The Warburg Institute, London, UK Since the official designation of the chair held ex officio by the Director of the Warburg Institute is that of the ‘Professor of the History of the Classical tradition’, the administrators of the University of London made me a member of the Board of Studies in Classics, though my competence in this field was and is, to say the least, highly questionable. Though my contributions to the debates of that august body were minimal, I still treasure their memory, and that mainly because they brought me into contact with John Onians’ father, Richard Broxton Onians, Hildred Carlile Professor of Latin at the University of London. He was indeed a character one could not easily forget. Admittedly his interventions were not always welcome to the other members of the Board, who were impatient to get on with the business in hand. This was not a consideration that seemed to count for Professor Onians. He evidently enjoyed putting forward an original point of view, and to defend it at length. When I first met John as an undergraduate student I was immediately struck by his similarity with his father. The characteristics singled out in the personal notes by his friends printed in this volume sometimes resemble to a striking extent the style and approach of his father. There is the same love of argument, of acting as the devil’s advocate and even, unless my memory deceives me, the cadence of his voice and speech. As an admirer of his books I should like to second this personal observation.

Richard Gordon Formerly School of European Studies, University of East Anglia, now Munich I do remember a characteristic intervention by him during the discussion of a paper I gave on the iconography of Greek sacrifice at the 26th CIHA conference in Washington in 1986, part of a panel on ‘art and ritual’ organised in whole or part by John and published in vol. 3 of the proceedings (World Art, edited by Irving Lavin) - this was an early statement of John’s about the biological origins of art, so you probably know the volume. A member of the audience objected that it was obvious that my approach was not that of a historian of art but of a historian of religion using art, and John intervened in my defence, to say that art historians could not claim a monopoly of insight into images and artefacts, and that anyway their traditions of approach had more or less systematically prevented them from studying the specifically religious value of images. I thought this was typical both of his own open-mindedness and of the spirit in which he edited Art History.

David Hemsoll Department of History of Art, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts University of Birmingham, UK I first met John Onians twenty five years ago as an undergraduate student at the University of East Anglia. He already had a reputation for original thinking and, for that matter, being rather contrary. For example, he professed very much to like Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, which was being built at the time and was where the art history department was shortly to be installed, and in this he seemed almost a lone advocate since many of his colleagues and

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies students (including myself) were openly hostile to the new building. To me as a student this seemed typical of his approach. What I remember most about his classes was that when a view was held to be virtually unassailable he would almost inevitably contradict it, whether this was fashionable or not. In addition to this, he encouraged a most refreshing disregard for art historical literature and troublesome fact, and I am eternally grateful for his advice (whether it was meant completely seriously or not) that it was much more rewarding to look and think than it was to read. In those days, I might add, John had a rather striking – and idiosyncratic – appearance, as he was often seen wearing a large fur coat. In fact he was wearing it on my graduation day when I introduced him to my parents who were charmed by him and, coming to an obvious conclusion, asked him if he had enjoyed the course as well. Since then, although I have seen him much less frequently, he has remained for me a constant source of inspiration, particularly in showing how buildings and other works of art can be ‘read’ and how the ideas lying behind them can thus be deciphered.

Martin Henig Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK I first became aware of John in about 1955. We both went to Merchant Taylors’ School, Northwood. Although we are about the same age, the headmaster seemed to have confused John with his elder brother Dick so he was put in a form for boys two years older. Thus when he reached the 6th form I was still in the middle school. We did get to know each other quite well at the school’s archaeological society: John had a passion for medieval churches, and used to cycle many miles to visit them. He did not however think very much of Renaissance architecture. We both got in to Cambridge; he to Trinity to read Classics and I to St Catharine’s as a ‘modern historian’. We soon met up and became very much closer. Early on, I think in King’s parade, he suggested to me that we found a Cambridge University National Trust Society. This we did, he becoming the first Secretary and I the Junior Treasurer. Considerable merriment over the new society’s initials led to it becoming a National Trust Centre and as such it survives. In its early days we roped in as many car–owning graduates as we could and went on long excursions to see the buildings of England, especially East Anglia. The Late Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was an early, and most entertaining, speaker. There were also two week long trips to the Welsh Marches and the English–Scottish border. In Cambridge I remember frequent punting trips with John in Summer and walking to Granchester as well as along the backs on the Cam in the Great Freeze of 1962–3. Our talk was often about art and architecture but also other things. We both sampled Buddhism, pointing to our thirst for knowledge of other religious and philosophical systems. There were also riotous parties aided by the fact that John at one time shared lodgings with the son of a major vintner. After Cambridge I decided to take a post graduate diploma in London, at the Institute of Archaeology. John followed two weeks later and went to the Courtauld. Two years later he started his doctorate at the Warburg and I took a job at the Guildhall, Museum in the City. Socialising continued through this time. As bright young things from Oxford and Cambridge a large gaggle of us, John’s brother Dick and elder sisters Vivie and Margie and other young graduates mainly from Oxford and Cambridge (including John and Brigid Cherry and Barbara Brend) met at frequent intervals to read plays meeting in each other’s houses. There were many hours after what passed for work in the Pride of Cockayne and other coffee bars. Most people remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated. John and I were talking in a coffee bar between Warren Street and Euston Square Station. I have vivid recollections of running for last trains at Baker Street (his left before mine) and once or twice John coming back to my house and phoning his father, attempting to persuade him that he was not sleeping with a woman! Visits to John’s parental home at The Weo, Little Chalfont was a wonderful experience. Professor Richard Onians fulfilled all expectations of what a professor should be. Author of one famous and unconventional book he had not written another. His learning was profound but could be dogmatic. Tea took a somewhat stylised form. A wonderful array of cakes provided by John’s mother followed by conversation about history, religion, morality, human nature. At some point John would propound an opinion, usually quite outrageous. This was the challenge. Then would come the argument, ending with the Professor leaving the room, and John his challenger in possession. This was a wonderful training ground for John’s later methods. This period ended in the later 60s. I left the museum and went to Oxford, following John in the quest for a doctorate. My first research trip began in the Hague and Wassenaar for John’s marriage to Elisabeth. Later I was to stay with them for a wonderful fortnight in Settignano where John and Elisabeth were teaching. It was the first of many occasions were he invited me to give a lecture.

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Subsequently there was UEA and many visits to a university which seemed to grow all the time, both social visits and giving courses in place of John or his colleagues. It has struck me over the years how much Elisabeth has added to John’s stature in a remarkably beautiful marriage, which also has an academic dimension that has helped to refine John’s work. No Festschrift could ever leave her out of account. And already Isabelle and Charles are experiencing their own London days, though with far more assurance– they have wandered further and gained more in wisdom and experience than we had done at that age. For them World Art...World History...is a way of life. But they know that John will not abandon an argument; he will not stalk out of the room while there is any corner of a topic left unexplored!

Sandy Heslop School of World Art Studies & Museology, University of East Anglia, UK “The trouble with you is that you let a few facts get in the way of a good idea.” Among the advice I have been given over the years, the above from John has stayed with me as particularly memorable. It was occasioned by a piece in Art History which he was trying to encourage me to develop. As usual, I saw the problems rather than the opportunities. However right he was, I was not inclined to turn a series of aperçus into a general proposition, and so the paper retained its rather tersely suggestive form. It had as yet no title, and when John proposed ‘Brief in words but heavy in the weight of its mysteries’ I could see that it elegantly let us both of the hook. Some seventeen years on it seems appropriate to return to one of the themes of that paper and try to develop it. I hope it is more appropriate since it takes a classical genre of visual composition and explores its deployment and reception in the middle ages, following John’s example with the classical orders in Bearers of Meaning. The final acknowledgement to John is that it was his insistence that I give a World Art Research Seminar at UEA early in 2001 which led to the first, rough draft of my offering to him in this volume. It also, I hope, takes on board his eloquent appeal that Canterbury crypt deserved much greater exploitation. His comment in front of the slide was “they think in columns”. John may also appreciate the strategy developed to prevent facts getting in the way of ideas: broadly to give ideas the status of facts and vice versa, by enhancing genre and reception at the expense of intention.

Mary Hollingsworth Tutorials with John were always slightly unconventional – the oddest took place in my flat in Florence while I was researching for my PhD in the Archivio di Stato. Aware that I had to convince him that what I had found was of considerable importance, I recounted my tale of wage rates and job titles in minute and enthusiastically tedious detail. He listened attentively, smiling occasionally. His response was startling. In a deep voice, with a strong German accent, he intoned the words “Very interesting – but so what?”. My face must have fallen dramatically, because he laughed immediately and said he had been dying to say those words to one of his students as they were what Gombrich had said to him at the Warburg when he had presented his own thesis.

Paul Jordan Author John Onians and I never met each other as undergraduates, for he was reading Classics and I was doing Arch. and Anth. We first met, as I recall, when we were research students, on the eve of a trip to the Périgord, organised for his WEA students by our mutual friend the archaeologist Desmond Collins, who was at school with John. This was 37 years ago. John, of course, was everything that he is today, only with the added energy of youth - something hard to credit now, given the quite extraordinary energy he still exudes. The trip took us to some of the best-known and most important of the cave sites of the Mousterian and Upper Palaeolithic cultures, including ones with engraved and painted pictures that my contribution to this Festschrift discusses. John’s wide range was early indicated in his vivid interest in these pictures and the archaeology that went with them: his equal interest in his fellows was also to the fore in his lively discourse with all the rest of us on the bus, not so much a ghastly but certainly a motley crew. John’s range is indeed wide.

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies I used to see him after that on odd occasions in Cambridge, always struck by his drive and his belief in the achievability of all goals. This latter was first brought home to me when he set off from my rooms by the Fitzwilliam to run to the station with only about seven minutes to catch his train, an ambition I regarded as futile in the circumstances. Even now I might be inclined to think he never caught it and just kept quiet about the whole thing if I had not once since been dragged along by him, first thing in the morning, on a similarly hopeless run from Unthank Road to Norwich station, where we duly caught our London train. A few meetings in the sixties and early seventies kept us in touch - and introduced me to the wondrous Elisabeth and their firstborn who made a certain impression on my carpet in Richmond. In the late seventies, I went to live in Norwich and began to experience the pleasures of life with the Onians, first as a guest in their house and then often as a guest at their table - surely one of the great joys of existence. What emanates from John and Elisabeth and their company is an air of intellectual stimulation, with no holds barred, that always refreshes. John is an exceptionally fecund thinker, in whom we may overlook the occasional extravagances for the sake of such novelty of mind and originality of insight, always informed by a wide scope of knowledge, that we regularly enjoy with him. In him I see a well evolved descendant of those remote ancestors of ours, foraging primates with a gleam in their eye, who made the most of what came their way, always brought their wits to bear, never stopped working at it and generally did the best for themselves, through the millions of years of evolution that led to such fellows as we crawling between earth and heaven.

Nigel Llewellyn University of Sussex, UK Almost thirty years ago, in early spring 1972, I was a member of a small party of second-year History of Art students, nearing the completion of a study term in Venice. (It has subsequently transpired that this stage in my UEA course was when I first considered whether or not I might pursue art history as a profession; so the details of what happened in those three months are important to me and my recollections are still vivid.) John Onians led that study trip and characteristically he had designed a curriculum that was both ambitious and thorough. Each week there were four lengthy student-led seminars and two of these strands took as their subjects Venetian Renaissance painting, architecture and sculpture. The third strand required each of us first to reconnoitre and then to lead a day-trip to a nearby cultural centre (I was given Ferrara) and the fourth strand required us each to conduct the student group through a designated part of the city itself. I was allotted the Dorsoduro and here it was that I first encountered Tiepolo, whose art is the subject of my short contribution to this celebratory volume. Up to that point I had been an enthusiast for the Renaissance, to the intolerant exclusion of the corrupt excesses of what we art historians insist on terming the "later" art of Italy, that is anything after about 1520. However, two events of that March morning jolted me out of my complacent acceptance of the view that it was right and proper that the Renaissance should dominate the art-historical canon. There were also sowed the seeds of a fascination with Italian art in the eighteenth century, which I still indulge, partly at least because that period is so often presented as a time of decay or final flowerings. The first episode took place in the great Venetian church known as the Gesuati. Here, in preparation for the up-coming guided tour, I engaged in a close scrutiny of its extraordinary quartet of altarpieces; the first of which was painted by Tintoretto and is an anachronism since it was a survivor from an earlier building. The other three represent tremendous responses to Tintoretto from Sebastiano Ricci, Piazzetta and Giambattista Tiepolo respectively. I gazed up at these ‘later’ pictures wondering what on earth I could possibly say about them. They spelled danger to an eye trained on Bellini and Cima. No guidebook was to hand so I was thrown back on what I have come to see as the training, which John helped me to acquire. As I looked at the three early eighteenth-century pictures and at the space they occupied I realised not only that my Renaissance heroes Bellini and Cima could help me in my presentation but that the architect Palladio was also relevant. Virtually by accident I stumbled on a way to tie the great Dorsoduro church into the historical narrative that by that stage in the Venice trip was becoming pretty familiar to all of us. The theme that had surfaced concerned the tradition of self-reference - hardly path-breaking stuff but an idea that would be useful as a pedagogic device for the class later that week. So, standing there with my notebook, I developed a line of argument that the architecture of the Gesuati represented Massari’s response to Palladio as manifested in the facades of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Redentore and the Zattere directly across the water; and for the pictures, that Tintoretto, the Renaissance master, was being responded to by his eighteenth-century successors. At the start of that study-trip I never would have seen with any discernible clarity the selfreferential relationship of the four altarpieces answering and responding to one another across the nave of the church. John taught me how to look for such patterns. The second episode that same afternoon was more mundane. Leaving the church to walk the several hundred yards to 360

Vignettes Sant’Angelo Raffaele (where I was to find Guardi even harder to digest) a puzzling scene greeted me. Off the traghetto from the Giudecca stepped two tiny figures dressed in costumes appropriate to the ranks of a Tiepolo crowd scene. The painted figures I had just been studying on the Gesuati ceiling watch carefully as Heresy is banished before the power of San Domenico and his Rosary. But here on the embankment the two children in their March carnival costume (for that, of course, was what it was), were probably intended to represent Marie Antionette and Casanova. Whomsoever they were playing, they evidenced one of John’s other most familiar themes, the central importance of place and context to the study of our subject. The key questions for art history to answer remain why was this work made and why was it made in the form that it takes? As John Onians helped me to understand, any scholar trying to answer questions like these needs a sensitivity to place and context and an openness to an endlessly broad world of ideas.

Elena de Luca Centre for Continuing Education, University of East Anglia, UK January, a wet and cold evening in Norwich. John Onians and Elisabeth de Bièvre received me with friendly manner. John and I talked, discussed, agreed, of course always in French or Italian. Simply because I did not know a single word of English. ‘Well’, John said, ‘it is a very exciting project…(pause)…of course language is a little bit of a problem’. He was looking at my papers, pondering, then said with exuberance, ‘but, you know, I did so many crazy things in my life that I am sure you will do this ( a PhD).’ Norwich became the warmest place in the world.

John Mitchell School of World Art Studies & Museology, University of East Anglia, UK I first met John and Elisabeth in the early 1970s, somewhere in London, at the flat of our friend Janet Holt. Janet had said that she had invited some sparky friends to supper, and this was confirmed by a first sight of them storming up the stairs with their comatose three–year-old Isabelle and one-year-old Charles slung over their shoulders, as always refusing to let anything stand in the way of the great game of social intercourse and adventure. Almost ever since they have been the best of friends, prodigally hospitable, wonderfully caring of others, inexhaustibly curious of the peculiarities of people, of their strengths and weaknesses, indefatigable travellers intent to cast their eyes on ultimate places, to taste extreme fruits. Of John, more than of any other person I know, Terence’s old tag speaks: Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.

Stefan Muthesius School of World Art Studies & Museology, University of East Anglia, UK John joined UEA at about the same age as most of his colleagues, which means that he arrived just a few years later than I did. Although our group, whether we called ourselves FAM or WAM, kept stressing that we have remained much the same throughout, the early days were really quite different. In a humanities’ subject, such as art history, everyone would teach almost exclusively the ‘area’ which was one’s specialisation, and as one’s specialisation at this early stage in the career would be quite narrow, the BA syllabus would consist of a number of rather specialised items, such as the sculpture of the Italian High Renaissance, or Victorian Architecture. What the department tried to make sure as a whole was that there were enough bodies on the ground to teach ‘the whole spread’ of Western art from Antiquity to the present day. John’s outlook, was, however, a broader one from the start, broader than any body else’s in the School. For him, Classical architecture and sculpture ran from Ancient Greece to the 16th century. Furthermore, John hardly thought in terms of ‘spread’, or ‘covering’, or of filling pre-determined time brackets with artifacts. Traditionally, antiquarians and art historians rely on a large amount of material evidence; again, John stood somewhat outside this habit - for a long time he kept only two books in his office at the University - and they weren’t even real books! - his own thesis and the telephone directory. Straight-down-the-line art historians would then treat the material with the traditional iconographic or formalist methods and their main conclusions would usually entail a new chronology. John’s way of proceeding laid less emphasis on the order in time, but was usually more analytical, continuing, perhaps, an older tradition of British thinking, which pre-existed those imported ways of a more narrowly academic art history. John has always cared more for unusual visual juxtapositions and for the kinds of causal links which arise unexpectedly. More and more John stepped outside the narrower range of Western works of art, as they were defined traditionally, in order to incorporate factors from a wide material, as well as from the psychic world. One could try an sum up all this by searching 361

Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies for a methodological label for John’s concerns, such as ‘material culture studies’, but John does not normally go for these kinds of classification. To him, this would work rather like a restriction; in any case, in teaching and in encouraging others in their research, John feels one has to be as open-minded as possible. One might, then, want to put stress on the purely personal elements of his approach. But John would not want to emphasise this either, certainly not within the circle of his colleagues, as he always likes to promote our group as a homogeneous and cohesive one.

Rodney Palmer Department of History of Art, University of Leicester, UK Over a drunken dinner in the winter of 2000-1, John Onians told how as a young boy a scab fell off some part of his anatomy and he spent hours searching under his grandmother’s dining room table for it, to no avail. He considered this revealing of his subsequent endeavours, believing failure to be the sure foundation for success. John’s many subsequent successes, his intellectual bravery and infectious optimism partly depend on his lovely wife, Elisabeth de Bièvre. John and Elisabeth are unstinting in having and creating fun. One day in May 2001 they awoke in Syria and arrived that same evening, bearing a large box of Arabic sweets, at a picnic in Norfolk. Before leaving, John and Elisabeth strolled around the garden, hand-in-hand. Unusually for an art historian, John is colour blind. Yet he dresses rather well, looking the suave jazz musician more than the professor. He attributes his costume to Elisabeth. ‘I’m her Barbie doll’. John more than makes up for his colour blindness, through the exceptional acuteness of his other senses, especially smell and taste. His instinct when he is presented anything for his inspection, or on entering any room for the first time, is to subject it to the opprobrium or approval of his elegant nose. He likes puddings, savouring be it a Colombian guava purée, English bread-and-butter pudding or Syrian pistacchio sweet with enjoyment but also attention, as a means of understanding their respective cultures. His approach to everything is thus enriched, and enrichening.

Victoria Parry Department of Theoretical Studies, Norwich School of Art & Design, UK I have been inspired and influenced by John and Elisabeth’s wide-ranging, exploratory, witty and learned conversation, by their constantly encouraging and warm response to hesitant, intuitive ideas, by their support, wisdom and generous hospitality.

Martin Powers Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA I remember some years ago attending a lecture John gave at one of America’s most distinguished centers of art historical learning. At that time this particular institution was especially renowned for its dedication to the art of Classical Europe and the Renaissance. John’s initial remarks basically claimed that there wasn’t much in Western architecture worth looking at after the Middle Ages! To everyone’s credit the audience took it quite well, but I couldn’t fail to notice the jaws hitting the floor. Of course few in that room could appreciate Renaissance architecture as deeply as John, and few could match his erudition in either Classical or Renaissance art, but the boldness and style with which he forced a rethinking of our usual hierarchies was absolutely typical. How does he pull it off? In my view John combines upper class British sophistication with a devil-may-care brashness which only Alan Bates could portray properly. He really seems like someone who might have hung around with people like Manet or Oscar Wilde. What makes John special of course is his unconditional open-mindedness, a readiness to try out any idea in the belief that intellectual richness could only, well, enrich. In a lesser man this could lead to eclecticism or even extremism, but John is fundamentally a humanist in the best sense; his commitment to tolerance, humaneness and compassion leads him toward productive paths of inquiry every time. Urged and inspired by his brilliant partner Elisabeth, John has always been remarkably successful at giving concrete shape to novel ideas. All my life I’ve been committed to de-parochializing the disciplines of art history, but time and again John actually does something about it. He organizes the symposia, he energizes the workshops and he continues to challenge art historians to question their most cherished assumptions. I can say without the slightest hesitation that, since the moment we met, John has been an inspiration as an 362

Vignettes intellectual, as an organizer, and as a human being. I feel most fortunate to count myself among the friends of the Onians family.

Richard Schofield Dipartimento di Storia dell’Architettura, Istituto Universitario di Venezia, Italy About 15 years ago Charles Burroughs was in London and told me that John’s fixation with architecture and music had got out of hand; he’d asked one of the students to deal with Bramante’s staircase in the Belvedere during a seminar; the student arrived with information and photographs; John said, “Oh no, not that way – I want you to sing it to me”.

Robin Skeates Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, UK John’s enthusiasm for World Art Studies is hard to resist. I worked with John for nearly six years in the School of World Art Studies and Museology, and for much of that time I remained somewhat sceptical of his vision of World Art. But John worked on me, like art, in a subtle but effective manner. First, he helped to stimulate my senses, by indirectly introducing me to his Italian doctoral student. Then he forced me to re-think my position in relation to World Art, by inviting me to work – for an enticingly generous reward – as a resident tutor on his Summer Institute of World Art Studies. My resistance was much diminished, and the paper that I have written for John in this volume represents the first fruit of our interaction. As for John’s research student: we’re happily married. I suppose that means I’m now wedded to World Art Studies.

David Thomson Once upon in a time in FAM a newly appointed very junior lecturer was keen to tap into the intellectual mainstream of the school with the 12.15pm daily lecture. The V.J.L. was seated promptly and seconds later J.O. sat beside him. J.O. - “Ah, you are our new recruit.” V.J.L. - “Yes, good to meet you.” 12.19pm J.O. - “Dear, dear. It is important the lecture programme runs smoothly for the image and the cohesion of the school.” V.J.L. - “Yes.” J.O. - “Who’s on?” V.J.L. “We await you in your presence.” J.O. - “Ah, indeed…of course.” There followed no idle dithrambic entertainment, but a seminal introduction to Florentine art in the First Ice Age, which moved all.

Wilfried van Damme Afrika Museum, the Netherlands In my essay for this Festschrift I relate how I met John intellectually after pulling a recent journal issue off the shelves of what was in fact Ghent University’s art history library, designed by Henry Van de Velde, and steeped at the time in the serenity of the weeks between Summer’s break and the hustle and bustle of a new academic year (such indeed were the joys of interdisciplinary research in pre- and proto-Internet days). Here I shall venture on a few reminiscences of first meeting John in person. In April 2000, the attraction of interesting ideas (or what one might call pheromemes), backed up by an invitation, lured me from the Netherlands to Williamstown, Mass., where John was convening a conference at the Clark Art Institute. On the day before the conference started John ‘phoned me in my hotel. He welcomed me, in Dutch, and invited me for lunch in the Williamstown Inn, where the conference’s speakers were housed. When we met, I was not surprised to find that John was a lively and amiable person – and a thoughtful host. He wanted to know all about my training at Ghent University, that mixture of art history, archaeology, anthropology and philosophy that had apparently prepared me to deal with matters of art and aesthetics from a global perspective. In outlining my academic education in Ghent, I mentioned that it included classes on African, Oceanic, Native American, Islamic and Oriental art, whereupon John expressed his

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Raising the eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies surprise that in the many years of talking about the idea of World Art Studies in Western academia no one had ever mentioned Ghent in this regard. For his part, John mentioned that he had been inspired in developing a neurobiological approach to art by watching the Reed Lectures on BBC television in the mid-1970s, when a young neuroscientist had opened his eyes to the neuronal development of the brain. He also admiringly mentioned the influence of Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt. These were both scholars, he stated enthusiastically, who spent most of their time making meticulous observations and then tried to account for what they found, coming up with solutions that turned out to be of relevance more generally. In explaining his views and especially in commenting on the present state of affairs in the humanities, John appeared to me somewhat more radical than I had anticipated. He even argued that if future scholars will look back on the 20th century they will point out humanities’ large-scale failure, and the erroneous assumptions on which it is based. It seems in fact that, as far as the humanities are concerned, John regards the 20th century as a quick-to-be-forgotten interlude between the 19th and the 21st century. Incidentally, when I observed that paradigms would already seem to be shifting rather rapidly, spurred on by developments in evolutionary thinking and related perspectives, John did not quite share my assessment. Specifically, he argued that even present-day sociobiological approaches of the arts usually fail to take into account what we presently know about genetics and neurology, while adding, quite intriguingly, that sociobiology shares with Marxism a preoccupation with power relations. In retrospect, I feel that by far the majority of participants of the Williamstown conference, some of whom were having lunch at nearby tables, would have been rather shocked if they had heard John’s words - as many of them surely were later on when John set out to “undress culture” in some of his introductory remarks and in presenting his own paper. John is of course aware of that response. In fact, when discussing the resistance among humanistic scholars to “biological approaches of the arts,” he observed that when confronted with these views, most people feel as if the ground is being swept away under their feet. John and I have met several times since. I fondly remember all of those meetings, for one since John’s liveliness, in both demeanour and conversation, always has a vitalizing effect on me. Moreover, chances are that John comes up with a statement that sticks to your head. I may illustrate this by recalling what was actually the second time we met. I had shown up in Norwich rather unexpectedly, and John kindly invited me over to have dinner with him and Elisabeth. At some point during our conversation we got to considering the various trendy topics that occupy so many minds in the humanities today – those transient scholars’ toys that time and again manage to direct away our attention from the “big questions.” I would not be surprised if I had been the one who actually initiated this thread. Still, somewhat to my own surprise, I took a rather lenient stance that night (as in effect I would in future conversations with John; it must be his “radicalism” in confrontation with views that now appear not so extreme after all). I suggested that, however annoying their buzz, and above all, however distracting us from “the larger picture,” some of these topics at least do point our attention to dimensions of art and behaviour that have hitherto been largely ignored. To which John replied: “That may all very well be true, but it’s not interesting!” And interesting it should be. Several months later I happened to mention to John that he had apparently been involved in the biology of art for well over two decades now. During that period such an involvement was even less popular in the humanities than it is today, and I suggested that this must have led to a feeling of scholarly insularity. John did not then seem too much bothered by that, emphasizing instead that he would have been “bored to death” if he had not confronted the challenge of pursuing a biological approach to artistic activity. In humanistic studies these days it has become a rare pleasure to meet a scholar who is driven by curiosity rather than ideology, who is interested in hidden regularities rather than hidden agendas. I for one am therefore glad to have made the acquaintance of the inquisitive primate that goes by the name of John Onians.

John Varriano Department of Art, Mount Holyoke College, USA Mount Holyoke College, where I teach, invited John Onians to be a Visiting Professor of Art History in the winter of 1983. That semester our museum had organized an exhibition called “Transformations in Hellenistic Art” and its curator, Martha Hadzi, thought the author of the recently published Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age might provide a stimulating set of accompanying lectures. As none of us had ever met John before, we assumed that being English and being a classicist, his lectures would be decorous, even if his appearance might be a little rumpled and his wife perhaps frumpier still. Quickly we learned we had it all wrong. “He’s not at all what you expected,” came the initial report of his arrival in the lobby of our building. Instead of the baggy suit he was sporting a full-length fur coat with his trousers tucked into bad-boy

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Vignettes boots; Elisabeth in leather jeans sparkled like a rock star. Then we found out that instead of speaking on topics related to Hellenistic art, John proposed to lecture on Brunelleschi. John’s presence shook us up that semester and we’ve remained colleagues and friends ever since. Beyond our obvious common interests in the classical orders, our taste for statuesque blondes and zany storytelling have enriched many an evening we and our wives have spent together over the years. But I’ve also learned a lot about taking intellectual risks from John, about playing more freely with ideas and relying less on secondary sources to make a point. My essay in this volume is in every sense intended as a tribute to John as a source of inspiration as well as a friend, an aemulatio no less than a laudatio.

Valentina Vulpi School of World Art Studies & Museology, University of East Anglia, UK My first encounter with John was through a message he left on my answering machine in Rome in the Spring of 1993. Despite the fact that I had been contacting UEA and other universities with the plan of spending some time as a student in the UK, his message gave me a real thrill. So far, I had received only letters with general information regarding the various institutions I had contacted, but this time, the voice speaking in perfect Italian with a slight English accent on my answering machine was actually saying that he had attentively read my CV and that the School of World Art Studies would be very happy to have my contribution in one of its MA programmes. Through his informal and personalised approach John had in one go swiped away my interest in other more well-known universities, and had put Norwich firmly on my map. My interest was vastly enlarged through further conversations on the phone and especially through a memorable meeting in Orvieto, on a very hot day in August 1993. Only much later did I realise that it was my ‘interview’ for a place on John’s MA, a process that as an Italian student was unknown to me. Equally, only much later was I told that the male friend who had come with me from Rome for some company on the journey had ‘scared’ John and his family. Because of his protective attitude, of which I was completely unaware, they thought he was a rather big boyfriend/body-guard who, in full Italian style, had come to check on them. The year of my MA with John was one of the most exciting of my life. The full immersion in another culture and lifestyle was an immensely enjoyable experience, while from the academic point of view that year was really mind-blowing. Firstly, I discovered that in British universities students are actually the most important element and not a nuisance as in most Italian institutions. Even more incredible was to realise that people around me, from fellow students to professors, were actively interested in my own thoughts! So I had to reshape totally my learning process, which up to that point had been mostly of a passive nature, and I had to become a more active participant in the debates that John has always been so great in firing up. With John I discovered a different way of looking at Renaissance architecture, but also -participating in the MA in World Art Studies he ran that year with the collaboration of almost all the members of the incredible and exciting cauldron which is the School of World Art Studies- I was exposed to art historical, anthropological and archaeological issues from all over the world and across time. Today, I am still very proud of the first class mark I received for an essay on Siberian Art, a subject I would have never dreamt of dealing with only a few months before. Adding to this the exquisite hospitality of John and Elisabeth, and the kindness and friendliness of most of the people I met in that year, it was not surprising that when I had to go back to Italy to finish my degree there I was obsessed with coming back to England as soon as possible. When, a couple of years later, this became possible through a scholarship which enabled me to start a Ph.D. with John, I could not believe my luck. This turned out to be even greater than I had expected. I thought that ahead of me were years of fascinating and hard work with John, the warm friendship with him, Elisabeth and many others, and a country which I was getting very fond of, but I did not know that during my absence a new young lecturer had arrived in WAM and that our paths where soon to happily meet. Dearest John, I will always be grateful to you for leaving that message on my answering machine!

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Cao Yiqiang The National Academy of Art, China I knew John’s work before I knew him personally. My impression of his scholarship is that it is very stimulating, undogmatic, with a genial touch of eccentricity. I first met John at a conference organized by him on European and Chinese painting in Norwich in 1994. Since then we have got to know each other very well. He is extremely goodnatured, and what is particularly charming in him is his appreciation of unpredictability – indeed, he is himself most unpredictable. In 1998 when John was establishing a scholarly programme at the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, he invited me to be the first Clark Fellow. There I witnessed how John transformed a small institute in a beautiful yet remote place into an Elysian Field where scholars of different convictions from different cultures could pursue their research, exchange their ideas, and dream their dreams freely, especially during the season when the green leaves all turned red or when the mountains were carpeted with white snow…John often says that he wants every scholar coming there to “live like a real human being.” I remember our often sitting together, drinking coffee, telling jokes and anecdotes. It was during those pleasant days that a vision emerged in my mind for setting up a proper institute of art history in one of the universities in China. Now this dream has come true, the institute is established in one of the ancient capitals – Nanjing, with a journal of The Intellectual History of Art as its organ. John is our advisor, as I regard his effort to bring non-European art into the main stream of world art studies as part of our own enterprise.

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“The capitals are exceedingly well made, and are wrought in the manner of olive leaves.” Quattro Libri dell’Architecturra, Andrea Palladio, 1570 In memory of Kevin Bateman