Reinventing Alexander: Myth, Legend, History in Renaissance Italian Art (Alexander Redivivus, 15) 9782503597430, 2503597432

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Legendary Tradition of Alexander in Medieval Art and Literature
The Medieval Tradition in Italy: An Overview
Episodes from the Legend
The Begetting and Birth of Alexander
The Taming of Bucephalus
The Flight with Griffins
The Submarine Voyage
The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon
Chapter 2: The Persistence of the Legendary Tradition in Fifteenth-Century Italian Art
Marvellous Adventures in the East in the Doria Tapestries
The Flight with Griffins in a Curtius Rufus Manuscript
Alexander as King of Swords in the Sola-Busca Tarocchi
A Fifteenth-Century Drawing Depicting the Submarine Voyage
Alexander among the Nine Worthies
The Sala Baronale in the Castle della Manta
The Triads of Castel Roncolo
The Castelnuovo Cycle
The “Cavalcavia” with the Worthies of Palazzo Trinci
Chapter 3: The Humanist Recovery of Ancient Historical Sources and Its Impact on the Reception of Alexander
The Recovery of the Ancient Greek Sources
Plutarch’s Life of Alexander
Arrian’s Anabasis
Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca Historica
The Revived Interest in the Ancient Latin Sources
Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni
Justin’s Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum
Humanist Use of Ancient Sources
Petrarch
Giovanni Boccaccio
Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria
Pier Paolo Vergerio
Chapter 4: The Emergence of a New Renaissance Iconography in the Fifteenth Century
Alexander on Cassone Panels
The Battle of Issus and the Meeting with the Family of Darius
Two Sienese Panels Based on Plutarch
Alexander and the Cycles of Uomini famosi
An Introduction to the Uomini famosi Cycles in Italian Art
Representations of Alexander in Uomini famosi Cycles
Medieval Cycles
The Castel Nuovo Cycle, Naples
Transitional Cycles
The Cycle in the Aula Minor, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
The Cycle in the Orsini Palace of Monte Giordano, Rome
Humanist Cycles
The Sala dei Giganti, Padua
The Cycle in the Corte Ducale, Palazzo dell’Arengo, Milan
The ‘Piccolomini Cycle’ of the Famous Men and Women
Images of Alexander in Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts
Images of Alexander Based on Ancient Numismatic Prototypes
Alexander Wearing the Lion-Skin of Hercules
The Helmeted Alexander
Alexander with the Horns of Zeus Ammon
A Curtius Rufus Manuscript “Illustrated Like a Romance Text”
Chapter 5: The Development and Consolidation of Renaissance Iconography in the Sixteenth Century
Selected Episodes from the Life of Alexander
The Meeting with the Women of Darius
The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane
Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe
The Taming of Bucephalus
The Birth (and Begetting) of Alexander
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of names
List of illustrations
Table of Contents

Citation preview

Reinventing Alexander

ALEXANDER REDIVIVUS Volume 15 Collection dirigée par Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas Margaret Bridges Corinne Jouanno Jean-Yves Tilliette

Reinventing Alexander Myth, Legend, History in Renaissance Italian Art

Claudia Daniotti

F

© 2022, Brepols Publishers n. v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2022/0095/148 ISBN 978-2-503-59743-0 eISBN 978-2-503-59744-7 10.1484/M.AR-EB.5.126480 ISSN 2466-5886 eISSN 2565-9189 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Acknowledgements

Vive Alessandro? Vive Alessandro, e regna per sempre.

I first began thinking about Alexander the Great when I was an undergraduate student in history of art at the University of Venice; in the late spring of my last year there, I chose as a subject for a September exam the representation of Alexander in Renaissance art. What was meant to be a rather limited investigation on the existing literature became an intoxicating immersion in the myth of Alexander, from the fourth century bc to the twenty-first century ad. I vividly remember that summer as one of the most absorbing and intellectually thrilling of my life, spent as it was among books, piles of photocopies and a large notepad of handwritten notes that kept growing a little thicker every day. It took, however, several years, a few life detours, a relocation to London, and a PhD at the Warburg Institute to give to that spellbinding attraction the shape of a more-structured academic work. This book originates from the dissertation that I completed at the Warburg in 2015. To carry out my research there has been a privilege like no other; with its unique community and the unparalleled resources of its Library and Photographic Collection, this remains, no doubt, the place where, as Chiara Frugoni once wrote, “tutti i desideri di uno studioso sono appagati”. The greatest of the many debts I have incurred over my years there is to my supervisor Jill Kraye, whose tireless dedication and scholarly accuracy and generosity remain a source of inspiration for which I feel immensely grateful. I am also indebted to Alessandro Scafi, who co-supervised the first part of my doctoral work and had the providential role of providing the earliest encouragement to turn my long-time interest for Alexander into a PhD dissertation. Thanks for their help and useful advice are also due to my examiners Donal Cooper and Scott Nethersole, as well as to Marta Ajmar, Guido Giglioni, Philippa Jackson, Jerzy Miziołek, and Paul Taylor. I feel honoured to have received inspiration, advice, and encouragement from Mario Casari, Patricia Fortini Brown, Valentina Gritti, Elizabeth McGrath, Charles Hope, Richard Stoneman, and Robin Lane Fox. I have a great debt of gratitude to Monica Centanni, my former mentor in Venice and the companion of many Alexander adventures since: she first opened for me the door of her wonderful library and infected me with her impassioned enthusiasm for Alexander, which I trust will be an incurable disease. I am grateful to Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas and Alexander Sterkens, who welcomed my book at Brepols in what is surely for any scholar of Alexander the ‘dream of dreams’ of all book series. Catherine’s stimulating comments and feedback on several drafts of the manuscript, as well as the constructive criticism and helpful advice I received from co-editors Margaret Bridges, Corinne Jouanno, and Jean-Yves Tilliette, were crucial in improving the text. Needless to say, all flaws and mistakes that remain are my own. At

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Brepols, I am also indebted to Marina Donikian, whose assistance throughout has been invaluable. While my research could not have been accomplished without the doctoral studentship granted by the AHRC, whose support I happily acknowledge, my work has greatly benefited in its final stages from the stimulating environment I found at the University of Warwick, particularly in the company of David Lines and Giorgio Tagliaferro. From the many institutions that provided the images that illustrate this book, I wish to acknowledge in particular the help I received from Paolo Alei and the staff of the Orsini-Odescalchi Castle at Bracciano, Donatella Borroni (Milan, Sotheby’s), Gabriele Caioni (Moretti Fine Art), Antonella Fumo (Venice, Procuratoria di San Marco), Veronica Ghizzi (Mantua, Musei Civici), Laura Paola Gnaccolini (Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la città metropolitana di Milano), Florian Hofer (Bolzano, Castel Roncolo), Alessandro Morandotti (Università di Torino), Silvia Nerucci (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati), Valérie Richard (Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts), Rossella Sileno (Arezzo, Museo Statale di Casa Vasari), Viviana Maria Vallet (Soprintendenza per i Beni e le Attività Culturali of the Valle d’Aosta), and Sian Phillips at Bridgeman Images. Many cherished friends and colleagues have helped in various ways: Bryony BartlettRawlings, Stefan Bauer, Giulio Boccaletti, Giulia Bordignon, Marta Celati, Gemma Cornetti, Francesca Franco, Barbara Furlotti, Richard Gartner, Clare Lappin, Livia Lupi, Nessa Malone, Andrea Mattiello, Nicol Maria Mocchi, Maria Pavlova, Guido Rebecchini, Jonathan Rolls, Carole Russell, Daniela Sacco, Claudia Terribile, Giulia Martina Weston, and Philip Young. I owe more than I can say to my most trusted and sympathetic sparring partners of thoughts, Paolo Sachet and Lorenzo Bonoldi. Help I received on specific issues is acknowledged in the text. This book is for my family, who knows all too well that the name of Alexander is never too far from my lips: without their love, unfailing support and unconditional faith in me very little of what follows could have been achieved. My father Roberto left us too soon to see the work of his little one printed; but I am sure that wherever he is now, he’s smiling down on me, and he’s happy and proud. C.D., Warwick, February 2022

Introduction

As a Christmas gift for the year 1450, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II who was then bishop of Trieste, presented the ten-year-old Ladislaus the Posthumous, duke of Austria and king of Hungary and Bohemia, with a treatise written in the form of a long letter entitled De liberorum educatione. In order to provide guidance to the orphan boy who lived at the court of Piccolomini’s patron, the Emperor Frederick III, Enea Silvio composed a work which is both a mirror for princes and an educational treatise, setting out a whole curriculum of studies that would provide Ladislaus with the education a king needed. Among the many things that such an education would entail, Piccolomini recommended the reading of ancient historians: Sunt et historici legendi pueris, ut Livius atque Sallustius, quamvis ad eorum intelligentiam profectu sit opus; Iustinus et Quintus Curtius et quem Petrus Paulus transtulit, Arrianus, in quibus vera, non fabulosa sunt. Alexandri gesta percurri debebunt. [Boys ought to read historians, too, like Livy and Sallust, although they will need to be older to understand them; or Justin and Curtius Rufus and Arrian, whom Pier Paolo Vergerio translated: in their writings one can find truth, not fables. The deeds of Alexander should be perused]1. Clearly regarded as a suitable subject matter even for children as young as Ladislaus, the life of Alexander the Great should be approached, Piccolomini says, through the accounts of three historians: the Latin Justin and Curtius Rufus, and the Greek Arrian in the Latin translation provided by Pier Paolo Vergerio. These sources, Piccolomini continues, are to be preferred above all others because they tell the truth, not fables, about Alexander’s life, as if in the Alexander tradition, Piccolomini implies, two distinct threads could be discerned: on the one hand, what he calls “vera” – the sources that can be trusted and believed; on the other, what he calls “fabulosa” – the sources that are deemed unreliable and untrustworthy. In the learned community of fifteenth-century humanists, Piccolomini was not the only one to address the tradition of Alexander in terms of credibility, and to feel the need to distinguish, in the vast array of accounts available at the time, reliable sources to be



1 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, “De liberorum educatione/The Education of Boys”, in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. C. W. Kallendorf, Cambridge MA and London, 2002, p. 126-259, at p. 224-225 (I have slightly modified Kallendorf ’s English translation). On Piccolomini’s treatise, see C. W. Kallendorf, “Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s De liberorum educatione: An Educational Classic”, Pan. Rivista di Filologia Latina, 7 (2018), p. 123-132; C. TerreauxScotto, “L’éducation du prince dans le Tractatus de liberorum educatione”, Cahiers d’études italiennes, 13 (2011), p. 103-128, and M. Lentzen, “Le idee pedagogiche di Enea Silvio Piccolomini”, in Pio II umanista europeo. Atti del XVII Convegno Internazionale (Chianciano-Pienza 18-21 luglio 2005), ed. L. Secchi Tarugi, Florence, 2007, p. 583-591.

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commended from fanciful retellings to be rejected. Around 1437, in the prefatory letter to his translation of Arrian (praised by Piccolomini), Pier Paolo Vergerio reconsiders the whole literary tradition surrounding Alexander and utterly condemns those authors who, in his opinion, showed little care for the truthfulness of their accounts; they were guilty, Vergerio said, of leaving their readers unable to tell whether those accounts contained fables or true history (“fabulasve an historiam veram”)2. A direct attack against an Alexander perceived as fabulous and historically untrue was also carried out in the 1450s by Angelo Decembrio. In a famous passage of his De politia litteraria (VI.68) discussing Netherlandish tapestries, Decembrio censured the depiction of stories based on fanciful accounts of Alexander’s life, and qualified those artworks as ‘fabulosa’ produced by ignorant (“inepti”) artists, the fruit of a foolishness (“vanitas”) worthy only of unsophisticated people (“imperiti”) and of some old wives’ tales (“anilia figmenta”), disrespectful of the work of historians3. Italian humanists were not alone in questioning the tradition handed down to them about the figure of Alexander. Well before the Quattrocento, distrust of fanciful incidents reported about Alexander’s life had occasionally been voiced by medieval writers throughout Europe as early as the twelfth century4, while north of the Alps the interest in truthful histories (“vrayes histoires”) of Alexander perceived as long forgotten and in need of recovering is famously at the core of Vasque de Lucène’s prologue to his 1468 French translation of Curtius’s Historiae Alexandri5. There is a moment, however, when these do no longer appear to be isolated voices carrying out single-minded attacks, but rather distinctive views that become dominant, and can be detected in the textual as much as in the visual tradition. An awareness that the Alexander tradition was a complex matter and that rumours and even gossip about the conqueror had been transmitted alongside more reliable information can be found even in the ancient biographers of Alexander, most famously among them Arrian. Yet, fifteenth-century humanists did not merely follow suit, for the claim they made was as bold as it was unprecedented. Firstly, they presented the diverse and multi-layered tradition of Alexander as resulting from two distinct threads, one pertaining to what they called fabula and the other to what they called historia – or, in more contemporary words, ‘legend’ and ‘history’; secondly, they assumed that a neat distinction between these two threads could and had to be drawn; thirdly, they passed judgement on the whole of the Alexander tradition and, by relying on that distinction, upheld a selected number of what they regarded as historically accurate sources, dismissing and rejecting all others as untrustworthy and untrue. That such a humanist claim is an oversimplified interpretation of reality must be acknowledged at once: the tradition of Alexander is far more complex



2 Pier Paolo Vergerio, Epistolario, ed. L. Smith, Rome, 1934, p. 382: “Atque hec tanta scribentium varietas perplexitatem legentibus afferre non modicam consuevit, cum essent incerti quibusnam fidem adhiberi pre ceteris conveniret, et fabulasve an historiam veram legerent”. 3 Angelo Decembrio, De politia litteraria, ed. N. Witten, Munich, 2002, p. 428. 4 See, for instance, the English examples discussed by C. Russell Stone, From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England, Turnhout, 2013. 5 For a transcription of the relevant passage, see C. Gaullier-Bougassas, “Le projet humaniste de Vasque de Lucène dans sa traduction de Quinte-Curce: les Faicts et Gestes d’Alexandre le Grand (1468)”, in Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce: De l’humanisme aux Lumières (xive-xviiie siècle), ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas, Turnhout, 2018, p. 213-240, at p. 225.

introduction

and intricate than this humanist cohort would have us believe, and cannot be overall reduced to a simple opposition, which is far from straightforward, between fabula and historia. It is also a fundamentally biased claim, for it clearly reflects the humanist attitude towards the past, which in seeking to revive and connect directly to antiquity (namely, to the Greek and Latin texts chiefly recovered by humanists themselves) cast into disrepute anything deemed to be not authentically ancient (that is, the fabulous stories which had been immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages). Nevertheless, this remains a most significant claim, not only because its influence was to be felt for centuries, but because it signals a reassessment of the figure of Alexander that greatly contributed to a permanent and definitive change in the tradition, from which the figure of the Macedonian conqueror emerged completely renovated. This reinvention of Alexander, which took place in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is the subject of this book. The focus of my investigation is on the visual depiction of Alexander as it developed in the Italian art of the period: a turning point was then marked in the tradition, for in the course of the 1400s the dominant imagery throughout the Middle Ages was progressively replaced by a new Renaissance portrait of Alexander, which became established in the early 1500s. In this period, the overall received view of Alexander, both literary and iconographic, did change dramatically; but it is in the visual tradition that the transition from a legendary depiction of Alexander, so widespread in the Middle Ages, to a historically grounded representation of him, exemplified in an extraordinarily vast and rich Renaissance repertoire, can be detected more sharply. In the coeval written production, this transition is far more nuanced and texts recounting the legendary tales of Alexander continued to have some popularity until well into the eighteenth century, at a time when those tales had long ceased to be illustrated. Although to be taken with a pinch of salt, because spoken by interested parties, the words of Piccolomini, Vergerio and Decembrio are worth recalling here, for they are proof that the dichotomy so patently expressed in the late medieval and Renaissance visual tradition of Alexander, which I discuss in this book, is not an issue that only the trained eye and mind of today’s scholars can see – or worse, an anachronistic superimposition of today’s views upon a radically different past; rather, it was an issue raised by contemporaries, who felt it as a problem needing sorting – as if it were a second Gordian knot that had, and in fact was, cut through. One of the most enduring, complex and widespread cultural myths of the entire Western tradition has grown up around the figure of Alexander6. The son of Philip II of Macedon and Olympias, princess of Epirus, Alexander was born at Pella (present-day Greece) in



6 To have some sense of it, see, e.g., the vast selection of material presented in a number of exhibitions over the last decade or so: The Immortal Alexander the Great: The Myth, The Reality, His Journey, His Legacy (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, Hermitage Amsterdam, 2010-2011), ed. A. Trofimova, Amsterdam, 2010; Alexander der Grosse und die Öffnung der Welt: Asiens Kulturen im Wandel (exhibition catalogue, Mannheim, Reiss-Engelhorn Museen, 2009), ed. S. Hansen, A. Wieczorek and M. Tellenbach, Regensburg and Mannheim, 2009; Sulla via di Alessandro: da Seleucia al Gandhara (exhibition catalogue, Turin, Palazzo Madama, 2007), ed. V. Messina, Cinisello Balsamo, 2007; see also Heracles to Alexander the Great: Treasures from the Royal Capital of Macedon, a Hellenic Kingdom in the Age of Democracy (exhibition catalogue, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 2011), ed. Y. Galanakis, Oxford, 2011, and Au royaume d’Alexandre le Grand: la Macédoine antique (exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2011-2012), ed. S. Descamps-Lequime, Paris, 2011. Additional proof to the continuing fascination of Alexander is the recent work by distinguished scholars in the field aimed at a wide audience, including H. Bowden, Alexander the Great: A Very

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356 bc, was educated by Aristotle, became king as Alexander III at the age of twenty, set out on his journey to Asia at twenty-two, conquered the Persian Empire from Egypt to India in less than ten years and died suddenly in Babylon on 10 (or possibly 11) June 323 bc, when he was not yet thirty-three years old. In view of such accomplishments, it is hardly surprising that he came to be regarded in his own lifetime as a heroic, almost divine figure; nor is it surprising that such an exceptional life, cut short by such an untimely death, earned Alexander an enduring renown, which spread well beyond the boundaries of the empire he conquered, reaching from England to Indonesia, from Russia to Ethiopia, and producing an uninterrupted fascination over the centuries which has hardly been equalled in history. When considered against this wider backdrop, the European tradition, and in particular the Italian Renaissance branch of it with which this book is concerned, might appear very limited. In an absolute sense, of course, this is true. And yet, the way in which Alexander was interpreted, re-evaluated and transformed in the Italian peninsula during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is an important, and as yet little studied, chapter in the Alexander tradition. Such a captivating figure was inevitably re-shaped again and again, with each age creating its own Alexander. The Alexander inherited from the Middle Ages by the Italian Renaissance was very different from the great conqueror who, in antiquity, had been emulated by Hellenistic rulers and Roman and Byzantine emperors alike7. On the basis of the late ancient Greek Alexander Romance conventionally known as the Pseudo-Callisthenes and of the vast and ramifying texts ultimately deriving from it, the Middle Ages turned Alexander into a marvellous, almost fairy-tale hero, the protagonist of an enormously successful legendary tradition which flourished from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and which continues to receive most attention from scholars8. By contrast, the ancient historical tradition, based on the Greek and Latin accounts of Quintus Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Arrian and Diodorus Siculus, which had presented a more reliable and less imaginative record of Alexander and his life, was only partially known in the Middle Ages – and, what matters the most for the purposes of this book, had only a very limited impact on the medieval visual imagery of Alexander. With the Greek authors lost to the West until the early fifteenth century, when they were recovered by Italian humanists, it fell almost entirely to the Latin text of Curtius Rufus, supplemented by the later account of Justin, to preserve the knowledge of a more sober, factual Alexander throughout the medieval period. It is in the course of the Quattrocento that the accounts of all the ancient historians of Alexander began to circulate widely both in Italy and in Europe, significantly enriching the body of works about the life of Alexander to survive from antiquity.





Short Introduction, Oxford, 2014, L. Braccesi, Alessandro il Grande: la storia, il mito e le eredità culturali, Naples, 2014, P. Briant, Alexandre: exégèse des lieux communs, Paris, 2016, and J. Boardman, Alexander the Great: From His Death to the Present Day, Princeton and Oxford, 2019. 7 From the vast bibliography on the reception of Alexander in antiquity and, in particular, the imitatio Alexandri, see Brill’s Companion to Alexander the Great, ed. J. Roisman, Leiden and Boston, 2003, with bibliography; see also D. Spencer, The Roman Alexander: Reading a Cultural Myth, Exeter, 2002, and Alessandro Magno tra storia e mito, ed. M. Sordi, Milan, 1984. Still essential are P. Treves, Il mito di Alessandro e la Roma di Augusto, Milan, 1953, and S. Mazzarino, L’impero romano, 3 vol., Rome and Bari, 1973. 8 Alongside the bibliography cited in Chapter 1, see A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Z. D. Zuwiyya, Leiden and Boston, 2011, with further references.

introduction

In this book, I refer to these two traditions as ‘legend’ and ‘history’ respectively, using the terms not merely in relation to these particular literary sources, but also to the entire textual and visual tradition of Alexander (and, therefore, the conception of Alexander) which is largely dependent on them. We need to bear in mind, however, that the categories of legend and history are not mutually exclusive but rather intertwined and overlapping, with no sharp distinction between them. According to Santo Mazzarino, a certain degree of contamination between the historical tradition (what he called “tradizione veridica”) and the legendary tradition (“tradizione fantastica”) – or, in my terminology, between legend and history – characterises the earlier extant accounts on Alexander’s life9 – and also, as far as we can tell, even the works, now lost, written by Alexander’s contemporaries10. The supernatural aura which surrounded Alexander and which encouraged the comparison of his deeds to those of Achilles, Hercules and Dionysus had already begun to form during his lifetime. What we now call ‘the myth of Alexander’ – created in the interstices between truth and imagination, fact and fiction – was not, therefore, a tribute paid to the conqueror by his court poets or later emulators, nor was it merely the result of the tradition through which he has come down to us. It was, instead, an essential part of Alexander’s own historical personality, as well as, to a large extent, a deliberate creation of Alexander himself11. The earliest surviving portrait of him, a tiny ivory head from a funeral couch, found in 1977 in the tomb of his father Philip at Vergina in northern Greece, shows not only highly idealized features but also an upward-looking gaze symbolising the direct contact of the young ruler with the heavenly powers12. The image of a deified Alexander also appeared on coins issued by Ptolemy, his successor in Egypt, as early as 322-321 bc – that is, only two years after Alexander’s death – which tends to confirm Paul Goukowsky’s observation that “Alexander entered myth before he entered history”13. And yet, the distinction between ‘legendary works’ and ‘historical accounts’, formulated some sixty years ago by George Cary in his attempt to organise the extraordinarily rich literature on Alexander produced in Europe during the Middle Ages14, remains valid.

9 S. Mazzarino, Il pensiero storico classico, 2 vol., Rome and Bari, 1966, II.1, p. 24. 10 On these works, see L. Pearson, The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great, London, 1960, and M. A. Levi, Introduzione ad Alessandro Magno, Milan, 1977, p. 19-107. The surviving fragments of Alexander’s first historians, edited by F. Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 3 vol., Berlin, 1923-1958, vol. 2B, p. 618-828, nos 117-153 (commentary in vol. 2D, p. 403-542), are now collected (with French translations) in Historiens d’Alexandre, ed. and trans. J. Auberger, Paris, 2001. 11 See P. Goukowsky, Essai sur les origines du mythe d’Alexandre (336-270 av. J.-C.), 2 vol., Nancy, 1978-1981. On the Alexander myth as a self-promoted creation, see M. Centanni, “Il mito di Alessandro nell’Ellenismo letterario”, in Alessandro Magno: storia e mito (exhibition catalogue, Rome, Palazzo Ruspoli, 1995-1996), ed. C. Alfano, Milan, 1995, p. 153-159, esp. p. 153-154, and her introduction to the first modern Italian translation of the Greek Romance: Il Romanzo di Alessandro, ed. and trans. M. Centanni, Turin, 1991, p. vii-lx. On the inclusion of  “materiale consciamente mitopoietico” in the historical accounts of Alexander, see P. Dronke, “Introduzione”, in Alessandro nel Medioevo occidentale, ed. P. Boitani, C. Bologna, A. Cipolla and M. Liborio, Milan, 1997, p. xiii-lxxv, at p. xv-xvii. 12 For the Vergina head, see M. Andronikos, Vergina: The Royal Tombs and the Ancient City, Athens, 1987, p. 123-136 and fig. 83. 13 Goukowsky, Essai sur les origines, I, p. 92: “[Alexandre] entrait dans le mythe avant même d’être entré dans l’Histoire”. 14 G. Cary, The Medieval Alexander, ed. D. J. A. Ross, Cambridge, 1956, esp. p. 1-2.

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Although it has been criticised as problematic and simplistic by some scholars15, Cary’s distinction is nevertheless a useful research tool and remains to this day a well-established approach to the Alexander literature16 – and to some parts of the Alexander iconography as well17. To be sure, a contamination between the legendary and the historical traditions can be detected from the very beginning of the Alexander myth: shreds of historical facts are present even in the most fanciful retellings of his story, and some fanciful material occasionally filtered into the most historically reliable accounts. What’s more, throughout the Middle Ages historical data provided by Curtius and Justin – or by the fifth-century Orosius who transmitted them – circulated alongside information deriving ultimately from the Alexander Romance. Not only such different texts were often bounded, and therefore transmitted, together in the same manuscript, but they were often juxtaposed or blended in the accounts of the medieval historical compilations such as universal histories and chronicles. This surely points to the fact that in the Middle Ages the distinction between fabula and historia was not perceived in the way later envisaged by Italian humanists, for no opposition was clearly felt between them18, but it also highlights the divergence that in this respect does exist in the Middle Ages between the literary and the iconographic tradition. As will be discussed in Chapter 1, in medieval Italy, when knowledge of the ancient historical sources was somehow limited, the legendary tradition became enormously influential and, as far as the visual tradition is concerned, assumed dominance. This is not to say that historical facts such as, above all, the battles fought by Alexander were not illustrated in the Middle Ages; rather, that episodes from the legend such as, most notably, the marvellous adventures taking place in Asia were vastly illustrated even in manuscripts of medieval historiographic accounts. Furthermore, the few examples we have of Alexander stories depicted outside the manuscript tradition are episodes taken from the legend – an additional proof of the popularity of those tales, even among the illiterate people who had no part into the learned world of books, including those of Curtius, Justin, and Orosius. From the early fifteenth century, the humanist recovery of Alexander’s ancient historians, together with the new cultural atmosphere of the Italian Renaissance and the emergence of a new socio-cultural milieu and artistic patronage, resulted in the gradual eclipse of the legendary tradition over the course of the Quattrocento and the creation of a new portrait

15 See, e.g., Dronke, “Introduzione”, p. xv-xix. 16 See, e.g., D. J. A. Ross, Alexander Historiatus: A Guide to Medieval Illustrated Alexander Literature, London, 1963. Cary himself applied these categories only to the sources on Alexander which were available to the Middle Ages; however, his classification has been extended to the entire literary production on Alexander, including the earliest accounts which were rediscovered only in the Renaissance by the humanists (e.g., the works of Arrian and Diodorus Siculus, which Cary did not discuss). 17 The dichotomy fabula/historia is commonly adopted, e.g., in relation to the important literary and iconographic production about Alexander found in late fifteenth-century Burgundy; see S. McKendrick, The History of Alexander the Great: An Illuminated Manuscript of Vasco da Lucena’s French Translation of the Ancient Text by Quintus Curtius Rufus, Los Angeles, 1996, esp. p. 63-65. 18 More on this is in L’historiographie médiévale d’Alexandre le Grand, ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas, Turnhout, 2011 (esp. the introductory essay by the editor’s volume “L’historiographie médiévale d’Alexandre: héritages, renouvellements et débats”, p. 5-34, where this complex issue is thoroughly examined) and La fascination pour Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures européennes (xe-xvie siècle): réinventions d’un mythe, ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas, 4 vol., Turnhout, 2014, esp. III, p. 1765-1768.

introduction

of Alexander, based on recently restored historical texts from antiquity, which were taken to present him as a virtuous man and a moral exemplum. Once again, this timescale applies to the visual tradition only, for in the written production the eclipse of the legend, as I will explain, is slower and more nuanced. Although this transition from the medieval Alexander of legend to the modern Alexander of history is generally acknowledged in the scholarly literature, it has never been fully discussed or adequately addressed19. Historians of the Alexander legend such as George Cary and Victor Schmidt have touched on it as the epilogue to the medieval legendary tradition – Cary, however, examined only the literary production, while Schmidt focused on a single episode, admittedly the most popular one, from the visual tradition: the ‘Flight with Griffins’20. If the impressive investigation into the reception of Alexander in the European literature from the tenth to the sixteenth century, published in the 2014 four-volume La fascination pour Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures européennes, has provided a wealth of new material also in respect to the Italian tradition21, other recent works have completely passed over the period of transition from the legendary to the historical Alexander, devoting attention instead to the Renaissance iconography after it was already established, from the sixteenth century onwards, without taking into consideration either its emergence in the previous century or its possible connections to and overlaps with the medieval tradition22. This neglected phase, on the cusp between legend and history, is the focus of this book devoted to the Italian tradition. Although it is intended as an examination of the visual tradition of Alexander, the material has been researched in constant dialogue with the literary tradition, which it was usually influenced by, if not dependent on; and the cultural and material context of the artworks, spanning several media, which I discuss, has also

19 Attention to this transition has been drawn by Monica Centanni in a number of studies, e.g., “Alexander the Great”, in The Classical Tradition, ed. A. Grafton, G. W. Most and S. Settis, Cambridge MA and London, 2010, p. 25-31, esp. p. 30; see also C. Frugoni, La fortuna di Alessandro Magno dall’antichità al Medioevo, Florence, 1978, p. 23-24. More recently, see T. Noll, “The Visual Image of Alexander the Great: Transformations from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period”, in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transcultural Perspectives, ed. M. Stock, Toronto, 2016, p. 244-263, and V. Anceschi, Alessandro Magno nella letteratura italiana: la figura del condottiero macedone nell’Umanesimo e nel Rinascimento, Saarbrücken, 2013. 20 See Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 226-259 (on England, France and Germany) and 260-272 (on Italy); V. M. Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image: The Aerial Flight of Alexander the Great, Groningen, 1995, p. 155-165. 21 For the Italian tradition examined in La fascination pour Alexandre, see the chapters by Michele Campopiano (I, p. 57-62 and 323-362; II, p. 927-954; III, p. 1489-1507, 1720-1722, 1744, 1755-1757, 1771-1773, 1800-1802; IV, p. 243-266); also relevant here is the work by Hélène Bellon-Méguelle (ibid., I, p. 228-232 and II, p. 908-925) on the first translations of Alexander’s ancient historians by French humanists. See also A. Ippolitov, “‘Stand Less between the Sun and Me’”, in The Immortal Alexander, p. 52-67; Spencer, The Roman Alexander, p. 205-218; and N. Yalouris, “Alexander and His Heritage”, in The Search for Alexander: An Exhibition (exhibition catalogue, Washington DC, National Gallery of Art and elsewhere, 1980-1982), Boston, 1980, p. 10-20. Further literature on the Alexander tradition is cited in the chapters below where relevant. 22 See, above all, Alexander the Great in European Art (exhibition catalogue, Thessaloniki, Organisation for the Cultural Capital of Europe, 1997-1998), ed. N. Hadjinicolaou, Athens, 1997, which discusses material dating from 1500 to 1750; Alessandro Magno in età moderna, ed. F. Biasutti and A. Coppola, Padua, 2009 (despite their promising titles, the essays by Piero Boitani, “Trionfo e fine di Alessandro: dal Medioevo all’età moderna”, p. 11-71, and Patrizio Tucci, “Dall’Alessandro medievale all’Alessandro umanistico [Villon, Montaigne]”, p. 73-93, do not provide any insight into this theme). Some interesting material is in Figures d’Alexandre à la Renaissance, ed. C. Jouanno, Turnhout, 2012, which, however, focuses mainly on the French tradition.

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been taken into account. As for the time frame, the vast majority of artefacts date roughly from the 1450s, when images of Alexander based on the historical ancient sources first emerged, to the 1560s, when the Renaissance visual repertoire based on those sources was firmly in place. In addition to these core fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artworks, a selection of earlier ones, from the 1160s to the end of the fourteenth century, serve to illustrate the legendary iconographic tradition as it developed in Italy in the Middle Ages. The organisation of the book is both chronological and thematic. In Chapter 1, I give an overview of the iconographic tradition of the legend in medieval Italy, examples of which are taken mainly from illuminated manuscripts, but also include sculpted reliefs, floor mosaics and similar decorative features. The small number of artworks from the fifteenth century which continue to draw on the legendary tradition (most importantly, four fresco cycles of the ‘Nine Worthies’) are presented in Chapter 2. In contrast to the other chapters, the third is devoted to the literary tradition: I discuss the humanist recovery of the main ancient historical sources on Alexander, their circulation in Italy through epitomes and translations and the impact which the discovery of these texts had on humanists (Petrarch, Boccaccio, Angelo Decembrio and Pier Paolo Vergerio) and on the received view of Alexander. The fourth chapter traces the emergence of the new Renaissance iconography of Alexander based on the newly-recovered ancient historians of the conqueror, as it appeared in Florentine cassone panels, humanist cycles of Uomini famosi and the creation of an all’antica portrait of Alexander based on the ancient numismatic types bearing his effigy. Chapter 5 illustrates the development and consolidation of this new Renaissance iconography of Alexander in the sixteenth century, when a vast repertoire of episodes from his life, taken from the ancient historical sources, took shape and which presented him as an exemplum virtutum and a model for rulers and aristocrats to emulate. Two appendices, providing an inventory of the historical episodes from Alexander’s life which are found in Renaissance Italian art and of the surviving painted cycles of Alexander in Italy (1500 to 1600), complete the work.

Chapter 1

The Legendary Tradition of Alexander in Medieval Art and Literature

In the “Foreword” to David J. A. Ross’s Alexander Historiatus: A Guide to Medieval Illustrated Alexander Literature, published in 1963, Ernst H. Gombrich described the research field in which the author had ventured as the “forbidding maze of the Alexander story”1. The image of a labyrinth with no ready exit is certainly an apt description of the enormous fortuna enjoyed by Alexander throughout the Middle Ages. The life of the Macedonian conqueror was recounted in so many versions, which were translated into so many languages, that it is virtually impossible to disentangle the web of interrelations, ramifications and contaminations of texts (and different recensions of texts) from which the medieval Alexander literature emerged2. Alongside this enormous corpus of texts is an equally vast iconographic repertoire, in which the stories about Alexander are illustrated, mainly in the form of illuminations accompanying texts, but also as ‘independent’ works of art such as, for example, sculpture and mosaics. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the literary and iconographic tradition of Alexander as it developed in Italy during the Middle Ages, most crucially from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Rather than examining this large body of work in detail, my intention is to present here the medieval view of Alexander as reflected in the art and literature of the period, since it is in dialogue with – and against – this view that the Renaissance conception of Alexander arose in the fifteenth century. The Medieval Tradition in Italy: An Overview The paramount role played by the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the huge body of literary works that derive from it, known overall as Alexander Romance, in the transmission of the myth of Alexander has long been established3. Between late antiquity and the Quattrocento – when the historical sources were recovered by humanists – this

1 Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. v. 2 For attempts to create a stemma of a portion of the written tradition, see ibid., p. 46, 52 and 60. A stemma can also be found in M. Pfrommer, Alexander der Grosse: Auf den Spuren eines Mythos, Mainz, 2001, p. 20-21. Corrado Bologna (“Prologo ai prologhi”, in Alessandro nel Medioevo occidentale, p. 5-15, at p. 7-8) has rightly observed that Alexander is “implicato in una fra le più straordinarie vicende di versioni, volgarizzamenti, adattamenti che la storia letteraria conosca” (“[Alexander is] caught up in one of the most extraordinary story of versions, vernacular translations, and adaptations known in the history of literature”. My translation). 3 For the status quaestionis on the Pseudo-Callisthenes, see C. Jouanno, Naissance et métamorphoses du Roman d’Alexandre: domaine grec, Paris, 2002, esp. p. 13-55, and R. Stoneman, “Introduzione”, in Il Romanzo di Alessandro, ed. R. Stoneman and T. Gargiulo, 2 vol., Milan, 2007-, I, p. xv-lxxxviii, at p. xvii-lxxxiii. R. Merkelbach, Die Quellen des

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literature was by far the chief means by which the Alexander stories were known and disseminated. This is not to say that knowledge of what we call the ancient historical tradition of Alexander was completely lost in the Middle Ages4. If no manuscript of the Greek Arrian, Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus was available in medieval Europe, the Latin historical accounts of Curtius Rufus and Justin were known. Their influence, however, seems to have been largely indirect through the medieval works relying upon them, most importantly the extremely successful twelfth-century epic Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon and the universal histories and chronicles where a section on the life of Alexander is included, from the vastly influential Orosius’s Historiae adversum Paganos (a particularly important source for the transmission of the historical Alexander in the Middle Ages) to Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale5. In addition, largely derived from the ancient historical tradition were exemplary anecdotes and apologues concerning Alexander, which are scattered in a vast body of medieval philosophical and theological literature6. Yet, when it comes to considering the visual, and not merely the literary, tradition, the limited impact that all this historical material had on the medieval imagery of Alexander ought to be acknowledged. On account of their circulation in clerical circles or use in schools, it is little surprising that the vast majority of these texts has no illustrations – at the present state of research, no illuminated manuscripts of either Curtius or Justin, Orosius or Walter’s Alexandreis has come to light7. Even when they are significantly illuminated, which is very much the case with universal histories chiefly produced north of the Alps but



4



5



6



7

griechischen Alexanderromans, 2nd edition, Munich, 1977, remains essential. For an overview of the literary tradition stemming from the Pseudo-Callisthenes, see R. Stoneman, Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend, New Haven and London, 2008, p. 230-245. On the widespread knowledge of ancient historians in medieval Europe, including authors like Orosius and Justin who talks at length of Alexander, the work of Bernard Guenée remains crucial, especially his Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident mediéval, Paris, 1980. On medieval chronicles, see Universal Chronicles in the High Middle Ages, ed. M. Campopiano and H. Bainton, York, 2017. On Alexander in particular, see La fascination pour Alexandre, I, p. 39-41 ( J.-Y. Tilliette), II, p. 841-870 (C. Gaullier-Bougassas and H. Bellon-Méguelle) and 1153-1158 (C. Thierry), as well as G. H. V. Bunt, “Alexander and the Universal Chronicle: Scholars and Translators”, in The Medieval Alexander Legend and Romance Epic: Essays in Honour of David J. A. Ross, ed. P. Noble, L. Polak and C. Isoz, Millwood, 1982, p. 1-10. Interesting material is also in C. Jouanno, “Alexander Romance and Byzantine World Chronicles: History Cross-Fertilized by Fiction and the Reverse”, in The Alexander Romance: History and Literature, ed. R. Stoneman, K. Nawotka and A. Wojciechowska, Groningen, 2018, p. 225-243. This literature was first explored by Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 77-162. A useful distinction between such “materiali alessandrini”, on the one hand, and “testi alessandrini”, devoted specifically to Alexander, on the other, has been drawn by Paolo Rinoldi, “La circolazione della materia ‘alessandrina’ in Italia nel Medioevo (coordinate introduttive)”, in Alessandro/Dhû l-Qarnayn in viaggio tra i due mari, ed. C. Saccone, Alessandria, 2008, p. 11-50, at p. 14-15. One unique exception is a Vatican manuscript of Orosius (ms. Vat. lat. 3340), dated to the late eleventh-early twelfth century, which has a series of interesting drawings in the page margins; its Macedonian section shows some episodes from the life of Philip and Alexander (including Philip’s marriage to Olympias and Alexander’s battle against Darius, his ordering the murders of Cleitus and Callisthenes, and the siege of Aornos). See G. Orofino, “La storia nei margini. I disegni dell’Orosio Vat. lat. 3340 tra eredità tardoantica e creazione medievale”, Convivium: Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean, 3.1 (2016), p. 122-135 (pictures at p. 127-129); see also the entry in Vedere i classici: l’illustrazione libraria dei testi antichi dall’età romana al tardo medioevo (exhibition catalogue, Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Salone Sistino, 1996-1997), ed. M. Buonocore, Rome, 1996, p. 210-214, no. 24 (P. Piacentini), and Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 74-75.

t h e l eg en da ry tr adition of alex an der in medieva l a rt a nd literature

circulating also in the Italian peninsula, such as Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale and even more its French translation by Jean de Vignay, the pictures relating to the life of Alexander tend to repeat a by then established figurative repertoire, which does not disdain, and in fact often borrows from, the fabulous material. With their making use of and combining together both legendary and historical material, universal histories and chronicles compiled throughout the Middle Ages are a particularly striking example of how little concern for the two traditions of legend and history existed before Italian humanists called for their distinction. But they are also proof to the fact that, when it comes to the visual tradition, the medieval historiographical production did contribute to the legendary imagery of Alexander, for alongside battles and military deeds, their illustrations invariably include a great number of fabulous adventures recounted in the Alexander Romance. The conventional name by which the Pseudo-Callisthenes is known deserves some explanation. The philosopher Callisthenes of Olynthus (c. 360-327 bc), a kinsman of Aristotle’s, was appointed by Alexander as the official historian of his expedition to Asia. The account he wrote, only fragments of which remain, was regarded in antiquity as a eulogistic composition which exaggerated Alexander’s merits and the extraordinary nature of the places he and his army visited in Asia8. Perhaps due to this reputation, several manuscripts of the anonymous Greek Romance were attributed to Callisthenes, including the codex seen in Paris by Isaac Casaubon, who, in a letter of 1605 to Joseph Scaliger, coined the name “Pseudo-Callisthenes”9. The Greek text of the Pseudo-Callisthenes was assembled in Alexandria at a date which remains difficult to establish, sometime between the Hellenistic age and the third century ad, from various materials partially dating to the third century bc. This account of Alexander’s life combines, often with very little consistency, a range of materials of different nature and origin, some of which dating to only a generation after Alexander’s death10. As early as ad 340-350, a Latin translation by Julius Valerius became available11. The five known recensions are all characterised by a mythic narrative which presents Alexander as a child of magic – not the son of Philip King of Macedon but rather of the Egyptian pharaoh and sorcerer Nectanebo – whose birth and death are foretold by dramatic presages. First and foremost, Alexander is depicted in the Pseudo-Callisthenes as a fearless adventurer who travels to the end of the world and encounters all the sorts of wonders and monstrous creatures which were thought to inhabit the East. Guided by divine providence (pronoia),

8 See L. Prandi, Callistene: uno storico tra Aristotele e i re macedoni, Milan, 1985. 9 Writing from Paris on 15 August 1605, Casaubon states that “exstat in Bibliotheca [the Bibliothèque nationale de France] pseudo-Callisthenis Historia rerum Alexandri”. Also interesting is Scaliger’s reply from Leiden of 15 September 1605, where he qualifies the work as “opus fabulosum”. The two letters are transcribed and commented in The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. P. Botley and D. van Miert, 8 vol., Geneva, 2012, VI, p. 115-118 and 162-164 (quoted passages are at p. 117 and 163 respectively). The anecdote about Casaubon is reported by Stoneman, “Introduzione”, p. lii-lvi, and Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 84, n. 2. It is worth remembering that another part of the manuscript tradition ascribes the Romance to the Greek fabulist Aesop instead. 10 See Stoneman, “Introduzione”, p. xxv-xxxiv. 11 Julius Valerius, Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis translatae ex Aesopo graeco, ed. M. Rosellini, 2nd edition, Stuttgart, 2004. See also J.-P. Callu’s introduction to his French translation of the text: Julius Valère, Roman d’Alexandre, Turnhout, 2010, p. 5-37.

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which in later versions becomes the Christian God12, Alexander is portrayed not only as the domitor Orientis, but also as the conqueror of both the East and the West. In the pages of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Alexander reaches far and beyond the lands that he conquered in actual fact on the map of the world. Among the plans left unfulfilled at his death, both Curtius Rufus (X.1.17-18) and Diodorus Siculus (XVIII.4.4) mention a military expedition against Italy and the West. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.29-30) these plans are reported, not as desirable projects, but rather as successful achievements. A key factor in the diffusion of the Pseudo-Callisthenes throughout Europe was the Latin translation made by the Archpriest Leo in Naples around 950; sent on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople by the Dukes John III and Marinus II of Naples, Leo brought back his transcribed copy of a Greek manuscript of the Romance, which he later translated into Latin on commission of John III. As David Ross has rightly said: “No version of the Alexander-romance has had a wider influence nor produced more vernacular progeny than this wretched little book”13. Despite the poor quality of the Latin, Leo’s Nativitas et victoria Alexandri Magni is at the origin of three highly influential interpolated versions (conventionally referred to as J1, J2, J3), known as Historia de Preliis, as well as of all the Alexander romances written in Europe during the Middle Ages14. By combining Leo’s account with materials from a variety of sources such as Orosius’s History against the Pagans, Solinus’s Collectanea rerum memorabilium and, most importantly, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle about India15, the interpolated texts emphasised the elements of myth and fable already present in the Pseudo-Callisthenes. In particular, they gave special prominence to Alexander’s adventures in India – e.g., his flight to heaven with griffins, exploration of the ocean, encounter with the monstrous races and journey to paradise. It is important to remember that accounts of these marvels entered medieval encyclopaedic compilations from those of Isidore of Seville and Rabanus Maurus to Gervase of Tilbury, Brunetto Latini and Vincent of Beauvais, and in this way influenced the European conception of India throughout the Middle Ages16. In these interpolated versions of the Romance and their illustrations, Alexander is transformed into a chivalric hero and a restless explorer, whose curiosity for the unknown is limitless. He

12 On the Christian patina found in all recensions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, see Centanni’s introduction to her Il Romanzo di Alessandro, p. xxvii-xxviii. 13 Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 47. 14 See the edition of the text provided by F. Pfister, Der Alexanderroman des Archipresbyters Leo, Heidelberg, 1913. On the circumstances of Leo’s translation, see A. Frugoni, “La biblioteca di Giovanni III duca di Napoli (dal Prologus dell’arciprete Leone al ‘Romanzo di Alessandro’)”, Annali della Scuola Speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell’Università di Roma, 9 (1969), p. 161-171. On the interpolated recensions of the Historia de Preliis, see Der Alexanderroman (ed. Pfister), p. 14-19; Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 43-58; Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 50-61. On Leo and his interpolated recensions, see also La fascination pour Alexandre, I, p. 32-37 and 115-177 (A. Cizek). 15 Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem ad codicum fidem edita et commentario critico instructa, ed. W. W. Boer, Meisenheim am Glan, 1973. See also L. L. Gunderson, Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle about India, Meisenheim am Glan, 1980, with an English translation of the original Latin text at p. 140-156. 16 See R. Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), p. 159-197; J. Le Goff, “L’Occidente medievale e l’Oceano Indiano: un orizzonte onirico”, in Mediterraneo e Oceano Indiano: atti del sesto colloquio internazionale di storia marittima tenuto a Venezia dal 20 al 29 settembre 1962, ed. M. Cortelazzo, Florence, 1970, p. 243-263; G. Zaganelli, L’Oriente incognito medievale: enciclopedie, romanzi di Alessandro, teratologie, Catanzaro, 1997, p. 87-129; E. Baumgartner, “L’Orient d’Alexandre”, Bien dire et bien aprandre, 6 (1988), p. 7-15. For the journey to Paradise, see Les voyages d’Alexandre au paradis: Orient et Occident, regards croisés, ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas and M. Bridges, Turnhout, 2013.

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is the protagonist of hugely successful and beautifully illustrated poems such as Alexander of Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre, written around 1180-118517, and the thirteenth-century Old French Prose Alexander18. Alexander becomes the prototype of the noble knights in chansons de geste and Arthurian romances and their model in terms of courage and largesse19. The figure of Alexander became so entangled with chivalric literature that he was turned into a Christian hero himself, protected and guided by God and not always readily distinguishable, in illustrated manuscripts, from the paladins of medieval sagas. If the Christianisation of Alexander – a process which began in late antiquity20 and was encouraged by his assimilation to Christ (or the Antichrist) in the theories of theologians and moralists since the early Middle Ages21 – was never predominant in Western Europe, it certainly assumed some significance at the time of the Crusades, when his battles against the Persians were transformed into wars against the Saracens, and it would, no doubt, have been easy to forget that Alexander was not, after all, a Christian22. Also, the direct contact with the exoticism of the East gave an unprecedented appeal to Alexander’s marvellous adventures in India, making them all the more popular in the illustrated manuscripts23. Italy played an important role in the medieval Alexander tradition: not only was the Archpriest Leo’s translation made in Naples, but also the J2 and J3 versions were extremely

17 On the text of Alexander of Paris, see C. Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre: Aux frontières de l’épique et du romanesque, Paris, 1998, esp. p. 79-99, 203-216, 227-237, and the introduction to the Italian translation of branches I and III of the poem: Alexandre de Bernay, Il Romanzo di Alessandro, ed. and trans. M. Infurna and M. Mancini, Milan, 2014, p. 5-40. On the sumptuously illuminated ms. Bodl. 264 in Oxford, a fourteenth-century miscellany containing the text of Alexander of Paris, see M. Cruse, Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264. The Manuscript as Monument, Cambridge, 2011, and Il manoscritto Bodley 264: il Romanzo di Alessandro, i Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. L. Lucchetti and M. I. Pesce, 2 vol., Rome, 2014, esp. I, Saggi e commenti. 18 See M. Pérez-Simon, Mise en roman et mise en image: les manuscrits du Roman d’Alexandre en prose, Paris, 2015. A lavishly decorated copy of c. 1290s, now ms. 78.C.1 in Berlin, is reproduced in A. Rieger, Der Alexanderroman: ein Ritterroman über Alexander den Großen. Handschrift 78.C.1 des Kupferstichkabinetts Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, Wiesbaden, 2006. 19 See C. Bologna, “La generosità cavalleresca di Alessandro Magno”, L’immagine riflessa, 12 (1989), p. 367-404, and Dronke, “Introduzione”, p. xlii-xlvii. For the importance of Alexander in the later epic and chivalric tradition culminating in the works of Boiardo and Ariosto, see M. Pavlova, Saracens and their World in Boiardo and Ariosto, Cambridge, 2020, p. 107-126; my thanks to the author, who kindly allowed me to read her work before its publication. 20 See L. Cracco Ruggini, “Sulla cristianizzazione della cultura pagana: il mito greco e latino di Alessandro dall’età antonina al Medioevo”, Athenaeum, 43 (1965), p. 3-80; Ead., “Un riflesso del mito di Alessandro nella ‘Historia Augusta’”, in Bonner Historia-Augusta-Colloquium 1964-5 (Antiquitas: Beiträge zur Historia-Augusta-Forschung, Bd. 3), Bonn, 1966, p. 79-89. See also H. Inglebert, Interpretatio christiana: les mutations des savoirs (cosmographie, géographie, ethnographie, histoire) dans l’Antiquité chrétienne (30-630 après J.-C.), Paris, 2001. In general, see also A. Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.”, in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano, Oxford, 1963, p. 79-99. 21 See Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 118-125. 22 See ibid., p. 183-186, and Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 210-211. For a comparable example from Byzantium, see C. Jouanno, “The Persians in late Byzantine Alexander Romances: A Portrayal under Turkish Influences”, in The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East, ed. R. Stoneman, K. Erickson and I. Netton, Groningen, 2012, pp. 105-115. 23 See M. Infurna, “Alessandro viaggiatore medievale”, in Pothos: il viaggio, la nostalgia, ed. F. Rosa and F. Zambon, Trent, 1995, p. 165-187; M. L. Meneghetti, “Alessandro e famiglia: la circolazione dei romanzi di materia greca nell’Italia della prima metà del XIII secolo”, in Mito e storia nella tradizione cavalleresca: atti del XLII Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 9-12 ottobre 2005, Spoleto, 2006, p. 347-362.

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popular in Italy – particularly in the south, where all three interpolated versions are likely to have been composed24. Yet, the Italian tradition has generally been neglected by scholars – in favour, above all, of the remarkably rich French Alexander literature25. Alongside the still useful monograph published by Joachim Storost in 193526, the only comprehensive study specifically devoted to the textual transmission of the Alexander Romance in Italy has been carried out by Michele Campopiano27. In addition, much valuable work has recently been done on the diffusion of the Latin and vernacular texts in Italy, notably by Paolo Rinoldi and Roberta Morosini28, as well as by Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja29. But there is still a major desideratum: a systematic survey of Alexander imagery in manuscripts and incunabula illustrated in Italy. The popularity of the imagery associated with Alexander went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Alexander Romance. The main source for illustrations of the episodes from the life of Alexander are illuminated manuscripts. Although the selection and number of stories represented vary considerably, the marvels connected to his Indian adventures are almost always highlighted. Some episodes from Alexander’s childhood are also frequently illustrated, including his begetting and birth, and the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’. Within this vast tradition, I shall discuss only those iconographic themes which are directly relevant to the argument developed in the following chapters: the emergence of the Renaissance portrait of 24 Rinoldi, “La circolazione della materia ‘alessandrina’”, p. 16 and n. 18; see also C. Russell Stone, “Proud Kings, Polyglot Scribes, and the I3 Historia de preliis: The Origins of Latin Alexander Romance in Norman and Staufen Italy”, Speculum, 91.3 (2016), p. 724-744. According to Michele Campopiano, “‘Gentes, monstra, fere’: l’Histoire d’Alexandre dans une encyclopédie du xiie siècle”, in Conter de Troie et d’Alexandre: Pour Emmanuèle Baumgartner, ed. L. Harf-Lancner, L. Mathey-Maille and M. Szkilnik, Paris, 2006, p. 233-252, the author of the J2 recension should be identified with a Tuscan priest, Guido da Pisa. 25 See P. Meyer, Alexandre le Grand dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge, 2 vol., Paris, 1886. Among numerous recent contributions, the most important are: Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre: Aux frontières de l’épique, and M. Gosman, La légende d’Alexandre le Grand dans la littérature française du 12e siècle: une réécriture permanente, Amsterdam and Atlanta GA, 1997. Largely devoted to the French literature are also two monographic issues of Bien dire et bien aprandre (6, 1988, Le Roman d’Alexandre, and 7, 1989, Autour d’Alexandre). See also the posthumous publication of a typescript left incomplete by David Ross at his death: D. J. A. Ross, Illustrated Medieval AlexanderBooks in French Verse, ed. M. Pérez-Simon and A. Stones, Turnhout, 2019. 26 J. Storost, Studien zur Alexandersage in der älteren italienischen Literatur: Untersuchungen und Texte, Halle (Saale), 1935. The pioneering studies of 1829-1830 by Guillaume Favre, “Recherches sur les histoires fabuleuses d’Alexandre le Grand”, in Id., Mélanges d’histoire littéraire, 2 vol., Geneva, 1856, II, p. 1-184, including a chapter on the Italian literary tradition (p. 118-125), deserve a mention. 27 See the reference in Introduction, n. 21 above, for the chapters he authored in La fascination pour Alexandre; see also his “Parcours de la légende d’Alexandre en Italie: réflexions sur la réception italienne de l’Historia de preliis J2 (xiie-xve siècle)”, in L’historiographie médiévale, p. 65-83. 28 Rinoldi, “La circolazione della materia ‘alessandrina’”; R. Morosini, “The Alexander Romance in Italy”, in A Companion to Alexander Literature, p. 329-364. Heavily relying on Morosini’s essay is B. Blythe, “Medieval and Renaissance Italian Receptions of the Alexander Romance Tradition”, in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great, ed. K. R. Moore, Leiden and Boston, 2018, p. 503-524. 29 Vita di Alessandro Magno con figure secondo il ms. Cracovia, Biblioteca Jagellonica, Ital. Quart. 33 (olim Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 1222), ed. A. Camozzi and C. Tardelli Terry, Turnhout, 2018; particularly relevant to us is Camozzi’s first chapter of the book, “I testi alessandrini in Italia dalla fine del XII secolo a Boccaccio”, p. 31-71. See also Id., “Il ciclo illustrativo del Romanzo di Alessandro nell’Italia medievale, con una nota sul ms. Lipsia, Universitätsbibliothek, Rep. II, 4o 143”, in Per i romanzi di Alessandro Magno: storie, incontri, tradizioni testuali, ed. G. Brunetti, Bologna, 2018, p. 89-103, and M. Vercesi, Alessandro Magno nella letteratura italiana del Duecento e Trecento, tesi di dottorato, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, 2008-2009. Valuable information is available in Alessandro Magno nel Veneto medievale e dintorni: tradizione mediolatina e tradizione romanza, ed. G. Peron, Padua, 2021; the volume appeared when this book was at an advanced stage of production and therefore I am only able to make brief reference to it.

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Alexander. I shall therefore take into account the episodes which were particularly popular in Italy during the Middle Ages and which were involved in the elaboration of a new conception of Alexander in the fifteenth century. As far as illuminated manuscripts are concerned, the benchmark studies of D. J. A. Ross will provide the framework for my analysis30. Episodes from the Legend The Begetting and Birth of Alexander

The birth of Alexander is described in the ancient sources as an extraordinary event befitting a hero31. His arrival in the world – as much as his departure from it, less than thirty-three years later – is marked by dramatic portents and cosmic signs such as earthquakes, thunders and flashes of lighting, while his parents had visions foretelling the child’s grand destiny even before his birth. These miraculous phaenomena signal a divine intervention in Alexander’s life from its very beginning, which is made apparent by the involvement of a serpent in the conception of the child. The story of Alexander being fathered by the god Zeus Ammon disguised as a serpent was part of the Alexander tradition from the very beginning32. According to the fullest account of the story given by Plutarch, Life of Alexander II-III, rumours had it that Olympias had conceived Alexander not with her husband Philip but rather with the god Zeus Ammon (the Greek name of the Egyptian sun god Amun-Ra), who in the form of a serpent was repeatedly seen lying by her side at night33. The story of the snake visiting Olympias in her bed not only found its way to fourth-century Roman contorniates34 and to the famous mosaic of the Birth of Alexander from Baalbek, also dated to the end of the fourth century ad35; but became so 30 Ross, Alexander Historiatus, and the supplement in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967), p. 383-388; see also his Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany and the Netherlands: A Study in Comparative Iconography, Cambridge, 1971. 31 On the myths concerning Alexander’s begetting and birth in antiquity, see D. Ogden, Alexander the Great: Myth, Genesis and Sexuality, Exeter, 2011, p. 7-56, and Id., “Nectanebo’s Seduction of Olympias and the Benign Anguiform Deities of the Ancient Greek World”, in East and West in the World Empire of Alexander: Essays in Honour of Brian Bosworth, ed. P. Wheatley and E. Baynham, Oxford, 2015, p. 117-131; see also S. R. Asirvatham, “Olympias’ Snake and Callisthenes’ Stand: Religion and Politics in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander”, in Between Magic and Religion: Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Society, ed. S. R. Asirvatham, C. O. Pache and J. Watrous, Lanham and Oxford, 2001, p. 93-125. 32 As noted by Monica Centanni in her comment on the Pseudo-Callisthenes (Il Romanzo di Alessandro, p. 229-230), the ram, and not the serpent, was believed to be Ammon’s incarnation; but the serpent is the animal traditionally connected to Olympias, whose familiarity with snakes is attested by several ancient sources, most notably Plutarch, Alexander I.2, 6-9. On Olympias see E. Carney, Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great, New York and London, 2006, as well as L. Braccesi, Olimpiade regina di Macedonia, la madre di Alessandro Magno, Rome, 2019. 33 Mention of the story is also in the Epitoma of Justin, who, however, speaks of Olympias conceiving Alexander with a huge snake, with no explicit reference to Ammon (XII.16.2). 34 See D. J. A. Ross, “Olympias and the Serpent: The Interpretation of a Baalbek Mosaic and the Date of the Illustrated Pseudo-Callisthenes”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 26 (1963), p. 1-21, at p. 17-21, and A. Alföldi, Die Kontorniaten: ein verkanntes Propagandamittel der Stadt-römischen heidnischen Aristokratie in ihrem Kampfe gegen das christliche Kaisertum, 2 vol., Budapest, 1942-1943, I, p. 102-103. On the contorniates in general, see also S. Mazzarino, “La propaganda imperiale nel tardo impero”, Doxa, 4 (1951), p. 121-148. 35 For the floor mosaic from the Villa of Soueidié near Baalbek, now in the National Museum in Beirut, see Ross, “Olympias and the Serpent”, and M. H. Chéhab, “Mosaiques du Liban”, Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth, 14-15 (19581959), p. 46-50 and pl. XXII-XXV.

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influential that similar tales were reported about the conception of both Scipio Africanus (Livy XXVI.19.7-8) and the emperor Augustus (Suetonius, Augustus XCIV.4). Into this plot of ‘serpent-siring’ – which, as we shall see later on, is also at the core of the (very problematic) question of the divinity of Alexander36 – the Romance introduces one significant element, namely, the figure of Nectanebo. According to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.1-12)37, followed by its derivatives, the father of Alexander was not Philip of Macedon, but the Egyptian pharaoh and magician Nectanebo, who fled his country when it was under Persian attack and took refuge in Macedon, at the court of King Philip38. The Nectanebo of the Romance draws on the historical figure of the last pharaoh of Egypt Nectanebo II (360-343 bc) who, before the invading army of the Persian King Artaxerxes III, escaped to Nubia (rather than to Macedon, as the Pseudo-Callisthenes has him do) and was never heard of again. Thanks to the cunning and magical arts with which he is gifted in the Romance, Nectanebo seduced Queen Olympias and tricked her into becoming his lover. By first turning himself into a serpent, and then by wearing horns of a ram and a golden fleece, he disguised himself as the god Ammon, of whom he was also the priest, and entered Olympias’s bedroom. That night Olympias and Ammon/Nectanebo conceived Alexander. Nectanebo was also present at the birth of Alexander: as an expert astrologer, he consulted the stars, cast horoscopes and made sure that Alexander was born when the astrological conjunctions were as auspicious as possible. Based on the stars, Nectanebo predicted to Olympias that Alexander would be the ruler of the world (I.12)39. The Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.14) also states that twelve years later Nectanebo, while teaching astronomy to Alexander, was murdered by him and with his last breath revealed to Alexander the truth about his paternity. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes, the begetting and birth of Alexander are presented as extraordinary events leading to a remarkable life protected by the gods; but they also tell of a rather prosaic story of seduction and deceit, which makes Olympias an adulteress and Alexander an illegitimate child, not the son of the worthy king of Macedon but rather of an Egyptian pharaoh and priest who was also a trickster and sorcerer. It’s no wonder that the illegitimate birth of Alexander, as recounted in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, 36 See J. P. V. D. Balsdon, “The Divinity of Alexander”, Historia, 1 (1950), p. 363-388; A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great, Cambridge and New York, 1988, p. 278-290; B. Dreyer, “Heroes, Cults, and Divinity”, in Alexander the Great: A New History, ed. W. Heckel and L. A. Tritle, Malden MA and Chichester, 2009, p. 218-234. See also E. Fredricksmeyer, “Alexander’s Religion and Divinity”, in Brill’s Companion to Alexander, p. 253-278. 37 All my references to the Pseudo-Callisthenes are to The Greek Alexander Romance, ed. R. Stoneman, London, 1991. 38 On the Egyptian sources of the Romance, see B. E. Perry, “The Egyptian Legend of Nectanebus”, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 97 (1966), p. 327-333; for the literary and iconographic imagery of Nectanebo, see H. U. Schmelter, Alexander der Grosse in der Dichtung und bildenden Kunst des Mittelalters: Die Nektanebos-Sage. Eine Untersuchung über die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen mittelalterlicher Dichtung und Bildkunst, PhD thesis, Bonn, 1977, and D. J. A. Ross, “Nectanebus in His Palace: A Problem of Alexander Iconography”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 15 (1952), p. 67-87. 39 For a detailed and entertaining account of the begetting and birth of Alexander, see Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 6-24. For the Nectanebo story, see Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre: Aux frontières de l’épique, p. 345-421, and L. Harf-Lancner, “Histoire, mythe et roman: la figure paternelle dans les romans d’Alexandre”, in Mito e storia nella tradizione cavalleresca, p. 331-346.

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remained a problematic issue throughout the Middle Ages, so much so that it was openly rejected in the earliest vernacular (French) re-elaborations of the Romance, dating to the twelfth century. By strongly maintaining that Alexander’s father was Philip and by no means Nectanebo, Alberic of Pisançon (c. 1100), Alexander of Paris (c. 1180-1185) and the anonymous author of the decasyllabic Roman d’Alexandre (c. 1160) tried to wash away the stain of illegitimacy from the image of a conqueror that medieval princes and rulers regarded as a model to look up to40. As far as the visual tradition is concerned, depictions of Alexander’s begetting and birth, treated as two separate events, are found in a number of manuscripts of, most notably, the Historia de Preliis and the French Roman d’Alexandre illuminated in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries41. The birth of Alexander is usually depicted as a conventional nativity scene, following the traditional iconography established for sacred births such as those of Christ, the Virgin Mary or John the Baptist: the new mother is shown either sitting or reclining on a bed, surrounded by female attendants who take care of her and her little baby. A beautiful example is in a codex of the Historia de Preliis ( J2 version) decorated in northern Italy about 1370-1380 (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 7190, fol. 1 v) (Fig. 1). Were it not part of a larger cycle illustrating Alexander’s life, this picture would hardly be identifiable for certain as the birth of our hero and no one else’s, for not even a crown distinguishes Olympias from any Virgin Mary, St Anne or St Elizabeth giving birth to their babies42. A similar composition is in an earlier manuscript of the French decasyllabic Roman d’Alexandre, arguably made in Padua and decorated by a Bolognese artist around 1285 (Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, ms. Correr 1493, fol. 1 r). Here, while one midwife is shown assisting the new mother lying on her bed, the identification of the birth as Alexander’s is made clear by the starry celestial vault above Olympias’s

40 For the relevant passages, see the fragmentary poem of Alberic of Pisançon, stanza 4, l. 27-32 (in The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, vol. 3, Version of Alexandre de Paris. Variant and Notes to Branch I, ed. A. Foulet, Princeton, 1949, p. 37-60, at p. 38); Alexander of Paris, Roman d’Alexandre, branche I, stanze 4, l. 182-184 and 16, l. 364-366 (The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, vol. 2, Version of Alexandre de Paris, Text, ed. E. C. Armstrong, D. L. Buffum, B. Edwards and L. F. H. Lowe, Princeton, 1937, p. 4 and 9); decasyllabic Roman d’Alexandre (Arsenal version, stanza 7, l. 61-65 (The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, vol. 1, Text of the Arsenal and Venice Versions, ed. M. S. La Du, Princeton, 1937, p. 4). Alexander’s problematic conception is discussed by C. Gaullier-Bougassas, “Nectanabus et la singularité d’Alexandre dans les Romans d’Alexandre français”, in Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures occidentales et proche-orientales: actes du Colloque de Paris, 27-29 novembre 1999, ed. L. Harf-Lancner, C. Kappler and F. Suard, Nanterre, 1999, p. 303-319, and Ead., Les Romans d’Alexandre: Aux frontières de l’épique, p. 345-370, esp. 361-366. 41 On the medieval tradition concerning Alexander’s birth, see M. Lecco, “‘Amon, le dieu de Lybie, en vous l’engendrera’: le leggende sulla nascita di Alessandro nei romanzi del Medioevo francese’, in Alessandro/Dhûl-Qarnayn, p. 91-108. On the French visual tradition and the remarkable production from fifteenth-century Burgundy in particular, see S. Hériché Pradeau, “La conception d’un héros et sa naissance dans Les Faicts et les Conquestes d’Alexandre le Grand de Jean Wauquelin et dans l’Histoire d’Alexandre de Vasque de Lucène”, in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries au xve siècle: fortune iconographique dans les tapisseries et les manuscrits conservés. La tenture d’Alexandre de la collection Doria Pamphilj à Gênes, ed. F. Barbe, L. Stagno and E. Villari, Turnhout, 2013, p. 165-179. 42 Little has been published on ms. Vat. lat. 7190, a miscellaneous manuscript containing the Historia de Preliis at fol. 1 r-41 v: a selection of Alexander pictures is illustrated in Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany, fig. 362, 368, 371, 374, 419. On the codex in general, see Les manuscrits classiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, ed. E. Pellegrin, 3 vol., Paris, 1975-2010, III.2, p. 660-661.

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bedchamber, an allusion to the astronomical portents which, according to the Romance, heralded Alexander’s birth43. In the Romance, we are clearly told about the key role played by Nectanebo at Alexander’s birth, his astrological knowledge being crucial in ensuring that Alexander is born at the most propitious moment. Yet, the visual tradition does not follow in this, for rarely does Nectanebo appear in images of the birth. His occasional inclusion in such scenes seems to be limited to a few manuscripts preserving the so-called PseudoCallisthenes late antique cycle, of which only one Italian codex survives: the richly illustrated thirteenth-century Historia de Preliis ( J2 version) from southern Italy, now in Leipzig (Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Rep. II.143)44. Rather than in images of the birth, it is in illustrations of Alexander’s begetting that the crucial role played by Nectanebo in the story is highlighted and the divine nature of the hero’s marvellous conception made clear. The episode is most frequently visualised as seen in an early fourteenth-century southern Italian codex of the Historia de Preliis ( J1 version) now in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 8501, fol. 5 r: Fig. 2): Olympias and Nectanebo lie in the queen’s bed and are observed by a dragon who stands just outside the chamber. A winged dragon is the most popular form assumed by the serpent of Ammon in medieval art, a metamorphosis that is likely to derive from Archpriest Leo’s translation of the PseudoCallisthenes’s text, where the original Greek “drakon” (meaning ‘snake’) was translated into the Latin “draco”, indicating a dragon45.

43 On the manuscript, see Le Roman d’Alexandre: riproduzione del ms. Venezia, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Correr 1493, ed. R. Benedetti, Tricesimo, 1998; for its decoration, see also R. Benedetti, “Pulcherrime codex! Il ms. Correr 1493 (Roman d’Alexandre) del Museo Correr”, Bollettino dei Musei Civici Veneziani, 30 (1986), p. 123-142, esp. p. 123-131 and 133-134. The Correr manuscript (known as B redaction) is of crucial importance in the Alexander textual tradition, as it is one of the two surviving testimonies of the decasyllabic Roman d’Alexandre (the other being Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Arsenal 3472). As for its origin, several reasons point to Padua, rather than Bologna as alternatively suggested; the owner of the manuscript was the Paduan jurist and humanist Rolando da Piazzola, whose uncle Lovato Lovati has been credited with the commission of the codex itself; see L. Novello, “Alcune testimonianze di miniatura cavalleresca del XIII secolo in Veneto”, in Miniatura: lo sguardo e la parola. Studi in onore di Giordana Mariani Canova, ed. F. Toniolo and G. Toscano, Milan, 2012, p. 101-107, at p. 102-105, and C. Gaullier-Bougassas, “Les manuscrits italiens des Romans d’Alexandre français en vers et de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à Cesar (xiiie et xive siècles): lectures originales et créations inédites”, in Alexandre le Grand à la lumière des manuscrits et des premiers imprimés en Europe (xiie-xvie siècle). Matérialité des textes, contextes et paratextes: des lectures originales, ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas, Turnhout, 2015, p. 49-80. 44 On the codex, see G. Orofino, “Il contributo di Federico II all’iconografia profana: le illustrazioni del Romanzo di Alessandro”, in Federico II e le nuove culture: atti del XXXI Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 9-12 ottobre 1994, Spoleto, 1995, p. 393-415, and Das Buch von Alexander, dem edlen und weisen König von Makedonien mit den Miniaturen der Leipziger Handschrift, ed. W. Kirsch, Leipzig, 1991 (with the image of Alexander’s birth of fol. 6 v at p. 16). On this scene, see Ross, “Olympias and the Serpent”, p. 10, and Schmelter, Alexander der Grosse, p. 389-390. Depictions of Alexander’s birth derived from the Pseudo-Callisthenes picture cycle (and including Nectanebo) are best preserved in the Armenian version of the Romance, for example in ms. Manchester, John Rylands Library, Arm. 3, fol. 11 v, illustrated in Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 11, fig. 4; other Armenian examples are discussed and illustrated in Ross, “Olympias and the Serpent”, p. 9-10 and pl. 3a-c. On the late antique picture cycle in general, see ibid., esp. p. 1-2. 45 North of the Alps, especially in France and the Netherlands, a particularly inventive and visually entertaining approach to the episode of Alexander’s begetting can be found, with the dragon being shown lying with Olympias in her bed (rather than standing outside her chamber) or depicted as a hybrid creature combining the features of a dragon with those of a lion and a ram. For examples from both manuscripts and early printed books, see Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany, fig. 331, 350 and 353. A 1506 woodcut showing a horned dragon lying

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If the extraordinary conception of Alexander is made visually clear by the inclusion of the monstrous creature, the point is also reinforced by a third scene which, recounted in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.10), often follows the depiction of Alexander’s begetting in the illuminated manuscript tradition: that is, Nectanebo who, in the form of a dragon, approaches Olympias during a banquet at the Macedonian court and kisses her in the presence of King Philip and the courtiers, so as to confirm the divine conception of Alexander and dispel Philip’s suspicion of his pregnant wife’s infidelity. The episode, which is shown in several manuscripts including the already mentioned ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France lat. 8501, at fol. 5 v46, is also found on one of the very few artefacts of the Middle Ages illustrating the stories of Alexander outside of the manuscript tradition: the wooden painted ceiling of the Sala Magna in the Palazzo Chiaromonte (known as Steri) in Palermo. The ceiling was commissioned in 1377-1380 by the powerful Count of Modica, Manfredi III Chiaromonte (d. 1391), when the palace was his official residence and the Sala Magna on the piano nobile the ceremonial space where Manfredi’s power as de facto ruler of Palermo (and to some extent, of the whole of Sicily) could be displayed and celebrated47. Among the episodes from Alexander’s childhood which unfold across the surface of one of the ceiling’s beams, there are all the three scenes discussed above: the hero’s begetting, with Nectanebo and Olympias’s romantic encounter being witnessed by a dragon standing outside the queen’s bedchamber (Fig. 3); his birth, with Olympias resting on her bed while gazing at baby Alexander being cared for by the nurses (Plate I); and the dragon/Nectanebo flying into the banquet hall, kissing Olympias and frightening all those present (Fig. 4)48. The influence of illuminated manuscripts on the Palermo cycle has been demonstrated by Maria Bendinelli Predelli, whose research has convincingly located the Steri Alexander within a rich figurative tradition, fed into by French and, to some

next to Olympias is generally considered to be the last depiction of Alexander’s marvellous begetting; placed on the opening page of the editio princeps of the Old French Prose Alexander (Alixandre le Grant, Paris, Michel le Noir, 21 September 1506), it has been illustrated several times, e.g. by Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 47. 46 For a picture, see Ross, “Olympias and the Serpent”, pl. 2d. 47 A most convincing reading of the ceiling has been offered by L. Buttà, “Storie per governare: iconografia giuridica e del potere nel soffitto dipinto della Sala Magna del palazzo Chiaromonte Steri di Palermo”, in Narrazione, exempla, retorica: studi sull’iconografia dei soffitti dipinti nel Medioevo mediterraneo, ed. L. Buttà, Palermo, 2013, p. 69-126. Still important remain the pioneering works of F. Bologna, Il soffitto della Sala Magna allo Steri di Palermo e la cultura feudale siciliana nell’autunno del Medioevo, Palermo, 1975 (repr. 2002) and Lo Steri di Palermo e le sue pitture, ed. E. Gabrici and E. Levi, Milan and Rome, [1932?]; neither of these studies, however, identifies the subject of the beam discussed here with the story of Alexander, which is regarded instead as the legend of the son of Satan and the myth of Phineus and the Harpies; the dragon in the Alexander story is ostensibly mistaken for these winged monsters (Lo Steri di Palermo, p. 92 and 115; and Bologna, Il soffitto della Sala Magna, p. 199-200). For the Chiaromonte family, see P. Sardina, Palermo e i Chiaromonte: splendore e tramonto di una signoria. Potere nobiliare, ceti dirigenti e società tra XIV e XV secolo, Caltanissetta-Rome, 2003. 48 There is no doubt that the stories painted on the roof beam of the Steri (conventionally referred to as XI-A-65 and XI-B-214) should be identified as Alexander’s, as shown by Maria Bendinelli Predelli (“La storia di Alessandro Magno nel palazzo Chiaromonte di Palermo”, Prospettiva, 46 [1986], p. 13-21, and Ead., “Un’interpretazione iconografica relativa al soffitto Chiaramonte di Palermo”, in Letteratura italiana e arti figurative: atti del XII Convegno dell’Associazione internazionale per gli studi di lingua e letteratura italiana [Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal, 6-10 maggio 1985], ed. A. Franceschetti, 3 vol., Florence, 1988, I, p. 357-368) and recently restated by Buttà, “Storie per governare”, p. 109-112. Bendinelli Predelli’s conclusive articles have been ignored by the recent Il soffitto dello Steri di Palermo: rilievo fotogrammetrico digitale, ed. F. Vergara Caffarelli, Palermo and Florence, 2009, p. 27, which repeats the earlier tentative identifications (see n. 47 above), despite acknowledging their incongruity.

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extent, Byzantine models, which is exemplified by a number of Italian codices, including some of those discussed above49. If the Steri Alexander cycle can be easily compared to those manuscript examples, it also contains a significant iconographic detail which has been overlooked by scholars and remains unparalleled. In the picture of the ‘Birth of Alexander’ (Plate I), the nativity scene is flanked by two trees, the one on the left-hand side being surmounted by the sun, the other by the moon. These are unmistakably the two Oracular Trees of the Sun and the Moon which, as will be discussed later on in this chapter, were encountered by Alexander on the last leg of his journey through India and which prophesied, among other things, that he would die soon but would nevertheless become lord of the world50. I argue that at the Steri, the unique iconographic conflation of these distinct moments in Alexander’s life, his birth and his much later encounter with the Talking Trees, underlines the extraordinary nature of our hero and the great destiny awaiting him. Here Alexander is not only a child of magic, as made clear by both his begetting and the storming of Nectanebo/dragon into the court banquet; he is also the boy destined to die young and yet to rule the whole world, as foretold by the Trees of the Sun and the Moon which in the painting flank his nativity51. But there is more to it than this. To a medieval viewer the sun and the moon placed at either side of the main composition could not but recall the iconography of the Crucifixion, with the sun at the left of Christ’s cross and the moon at the right, so as to underline the universal importance of the event52. The visual association with the story of Christ that is therefore established would appear less surprising if considered in light of the assimilation of Alexander to Jesus, which, as mentioned above, underpins much of the medieval moral literature on Alexander and can be detected in the visual imagery, too53. The Trees of the Sun and the Moon partaking in the nativity of Alexander provide a reminder of both the world rulership and the untimely death he is destined to; also, by their association with the celestial bodies that partook in the Crucifixion of Christ, not only do they signify the importance of an event that changed the course of history but also remind the viewer of the many similarities shared by Alexander and Jesus Christ: a double paternity, a divine conception, and a death that happened at (almost precisely) the same age. The inclusion of Alexander in an iconographic programme as vast and ambitious as the Steri’s is as significant as it is unique. No other example in Italian art is known to me where

49 Bendinelli Predelli, “La storia di Alessandro”. 50 See Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem (ed. Boer), p. 46, l. 6-8 (“Invicte bellis Alexander, ut consuluisti, unus eris orbis terrarum dominus, sed vivus in patriam non reverteris amplius, quoniam fata ita de tuo capite statuerunt”) (“Alexander, unconquerable in war, as you asked, you will be the one Lord of the world, but you will no more return alive to your fatherland for the fates have decided thus about your death”. English translation in Gunderson, Alexander’s Letter, p. 153), then restated at p. 51, l. 2-3. For a fuller account of this episode, see below in this chapter. 51 The Steri Alexander cycle contains another depiction of fulfilment of a prophecy promising the dominion of the world: the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’, which I will discuss later on. As mentioned above, that Alexander would become a world ruler was also seen in the stars by Nectanebo at the moment of the baby’s birth. 52 For this well-known iconography based on ancient models and widely attested throughout the Middle Ages, see L. Hautecoeur, “Le soleil et la lune dans les Crucifixions”, Revue Archéologique, 20 (1921), p. 15-32. 53 For a particularly striking case in the Armenian iconographic tradition, see F. Lollini, “Alessandro il Grande come Cristo in due manoscritti miniati armeni”, La Rivista di Engramma, 39 (2005) (on-line journal) (republished in Id., Esercizi di iconologia, Venice, 2012, p. 7-14).

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stories of Alexander were depicted on similar wooden ceilings54 – for instance, none of the fifteenth-century wooden ceilings decorated with portrait-heads of men and women, particularly favoured in Lombardy, includes an image of Alexander. The uniqueness of the Steri decoration can be explained, I believe, in light of the popularity, due to Arab influence, of painted wooden ceilings in medieval Sicily after the Norman conquest of the island, both in ecclesiastical and palatial settings. To anyone standing in the huge Sala Magna of Palazzo Chiaromonte, the stories of Alexander painted high up on the dark ceiling must have been, as they are today, unreadable. But it is significant that they were included in a vast iconographic programme encompassing the entire visual encyclopaedia of the late Middle Ages: from the mythical stories of Troy to the monstrous creatures in bestiaries, from the encounters of courtly lovers to hunting scenes and chivalric jousts, from the figures of the biblical prophets to the scenes from the Apocalypse. And yet, an emphasis in the Steri decoration has been detected on episodes discussing political issues that Manfredi Chiaromonte must have considered particularly important, such as the good use of power or the wisdom required in the administration of justice55 – the last episode on our beam, with an enthroned Alexander acting as a judge in settling a dispute, also contributes to this topic56. If Alexander was an obvious choice worth recalling for any ruler, the attention paid at the Steri to his early life, rather than to his military achievements, still calls for an explanation. Six out of the seven episodes retelling his story focus on his infancy, stretching back to even before his begetting and then leaping forward to the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’, the event marking Alexander’s end of childhood and his coming of age as Philip’s heir and future king. Alexander is here neither the ruler and military leader nor the adventurer and explorer; rather, I would argue that in the general context of the Steri, he acts as a reminder of the supernatural, almost divine element that is embedded in the idea of rulership, while the visual emphasis on a child and his mother may perhaps be seen as an allusion to Manfredi’s marriage to Eufemia Ventimiglia, celebrated in the same year 1377 when work began on the wooden ceiling. The Taming of Bucephalus

No source material about Alexander, whether legendary or historical, ancient or medieval, fails to mention Bucephalus57. From his childhood until shortly before his death at Babylon, Alexander is always accompanied by his most loyal and trusted companion: his horse Bucephalus. According to Andrew Runni Anderson, Bucephalus “became the equine counterpart of Alexander”58: even during Alexander’s lifetime, it was believed that they were born at the same time; and some versions of the Romance synchronised their deaths

54 A 1457 wooden panel from a painted ceiling in Germany, showing Alexander’s ‘Submarine Voyage’ and the ‘Flight with Griffins’, is illustrated in Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 204-205, no. 89 and fig. 113. 55 Buttà, “Storie per governare”, passim. 56 For this episode, taken from the Novellino, see Bendinelli Predelli, “La storia di Alessandro”, p. 19-20, and Buttà, “Storie per governare”, p. 111-112. 57 The correct historical name of Bucephalus seems to be “Bucephalas”. Nevertheless, the Pseudo-Callisthenes and its derivatives prefer “Bucephalus”, which I have therefore adopted. 58 A. R. Anderson, “Bucephalas and His Legend”, American Journal of Philology, 51 (1930), p. 1-21, at p. 1.

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as well59. The legends of Alexander and Bucephalus exerted considerable influence on each other; just as Alexander was regarded as a heroic and nearly supernatural figure, so, too, Bucephalus was very early on turned into a quasi-mythical creature60. The event which marks the beginning of their lifelong friendship is the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’: this episode is recounted in both the historical and legendary accounts of Alexander’s life and was widely represented – though with significant changes in the appearance of Bucephalus – both in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. It is therefore particularly significant for our discussion, since it is located precisely on the cusp of legend and history61. According to Plutarch (Alexander VI), Bucephalus was presented to Philip of Macedon as a gift, but his savage nature made him intractable and dangerous to anyone who tried to approach him. Only the fifteen-year-old Alexander was able to tame and ride him, and this successful deed – the first in the career of the young prince – was immediately interpreted as a good omen, foretelling the future greatness of Alexander. The Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.13-17) introduced a few important changes, the most remarkable of which was the transformation of Bucephalus into a man-eating horse, kept in an iron cage and fed by Philip on thieves and felons who had been sentenced to death. In addition, the Delphic oracle is said to have predicted that the one who tamed Bucephalus would conquer the world – a prophecy fulfilled by Alexander. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bucephalus is not simply a wild horse; he is a monstrous creature implicitly compared to the mythical flesh-eating mares of Diomedes captured by Hercules as his Eighth Labour62. Medieval illustrated manuscripts reflect this description and depict the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ accordingly. In ms. Correr 1493 the ferocity of Bucephalus is expressed by showing him breaking down the doors of the iron cage in which he is imprisoned (Fig. 5). In this picture, as well as in the rest of the manuscript, the illuminator portrays Bucephalus as a powerful but also graceful horse. A little further on in the text, however, he is described as a monstrous creature, born from an elephant and a dromedary63. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes 59 The Ethiopic version of the Romance goes even further: Bucephalus is not only conceived at the same time as Alexander but shares with him the same father, the magician Nectanebo. See Anderson, “Bucephalas and His Legend”, p. 15-16, and, more generally, P. C. Kotar, “The Ethiopic Alexander Romance”, in A Companion to Alexander Literature, p. 157-175. On the synchronised deaths of Bucephalus and Alexander in the epsilon recension of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, see Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 190-191. 60 The literature on Bucephalus and his legend is not particularly abundant. In addition to the exhaustive study of Anderson, “Bucephalas and His Legend”, which remains essential for the topic, see D. Carraroli, La leggenda di Alessandro Magno: studio storico-critico, Mondovì, 1892, p. 290-293; D. J. A. Ross, “A Funny Name for a Horse: Bucephalus in Antiquity and the Middle Ages”, Bien dire et bien aprandre, 7 (1989), p. 51-76; F. Dubost, “De quelques chevaux extraordinaires dans le récit médiéval: esquisse d’une configuration imaginaire”, in Le cheval dans le monde médiéval, Aix-en-Provence, 1992, p. 189-208, esp. p. 195-202; E. Baynham, “Who Put the ‘Romance’ in the Alexander Romance? The Alexander Romances within Alexander Historiography”, Ancient History Bulletin, 9 (1995), p. 1-13, esp. p. 5-9; L. Harf-Lancner, “Bucéphale et ses avatars dans les romans français d’Alexandre: textes et images”, Critica del testo, 22.3 (2019), p. 89-101. Despite its focus on the Spanish Libro de Alexandre, G. Peron, “Rielaborazione narrativa e originalità dell’Alexandre castigliano: la storia di Bucefalo”, in Alessandro/Dhû l-Qarnayn, p. 51-76, is also useful. 61 For Bucephalus as a liminal creature between history and legend, see Carraroli, La leggenda di Alessandro, p. 290. 62 This comparison can be inferred from the fact that, according to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.15), Philip was waiting for “a second Hercules” to tame Bucephalus; see Il Romanzo di Alessandro, ed. Centanni, p. 234. 63 The text of the decasyllabic Roman of ms. Correr 1493 can be read in The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, vol. 1, p. 3-495. The description of Bucephalus, begotten “en l’isle de Micene / D’un olifant e d’une dromedene” (l. 748-749) is at stanza 73 (p. 39).

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it is stated that, as soon as Alexander approached his cage, Bucephalus recognised him as his master by licking his hand. This moment is very often depicted in manuscripts, as in a southern Italian Historia de Preliis of around 1250, now in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 174, fol. 4 v), where the remains of the criminals killed by the horse are scattered on the ground64. More frequently, however, Bucephalus is depicted as a unicorn, with a single horn – or, less often, with two horns – on his head. This imagery is related to the explanation of the origin of the name “Bucephalus” (meaning ‘ox-head’) which had been suggested in the third century ad by Solinus. Ancient authors, for the most part, claimed prosaically that Bucephalus got his name from a brand with an ox-head sign on his haunch or shoulder (or alternatively, from a white blaze on his forehead)65. Solinus, instead, offered a fantastic alternative: Bucephalus had actual horns on his forehead66. Because this passage was interpolated in the Historia de Preliis and several other medieval Alexander books – as well as in the bestiary tradition – the image of a horned Bucephalus became widespread, whether with two horns like an ox or only one like a unicorn – possibly to stress the nature of a monstrous, almost untameable creature he shared with that legendary animal67. It is found at fol. 7 r in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. 8501 mentioned above, where Bucephalus, in the guise of a unicorn, is presented to Philip and then approached by Alexander; the two scenes are also juxtaposed in a coloured pen drawing from ms. lat. 7190 of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Fig. 6)68. In the same 1370s a picture of a horned Bucephalus was included among the remarkable Alexander stories on the ceiling of the Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri) in Palermo. Immediately after the depiction of the storming of the dragon/Nectanebo into the banquet hall to kiss Olympias, the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ is shown in a somewhat unconventional way, with Alexander entering the cage and grabbing Bucephalus’s horn with his hands (Fig. 7) – a very clear visual

64 On this manuscript, see Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 53-54, and Manuscrits enluminés d’origine italienne (Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des manuscrits, Centre de recherche sur les manuscrits enluminés), 3 vol., Paris, 1980-2012, I: vie-xiie siècles, ed. F. Avril and Y. Załuska, p. 83-84, no. 149. 65 See Anderson, “Bucephalas and His Legend”, p. 3-7. A representation of Bucephalus branded with the sign of an ox’s head on his thigh is found in the eleventh-century manuscript of the Cynegetica by Pseudo-Oppian (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, ms. Gr. 479, fol. 8 v); see Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 6, and I. Furlan, Codici greci illustrati della Biblioteca Marciana, 6 vol., Milan, 1978-1997, V, p. 25. 66 See C. Iulius Solinus, Collectanea rerum memorabilium 45.8 (ed. T. Mommsen, 2nd edition, Berlin, 1958, p. 174-175). In the early fourteenth-century Italian manuscript of Solinus now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (ms. C. 246 inf., fol. 18 v), Bucephalus is depicted with two horns and resembles a bull: for a picture see Ross, “A Funny Name”, p. 72. On ms. C. 246 inf., see L. Cogliati Arano, “Il manoscritto C. 246 inf. della Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Solino”, in La miniatura italiana in età romanica e gotica: atti del I Congresso di Storia della Miniatura Italiana, Cortona 26-28 maggio 1978, ed. G. Vailati Schoenburg Waldenburg, Florence, 1979, p. 239-258 (where, however, no mention of the Bucephalus picture is made). Images of Bucephalus as a two-horned horse are also documented in the third century bc on coins issued by Antiochus I Soter and Seleucus I Nicator. 67 See, e.g., Pseudo-Hugo of St Victor, De bestiis et aliis rebus 3.23, PL CLXXVII, col. 9-164, at col. 91. This tradition subsists, for example, in encyclopaedic compilations as late as the work of Brunetto Latini, whose Tresor 186.3 (ed. P. G. Beltrami, P. Squillacioti, P. Torri and S. Vatteroni, Turin, 2007, p. 308-309), of around 1260-1266, also depicts Bucephalus with the head of a bull and two protrusions similar to horns. 68 See Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 53-54, and V. M. Schmidt, “The Picture Cycle of the Old French Prose Alexander”, in Boeken in de late Middeleeuwen: verslag van de Groningse Codicologendagen 1992, ed. J. M. M. Hermans and K. van der Hoek, Groningen, 1994, p. 239-252.

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expression, both eloquent and forceful, of the most sensational deed performed by the young Alexander. The Flight with Griffins

Of all the fabulae told in the Alexander Romance the ‘Flight with Griffins’ was by far the most widespread in the Middle Ages and is also the most extensively studied episode of the legend69. It was illustrated in nearly every artistic medium and was one of the very few themes to be represented outside the context of Alexander cycles in illustrated manuscripts70. As David Ross has rightly noted: “Specialists apart, those who know anything of Alexander the Great as a hero of medieval romance know him usually as an airman”71. The story goes back to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (II.41) as one of the tasks carried out by Alexander in the last part of his journey to the borders of the world72. Having reached the furthermost part of Asia, Alexander is overcome by the desire to explore the heavens. He has a flying machine built (usually, a casket or a chariot) and travels through the air in the vehicle drawn by griffins, only to be sent back to the earth by a divine creature (in later versions, God). The ambiguity of this ascent led it to be regarded either as a symbol of Alexander’s hybris – not least in connection with Christ’s Ascension to Heaven, of which this seemed a blasphemous imitation – or as an iconic image of power and a prefiguration of the imperial apotheosis. Whether praised or condemned, the Flight was charged with an ideological and symbolic meaning, which explains why it was represented as an independent work of art (e.g., in floor mosaics, reliefs, column capitals), mainly in churches and monasteries73. One of the best-known examples of the Flight is the twelfth-century marble relief on the north façade of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, brought from Constantinople in 1204 as part of the booty of the Fourth Crusade (Fig. 8)74. The specific connotation assumed by the triumphal image of the Flight in Byzantine art explains the inclusion of this relief in the renovation project of St Mark’s after the Venetian conquest of Constantinople. As the first kosmokrator, Alexander was regarded in Byzantium as a predecessor of the emperors, and the Flight was thought to prefigure their apotheosis, as well as functioning as an apotropaic

69 See C. Frugoni, Historia Alexandri elevati per griphos ad aerem: origine, iconografia e fortuna di un tema, Rome, 1973; Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image. Still useful are: R. S. Loomis, “Alexander the Great’s Celestial Journey”, Burlington Magazine, 32 (1918), p. 136-140 and 177-185; G. Boffito, “La leggenda aviatoria di Alessandro Magno nella letteratura e nell’arte”, La Bibliofilía, 22 (1920-1921), p. 316-330, and ibid., 23 (1921-1922), p. 22-32 and 268-271; G. Millet, “L’Ascension d’Alexandre”, Syria, 4 (1923), p. 85-133. 70 See C. Frugoni, “La fortuna di Alessandro nel Medioevo”, in Alessandro Magno: storia e mito, p. 161-173, at p. 161. 71 D. J. A. Ross, “Alexander and the Faithless Lady: A Submarine Adventure”, in his Studies in the Alexander Romance, London, 1985, p. 382-403, at p. 384. 72 The account of the Flight appears in only one branch of the Pseudo-Callisthenes’s textual tradition (L variant of the beta recension). It is not mentioned in the Latin translation by Julius Valerius, but it does appear in Archpriest Leo of Naples’s version and its derivatives. See Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, p. 5-11. 73 For the diffusion in Italy, see ibid., p. 282-316. The European examples are listed in Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 167-209. 74 J. Durand, “Légende d’Alexandre le Grand”, Annales Archéologiques, 25 (1865), p. 142-158; Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, p. 162-164; Ead., “La lastra marmorea dell’Ascensione di Alessandro Magno”, in La basilica di San Marco: arte e simbologia, ed. B. Bertoni, 2nd edition, Venice, 1999, p. 167-169. Some useful remarks are in L. Bréhier, La sculpture et les arts mineurs byzantins, Paris, 1936, p. 64-65.

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image75. Alexander was often depicted wearing imperial robes and attributes, and in this way he was transformed into a Byzantine emperor. This is the also the case in the St Mark’s relief, where Alexander ascends to the heavens dressed as, and truly looking like, a Byzantine emperor. Once brought to Venice and walled in a very prominent position into the north façade of the Basilica, the relief from Constantinople assumed a new meaning: in Venice, this Alexander ascending to the heavens became figura of the defeated Byzantine emperor, whose capital the Crusaders had conquered, and therefore came to symbolise the 1204 translatio imperii, when the power of the emperors of Rome and Constantinople passed to the Venetian doge. This political use of the image of Alexander in St Mark’s is hardly surprising, given that the Basilica was the private chapel of the adjacent Ducal Palace from its foundation in 829 until 1797, and became the cathedral of Venice only in 1807. The triumphal connotation of the Flight is confirmed by the presence of the same theme in the most precious artefact in the Treasury of St Mark’s: the Pala d’Oro. Completely renovated by Doge Andrea Dandolo in 1342-1345, the Pala includes two enamel roundels from the 1204 Sack of Constantinople; surrounded by figures of saints and prophets, they are the only medallions displaying non-religious iconography76. The episode of the Flight is divided between the two enamels. In the first, the crowned head of Alexander appears between two rampant griffins in a simplified but unmistakable image of his ascent to the heavens (Fig. 9). The second medallion shows the cosmic vision which, according to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (II.41), concludes the Flight: looking down from above, Alexander sees the earth as a heavenly garden and the surrounding ocean as a serpent (Fig. 10)77. It is worth mentioning in passing a third image of Alexander that is found near St Mark’s: carved around 1342-1348 on a column capital in the Ducal Palace, next to the Basilica, there is an Alexander kosmokrator, with crown and sceptre, seated among the kings and emperors of antiquity78. Although here Alexander is not engaged in his Flight, his inclusion amongst the monarchs of ancient times confirms the political use of his image in what was the political centre of the Republic of Venice for nearly a thousand years. 75 On the use of the image of the Flight of Alexander at Constantinople, see Frugoni, La fortuna di Alessandro Magno, p. 17-19, and Ead., “La fortuna di Alessandro nel Medioevo”, p. 165-168. For an examination of the relief and its meaning within the iconographic programme of the Basilica, see M. Centanni, “‘Alexander Rex’ tra Bisanzio e Venezia: la doppia lettura ideologica del volo di Alessandro, tra XII e XIII secolo”, in Divinizzazione, culto del sovrano e apoteosi tra antichità e Medioevo, ed. T. Gnoli and F. Muccioli, Bologna, 2014, p. 391-426. 76 The two enamels discussed are part of a series of five; the other three represent scenes of a royal hunt with falcons. See Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, p. 186-189 and Ead., “La fortuna di Alessandro nel Medioevo”, p. 166; Centanni, “‘Alexander Rex’”, p. 413-414 and 421-422; W. F. Volbach, “Gli smalti della Pala d’Oro”, in La Pala d’oro, ed. H. R. Hahnloser and R. Polacco, Venice, 1994, p. 3-71 (on the five enamels, see p. 65-66, nos 148-152); and A. Grabar, “Le succès des arts orientaux à la cour byzantine sous les Macédoniens” and “Images de l’ascension d’Alexandre en Italie et en Russie”, in his L’art de la fin de l’antiquité et du Moyen Âge, 3 vol., Paris, 1968, I, p. 265-290 and 291-296, respectively. The medallion with the Flight is also illustrated in G. Dimitrokallis, “L’ascensione di Alessandro Magno nell’Italia del Medioevo”, Thesaurismata, 4 (1967), p. 214-222, at p. 214 and fig. 1. An important investigation into the Alexander enamels has been carried out by Maria Bergamo, whose article “Le placchette profane della Pala d’Oro di San Marco” is in preparation; I thank the author for sharing with me her findings before their publication. 77 For a different interpretation of the second enamel as the Tree of Life, see D. J. A. Ross’s review of C. Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, in Rivista Storica Italiana, 88 (1976), p. 165-174, at p. 169. 78 The other seven rulers are Priam, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius (most likely to be identified with Darius I, rather than Darius III), Julius Caesar, Augustus, Titus (alternatively, Vespasian) and Trajan. See A. Lermer, Der gotische “Dogenpalast” in Venedig: Baugeschichte und Skulpturenprogramm des Palatium Communis Venetiarum, Munich and Berlin, 2005, p. 101106. This image of Alexander is merely mentioned in the otherwise authoritative study of the Ducal Palace capitals by A. Manno, Il poema del tempo. I capitelli del Palazzo Ducale di Venezia: storia e iconografia, Venice, 1999, p. 147-148.

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The majority of the examples of the Flight of Alexander on a monumental scale are to be found in churches of the southern Italian region of Apulia79. They date from around the 1160s and are all very similar, both iconographically and stylistically; more importantly, they present the Flight as an exemplum superbiae and, therefore, as a negative episode. Three mosaic floors in the cathedrals of Otranto (Fig. 11), Trani and Taranto80 depict Alexander’s Flight alongside biblical examples of pride being punished: for example, the Tower of Babel, the Fall of Adam and Eve and their Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. There is also a column capital in the cathedral of Bitonto which shows the episode divided into two scenes: on one side Alexander is portrayed ascending to the heavens, while on the other he is represented flying back to the earth. The proximity to such notorious examples of overweening pride – or, at Bitonto, the emphasis on the conclusion of the adventure, which is rarely illustrated – makes it clear that the Flight was openly condemned in these works81. The same can be said of a badly damaged stone relief on the façade of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Corato, which has recently been identified as a representation of the ‘Flight with Griffins’82. No iconographic details or connections to nearby scenes help us to understand whether Alexander was portrayed here as an exemplum superbiae; but the location of Corato, halfway between Trani and Bitonto, where other negative examples of the Flight are found, suggests that this might well be the case. This condemnatory attitude towards the Flight is partly due to the influence of medieval theological literature, where Alexander’s celestial journey was regarded as a blasphemous act and came to typify the sin of pride83. But the concentration of negative images of the Flight in twelfth-century Apulia also calls for further explanation84. As Chiara Frugoni has convincingly argued, the political context of this area around the 1160s is crucial for understanding the meaning of these works. The 79 Apart from the case of St Mark’s in Venice, reliefs with the Flight in north and central Italy are at Fidenza (Parma, cathedral of San Donnino), Narni (Terni, church of San Domenico), Matrice (Campobasso, Santa Maria della Strada) and Monte Sant’Angelo in the Gargano (Santa Maria Maggiore). See Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 169-174, with related bibliography. A marble relief of unknown provenance dated to the ninth-tenth century is in the Museo dell’Alto Medioevo “Alessandra Vaccaro”, now part of the Museo delle Civiltà, Rome: see Alessandro Magno: storia e mito, p. 323, no. 121 (A. Settis Frugoni). 80 The lost mosaic in San Cataldo at Taranto is known through a drawing of 1844; the drawing is now also lost but was first published by G. Antonucci, “Il musaico pavimentale del Duomo di Taranto e le tradizioni musive calabro-sicule”, Archivio storico per la Calabria e la Lucania, 12 (1943-1944), p. 121-132. 81 I do not share the view of Victor Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 60-65, who sees no negative connotation at all in the Otranto mosaic and interprets Alexander’s Flight, at p. 65, as “an indication of the salvation awaiting people in the afterlife”. 82 G. Magnini and L. Soldano, “Un nuovo ‘Volo di Alessandro’ a Corato, in Puglia”, La Rivista di Engramma, 124 (2015) (on-line journal: http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=2119) [last accessed 24 November 2021]. 83 On the interpretation of the Flight by medieval theologians and mystics, see Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 134-135, and Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, p. 240-250. 84 According to Francesco Gandolfo, “Una abbazia molisana e il suo programma decorativo: Santa Maria della Strada presso Matrice”, in Le vie del medioevo: atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Parma, 28 settembre-1 ottobre 1998), ed. A. C. Quintavalle, Milan, 2000, p. 208-222, the Flight in the twelfth-century tympanum in Santa Maria della Strada at Matrice (in neighbouring Molise) should also be interpreted as an exemplum superbiae. Gandolfo’s hypothesis is based on a re-examination of the entire sculptural decoration of the church, which I do not find entirely convincing. The traditional interpretation of the Flight at Matrice as a positive image still seems to me more likely. See E. Jamison, “Notes on Santa Maria della Strada at Matrice, its History and Sculpture”, Papers of the British School at Rome, 14 (1938), p. 32-97, esp. p. 67-69; A. De Rubertis, Breve guida di S. Maria della Strada in Matrice, Petrella Tifernina, 1948; Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, p. 296-302 and 304.

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region had recently been conquered by the Normans, who were able to prevail over the Byzantines throughout southern Italy by the end of that century. At Otranto, and in the other Apulian examples, Alexander is emphatically represented as a Byzantine emperor: he wears a crown and imperial robes, sits on a throne (instead of the usual chariot) and is identified by the inscriptions on the mosaic floors as “Alexander Rex”. According to Frugoni, these images carried a political meaning inspired by the Norman court: the proud Alexander, whose legendary ascent had been punished by God, became a symbol of the Byzantine emperor repeatedly defeated by the Normans on the battlefield85. This hypothesis is all the more persuasive as it helps to situate these images within the larger Italian context, where a more positive representation of Alexander’s Flight remained predominant. The Submarine Voyage

As iconic as the ‘Flight with Griffins’ is the episode of the ‘Submarine Voyage’. This story is told in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (II.38), where it is narrated shortly before Alexander’s flight to the heavens. While marching with his army by the ocean shore, he comes across a giant crab with huge pearls inside it; he supposes that the sea might contain other such wonders and resolves to explore the abyss to find out more. A glass jar protected by an iron cage is built for him to be lowered into the sea; he has a long chain attached to the submarine vessel and orders his men, who are responsible for controlling it from the surface, not to pull him up until they feel the chain shake. The dive, however, is not a complete success; for while admiring the various fish and other sea creatures, Alexander is suddenly dragged for a mile by a huge fish which seizes the vessel in its mouth. When he is finally cast out on to the beach, Alexander, half dead with terror, thanks providence for his lucky escape86. Medieval versions of the Romance often emphasised the moralistic and symbolic meaning of the episode: not only was Alexander powerless against the huge fish he was dragged off by, but the ultimate lesson he was taught, while gazing at the fascinating but pitiless sea life from inside his glass jar, was that “big fish eat little fish”. The episode of the Submarine Voyage was extremely popular in the Middle Ages and is often regarded by scholars as an offshoot of the ‘Flight with Griffins’87. Unlike the Flight,

85 Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, p. 282-312, esp. p. 303-312, and Centanni, “‘Alexander Rex’”, who also examines the similarity between the political use of the image of Alexander in Norman Apulia and the Republic of Venice after 1204. Other interpretations of the Otranto mosaic (and by extension of the other Flight representations in Apulia) are summarised in Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 119-120. The contribution of M. Castiñeiras, “L’Alessandro anglonormanno e il mosaico di Otranto: una ekphrasis monumentale?”, Troianalexandrina, 4 (2004), p. 41-86, contains important material but is often inaccurate and, in many respects, obscure. On the mosaic in general, see C. Ungruh, Das Bodenmosaik der Kathedrale von Otranto (1163-1165): Normannische Herrscherideologie als Endzeitvision, Affalterbach, 2013 (on Alexander’s Flight, p. 206-211). 86 On the parallel between Jonah “vomited by the whale” and Alexander “vomited by the abyss”, see Alessandro nel Medioevo occidentale, p. 663, n. 5. 87 The narrative similarities between the two episodes are discussed by Frugoni, Historia Alexandri, p. 110-113. For Alexander’s underwater adventure, see Ross, “Alexander and the Faithless Lady”; see also Carraroli, La leggenda di Alessandro, p. 293-296; Der altfranzösische Prosa Alexanderroman, ed. A. Hilka, Halle, 1920, p. xxxviii-xli; Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 111-114. Although devoted to French literature, useful remarks can be found in C. GaullierBougassas, “La réécriture inventive d’une même séquence: quelques versions du voyage d’Alexandre sous la mer”,

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however, Alexander’s descent into the sea does not seem to have been illustrated outside of the manuscript tradition88. The two scenes are usually represented one after the other, often on facing pages and sometimes even as part of the same picture. Their order, however, varies according to the structure of the text: in certain medieval versions, for instance, that of Leo of Naples (III.27ii.5-6), the account of the ‘Submarine Voyage’ comes after the ‘Flight with Griffins’, and not before it as in the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes. Two manuscripts of the Historia de Preliis from southern Italy show Alexander’s descent into the sea paired with his ascent to the heavens. The first manuscript, ascribed to a workshop in Salerno, is the already mentioned ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8501, presenting the two scenes on facing pages (Fig. 12)89. This picture cycle is based on French models, since the direct source of inspiration is a copy of the Old French Prose Alexander90 – the availability of manuscripts of French rielaborations of the Romance in southern Italy being also documented by the painted ceiling of Palazzo Chiaromonte, mentioned above. The second codex is the lavishly illustrated ms. Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek, Rep. II.143 and has the two episodes on the recto and verso of the same leaf (Plate II)91. A section devoted to Alexander is frequently found in larger works such as universal history compilations. This is the case of the Weltchronik of the German epic poet Rudolf von Ems, which was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death in about 1254 and was later continued by others. A manuscript of this expanded version (Christherrenchronik), dated 1385 and now in Kassel, was decorated by a northern Italian, most likely Venetian, illuminator92. The Alexander section contains three miniatures illustrating the ‘Submarine Voyage’ and the ‘Flight with Griffins’ (the latter is unfortunately badly damaged by rubbing). A third scene follows, which depicts Alexander’s return to his army after his ascent to the heavens. His adventure in the abyss is represented here according to an anomalous version of the story, which is peculiar to German texts: a woman (the unfaithful wife or mistress of Alexander) replaces the men in lowering and raising the glass jar and tries to drown Alexander by releasing the chain attached to the vessel93. A section devoted to the history of Macedon, and therefore to Alexander, was interpolated into the French book known as the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, written in the

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Bien dire et bien aprandre, 14 (1996), p. 7-19, and S. Hériché Pradeau, “Immersion et survivance dans Les Faicts et les conquestes d’Alexandre le Grand de Jehan Wauquelin (xve siècle)”, in Dans l’eau sous l’eau, ed. D. James-Raoul and C. Thomasset, Paris, 2002, p. 339-355. According to Frugoni, “La fortuna di Alessandro nel Medioevo”, p. 171-173, the only representation on a monumental scale is one of the two Burgundian tapestries of around 1460, now held in the Villa del Principe at Genoa; the ‘Submarine Voyage’ is depicted here alongside the ‘Flight with Griffins’ and Alexander’s battle with the monstrous creatures of the East. I shall come back to the so-called Doria tapestries in Chapter 2 below. See Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 196, no. 70, with related bibliography. This hypothesis was formulated by Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 51. For the Old French Prose Alexander (a thirteenthcentury French derivative of the J2 Historia de Preliis), see ibid., p. 54-57. The manuscript is discussed also by Schmidt, “The Picture Cycle”, p. 246-247. See Orofino, “Il contributo di Federico II”, and Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 182, no. 40. See Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany, p. 92-93, and Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 181-182, no. 38. On this odd version of the story, see Ross, “Alexander and the Faithless Lady”.

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early thirteenth century94. In ms. 2576 of the National Library of Vienna, containing a Franco-Italian version of the history, a Venetian illuminator of the late fourteenth century included the ‘Submarine Voyage’ and the ‘Flight with Griffins’ in the same picture (Fig. 13)95. The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon

The ‘Visit of Alexander to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon’ is a crucial event in the last part of the Pseudo-Callisthenes. After the ‘Submarine Voyage’ (II.38), the ‘Flight with Griffins’ (II.41) and the battle against the Indian King Porus (III.1-4), Alexander’s remarkable journey through India turns into an anxious march to the furthest edges of the world. At every step, signs and portents occur, which are interpreted as bad omens for Alexander. Even his encounters with the legendary queen of Meroe (in present-day Sudan), Candace (III.18-23) and with the Amazons (III.25-6)96 take place in a menacing and discomforting atmosphere. This is the context of the ‘Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon’97. According to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (III.17), the wise men of Prasiake, the capital of the kingdom of Porus, invite Alexander to visit the local sanctuary, where at the rising and the setting of the sun and the moon two oracular trees speak, the sun with the voice of a man, the moon with that of a woman. On three different occasions, the trees warn Alexander of his impending early death, foretelling that he will die very soon in Babylon by the hand of one of his companions and that he will not see again either his mother Olympias or his wife Roxane, who will both also suffer terrible deaths98. A fuller account of the episode is given in the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle about India (p. 43, l. 5-p. 52, l. 6), where the wise men are replaced by a high priest with black skin and dog-like teeth99, who is the guardian of the trees and who translates their pronouncements. In this account, as mentioned before, the trees also prophesy to Alexander his dominion of the world. In the Italian iconographic tradition of this episode, Alexander is presented accompanied by a few companions, either standing or kneeling in prayer before the two trees. Placed either at the top of the image or in the foliage of the trees are the disks of the sun and the

94 See D. J. A. Ross, “The History of Macedon in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César: Sources and Compositional Method”, Classica et mediaevalia, 24 (1963), p. 181-231, esp. p. 225-231 (republished in his Studies in the Alexander Romance, p. 198-248), and Wauchier de Denain, Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César ou Histoires pour Roger, châtelain de Lille, de Wauchier de Denain: l’histoire de la Macédoine et d’Alexandre le Grand, ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas, Turnhout, 2012. 95 See Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 201, no. 82, and Ross, “The History of Macedon”, p. 225-231; for a critical edition of ms. 2576, see Wauchier de Denain, Histoire ancienne (ed. Gaullier-Bougassas), p. 247-358 (p. 303-304 for the episodes of the ‘Flight’ and the ‘Submarine Adventure’). 96 For more on these meetings, see Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 128-136. 97 On the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, see S. Hériché-Pradeau, “Les arbres prophétiques du Soleil et de la Lune dans les romans d’Alexandre”, in Par les mots et les textes… Mélanges de langue, de littérature et d’histoire des sciences médiévales offerts à Claude Thomasset, ed. D. Jacquart, D. James-Raoul and O. Soutet, Paris, 2005, p. 413-429. 98 According to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (III.31) and its derivatives, Alexander dies from the poison given to him by his cupbearer Iollas at the order of Alexander’s general Antipater. His death is therefore the result of treachery. See Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 194-195 and 313-318. 99 As a consequence, in the Northern European tradition the high priest is sometimes depicted as a dog-headed man. See, e.g., the picture in a Bible decorated at Utrecht around 1467 (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ms. 78.D.39, fol. 374 v), illustrated in Stoneman, Alexander the Great, pl. 16.

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moon, which sometimes take the form of a male and female face (or of a crescent, in the case of the moon). The Leipzig manuscript mentioned above includes a representation of this episode (Fig. 14). The ‘Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon’ was also introduced by another image, in which Alexander is seen meeting with the high priest in front of the trees, as for example in ms. Correr 1493, containing the text of the French decasyllabic Roman d’Alexandre (Fig. 15 and 16). In the donjon of the castle of Quart, near Aosta in north-west Italy, a fragmentary frescoed figure of Alexander was discovered a few years ago100. Despite its damaged state, the fresco is remarkable in several respects. It represents a man on horseback, clearly identified by the inscription “ALEXANDER”, gesturing towards an unusual tree with nine branches, each of which ends with a human face depicted in profile (Plate III). Above the tree is the inscription “ARBOR SICA”. This scene is part of a larger fresco cycle decorating the main hall of the donjon, which has been dated on stylistic grounds to the 1260s-1270s101. After the room underwent major alterations between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, the walls were whitewashed. The restoration campaign, which started in 2006 and was completed in 2016, has uncovered all that remains of what must have been a dazzling painted cycle; and yet, with an estimated 16% of the original decoration surviving to this day, the iconographic programme of the cycle remains unclear. Nevertheless, a few observations can be made about it. The episode was first identified as “Alexander before the Tree of the Sun”. In addition to the general iconographic appearance of the scene, this hypothesis was apparently strengthened by the presence of the letter ‘S’ from the inscription above (at the time the only legible one), which was assumed to stand for ‘S[OLIS]’102. When, however, the restoration process subsequently revealed (in 2008) the next three letters to be ‘I’, ‘C’

100 The frescoes on the north wall of the room, where Alexander is represented, were first published by Michelangelo Lupo and Gianfranco Zidda in Fragmenta picta: testimonianze pittoriche dal castello di Quart, secoli XIII-XVI (exhibition catalogue, Castello Sarriod de La Tour [Aosta], 2003), ed. E. Rossetti Brezzi, Aosta, 2003, p. 22-23, no. 2 (“Alexander e gli alberi del sole e della luna: fonti iconografiche”). I am grateful to Viviana Maria Vallet and Gianfranco Zidda of the Soprintendenza per i Beni e le Attività Culturali of the Valle d’Aosta, who kindly provided me with bibliographic material on the fresco cycle and generously discussed their findings with me. My thanks are also due to Mario Casari, who shared his thoughts about the frescoes with me. In the final stages of writing I became aware of an essay published by Marco Infurna, “Alessandro Magno e gli alberi oracolari in un ciclo di pitture valdostane del XIII secolo”, in “La somma de le cose’’. Studi in onore di Gianfelice Peron, ed. A. Andreose, G. Borriero and T. Zanon, Padua, 2018, p. 109-118. Infurna contributes some important comparative material on the Quart fresco and partly reaches the same conclusions that I suggest here. I wish to thank him for graciously allowing me to read his essay before its publication. 101 Technical examination has shown that the frescoes were realized shortly after the donjon was significantly enlarged in 1261-1262 – a renovation campaign that has been securely dated by dendrochronology: see V. M. Vallet, “Tracce di cultura cortese nell’arco alpino occidentale: linguaggi e testimonianze figurative in Valle d’Aosta tra Duecento e Trecento”, in Carlo Magno va alla guerra: le pitture del castello di Cruet e il Medioevo cavalleresco tra Italia e Francia (exhibition catalogue, Turin, Palazzo Madama, 2018), ed. S. Castronovo, Novara, 2018, p. 60-73, at p. 62-63 and n. 18; see also Ead., “Châteaux et décors peints dans la Vallée d’Aoste aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles: réflexions sur l’horizon figuratif et culturel de quelques familles nobles locales”, in Les vies de châteaux: de la forteresse au monument. Les châteaux sur le territoire de l’ancien duché de Savoie, du XVe siècle à nos jours (exhibition catalogue, Annecy, Musée-Château, 2016), Cinisello Balsamo, 2016, p. 146-155, at p. 147-148). On the castle, the volume Il castello di Quart: indagini archeologiche, cantieri di restauro e valorizzazione is forthcoming. 102 Fragmenta picta, p. 22-23, no. 2 (Lupo and Zidda).

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and ‘A’, the inscription, in fact, turned out to read ‘SICA’. As a consequence, the earlier identification of the subject matter with the episode of the Tree of the Sun seemed no longer to be valid, and the conjecture was withdrawn103. There is, however, a tradition which identifies the “arbor solis” (Tree of the Sun) of the Alexander story with the “arbor sica” (Dry Tree) of the Christian tradition. The connection is notably found in The Travels of Marco Polo (I.22), when, in the Persian province of Tonocain, Marco encounters the Solitary Tree (“Arbre Sol”) which Christians called the Dry Tree (“Arbre Sec”). According to the locals, he notes, it was here that Alexander and Darius fought in battle. In another passage (IV.5), Marco mentions “the Arbre Sol, which the Book of Alexander calls the Arbre Sec”104. The reason why he considers the Solitary Tree, the Dry Tree and the Tree of the Sun to be the same deserves to be investigated, but this is beyond the scope of the present research. It should be borne in mind, however, that in the medieval versions of the Romance Alexander is said to visit the Dry Tree, on which a phoenix is perched. This episode, which in the textual tradition comes immediately before his ‘Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon’, is often illustrated in manuscripts, as for example in the Leipzig Historia de Preliis (Fig. 17)105. This suggests the possibility, which is no more than a tantalising hypothesis at this stage, that such an iconographic conflation of the Dry Tree and the Tree of the Sun might have found its way into the castle of Quart. I have already noted how unusual the tree with human heads is in the Alexander tradition in Italy, with nothing equivalent to it elsewhere in the peninsula. Nevertheless, the encounter between Alexander and a tree bearing human heads as its fruit is well documented in the Eastern iconographic tradition. The episode of Alexander’s visit to the oracular trees is told in the Shahnameh (‘Book of Kings’), written around the year 1000 by the Persian poet Firdausi. This is not by chance, since the story of Alexander (Iskander) occupies three entire books of this Persian national epic and plays a central role in it106. While Firdausi’s account of the episode follows the text of the Pseudo-Callisthenes very closely, the illustrated copies of the poem always show the tree in the form of the waq-waq tree. The Arab tradition refers to speaking trees known by this name: they are found in the islands of Waq-Waq (possibly, Madagascar or Borneo) and have human heads as

103 G. Zidda, “Aggiornamento su alcune novità iconografiche nel donjon del castello di Quart, in seguito agli interventi di restauro condotti nel 2008”, Bollettino della Soprintendenza per i beni e le attività culturali, Regione Autonoma Valle d’Aosta, 5 (2008), p. 219-221. 104 Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. H. Yule, 2 vol., London, 1903; for the first passage, see I, p. 127-128, and the editor’s note at p. 128-139; for the second passage, see II, p. 466. For more on these themes, see R. Wittkower, “Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East”, in Oriente Poliano: studi e conferenze tenute all’Is.M.E.O. in occasione del VII centenario dalla nascita di Marco Polo (1254-1954), Rome, 1957, p. 155-172, esp. p. 166-169. For the Dry Tree, see also R. J. Peebles, “The Dry Tree: Symbol of Death”, in Vassar Mediaeval Studies by Members of the Faculty of Vassar College, ed. C. Forsyth Fiske, New Haven, 1923, p. 57-79, esp. p. 67-70. 105 See Orofino, “Il contributo di Federico II”, p. 408. Another example is in ms. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 7190, which contains at fol. 36 r a picture of Alexander being led to the Dry Tree with a phoenix. There is an illustration of the picture in Schmidt, “The Picture Cycle”, p. 243, fig. 6. 106 According to the Persian tradition, as exemplified in Firdausi’s poem, Alexander and Darius (Dara) are half-brothers; after the defeat of Darius, Alexander can therefore reclaim the throne as the legitimate king and enter the royal lineage of Persia. See Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 24-33.

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their fruit107. A famous fifteenth-century representation of this tree, with both human and animal heads, is found in a manuscript of Firdausi now in the Bodleian Library (Fig. 18). Although such images bear a striking resemblance to the Quart tree, it is difficult to establish a connection between these Persian examples and the Val d’Aosta region of the late thirteenth century, particularly on account of the very early date of the Alexander fresco, which predates by several years the account of Marco Polo – a work which served as an important conduit between East and West. I am aware of only very few examples in the European tradition of Alexander approaching the oracular trees with human heads; while Marco Infurna has pointed out some interesting French examples that certainly need careful consideration, what seems to me the most notable of them is found in a thirteenth-century southern Italian manuscript of Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon and bears some resemblance to the Quart tree (Fig. 19). It seems highly significant that Krystyna Secomska argued that this picture “descends from the Oriental type of the ‘Wakwak’ tree with anthropomorphic fruits”108. Despite the potential influence of this larger context, I nevertheless believe that the episode depicted in the donjon at Quart should be regarded as the ‘Visit of Alexander to the Tree of the Sun’. The identification of the tree as the “arbor sica”, which is clearly stated in the inscription, supports, rather than undermines, this interpretation. The unusual character of the Quart Alexander is apparent in other ways as well. To my knowledge, showing Alexander approaching the tree on horseback, rather than standing or kneeling before it, is unique in the Italian tradition109. Interestingly, several Persian miniatures depict Alexander riding Bucephalus as he approaches the oracular tree of the waq-waq: for instance, in the richly decorated page from Firdausi’s Shahnameh, made in Tabriz around 1330-1336, today in the Freer Gallery in Washington. In the present state of research, the fresco in the Quart castle seems to be the only surviving representation on a monumental scale of Alexander’s ‘Visit to the Tree of the Sun’. Also, its date of 1260s-1270s makes of this picture a very early example of the illustration of legendary episodes from the life of Alexander110.

107 For more on the waq-waq tree, M. Casari, “Alexandre et l’arbre anthropique”, in L’arbre anthropogène du WâqWâq, les femmes-fruits et les îles des femmes: recherche sur un mythe à large diffusion dans le temps et dans l’espace, ed. J. L. Bacqué-Grammont, M. Bernardini and L. Berardi, Naples, 2007, p. 177-201, and Id., “Percorsi tematici nel viaggio euro-asiatico dei testi”, in Lo spazio letterario del Medioevo, III: Le culture circostanti, II: La cultura arabo-islamica, ed. B. Scarcia Amoretti, Rome, 2003, p. 459-498, at p. 493-496. See also P. Ackerman, “The Talking Tree”, Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, 4 (1935), p. 66-72; J. Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen Âge fantastique: antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique, Paris, 1954, p. 117-132; Id., “Une survivance médiévale: la plante à têtes”, La Revue des Arts, 4 (1954), p. 81-92. 108 K. Secomska, “The Miniature Cycle in the Sandomierz Pantheon and the Medieval Iconography of Alexander’s Indian Campaign”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38 (1975), p. 53-71, at p. 63-64, n. 50. It should be noted that Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon (1183-1190) interpolated the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle; and it is from this part of the work, where the episode of the oracular trees is recounted, that the picture of Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 5003 is taken. For further information on this manuscript, see Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 28; and Manuscrits enluminés d’origine italienne, II: xiiie siècle, ed. F. Avril and M. T. Gousset, p. 160, no. 188. On the Pantheon, see La fascination pour Alexandre, IV, p. 27-30 (M. Campopiano). 109 A French example from a late thirteenth-century manuscript of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ms. 78.D.47, fol. 122 v) has been traced by Infurna, “Alessandro Magno e gli alberi oracolari”, p. 111-112. At least for the German and Northern tradition, some proof of this can be drawn from browsing the catalogue of pictures put together by Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany. 110 As rightly noted by Lupo and Zidda in Fragmenta picta, p. 22.

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In the main hall of the donjon of Quart, however, Alexander is not alone: the representation of a calendar with personifications of the months has been revealed on one of the walls, alongside pictorial fragments of other scenes, including the figure of the biblical Samson, an elephant, a fortified building and warriors labelled as ‘SARRACENI’111. While a connection with the Spanish Libro de Alexandre has been suggested112, I believe that the source of inspiration should instead be sought among the French retellings of Alexander’s story, in the direction indicated by the studies of both Infurna and Vallet. In an area so deeply influenced by French culture as the Val d’Aosta region, the monumental Roman d’Alexandre by Alexander of Paris (c. 1180-1185) might have provided an important point of reference. In the French decasyllabic Roman d’Alexandre ms. Correr 1493, there is also a description of a ‘magic tent’ of Alexander’s – stressing his conquest of the East, it is decorated with his heroic deeds and has a calendar with personifications of the months – which may have contributed to the iconographic programme of the main hall of Quart113. The examples discussed in this chapter clearly indicate that Alexander imagery in medieval Italy was almost entirely based on the legendary tradition deriving from the Pseudo-Callisthenes. All these episodes were popular in the Middle Ages, but it was only the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ and the ‘Birth of Alexander’ which continued to be illustrated until the sixteenth century and beyond, although with dramatic changes in their representation. As we shall see, the ‘Visit to the Trees of the Sun and Moon’ virtually disappeared from the iconographic repertoire of Alexander stories, while only a few fifteenth-century depictions of the ‘Flight with Griffins’ and the ‘Submarine Voyage’ can be identified.

111 Vallet, “Tracce di cultura cortese”, esp. p. 66-68, with previous bibliography. 112 G. Zidda, “I cicli di Alexander e dei mesi nel castello di Quart”, Bollettino della Soprintendenza per i beni e le attività culturali, Regione Autonoma Valle d’Aosta, 1 (2003-2004), p. 236-238, and Id., “Arbor sica: nuove chiavi interpretative di un’iconografia legata alla concezione figurativa medievale di Alessandro Magno”, ibid., 8 (2011), p. 216-227, at p. 216-217. On the epic poem Libro de Alexandre and the Spanish tradition, see Z. D. Zuwiyya, “The Alexander Tradition in Spain”, in A Companion to Alexander Literature, p. 231-253. 113 The description of Alexander’s tent, but with no connection to the Quart fresco, is examined by A. Petit, “Le pavillon d’Alexandre dans le Roman d’Alexandre (ms. B. Venise, Museo Civico VI, 665)”, Bien dire et bien aprandre, 6 (1988), p. 77-96 (VI.665 is the former classmark of ms. Correr 1493).

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Fig. 1: The Birth of Alexander, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1370-1380; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 7190, fol. 1 v

Fig. 2: The Begetting of Alexander, from Historia de Preliis ( J1 version), c. 1310-1320; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 8501, fol. 5 r

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Fig. 3: The Begetting of Alexander, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna

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Fig. 4: Nectanebo Flying into the Banquet Hall, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna

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Fig. 5: The Taming of Bucephalus, from Venice Alexander Romance, c. 1280; Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, ms. Correr 1493, fol. 2 r

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Fig. 6: The Taming of Bucephalus, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1370-1380; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 7190, fol. 2 v

Fig. 7: The Taming of Bucephalus, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna

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Fig. 8: The Flight with Griffins, 12th century; Venice, St Mark’s Basilica, north façade

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Fig. 9 and 10: The Flight with Griffins, 11th century; Venice, St Mark’s Basilica, Pala d’Oro

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Fig. 11: The Flight with Griffins, 1163-1165; Otranto, Cattedrale di Santa Maria Annunziata

Fig. 12: The Flight with Griffins and the Submarine Voyage, from Historia de Preliis ( J1 version), c. 1310-1320; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 8501, fol. 48 v and 49 r

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Fig. 13: The Submarine Voyage and the Flight with Griffins, from Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, c. 1380-1410; Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ms. 2576, fol. 101 r

Fig. 14: The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1250-1275; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Rep. II.143, fol. 89 r

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Fig. 15 and 16: The Meeting with the High Priest and The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, from Venice Alexander Romance, c. 1280; Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, ms. Correr 1493, fol. 64 v and 65 r

Fig. 17: The Visit to the Dry Tree, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1250-1275; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Rep. II.143, fol. 88 v

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Fig. 18: Alexander and the Oracular Tree, from Firdausi, Shahnameh, c. 1430; Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Ouseley Add. 176, fol. 311 v

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Fig. 19: The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, from Godfrey of Viterbo, Pantheon, 13th century; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 5003, fol. 96 r

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Chapter 2

The Persistence of the Legendary Traditionin Fifteenth-Century Italian Art

The marvellous episodes from the Romance, which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, were widely diffused in earlier centuries, no longer featured in the iconography of Alexander in fifteenth-century Italian art, apart from a few exceptions which will be discussed below. Retellings and volgarizzamenti of the medieval Historia de Preliis continued to be written in Italy well into the fifteenth century – notably, the Alexandreida in rima (1420-1437) and the Libro del Nascimento (published in Treviso in 1474), both printed several times, the former until the early eighteenth century1. These texts also recount Alexander’s marvellous adventures in India – including the ‘Flight with Griffins’, the ‘Submarine Voyage’ and the ‘Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon’; but they are all unillustrated and therefore do not contribute to the fifteenth-century iconography and to the topic of this chapter2. In fifteenth-century Italian art, the legendary tradition of Alexander was indirectly continued mainly through his inclusion in the canon of Nine Worthies. Although this iconographic scheme did not depict any narrative illustrations of his exemplary deeds, it unmistakably reflected the medieval and chivalric conception of Alexander, since much of it relied on legendary material from the Romance. Yet, by reinstating Alexander’s pagan identity, the Nine Worthies theme also marked a turning point within the tradition, contributing to the emergence of a new iconographic representation, which first appeared in the 1450s. This tradition consisted of a small number of episodes from Alexander’s life, celebrating his heroic feats and virtuous behaviour. These episodes were selected from ancient sources made newly available through the efforts of humanists and so had not formed part of his medieval image. They are of particular importance since the iconography of Alexander which would become established from the early sixteenth century onwards was largely based on them. In this chapter, I will discuss the persistence of the legendary tradition in the art of Quattrocento Italy, while the emergence of the humanist iconography of Alexander will be the focus of Chapter 4.

1 See La fascination pour Alexandre, IV, p. 248-250 and 259-260 (M. Campopiano). Two more fifteenth-century volgarizzamenti of J3 are known, each preserved in a single manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, ms. II.I.363; and Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, ms. It. Cl. VI.66, Sign. 6033); see ibid., p. 243-244 and 258-259. See also T. Maus de Rolley, “La postérité de l’Ascension d’Alexandre dans la fiction narrative de la Renaissance”, in Figures d’Alexandre à la Renaissance, p. 91-112. 2 Something similar happened north of the Alps, where the episodes of the ‘Flight’ and the ‘Submarine Voyage’ were still recounted, but no longer illustrated, in late fifteenth-century manuscripts of French and German re-elaborations of the Historia de Preliis; see Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 161. Interesting remarks on this are also in Cruse, Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre, p. 199-204.

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Marvellous Adventures in the East in the Doria Tapestries The most remarkable examples of persistence of the Alexander legendary tradition in the fifteenth century are two outstanding tapestries which were famously brought to the attention of scholars in 1913 by Aby Warburg, who had seen them the year before in the private apartments of Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome3. Displayed since 2005 in the family’s other residence, the Villa del Principe in Genoa, where they hang under Perin del Vaga’s ceiling frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti, the two tapestries were made in Tournai (present-day Belgium) around 1460, and remain to this day among the best preserved such items of the Quattrocento. It is still debated whether they belonged to the famous and as yet untraced chambre d’Alexandre comprising twelve tapestries, which the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good bought from merchant Pascal Grenier in 14594. Whether part of a larger series or conceived as a two-piece set, they ended up in the Doria Pamphilj collection in circumstances which are still unclear: first documented among the family possessions as late as 18765, it is possible that the tapestries entered the Doria collection before 1560, when, according to a family oral tradition, they were gifted to Andrea Doria, imperial admiral and owner of Villa del Principe, by Emperor Charles V, great-grandson of Philip the Good’s son Charles the Bold and heir to the house of Burgundy6. Whatever the case, the Doria tapestries – woven as they were outside of Italy for a non-Italian patron ruling north of the Alps over the most lavish court of late medieval Europe – do not belong strictly speaking to the Italian tradition which is under consideration in this book. Nonetheless, there is good reason to discuss them here. First, evidence does exist of Alexander tapestries being commissioned or bought by Italian patrons in the same years and through the intermediacy of the same Grenier family that is behind the Doria pieces; it is likely therefore that those tapestries, albeit lost or surviving unrecognized, resemble the Genoa ones both in style and design. Secondly, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, it is precisely against Burgundian tapestries like these that in around 1450 the Italian humanist Angelo Decembrio spoke out in order to condemn the fabulous stories of Alexander that were illustrated on them; with his vehement attack, Decembrio provides certain proof





3 On the Doria tapestries, alongside A. Warburg, “Airship and Submarine in the Medieval Imagination” [1913], in his The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 332-337, see the essays in Le imprese di Alessandro Magno in Oriente, Collezione Doria Pamphilj: presentazione dell’arazzo restaurato. Atti della giornata internazionale di studi, Genova, 11 aprile 2005, ed. L. Stagno, Genoa, 2005, and in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries. Important are also A. Rapp Buri and M. Stucky-Schürer, Burgundische Tapisserien, Munich, 2001, p. 230-245, and Eaed., “Alexandre le Grand et l’art de la tapisserie du xve siècle”, Revue de l’Art, 119 (1998), p. 21-32. 4 The thorny issue has been re-examined by C. Blondeau, Un conquérant pour quatre ducs: Alexandre le Grand à la cour de Bourgogne, Paris, 2009, p. 64-68, with previous bibliography. For a transcription of the document recording the payment to Grenier of 30 August 1459, see Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 205-206. 5 Upon the death of prince Filippo Andrea V Doria Pamphilj in that year, an inventory was made of his collections, which included the two Alexander tapestries; see M. Stucky-Schürer, “Coppia d’arazzi: Alessandro Magno dall’adolescenza alla conquista dell’Oriente”, in Le imprese di Alessandro Magno in Oriente, p. 23-40, at p. 27. 6 For an overview of the problematic provenance history of the tapestries, see the essays of Piero Boccardo, “Gli inventari degli arazzi Doria e l’assenza delle Storie di Alessandro Magno” and Laura Stagno, “Gli arazzi di Alessandro Magno nella collezione Doria Pamphilj”, in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries (p. 25-34 and 35-43, respectively).

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that artefacts like the Doria tapestries were well known in the Italian peninsula as much as north of the Alps where they were made, and can therefore be profitably discussed here. A wealth of fifteenth-century inventories, archival records and notarial acts attests to the widespread popularity in the Quattrocento of luxurious tapestries illustrating Alexander stories, which were produced in Arras and Tournai in the Duchy of Burgundy and sold throughout Europe7. Of the some thirty items dating from 1364 to 1499 that have been counted8, very few survive to this day, their destination and circumstances of commission being always difficult to establish with some degree of certainty. As the extant visual evidence shows, these artefacts recounted the life of Alexander as told in the Romance tradition and, for the purpose of our discussion, can therefore be regarded as eloquent examples of persistence of the legendary tradition well into the fifteenth century. The Romance is not only the source of specific iconographic details – most notably, the horns that almost invariably characterise Bucephalus, but also of many incidents, or particular versions of incidents, woven on fifteenth-century Burgundian tapestries. It is the case of Alexander Receiving the Submission of the Romans now in the Burrell Collection at Glasgow (c. 1475)9 and of The Battle of Alexander and King Nicholas of Armenia of the Petit Palais in Paris (c. 1480)10. If the battle with Darius seems to have been a particularly favoured subject11, the fight with the Indian king Porus unfolds according to the account of the Romance, that is as a chaotic clash between the two armies followed by the single combat of Alexander and Porus; this can be seen in two petit patrons of around 1460 now in the Musée d’Histoire in Berne, which are part of an extraordinary larger series of six pieces today scattered between London (British Museum), Berne and Weimar (Klassik Stiftung, Graphische Sammlungen)12. The petit patrons are drawings on parchment made in connection with tapestries, their careful and highly-detailed execution suggesting that they were meant as designs/cartoons to be shown to patrons and potential buyers13. The close similarity of the six petit patrons with the Doria tapestries in terms of style, design and composition has led scholars to argue that the drawings may be the surviving evidence of 7 On Burgundian tapestries in general, see Rapp Buri and Stucky-Schürer, Burgundische Tapisserien. 8 See the survey undertaken by S. McKendrick, Classical Mythology and Ancient History in Works of Art at the Courts of France, Burgundy and England 1364-1500, PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), 1988, p. 188-201. 9 See E. Cleland and L. Karafel, Glasgow Museums: Tapestries from the Burrell Collection, London and New York, 2017, p. 415-419, no. 94 (E. Cleland). The submission of Rome to Alexander is recounted in Pseudo-Callisthenes I.29, where Alexander is said to have reached Italy and have received a crown of pearls from the Roman generals, who hailed him as the “king of the Romans and of all the earth”. 10 See C. Blondeau and M. Gil, “La tapisserie de la Guerre entre Alexandre et Nicolas d’Arménie (Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris)”, in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries, pp. 151-164. 11 See McKendrick, Classical Mythology, p. 188-201. For a fifteenth-century tapestry depicting this episode, formerly in the collection of Castletown House at Celbridge, Ireland, and now untraced, see ibid., p. 205-206 and 213-214. 12 On these Alexander petit patrons, see Charles le Téméraire (1433-1477): faste et déclin de la cour de Bourgogne (exhibition catalogue, Berne, Musée historique and Bruges, Bruggemuseum and Groeningemuseum, 2008-2009), ed. S. Marti, T.-H. Borchert and G. Keck, Brussels, 2008, p. 307-310, no. 128 a-f (S. McKendrick); Blondeau, Un conquérant pour quatre ducs, p. 61-75; F. Joubert, “La tenture d’Alexandre de la collection Doria Pamphilj: le cheminement des hyphothèses, les questions ouvertes”, in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries, p. 11-23, esp. p. 13-18 and pl. XIII-XIV; and B. Franke, “Herrscher über Himmel und Erde: Alexander der Grosse und die Herzöge von Burgund”, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 27 (2000), p. 121-169. 13 On the possibility, still debated among scholars, that they may be derivative copies from tapestries, rather than preparatory designs for them, see McKendrick’s entry in Charles le Téméraire, p. 307.

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an Alexander tapestry set devised at Tournai in the years around 1460, which was produced in several series, each of which could be adapted to the patron’s wish, and sold through Pascal Grenier. So, it can be presumed that the “certum designum regis Alexandri” – that is, a petit patron – shown by the Greniers to the Duke of Milan Francesco Sforza in 1459 belonged to this tapestry set, although we do not know whether the duke eventually placed his commission for it14. It is likely that the lavish History of Alexander tapestries bought through Grenier by the King of England Edward IV in 1467/1468 belonged to the same set15, as much as the lost Alexander tapestries owned by Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, which were highly praised when displayed in Bologna, during the visit the Cardinal made there in July 1471. On that occasion, an anonymous chronicler described in awe one of them, “con la istoria de Alixandro Magno contra del re Porto [i.e. Porus] de India”16, packed with fighting soldiers, horses and elephants in a composition recalling closely the Berne petit patron of the battle with Porus17. In this vast body of works which is well documented, albeit only partly preserved, the Doria tapestries represent an extraordinary case, as they are the only one to depict Alexander’s marvellous Indian adventures18. While the first tapestry (Plate IV) illustrates episodes from the childhood and youth of Alexander, as recounted in the Romance, among which there is the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ which will be discussed in Chapter 319, the second tapestry (Plate V) depicts Alexander’s fabulous adventures in the East, including the ‘Flight with Griffins’, the ‘Submarine Voyage’ and his encounter with monstrous creatures and ferocious beasts. If this second Doria tapestry is among the last depictions in Europe

14 The notarial act from which I quote, dated 18 January 1459, is published in J. Lestocquoy, Deux siècles de l’histoire de la tapisserie (1300-1500): Paris, Arras, Lille, Tournai, Bruxelles, Arras, 1978, p. 82: “Venerunt [Melchior and Guillaume Grenier] Mediolanum causa portandi et ostendendi certum designum regis Alexandri et certas alias tapazarias illustrissimo domino duci Mediolani et illustrissime domine ducisse consorti eius”. For the popularity of Burgundian tapestries in fifteenth-century Milan and Urbino and the connections of those Italian courts with Pascal Grenier, see N. Forti Grazzini, “Federigo da Montefeltro, i suoi arazzi e la serie delle ‘Storie della caduta di Troia’”, in Il Montefeltro e l’Oriente islamico. Urbino 1430-1550: il Palazzo Ducale tra Occidente e Oriente (exhibition catalogue, Urbino, Palazzo Ducale, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 2018), ed. A. Bruschettini, Genoa, 2018, p. 64-90, with previous bibliography. 15 On this untraced series, see S. McKendrick, “Edward IV: An English Royal Collector of Netherlandish Tapestry”, The Burlington Magazine, 129 (1987), p. 521-524. 16 On Cardinal Gonzaga’s two sets of Alexander tapestries made up of two and four pieces, see D. Chambers, A Renaissance Cardinal and His Worldly Goods: The Will and Inventory of Francesco Gonzaga (1444-1483), London, 1992, p. 81-82 and 150; my quotation is taken from p. 82, n. 248. On the well-attested practice of publicly displaying tapestries as part of court ceremonies and pageants in medieval and Renaissance Europe, see J. Chipps Smith, “Portable Propaganda: Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Courts of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold”, Art Journal, 48.2 (1989), p. 123-129. 17 For the similarity between the Gonzaga tapestry and the Berne petit patrons, see A. Rapp Buri, “La produzione d’arazzi a Tournai attorno al 1460”, in Le imprese di Alessandro Magno in Oriente, p. 41-59, at p. 52, and G. Delmarcel and C. M. Brown, Gli arazzi dei Gonzaga nel Rinascimento (exhibition catalogue, Mantua, Palazzo Te, 2010), Milan, 2010, p. 36-45, no. 1, at p. 38 (N. Forti Grazzini): “Su quei disegni si basavano dunque le tappezzerie fiamminghe di Alessandro Magno di Francesco Gonzaga”. 18 None of the petit patrons – that is, the most complete Alexander cycle known to date that can be connected to tapestries – shows his legendary stories in the Orient, as they depict: The Military Campaign against Darius, The War against Porus, and The Death of Porus and the Meeting with the Amazons (Berne, Musée d’Histoire), The Entry into Babylon and The Death of Alexander (London, British Museum) and The Crowning of Alexander and Alexander Being Poisoned at the Banquet (Weimar, Klassik Stiftung, Graphische Sammlungen). 19 An accurate description of the numerous episodes illustrated in the tapestries can be read in Stucky-Schürer, “Coppia d’arazzi”, p. 31-39.

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of Alexander’s legendary adventures20, it has also been noted that it contains the only representation on a monumental scale of the ‘Submarine Voyage’21, and one of the very few to be found outside of the illustrated manuscript tradition. This persistence, well into the fifteenth century, of episodes from the Romance is notable in the Doria tapestries not only for the huge scale of the artefacts, but also because it is frictionlessly combined with an attention for modern, fifteenth-century artillery and weaponry. In the second tapestry, a besieged city is conquered not only thanks to archers22 but also to gunpowder, with devastating cannons being loaded and fired very prominently in the foreground of the picture, as first noted by Aby Warburg as early as 191323. The Flight with Griffins in a Curtius Rufus Manuscript Around 1468 the illuminator Cola Rapicano decorated a vellum manuscript of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni for Ferdinand I (Ferrante) king of Naples (1458-1494)24. The manuscript, today in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (ms. Vitr. 22.9), has received very little attention, despite its richly decorated title-page (Plate VI). Framed by a floral decoration with putti and initial containing an author portrait, the title-page – the only part of the codex to be illuminated – on the right-hand side has two medallions depicting Alexander. The on-line catalogue of the Biblioteca Nacional describes this page as lavishly illuminated, but gives only a vague reference to its “varios medallones con miniaturas”25. Although Lisardo Rubio Fernández specifies that these pictures are a “paisaje fantastic y una miniatura de Alejandro”26, I believe that the subject of the two medallions can be more precisely identified. The higher of the two medallions is an unmistakable representation of the ‘Flight of Alexander with Griffins’ (Plate VII). From an iconographic point of view, the composition is perfectly consistent with the medieval tradition examined in Chapter 1: seated on a throne carried by griffins, Alexander, whose name is clearly written above his head, wears a crown and holds a sceptre, as well as the globe of power. He is therefore represented as a kosmokrator, a ruler of the world, whose glory seems to be announced by the winged putto blowing a trumpet at the top of the medallion. In light of this imagery, I would suggest that the second

20 As noted by Centanni, “‘Alexander Rex’”, p. 401-402. 21 See above Chapter 1, n. 88. 22 The figure of the archer standing in the foreground of the second tapestry has been studied by F. Reitinger, “Tirs en l’air: l’Archer dans la tapisserie d’Alexandre du Palais Doria”, in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries, p. 87-102. 23 Warburg, “Airship and Submarine”. 24 On Cola Rapicano, who was active in the Aragonese court of Naples in the second half of the fifteenth century, see the entry by G. Toscano in Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani: secoli IX-XVI, ed. M. Bollati, Milan, 2004, p. 893-896. Also useful is Id., “La bottega di Cola e Nardo Rapicano”, in La Biblioteca Reale di Napoli al tempo della dinastia Aragonese/La Biblioteca Real de Nápoles en tiempos de la dinastía Aragonesa (exhibition catalogue, Naples, Castel Nuovo, 1998), ed. G. Toscano, Valencia, 1998, p. 385-415. 25 The manuscript is also briefly mentioned, but with no description of its decoration, by J. Domínguez Bordona, Manuscritos con pinturas, 2 vol., Madrid, 1933, I, p. 395, no. 947; see also T. De Marinis, La biblioteca napoletana dei re d’Aragona, 4 vol., Milan, 1947-1952, II, p. 61; E. Pellegrin, “Manuscrits des auteurs classiques latins de Madrid et du Chapitre de Tolède”, Bulletin d’Information de l’Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, 2 (1953), p. 7-24, at p. 17. 26 L. Rubio Fernández, Catálogo de los manuscritos clásicos latinos existentes en España, Madrid, [1984?], p. 399-400, no. 485.

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medallion, placed immediately below, rather than representing a “paisaje fantastic”, shows the earth which Alexander, according to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (II.41), contemplated from the heavens to which he had ascended. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in the Romance and its medieval versions, Alexander has a marvellous vision of the earth, which seemed like a garden surrounded by a serpent, that is, a body of land encircled by an ocean. In the miniature of the Madrid manuscript, the marvellous element has largely been eliminated; but the nature of the vision remains the same: Alexander sees from above the mass of an inhabited land surrounded by the water. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that the two medallions are visually connected by decorative elements on the page; moreover, in the first medallion Alexander is clearly looking down, in the direction of the medallion at his feet. The reader may remember that a depiction of Alexander’s Flight to Heaven and his celestial vision of the earth, split into two scenes, has already been discussed, namely in relation to the Pala d’Oro in the St Mark’s Basilica of Venice, where the two intertwined moments of the story are illustrated, as in the Madrid manuscript, on two separate medallions. It is particularly striking that an illustration so closely connected to the Romance and the medieval conception of Alexander was made as late as the 1460s. Furthermore, the Madrid manuscript does not contain the medieval Romance in one of its innumerable versions, but instead a historical account from antiquity: Curtius Rufus’s life of Alexander. Why, then, does a legendary episode which is totally inconsistent with and unrelated to this text appear on its illuminated title-page? A plausible answer is that, in order to provide an iconic frontispiece illustration for a book which still lacked any iconographic apparatus, Cola Rapicano (or his workshop) turned to the established repertoire of the Alexander Romance and selected the most popular episode from it: the Flight – an episode which evidently still had enough currency to serve the purpose. This is also suggested by the old-fashioned style of both the crown of Alexander and the throne he is sitting on, which were clearly copied from an earlier model27, probably belonging to the dispersed library of the kings of Aragon. What is significant, however, is that, by illustrating Curtius Rufus’s text with an image of the ‘Flight’, the illuminator presented the historical and legendary Alexander side by side. It is worth noting that Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni was very popular at the Aragonese court in Naples and was even credited with miraculous healing powers: in a famous anecdote reported in 1455 by Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli), his patron King Alfonso I, merely by reading the Historiae, recovered at once from a serious illness which no physician had been able to cure28. According to Pier Candido Decembrio, the reading of his own Italian translation of Curtius Rufus (which will be discussed in Chapter 3) had the same effect on a future duke of Ferrara who had been taken ill in Naples, the young Ercole I d’Este29.

27 I thank Fabrizio Lollini, to whom I owe this observation, for discussing the picture with me; further advice was offered by Anna Melograni. 28 See Panormita, De dictis et factis Alphonsi regis 14, transcribed by Gianvito Resta in his annotation on Panormita, Liber rerum gestarum Ferdinandi regis, ed. G. Resta, Palermo, 1968, p. 68, n. 1. The story is recorded as late as 1566 by Jean Bodin in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (ed. S. Miglietti, Pisa, 2013, p. 86-88). For additional references to the episode found in late sixteenth-century historical treatises, see A. Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2007, p. 4-5, n. 9. 29 Pier Candido Decembrio, De laude et commendatione vitae clarissimi Principis Herculis Estensium Ducis liber, Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, ms. Antonelli 495, fol. 16 v-17 r, transcribed in G. Resta, Le epitomi di Plutarco nel Quattrocento, Padua, 1962, p. 57, n. 3.

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Alexander as King of Swords in the Sola-Busca Tarocchi The Sola-Busca Tarocchi is the only complete set of metal-engraved tarot cards to survive from the fifteenth century. The deck is comprised of seventy-eight pieces: fourteen for each of the four suits (Swords, Staves, Coins and Cups), plus twenty-two so-called trionfi or trumps. Sometime after they were engraved, the cards were painted, and several iconographical details were added to the original composition30. The deck takes its name from the Sola-Busca family in Milan which owned it until 2009, when it was acquired by the Pinacoteca di Brera. Despite the impressive literature on these tarot cards, many questions about them are still unanswered. The main issues concern the date and place of their production (suggested as either Ferrara or Venice), the name of the artist (or artists) involved in their creation and their iconographic meaning31. Their recent acquisition by the Pinacoteca di Brera has made it possible to re-examine the entire status quaestionis, as well as to provide an in-depth analysis of these tarot cards within the context of the culture which produced them32. It is now thought that the deck was engraved in the 1470s by Nicola di maestro Antonio of Ancona and illuminated in Venice in 1491, most likely for the Venetian historian, Marin Sanudo. The tarot cards have also been linked to the hermetic-alchemical tradition of the late Quattrocento33. The Sola-Busca Tarocchi include a figure of Alexander, who is represented as the King of Swords. He is seated on a chariot drawn by four griffins and is holding both a sword and the globe of power. An inscription at the top of the card spells out his name as “ALECXANDRO M” (Fig. 20). Not only is Alexander himself present in this set of tarot cards, but three other cards display figures closely connected to him in the legendary tradition: the Queen of Swords (Fig. 21) is represented by his mother, Olympias (“OLINPIA”), the Knight of Swords (Fig. 22) by the Egyptian god Ammon (“AMONE”) and the Knight of Cups (Fig. 23) by Nectanebo (“NATANABO”)34. A fifth card, the King of Coins, identified in an inscription as “R[EX] FILIPO”, may represent Philip, King of Macedon and father of Alexander (Fig. 24)35. While Alexander was often depicted in court decks36, the group of 30 Prints from the original plates are held in several museums: the British Museum (4 cards); the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (4); the Albertina in Vienna (23); and the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris (4). 31 See A. M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue with Complete Reproduction of All the Prints Described, 2 vol., London, 1938-1948, I, p. 241-247; Le muse e il principe: arte di corte nel Rinascimento padano (exhibition catalogue, Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, 1991), ed. A. Mottola Molfino and M. Natale, 2 vol., Milan, 1991, II, p. 262-277, no. 71; M. J. Zucker, “The Master of the Sola-Busca Tarocchi and the Rediscovery of Some Ferrarese Engravings of the Fifteenth Century”, Artibus et Historiae, 18 (1997), p. 181-184. 32 See Il segreto dei segreti: i tarocchi Sola Busca e la cultura ermetico-alchemica tra Marche e Veneto alla fine del Quattrocento (exhibition catalogue, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, 2012-2013), ed. L. P. Gnaccolini, Milan, 2012. 33 See L. P. Gnaccolini, “Il segreto dei segreti: i tarocchi Sola Busca e la cultura ermetico-alchemica tra Marche e Veneto alla fine del Quattrocento”, in Il segreto dei segreti, p. 15-59, esp. p. 48-52. 34 On the Alexander group of cards, see Gnaccolini, “Il segreto dei segreti”, p. 21-25; the scholar also tentatively suggests (p. 55, n. 96) that the Nine of Cups, depicting a creature which is half-man, half-sea serpent, might represent Alexander’s cook, who, according to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (II.41), stole the water of life from Alexander and was therefore transformed into a sea monster. 35 The inscription was misread as “A FILIPO” by S. R. Kaplan (The Encyclopedia of Tarot, 3 vol., New York, 1978-1990, II, p. 297), who interpreted it as a dedication, possibly referring to Filippo Maria Visconti, and on this basis suggested that the deck was made in Milan. 36 Ibid., I, p. 7. An incomplete Venetian tarot deck of the early sixteenth century also includes Alexander as the King of Swords; two griffins are part of the throne on which he is seated. See ibid., p. 133.

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cards associated with him and his legend seems to be unique to the Sola-Busca Tarocchi. The portrayal of Alexander holding the globe of the kosmokrator and sitting on the chariot of the flight to heaven also signals that he is being represented as the hero of the medieval legend. Additional proof of this is also the inclusion in the series of the figure of Nectanebo. Ancient authors such as Curtius Rufus (Historiae Alexandri Magni IV.7.25) say that Alexander was greeted as “son of the god” by the priest of the oracle of Ammon at Siwa, in the Libyan desert. But, as seen in Chapter 1, only the Pseudo-Callisthenes mentions Nectanebo and the crucial role he played in the events leading to the birth of Alexander. The legendary tale of Alexander’s birth therefore explains how the four cards in the Sola-Busca Tarocchi are connected. Olympias and Ammon, the mother and divine father of Alexander, share with him the suit of Swords, while his ‘biological father’ Nectanebo belongs to the suit of Cups. Both Ammon and Nectanebo are depicted as Knights on horseback; Queen Olympias of Macedon, and the Queen of Swords in the deck, is seated on her throne. Furthermore, I believe that the King of Coins represented on the fifth card mentioned above should be identified with King Philip II of Macedon, the ‘historical father’ of Alexander, rather than, as has been suggested, the Roman emperor Philip the Arab37. In the Quattrocento, the only Philip who could possibly be labelled “R[EX] FILIPO” was Philip of Macedon. As mentioned above, the Sola-Busca Tarocchi have been associated with the hermetic­ alchemical tradition of fifteenth-century Italy, on the grounds that Alexander, through his ascent to the heavens, represents the new sun, symbol of the noblest of metals and the ultimate goal of alchemical transmutation: gold. He was also presented as an exemplum to those rulers who aspire to greatness, since the ‘Flight with Griffins’ alludes to immortality38. This interpretation is not entirely convincing. The connection between the Sola-Busca Tarocchi and the stages of the alchemical process which has been proposed is a good fit for the suit of Coins, but it is not applicable to the others. If, moreover, the only reason for including Alexander in the deck was to symbolise both gold and the aspiration to immortality, then the picture of Alexander with the griffins would have been sufficient on its own, and none of the other four cards associated with it would have been needed. The inclusion of Olympias, Ammon, Nectanebo and Philip in the deck therefore undermines this line of argument, and makes instead of the Sola-Busca Tarocchi an even more striking example of the persistence into the late Quattrocento of the legendary image of Alexander. A Fifteenth-Century Drawing Depicting the Submarine Voyage Very little is known about a late fifteenth-century drawing depicting the ‘Submarine Voyage’ of Alexander which has been attributed, though on questionable grounds, to Raphael and which is now in the Louvre (Plate VIII)39. According to Victor Schmidt, it is probably

37 Gnaccolini, “Il segreto dei segreti”, p. 18. 38 Ibid., p. 25, 33 and 52. 39 D. Cordellier and B. Py, Raphaël, son atelier, ses copistes (Musée du Louvre/Musée d’Orsay, Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens, V), Paris, 1992, p. 3, no. 1 (with related bibliography) and Raphaël: autour des dessins du Louvre (exhibition catalogue, Rome, Villa Medici, 1992), ed. D. Cordellier and B. Py,

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“a reflection of, or a study for a monumental cycle, which no doubt included Alexander’s Flight”40. Since neither the cycle nor the pendant drawing of the ‘Flight with Griffins’ has been traced, Schmidt’s hypothesis, while intriguing, needs to be supported by further evidence before it can be treated as credible. The episode of Alexander’s exploration of the ocean has already been discussed in Chapter 1. The Louvre drawing shows the sea dotted with boats, two of which carry the men who control Alexander’s descent. On the left-hand side, a landscape with some men and a walled city is represented. At the centre of the composition, Alexander is standing in the glass sphere, surrounded by fish and sea creatures; two small animals are sketched in the vessel next to him (Fig. 25). As we have seen, Alexander is usually alone in the glass jar; but a version of the story found mainly in German texts recounts that he took with him two or three animals – a cat, a hen and usually a dog. Every animal has a specific purpose in the adventure, which is connected to the belief that the sea will not tolerate the presence of a corpse or of blood. So, in case of danger or misfortune, Alexander would be able to kill one of the animals, and the water would immediately cast the vessel ashore, allowing him to escape and save his life. This version of the story sometimes includes a “faithless lady” who takes control of Alexander’s descent from the boat41. Mario Casari has shown how this particular version of the story came to Germany from Persian models42 and Roberta Morosini has recently drawn attention to its occurrence in fourteenth-century texts belonging to the Italian tradition such as the verse adaption of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor and, with minor variations, Domenico Scolari’s Istoria di Alessandro Magno43. The two small animals sharing the vessel with Alexander in the Louvre drawing can be identified as the cat and the hen in this version of the story. No other Italian example is Paris, 1992, p. 37, no. 3. The attribution to Raphael is essentially based on the fact that his name is written, in Greek and Italian, alongside an inventory number at the bottom left of the drawing. This note, presumably by an early seventeenth-century hand, has been convincingly compared to those added by Filippo Baldinucci to the works he acquired for his private art collection: see J. Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford, 2 vol., Oxford, 1976, I, p. 11-12. The drawing has been assigned by some scholars to Pietro Perugino, in whose workshop Raphael was trained in the last decade of the fifteenth century; see Exposition de dessins italiens, xive, xve et xvie siècles (exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, 1931), ed. G. Rouchès, Paris, 1931, p. 29, no. 41 (where the subject is unidentified and generically indicated as a “marine”). On the occasion of a 2012 exhibition in Thessaloniki, the attribution of the Louvre drawing has been presented as “controversée entre Raffaello et son maître Perugino”: see Europē kai ellēnikoi mythoi: 16os-19os ai.: Erga technēs apo to Louvro stē Thessalonikē = L’Europe et les mythes grecs: dessins du Musée du Louvre, xvie-xixe siècles: œuvres d’art du Musée du Louvre à Thessalonique (exhibition catalogue, Thessaloniki, Fondation Teloglion, 2012-2013), ed. C. Loisel and A. Goulaki-Voutyra, Thessaloniki, 2012, p. 188-189, no. 80 (R. Serra). 40 Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 119. His speculation about the existence of a pendant representation of the ‘Flight with Griffins’ is based on the fact that, as we have seen in Chapter 1, depictions of the ‘Submarine Voyage’ do not occur independently. 41 Ross, “Alexander and the Faithless Lady”; see also Id., Alexander Historiatus, p. 38-39. 42 M. Casari, “Alessandro e Utopia nei romanzi persiani medievali”, supplement 1 to Rivista degli studi orientali, 72 (1999), esp. p. 51-52. 43 R. Morosini, “‘Perché Alexandro cercò molti istrani paesi’: i viaggi di Alessandro e la malattia di Aristotele. La crisi della conoscenza dall’Alexandreis di Quilichino da Spoleto (1236) al Triompho Magno di Domenico Falugio (1521)”, in Sindbad mediterraneo: per una topografia della memoria, da Oriente a Occidente, ed. R. Morosini and C. Lee, Lecce, 2013, p. 157-227, at p. 192-198. For Scolari’s Istoria of 1355, see La fascination pour Alexandre, IV, p. 263-265 (M. Campopiano), with bibliography, as well as C. Bologna, “À propos de l’Istoria di Alessandro Magno de Domenico Scolari et d’un volgarizzamento enluminé de l’Historia de preliis J3”, in Alexandre le Grand à la lumière des manuscrits, p. 81-100.

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known to me of this iconographic variant, which, surprisingly for the legendary tradition, appears as late as the 1490s. There is, however, an important point to be made: despite the continuity of the subject matter, this representation of the ‘Submarine Voyage’ does not resemble the flat, two-dimensional medieval precedents discussed and illustrated in Chapter 1. The compositional arrangement of the scene, the more realistic way in which the space is conceived, the scale and proportion of the vessel in which Alexander is standing and of the large ships from which it is manoeuvred – all these portray Alexander’s descent into the abyss, not as a fanciful adventure, but as an exploration which really could take place. The construction of the glass jar demonstrates an engagement with the technological challenge posed by an underwater descent and resonates with actual attempts documented from the mid-Quattrocento to design submarine vessels and similar aquatic machines (in the works, for instance, of Mariano Taccola, Roberto Valturio, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo)44. In this light, it seems significant that a number of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian re-elaborations of the Romance mentioned by Morosini put particular emphasis on the scientific interest of the story45, that is, on the construction of the vessel, rather than stressing the moralistic and symbolic meaning of the descent, as was usually the case in the Middle Ages (the moral of “big fish eat little fish”, which we have seen in Chapter 1)46. The drawing in the Louvre seems to be unique in Italian art for its display of a technical sensibility in the depiction of the ‘Submarine Voyage’. As such, it is a rare transitional hybrid, in which a very popular episode from the medieval legend, at the tail end of that tradition, is visualised in a distinctively Renaissance manner. Alexander among the Nine Worthies The Nine Worthies formed the most important canon of military valour and moral virtue in medieval and early modern Europe. Alexander appears in it alongside Hector and Julius Caesar as representatives of the pagan world. This first triad reveals at once the rationale behind the selection of heroes for inclusion in the canon: figures from the myth and history were put together as equals, side by side, regardless of the different times in which they had lived and, more importantly, without any distinction between historical or fictional characters. The Nine Worthies were chosen by virtue of their wisdom and valour, which were the highest chivalric ideals embodied in the canon. The verses accompanying the figure of Alexander as a Worthy often allude to his marvellous adventures or to episodes of his life recounted in the Romance. In one sense, therefore, the representation of Alexander among the Nine Worthies was part of the legendary tradition. In another sense, however,

44 See G. Moretti, “Alessandro, le razze mostruose e i viaggi fantastici: scienza e leggenda fra Antichità, Medioevo e Rinascimento”, in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries, p. 103-110, at p. 106-107. See also P. O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Baltimore and London, 2001, p. 104-116, and, in general, L. Molà, “Inventors, Patents and the Market for Innovations in Renaissance Italy”, History of Technology, 32 (2014), p. 7-34. 45 Morosini, “‘Perché Alexandro cercò molti istrani paesi’”, p. 189-192. A similar preoccupation is noted in the Northern European tradition by Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 161. 46 For the scientific interest in the ‘Submarine Voyage’ shown by Roger Bacon as early as 1250, see Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 162.

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his inclusion in the canon of Nine Worthies restored Alexander to his pagan identity, signalling the end of the long process of assimilation to a Christian hero – begun in late antiquity and culminating in the thirteenth century – which was discussed in Chapter 1. The canon of Nine Worthies (Neuf Preux) was first mentioned in Les Voeux du Paon (“The Vows of the Peacock”), a poem about Alexander completed by Jacques de Longuyon in 1312 at the instance of the prince-bishop of Liège, Thibaut of Bar. Towards the end of the work, the Nine Noblest and Bravest Men are introduced as a comparison to the valour shown on the battlefield by Porus47. They are presented in three triads, according to their religious confession: the Heathens (Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar), the Jews ( Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus) and the Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon). From the pages of Les Voeux du Paon, the Worthies quickly passed into art, literature and pageant, enjoying an immediate popularity throughout Europe. From the early fourteenth century, they provided rulers and princes with the exemplary personifications of the ideals of chivalry, chosen from the Augustinian ages of ante legem, sub lege and sub gratia. The Nine Worthies were represented in a variety of artistic genres, from sculpture to frescoes, from tapestries to plasterwork, from manuscripts to engravings48. Though many of these works are either lost or documented only in written sources, a large number survive and show that the Nine Worthies were usually portrayed standing upright in full armour, with each Worthy identified by his own coat of arms, as well as a titulus describing his life and deeds49. At a later stage, probably thanks to Eustache Deschamps, Nine Lady Worthies (Neuf Preuses) were paired with the male Worthies: mainly selected from the Amazons of the myth, their identities and iconography remained far more variable than those of their male counterparts50. The theme of the Nine Worthies was extremely successful north of the Alps, especially in France and Germany, until at least the seventeenth century. Contrary to an influential

47 Les Voeux du Paon was published in The Buik of Alexander or the Buik of the Most Noble and Valiant Conquerour Alexander the Grit, ed. R. L. G. Ritchie, 4 vol., Edinburgh and London, 1921-1929, II-IV. The Nine Worthies are presented at l. 7484-7579 (IV, p. 402-406). These verses have been republished in appendix to G. M. Cropp, “Les vers sur les Neuf Preux”, Romania, 120 (2002), p. 449-482, at p. 465-468. On the composition of the poem and its huge popularity throughout Europe, see Les Voeux du Paon de Jacques de Longuyon: originalité et rayonnement, ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas, Paris, 2011; see also H. Bellon-Méguelle, Du Temple de Mars à la Chambre de Vénus: le beau jeu cortois dans les Voeux du paon, Paris, 2008. 48 The most important studies remain R. L. Wyss, “Die Neun Helden: Eine ikonographische Studie”, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, 17 (1957), p. 73-106, and H. Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies in Literatur und bildender Kunst, Göttingen, 1971; more recently, see W. van Anrooij, Helden van weleer: De Negen Besten in de Nederlanden (1300-1700), Amsterdam, 1997; A. Salamon, “Les Neuf Preux: entre édification et glorification”, Questes, 13 (2008), p. 38-52; Ead., “Alexandre parmi les Neuf Preux: portraits et vie en images”, in Alexandre le Grand à la lumière des manuscrits, p. 485-506, and the monographic issue of Bien dire et bien aprandre (31, 2015, Les Neuf Preux). 49 Within this canonical representation, there were innumerable variations and combinations: the titulus is not necessarily present (though in this case it is usually replaced by the name of the Worthy) and the coats of arms can vary slightly. More rarely, the Worthies appear to be seated on thrones, as in the well-known fragmentary tapestry set, woven in the Netherlands for Jean de Berry around 1400-1410 and now at the Cloisters: see A. S. Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1993, p. 94-124. In the sixteenth century a variation of the theme, particularly successful north of the Alps, represents the Worthies on horseback: among them, Alexander is usually riding an elephant, clearly alluding to his Indian military campaign. Examples are offered by Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies, pl. 9-25. 50 On the Neuf Preuses, see I. Sedlacek, Die Neuf Preuses: Heldinnen des Spätmittelalters, Marburg, 1997.

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statement in Cary’s Medieval Alexander51, the theme was not alien to Italian art and culture. The first known mention of the Worthies in Italy occurs in Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle, written in the 1390s52. As Maria Monica Donato has pointed out, moreover, the Hebrew Worthies were painted among the four sub lege figures on the vault of Orsanmichele in Florence (1398-1401), the iconographic programme of which was designed by Sacchetti himself53. In addition, significant evidence exists of the knowledge and manuscript circulation of the Voeux du Paon in the Italian peninsula, where the poem is known to have been copied in Italian scriptoria and belonged to important private libraries such as that of the Gonzaga, its influence being detectable in the writings of both Petrarch and Boccaccio54. No fourteenth-century Italian representation of the complete canon of Nine Worthies has survived. The only preserved examples date to the first half of the fifteenth century: afterwards, the theme seems to have disappeared from Italian art. It is certainly not by coincidence that three of the four extant series are found in fortresses and strongholds (La Manta, Castel Roncolo and Castelnuovo) located very close to the northern border of present-day Italy in the Piedmont and Trentino-Alto Adige regions, areas which have been profoundly influenced over the centuries, both culturally and politically, by French- and German-speaking lands. The fourth fresco cycle, in the Palazzo Trinci at Foligno, a central Italian town in Umbria, depicts an “expanded Nine Worthies”55, with an unprecedented juxtaposition of two heroes from Roman history to the standard chivalric canon. North of the Alps the Nine Worthies were represented in a variety of artistic media. In particular, there are countless mentions of tapestries depicting the Nine Worthies in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century inventories; regrettably, however, almost all of these works are now lost, depriving us of a key element in the decoration of European palaces and castles. By contrast, in Italy the theme survives only in four mural paintings on a monumental scale56; nevertheless, these fresco cycles can perhaps give us some sense of what many reception halls of medieval and early modern Europe would have looked like. 51 Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 262, n. 1: “The Nine Worthies were unknown to Italian writers”. In Cary’s view, the only exceptions were the frescoes and verses in the castle of La Manta, which were so deeply influenced by neighbouring France as to be considered no more than an import from abroad. Cary’s opinion became a commonplace and has only recently been questioned. For the La Manta fresco cycle, see below. 52 Tale CXXV, in Franco Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, ed. F. Pernicone, Florence, 1946, p. 277-278, which recounts a story about Charlemagne, begins with the mention of the Nine Worthies. This mention was first noted by P. D’Ancona, “Gli affreschi del Castello di Manta nel Saluzzese”, L’Arte, 8 (1905), p. 94-106 and 183-198, at p. 100. Nine worthy men including Alexander are also mentioned in the early fourteenth-century Avventuroso ciciliano, but they are not the Nine Worthies of the canon: see L’Aventuroso ciciliano attribuito a Bosone da Gubbio: un “centone” di volgarizzamenti due-trecenteschi, ed. C. Lorenzi, Pisa, 2010. 53 M. M. Donato, “Gli eroi romani tra storia ed ‘exemplum’: i primi cicli umanistici di Uomini Famosi”, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, ed. S. Settis, 3 vol., Turin, 1984-1986, II: I generi e i temi ritrovati, p. 95-152, at p. 111. On Sacchetti and the decoration of the Orsanmichele, see also A. Simon, “Letteratura e arte figurativa: Franco Sacchetti, un testimone d’eccezione?”, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge, 105.1 (1993), p. 443-479, at p. 446-447 and n. 20. 54 A useful recapitulation of the circulation of the Voeux du Paon in Italy is offered by N.-C. Rebichon, “Diffusion et réception de la galerie des Neuf Preux en Italie: étude des peintures murales du Palais Trinci (Ombrie)”, Bien dire et bien aprandre, 31 (2015), p. 85-114, at p. 89-92, with bibliography. 55 A. Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy, University Park PA, 2009, p. 204. 56 See N.-C. Rebichon, “Le cycle des Neuf Preux au Château de Castelnuovo (Piémont)”, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge, 122 (2010), p. 173-188, at p. 176-177.

the persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century italian art The Sala Baronale in the Castle della Manta

On the hillside of the town of Saluzzo, in the province of Cuneo (Piedmont), the Castle della Manta had been an isolated fortress of strategic importance in the small Marquisate of Saluzzo for more than two centuries. On his deathbed in October 1416, the Marquis Thomas III bequeathed the castle to his natural son Valerano, nicknamed “il Burdo” (the Bastard), who enlarged and transformed it into a noble residence for his family. At the core of the castle is the Sala Baronale, which has a fresco cycle datable around 1420-142557, which was commissioned by Valerano to a still anonymous “Master of La Manta” (Fig. 26)58. Starting just to the right of the fireplace on the west wall and running all along the north wall up to the beginning of the east wall, the series of Nine Worthies, accompanied by their female counterparts, stand on a flowered meadow against a whitewashed background. The eighteen figures – all of them dressed in the lavish fashion of early fifteenth-century courts – are each identified by a distinctive coat of arms hanging from a tree and by a titulus, a short composition in verse running under their feet and presenting each of them to the viewer. Across from the procession of Preux and Preuses is a representation of the Fountain of Youth, to which the elderly flock in order to be given back both youthfulness and love. In the Sala Baronale, the triads of Worthies are arranged in the order followed by Jacques de Longuyon, which would become canonical: the Heathens (Hector, Alexander and Julius Caesar) come first, followed by the Jews ( Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus) and the Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon). So, while Hector opens the procession by the fireplace, Godfrey of Bouillon, in the middle of the north wall, connects the series of knights to that of their ladies, from Deipyle to Penthesilea. Alexander appears in the second position (Plate IX), next to Hector. Dressed in blue 57 M. L. Meneghetti, Storie al muro: temi e personaggi della letteratura profana nell’arte medievale, Turin, 2015, p. 214-223, has convincingly argued for a date between 1419 and 1424/1426. By partially revising her previous contribution on the matter (“Il manoscritto fr. 146 della Bibliothèque Nationale di Parigi, Tommaso di Saluzzo e gli affreschi della Manta”, Romania, 110 [1989], p. 511-535, at p. 532), Meneghetti has pointed out that despite the absence of any relevant archival documentation, at least the post and ante quem dates can be determined. According to her, the decoration of the Sala Baronale is likely to have been commissioned by Valerano while in a position of power within the Marquisate, that is to say between 1416 – when on the death of his father Thomas III of Saluzzo, Valerano was appointed guardian to the legitimate, still underage heir Ludovico, while Thomas’s wife Marguerite of Roussy was named as the regent – and 1424/1426, when Ludovico took command of the state. An additional point made by Meneghetti also suggests that the frescoes were painted after the death, in 1419, of Marguerite of Roussy, leading her to conclude that the decoration of the Sala was probably carried out between 1419 and 1424/1426. An examination of the costumes and headdresses painted in the frescoes also confirms a 1420s date: see C. Robotti, “Moda e costume al Castello della Manta (Indicazioni per la datazione degli affreschi della sala baronale)”, Bollettino della Società Piemontese di Archeologia e Belle Arti, 42 (1988), p. 39-56. 58 Given the geographical and cultural proximity of the Piedmont region to France – as evident in the style of the frescoes of the Sala Baronale – it is not surprising that, in attempting to identify the artist responsible for the paintings, scholars have suggested (though later withdrawn) both Italian and French names, most notably Jacques Yverny and Giacomo Jaquerio. For a concise and useful overview of this topic, see V. Sgarbi, “Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?”, FMR, 32 (1985), p. 114-124, esp. p. 124. On the castle and its decoration, the main reference remains La Sala Baronale del Castello della Manta, ed. G. Romano, Milan, 1992; still useful is the work of Paolo D’Ancona, “Gli affreschi del Castello di Manta”, who first published the frescoes. The iconographic programme of the Sala Baronale has been recently re-examined by Lea Debernardi, “Il ciclo quattrocentesco del Castello della Manta: considerazioni sull’interpretazione iconografica, nuove acquisizioni”, Opera, Nomina, Historiae. Giornale di cultura artistica, 8 (2013), p. 1-102, who also provides a reassessment of all the scholarship on the frescoes. Valuable is also her recent Lo specchio della famiglia: cultura figurativa e letteraria al castello della Manta, Rome, 2019.

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and red over his armour, he is depicted as a mature man with a beard and curly brown hair, wearing the crown and holding a sword that identify him as a king and a warrior. The golden globe that appears just above his right hand shows him to be a kosmokrator, a ruler of the world – the cross on top of the globe clearly indicating that this world is a Christian one. An iconographic tradition of Alexander as kosmokrator existed in antiquity and is well documented as early as the third century bc59. The globe was not, however, part of the original iconography; it was first introduced as a symbol of sovereignty by the Roman emperors and passed down to the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, who placed the cross of the Christian faith on top of it. In the La Manta frescoes a globe identical to Alexander’s also appears in the hands of the preux Julius Caesar and Charlemagne – both of whom regarded themselves as emulators of Alexander – and is an attribute of the preuse Semiramis, the legendary queen of Babylon, whose empire reached as far as India. It is not surprising that Julius Caesar holds a globe as a symbol of power, since he was included in Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum and throughout the Middle Ages had been regarded as the first Roman emperor. Rather more surprising is that, while both Julius Caesar and Charlemagne grasp the globes firmly in their hands, Alexander is not even touching his, which is depicted as suspended in mid-air. This seemingly floating globe, which has been considered as an iconographic anomaly supporting a more general re-interpretation of the cycle to which I shall return, can in fact be easily explained. As Lea Debernardi has recently pointed out60, iconographic attributes depicted as if suspended in mid-air are less rare than they seem to be, and it is noteworthy that in the Sala Baronale not only Alexander’s but also Semiramis’s globe is a floating one. While Debernardi finds interesting comparisons of mid-air painted objects in both the religious and secular visual tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries61, she does not ultimately give any explanation for the peculiarity of Alexander’s and Semiramis’s globes at La Manta. I believe the reason for this is rather a simple one: in the Sala Baronale, both Alexander and Semiramis are shown engaged in activities that do not allow them a free hand to hold their globe. While Alexander holds a sword with his left hand, with his right he is clearly pointing at the preux Hector next to him – a significant gesture to which I will return. As for Semiramis, she is depicted while holding and combing her long blonde hair – an occupation which is key to her identification as the queen of Babylon62 and, again, makes her unable to carry a globe in

59 See Goukowsky, Essai sur les origines, I, p. 149-153. For this iconographic tradition, see H. P. L’Orange, Apotheosis in Ancient Portraiture, Oslo, 1947, p. 19-27. The most remarkable example of Alexander as kosmokrator is a terracotta fragment (third-second century bc) in the Musée Art & Histoire, Brussels, in which Alexander is shown looking heavenward and crowned with astral symbols: for this object see Alexander der Grosse und die Öffnung, p. 243, no. 7 (N. Massar); see also P. Moreno, Alessandro Magno: immagini come storia, Rome, 2004, p. 400-401. 60 See her “Il ciclo quattrocentesco”, p. 14-16. 61 Ibid., p. 15-16. 62 The story of Semiramis being interrupted at her toilette by news of a revolt in Babylon and refusing to finish combing her hair until the uprising had been crushed was reported by Valerius Maximus (Facta et dicta memorabilia, IX, p. 3, ext. 4) and related by a number of medieval authors including Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan. Despite the existence of a solid iconographic tradition of the episode, to which our preuse is evidently connected, the figure of Semiramis at La Manta has been confused in the past with the nearby Menalippe and an otherwise unattested Etiope. The genesis of this garbled misidentification has been clarified by Lea Debernardi, “Note sulla tradizione manoscritta del Livre du Chevalier Errant e sulle fonti dei tituli negli affreschi della Manta”, Opera, Nomina, Historiae. Giornale di cultura artistica, 4 (2011), p. 67-131, at p. 85-90.

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her hand. It may also be worth noticing that mention of Alexander is also made in the titulus accompanying the figure of Semiramis in the Sala Baronale: she invaded India, the verses read, a land that beside her, Alexander alone had reached63. As mentioned before, at La Manta Alexander is depicted as a mature, bearded man; this is a most notable element, for Alexander, who died at only 32, was usually represented as a young man, if not a boy. Roberto Benedetti has argued that, after being incorporated in the canon of the Nine Worthies, Alexander tended to assume the physical attributes of wisdom appropriate to these exemplary figures, in particular, a beard, leading to a number of fifteenth-century representations of Alexander as a man in his mature years, with a short beard, or even as a venerable old man, with a very long white beard64. Benedetti’s hypothesis is all the more convincing if we look at a longer time frame, for representations of a bearded Alexander among the Nine Worthies are found in European art before and after the fifteenth century and include, for example, the earliest surviving iconographic example of the Neuf Preux, sculpted around 1330 for the City Hall of Cologne and nowadays still in situ65, and two famous sixteenth-century woodcut series of the Worthies by Hans Burgkmair (1516-1519) and Lucas van Leyden (c. 1520)66. Examples which are contemporary with the La Manta frescoes and will be discussed later on can be found in the 1430s cycle of Famous Men once in the palace of Cardinal Giordano Orsini on Monte Giordano (Rome)67 and in an illuminated page in the Paris manuscript of the poem Le Chevalier Errant written by Thomas III of Saluzzo himself. And yet, this was by no means an established iconography: as we shall see, among the Worthies in the castle of Castelnuovo in Piedmont and in Palazzo Trinci at Foligno Alexander, who appears as a fully armoured knight, holding a shield and wearing a crown, is extremely young and beardless. Another possible reason for the representation of a mature Alexander at La Manta has been suggested by Robert Louis Mode. He pointed out that, given the nature of military training in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which required lengthy drillings and physical strength, an exemplary knight, held up for emulation by princes and rulers, could not have been young; instead, “it was this sturdy warrior type, the product of knightly discipline, who became the ideal of heroic action if and when his great strength was properly matched by extraordinary valor”68. It seems to me that the reason behind the depiction of a mature preux Alexander lies in between: only an adult man, who has left behind the impetuous and somehow foolish behaviour typically associated with the youth, can embody the ideal knight who, it is worth remembering, is both a wise, virtuous

63 Ibid., p. 77: “[Semiramis] envay Inde, en quel terre / n’e(n)tra onq q(ue) Alixa(n)dre e elle”. 64 R. Benedetti, “Codice, allocuzione e volti di un mito”, in Le Roman d’Alexandre: riproduzione del ms. Venezia, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, p. 29-53, at p. 49-50. 65 The Nine Worthies of Cologne, as the earliest known representation of the theme, are mentioned in much of the literature specifically devoted to the Neux Preux. See, e.g., Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies, p. 113-114; also, van Anrooij, Helden van weleer, p. 39-41. 66 See the illustrations in Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies, pl. 20 (Lucas van Leyden, though here ascribed to Cornelisz van Oostsanen) and 27 (Hans Burgkmair). 67 See R. L. Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle of Cardinal Giordano Orsini and the Uomini Famosi Tradition in Fifteenth-Century Italian Art, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1970, p. 127; L. Scalabroni, “Masolino a Montegiordano: un ciclo perduto di ‘uomini illustri’”, in Da Pisanello alla nascita dei Musei Capitolini: l’Antico a Roma alla vigilia del Rinascimento (exhibition catalogue, Rome, Musei Capitolini, 1988), ed. A. Cavallaro and E. Parlato, Milan and Rome, 1988, p. 62-72, at p. 67. 68 Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 187-188.

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man and a skilled warrior fully capable of acting in service of society69. And in visual terms, no “biological marker”70 better than a beard could express the idea of adulthood. In the scholarship, a traditional view exists which sees in the Alexander of the Sala Baronale a portrait in disguise of Valerano’s father, Thomas III71. If this interpretation should not be rejected out of hand, it must be acknowledged that it relies more on a commonplace than it is supported by some material evidence. According to a tradition first reported by Valerano’s descendant Valerio di Saluzzo della Manta in 1587, the person who commissioned the cycle and his wife are depicted opposite each other, at either side of the procession: so, portrayed under the garments of Hector is Valerano il Burdo, while his wife Clemenza Provana di Pancalieri is represented as Penthesilea72. These identifications, which are spelled out by two sixteenth-century Latin graffiti, scratched on the wall below the two figures73, have been generally accepted, and rightly so, supported as they are by several iconographic elements including a personal motto and a family’s coat of arms74. It is the presence in the Sala Baronale of these two portraits that has led scholars to speculate that each of the eighteen painted figures is to be identified with a member of the Saluzzo family: the nine most important rulers of the Marquisate are depicted as Worthies, from Valerano-Hector to Manfred I-Godfrey of Bouillon75, while their wives are represented as the nine Lady Worthies76. Following this

69 On the etymological meaning of the word “preux”, which refers both to “celui qui rend service à la société” and “une personne sage et vertueuse”, see Bellon-Méguelle, Du Temple de Mars, p. 489, n. 2. 70 R. Bartlett, “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4 (1994), p. 43-60, at p. 43-44: “The beard was thus of general importance as a biological marker”. 71 Among the recent studies relying on this assumption, see R. Silva, Gli affreschi del Castello della Manta: allegoria e teatro, Milan, 2011, p. 17 and Meneghetti, Storie al muro, p. 232. 72 See Valerio di Saluzzo della Manta, Libro delle formali caccie (Turin, Biblioteca Reale, ms. Miscell. Saluzzo 657): “Non voglio tacere come nel primo personaggio dei novve [sic] prodi posto in capo la parte qual confina al camino ci è dipinta sotto il titolo di Ettore Troiano la effigie di Valerano primo Sig.re della Manta… et all’altro capo verso la faccia della entrata ci è posta la Regina Pantasilea…, la cui effigie fu protratta alla sembianza della Sig.ra Clementia Provana figliuola del Conte di Pancalieri moglie allo istesso Valerano”. The passage, which is part of an accurate description of the frescoes in the Sala Baronale, has been published by A. Griseri, Jaquerio e il realismo gotico in Piemonte, Turin, 1965, p. 150-154, from which my quotation is taken (at p. 151-152). 73 See Debernardi, “Il ciclo quattrocentesco”, p. 7-8, who provides both a transcription and a photograph of the two graffiti, where Hector is said to show “Valerani… effigies” and Penthesilea “uxor valerani”. 74 Valerano’s personal motto leit, which appears throughout the walls and ceiling of the Sala Baronale (as well as in several rooms of the castle), is painted on the dresses of both Hector and Penthesilea. Moreover, Penthesilea holds a glimmering golden belt with hanging grapes (provana in the local dialect) that were the coat of arms of Clemenza Provana’s family. On Valerano’s motto leit, see Debernardi, “Il ciclo quattrocentesco”, p. 45-51. The identification of Penthesilea’s attribute as Clemenza’s coat of arms is due to L. C. Gentile, “Nel giardino di Valerano: araldica reale e immaginaria negli affreschi del Castello della Manta”, in L’arme segreta: araldica e storia dell’arte nel Medioevo (secoli XII-XV), ed. M. Ferrari, Florence, 2015, p. 249-264, at p. 259-260. For the alternative and more traditional identification of the golden belt with the collar of the Order of the Broom-cod (“Ordre de la Coste de Genest”), which had been bestowed on Valerano and his wife by the French king Charles VI in 1411, see D’Ancona, “Gli affreschi del Castello di Manta”, p. 195; D. Arasse, “Portrait, mémoire familiale et liturgie dynastique: Valerano-Hector au château de Manta”, in Il ritratto e la memoria. Materiali, ed. A. Gentili, 3 vol. Rome, 1989-1993, I, pp. 93-112, at p. 95; Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 151; Silva, Gli affreschi del Castello della Manta, p. 12-13. 75 Manfred I del Vasto (1123?-1175) was the first ruler of the Saluzzo Marquisate. 76 As Meneghetti, Storie al muro, p. 365, n. 43 has pointed out, the first who suggested identifying the Preux and Preuses with the Saluzzos was Mario Perotti (“I ritratti dei marchesi di Saluzzo a La Manta”, Cuneo Provincia Granda, 25 [1976], p. 9-18), later followed by Luigi Botta (Il castello della Manta, Turin, 1986, unnumbered pages [p. 7]). The list, which is often alluded to without any reference to its source, has been most recently reported by Silva, Gli affreschi del Castello della Manta, p. 17.

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principle, Alexander, who is standing next to Hector, represents Valerano’s father, Thomas III, while Theuca, who is standing across the room next to Penthesilea, represents Thomas’s wife, Marguerite of Roussy. The idea that the Sala Baronale is a room of portraits in disguise has quickly become a sort of scholarly commonplace, but it remains essentially speculative and problematic in many respects. Despite its ingenuity, the hypothesis that these frescoes were intended to depict a “galerie dynastique mythique”, as Daniel Arasse put it77, has been disproved by the stringent investigation carried out by Lea Debernardi78. In Arasse’s view, on the walls of the most representative room of his own castle, the illegitimate Valerano placed himself among the idealised portraits of the Saluzzo lineage, becoming part of the noble family by virtue of his lawful, though temporary, position as ruler of the marquisate. Most importantly for our purposes, a key element in this interpretation is the floating globe above Alexander’s hand, which, Arasse argued, could be explained in light of the traditional identification of Thomas III with Alexander, as it would symbolise the power literally floating from Alexander (that is, Thomas III) to Hector (Valerano) in a sort of translatio imperii taking place before our eyes – an allusion to the investiture which did, in fact, take place in 1416 at the Saluzzo court, when Thomas III entrusted Valerano with sovereignty over the marquisate79. This line of thinking is undermined by some of the evidence already remarked upon, including the existence in the Sala Baronale of a second floating globe, owned by Semiramis – its very presence weakening the uniqueness of Alexander’s attribute and the special meaning assigned to it. I think that even Alexander’s pointing his forefinger towards Hector, which Arasse sees as a gesture of offering, is more likely intended to merely draw the viewer’s attention to the portrait of the owner of the castle Valerano disguised as the preux Hector. This is confirmed by the identical gesture made by the preuse Theuca next to Penthesilea, who points at her companion under whose garments is Valerano’s wife, Clemenza. Unlike Arasse, I see no special relationship being depicted in the Sala Baronale between Hector and Alexander nor real evidence supporting the identification of Alexander with Thomas III80. What can also be said is that the La Manta Alexander is certainly not a faithful portrait of Valerano’s father. The 1989-1991 restoration campaign of the frescoes has shown that each of the eighteen Preux and Preuses was completed in one day’s work (giornata), with the only exception of Hector: his face, showing very distinctive, rather than generic, features, was painted separately and, as a distinct area inserted into the picture, it is surely a portrait of Valerano from life81. In all probability, this was also the case for Clemenza-Penthesilea, though we are in no position to ascertain that, as her figure is only partially preserved and 77 Arasse, “Portrait, mémoire familiale”, p. 95. 78 Debernardi, “Il ciclo quattrocentesco”, p. 8-16, esp. p. 11-12. 79 Arasse, “Portrait, mémoire familiale”, p. 96-101. For the floating globe as a symbol of the “vacancy of power” during Valerano’s regency for the underage Ludovico, rather than the “transfer of power” from Thomas III to Valerano, see Meneghetti, Storie al muro, p. 232-233. 80 According to Arasse, “Portrait, mémoire familiale”, p. 95, the similarity of the coats of arms that Hector and Alexander bore on their shields (respectively, a leopard sitting on a chair and holding a sword, and a lion sitting on a similar chair and holding a halberd) contributes to create a visual connection between the two Preux. This similarity, however, has also been disproved by Debernardi, “Il ciclo quattrocentesco”, p. 10 and 13. 81 On the portrait of Valerano-Hector and its execution, see P. Brambilla Barcilon, “Note sul restauro degli affreschi nella Sala Baronale”, in La Sala Baronale del Castello della Manta, p. 81-105, at p. 86-89. At first neglected, this important acquisition has finally been given due consideration in the literature, for example in Debernardi, “Il ciclo quattrocentesco”, p. 7 and Meneghetti, Storie al muro, p. 222-223.

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the entire upper part of her body, including her face, has long been lost82. What can be said for certain, however, is that no such attention was given to the figures of Alexander and Theuca; they were each painted from head to toe in one single giornata and no material evidence exists suggesting that their faces were modelled on portraits of Thomas III and Marguerite83. The figure of Valerano’s father still wanders indeed in the main room of the La Manta castle, but not in the form of a veridical portrait. It has long been established that the entire decoration of the Sala Baronale is meant as a homage to Thomas III, inspired by the allegorical poem Le Livre du Chevalier Errant, which he wrote – or most likely completed – while in Paris between 1403 and 140584. The encounter of the wandering knight of the title with the Nine Preux and Preuses in the “palais aux esleuz” – some of them, including Alexander, roaming just outside the gates of the palace – is one of the longest and most elaborate episodes of the final part of the poem. In the Paris manuscript which preserves Thomas’s work, two half-page miniatures attributed to the Master of the Cité des Dames show the groups of Preux and Preuses, fully armoured and displaying their coats of arms (fol. 125 r-v)85. Although the eighteen figures depicted in the Sala and those in the manuscript belong to the same context, Marco Piccat has definitively disproved the assumption that the frescoes were a mere transposition onto a wall of the Paris miniatures86; apart from a number of iconographic details which are exactly alike (e.g., Joshua’s backward position or the coats of arms of the Preuses), the two series differ greatly from one another.

82 Meneghetti, Storie al muro, p. 223 has tentatively suggested that the loss itself of the upper part of the figure of Penthesilea may be an indication of the different thickness of the plaster layer (“forse proprio un danno relativamente circoscritto, come quello che ha riguardato la parte alta della figura di Pentesilea, potrebbe essere ritenuto una prova della diversa consistenza di quella parte dell’intonaco”). 83 For a rather fanciful attempt to demonstrate that Alexander’s features are those of Thomas III, see Perotti, “I ritratti dei marchesi di Saluzzo”, p. 16; on Theuca as an unlikely candidate for Marguerite in disguise, see Meneghetti, Storie al muro, p. 223. 84 On the much-discussed circumstances which led to the composition of the poem, see now M. Piccat, “Tommaso III, Marchese errante: l’autobiografia cavalleresca di un Saluzzo”, in Tommaso III di Saluzzo, Il Libro del Cavaliere Errante (BnF ms. fr. 12559), ed. M. Piccat, Cuneo, 2008, p. 5-26, at p. 13; see also Debernardi, “Note sulla tradizione manoscritta”, p. 78. The connection between Le Chevalier Errant and the frescoes was already mentioned by the first scholar to draw attention to the La Manta cycle, Julius von Schlosser; see his “Ein veronesisches Bilderbuch und die höfische Kunst des XIV. Jahrhunderts”, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 16 (1895), p. 144-230, at p. 177-178. For other literary sources which inspired the representation of the Fountain of Youth on the opposite wall of the Sala Baronale, see Meneghetti, “Il manoscritto fr. 146”, esp. p. 526-528. 85 The poem Le Chevalier Errant is preserved in only two manuscripts, both illuminated in France and now in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. fr. 12559) and Turin (Biblioteca Nazionale, ms. L.V.6). The scholarly literature is mainly based on the Paris copy, which is the more complete and lavishly decorated of the two. The Turin manuscript was seriously damaged by fire in 1904 and, as far as its fragmentary state allows us to say, did not include any illuminated picture of Preux and Preuses: see Giacomo Jaquerio e il gotico internazionale (exhibition catalogue, Turin, Palazzo Madama, 1979), ed. E. Castelnuovo and G. Romano, Turin, 1979, p. 212-215 (A. Quazza). A description of the Turin pictures given by Vincenzo Malacarne, who examined the still intact codex in the late 1780s, has been recently republished in Debernardi, “Note sulla tradizione manoscritta”, p. 106-109. On the Paris manuscript and its decoration, see F. Bouchet, L’iconographie du Chevalier Errant de Thomas de Saluces, Turnhout, 2014. 86 M. Piccat, “Le scritte in volgare dei Prodi e delle Eroine della sala affrescata nel castello di La Manta”, Studi piemontesi, 20 (1991), p. 141-166, at p. 142-143 and 165. The assumption disproved by Piccat was essentially based on a superficial interpretation of the “analogia strettissima” which Paolo D’Ancona, “Gli affreschi del Castello di Manta”, p. 191, had seen between the miniatures and frescoes. Further evidence supporting Piccat’s position has been contributed by Debernardi, “Note sulla tradizione manoscritta”, esp. p. 90-91.

the persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century italian art

Alexander is very much a case in point. In the Sala Baronale, as we have seen, Alexander stands in the second position, between Hector and Julius Caesar; he is brown-haired and bearded, with a sword, crown and globe. In the Paris manuscript, Alexander is represented as an old man, with a white beard, dressed in armour and wearing a crown; he holds a banner and a large shield depicting a rampant lion with an axe in its paws. Also, as the name written underneath him tells us, Alexander occupies the third position, instead of the second, in the Heathen triad, coming after Hector and Julius Caesar. This unusual disposition has been noted in the literature, but no one has as yet produced a convincing explanation for it87. As mentioned above, representations of Alexander as a venerable old man are not an exception in the fifteenth century; in my view, however, Alexander’s appearance in the Paris codex mirrors the way he is presented in the text of the poem. In Le Chevalier Errant Alexander is no longer the proud conqueror of the world, but rather a man who has been abandoned by Fortuna and is therefore not allowed into her mountaintop “palais aux esleuz”: his deeds and marvellous adventures – including the celestial journey and the descent to the bottom of the sea – are remembered and praised, but they are dismissed by Alexander himself and recounted as triumphs belonging to the past. Despite the deference he inspires and the significant position he holds in the poem88, Alexander comes across as a sickly and extremely weak man. In accordance with a large part of the medieval tradition concerning the circumstances of Alexander’s death89, Le Chevalier Errant presents him as betrayed and poisoned by his general Antipater, and greatly debilitated, in body and spirit, as a consequence of that treachery. Even though the illuminations in the Paris manuscript are not verbatim illustrations of the text, I think that this aged Alexander among the Worthies may have been intended to reflect the Alexander portrayed by Thomas III in his poem. It seems significant that a number of fifteenth-century representations of Alexander wearing a long, often white beard are found in illustrations of his death. In addition to a French miniature mentioned by Benedetti90, another example can be found in an illuminated page from the Bible of Borso d’Este (Modena, Biblioteca Estense, mss. Lat. 422-423), decorated for the duke of Ferrara between 1455 and 1461. It is worth remembering that Alexander is the only figure of classical antiquity to be mentioned in the Bible and therefore to have a place in Judaeo-Christian history: an account of his conquests appears at the beginning of the first book of Maccabees (I.1-7), from the 87 The figure of Julius Caesar as presented in Le Chevalier Errant has been studied by Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, “Entre la France et l’Italie: Jules César chez Thomas III de Saluces et Eustache Deschamps”, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 14 (2007), p. 191-205. Although Mühlethaler discusses both the La Manta frescoes and the Paris manuscript, he does not provide an explanation for the unusual placement of Julius Caesar in the central position of the heathen triad. A lack of significant evidence seems to me to undermine Meneghetti’s claim that the order Hector-Julius Caesar-Alexander is almost equally canonical in the tradition as the order Hector-Alexander-Julius Caesar (see her Storie al muro, p. 368, n. 68). 88 See M. Piccat, “Alessandro: il ritorno di un mito”, in Immagini e miti nello Chevalier Errant di Tommaso III di Saluzzo, ed. R. Comba and M. Piccat, Cuneo, 2008, p. 87-114, at p. 88-90. 89 See Chapter 1, n. 98 above. 90 See Benedetti, “Codice, allocuzione e volti”, p. 49-50 and fig. 16. The en-grisaille miniature decorates an early fifteenth-century copy of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à Pompée (Bibliothèque de Genève, ms. fr. 72, fol. 142 v). It shows the body of an aged Alexander being reduced to ashes before his subjects (among whom is a queen, presumably Alexander’s spouse); Benedetti labelled the picture “Alessandro muore vecchio”. For this manuscript, see L’enluminure de Charlemagne à François Ier: Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève (exhibition catalogue, Geneva, Musée Rath, 1976), Geneva, 1976, p. 93.

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destruction of the Persian Empire to his death and the partition of his kingdom among his successors91. In the Borso Bible, the lower register of the opening page of Maccabees (ms. Lat. 423, fol. 110 r) shows Alexander summoning his generals to his deathbed and dividing his empire among them. Although the accompanying text states that the Diadochi are the same age as Alexander, they are depicted as young courtiers, while Alexander is portrayed as an aged king92. In the Sala Baronale, as was customary in representations of the Nine Worthies, Alexander is accompanied by a titulus summing up his life and deeds. The verses, written in French, have been published several times and, as recently emended by Lea Debernardi, read as follows93: I’ay co[n]quis por ma force les illes d’outramer; d’Orient iusq[u]es a Ocident fu-ge ia sire apeles; i’ay tue roy Daire li persian, Porus li Endia[n], Nicole l’armires; la grant Babiloina fi-ge ver moy encliner; e fuy sire du monde, puis fui enarbres: ce fut iii.c ans devant que Diu fut nee. Alisandre. In this titulus Alexander presents himself as the king of the world, conqueror of both East and West, victor over his enemies and lord of Babylon. The passage in which he declares: “e fuy sire du monde, puis fui enarbres” is, however, problematic. The meaning of the word “enarbres” – or, perhaps, “en-arbres” – remains obscure, as it is unattested elsewhere in medieval French. Several interpretations have been offered: Anne Dunlop has suggested “then [I was] in Araby”, alluding to Alexander’s planned conquest of the Arabian peninsula94; and Marco Piccat, followed by Roberto Guerrini, has proposed translating “enarbre”’ as “elevated”, referring to Alexander’s ‘Flight with Griffins’95. Neither of these interpretations seems to me entirely convincing. It is worth noting that all the tituli in the Sala Baronale – in line with the customary tradition for this theme – clearly mention the death of the Preux or Preuses to which they refer; and it is highly improbable that Alexander would have been an exception to this rule. Therefore, it seems very likely

91 According to St Jerome’s commentary, Alexander’s kingdom had been predicted by the prophet Daniel (Commentariorum in Danielem libri III , II.VII.5-7b, II.VIII.1a-12, and III.X.20b-4a [ed. F. Glorie (S. Hieronymi presbyteri Opera: Pars I, Opera exegetica 5), Corpus Christianorum, series latina LXXV A, Turnhout, 1964, p. 839-843, 850-855 and 895-899]). The account in Maccabees and the prophecies of Daniel as interpreted by Jerome are the basis for the theological conception of Alexander throughout the Middle Ages; see Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 118-125. 92 In the commentary accompanying the facsimile edition of the Borso Bible, the Alexander depicted in this miniature is mistakenly identified as Alexander Balas Epiphanes, the alleged son of Antiochus IV, whose life is recounted further on in Maccabees: see F. Toniolo, “Descrizione delle miniature del secondo volume della Bibbia”, in La Bibbia di Borso d’Este: commentario al codice, 2 vol., Modena, 1997, II, p. 499-573, at p. 530. There is no question, however, that the Alexander mentioned in the beginning of Maccabees is Alexander the Great. 93 Debernardi, “Note sulla tradizione manoscritta”, p. 72. The first transcription of the verses was published by D’Ancona, “Gli affreschi del Castello di Manta”, p. 195-198. 94 Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 259, n. 71. 95 Piccat, “Le scritte in volgare”, p. 154, and R. Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta: la figura di Alessandro Magno tra Medioevo e Rinascimento”, in L’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand dans les tapisseries, p. 135-150, at p. 135.

the persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century italian art

that “enarbres” alludes to the death of Alexander96. In the literary sub-genre of the Dits des Neuf Preux to which the La Manta tituli belong, reference to the demise of Alexander is consistently made by saying that he was “empoixonner/empuissoner/empoysonné”97 – that is to say: he was poisoned. While the La Manta “enarbres” is certainly a lectio difficilior, as Piccat says98, something may be argued about the origin of such a peculiar word. In her analysis of the Dits des Neuf Preux tradition, Glynnis Cropp has drawn attention to a manuscript of Les Voeux du Paon, written in 1344 in northern France or Flanders (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. fr. 2167), which contains some interpolations added by the scribe into the text. These additions, it has been noted, are nothing more than “superfluous chronological observations”99 stating how many years before or after the birth of Christ each Preux has lived, reigned or died. In the case of Alexander, however, something more interesting for us can be found. After Jacques de Longuyon’s verse reading “Alixand’ aussi dont ie vous uoi parlant”, the scribe has added: “qui fu puis en herbes devant le naissonment / de Diex bien .vi.c ans, je.l di dont proprement” (the emphasis is mine)100. By saying that Alexander was “en herbes” – evidently connected to the medieval French “enherber”, meaning “to poison” – the interpolator states that Alexander was poisoned by some toxic herbs, in accordance with the tradition of the Dits. What’s significant for us, however, is that the expression the scribe employed, “qui fu puis en herbes”, resonates closely with the “puis fui enarbres” found at La Manta. I am not suggesting a direct connection between this particular manuscript interpolation and our titulus, which would be mere speculation; I argue instead that the word “enarbres” of the Sala Baronale can be explained as a mis-read/mis-transcribed version of “enherber/en herbes”, or other similar form of the verb, which ms. fr. 2167 proves to have been employed in relation to Alexander within the context of the Nine Worthies literary tradition. This hypothesis not only makes sense of a seemingly problematic word, which has given rise to several dubious interpretations, but also confirms the rule by which the verses accompanying Alexander in the Nine Worthies tradition customarily contain reference to his death by poison. In the third verse of his titulus in the Sala Baronale, Alexander is said to have killed Darius, Porus and a “Nicole l’armirés”, who is to be identified with King Nicholas of Armenia, also known as Nicholas of Caesarea (present-day Kayseri, in Cappadocia), after the city where he took refuge from the advancing Alexander. The single combat in which Nicholas was

96 Piero Boitani also seems to be of this opinion (“Trionfo e fine di Alessandro”, p. 28-29): although he does not explicitly translate or refer to the word “enarbres”, Boitani summarises the content of the titulus as follows: “Sotto la sua [di Alessandro] figura, alla Manta, compare l’epigrafe che ne riassume la vita: la conquista delle ‘isole d’oltremare’, dall’Oriente all’Occidente; l’uccisione di Dario, di Poro e di Nicola; la sottomissione di Babilonia; la signoria del mondo; l’assassinio” (my emphasis). 97 I take these textual variants referring to the death of Alexander from the collections of Dits examined by Piccat, “Le scritte in volgare”, p. 147 and 154; a fourth variant, “emprisonnez” (“imprisoned”), is clearly a derivation. 98 Ibid., p. 154. 99 I quote from Ritchie’s edition of The Buik of Alexander, III, p. li, where ms. fr. 2167 is first analysed. For a description of the codex, see ibid., II, p. xl and, more recently D. Leo, Images, Texts, and Marginalia in a “Vows of the Peacock” Manuscript (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24): with a Complete Concordance and Catalogue of Peacock Manuscripts, Leiden and Boston, 2013, p. 308-309. 100 The interpolation, added after l. 7945 at fol. 112 v of ms. fr. 2167, is in Cropp, “Les vers sur les Neuf Preux”, p. 462, and The Buik of Alexander, III, p. lxxx.

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defeated and eventually beheaded is not recorded in any of the ancient historical sources, but appears as the first great battle fought by Alexander in some medieval texts such in Alexander of Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre and in the French decasyllabic Roman preserved in ms. Correr 1493, where the story is also illustrated by three pictures101. This proves that the Alexander titulus at La Manta depends on the legendary tradition. In addition, in the same verse Darius of Persia and the Indian king Porus are said to have been killed by Alexander – an event which, although unusual in the tradition, does appear in some versions of the Romance. The death of Porus at the hands of Alexander is reported in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (III.4) and was transmitted to its derivatives, with a number of illuminated manuscripts showing Alexander killing Porus in single combat102. As for the murder of Darius, it is ascribed to Alexander in some exegetic works and encyclopaedic/ geographical compilations dating from the fourth to the twelfth century103; from there, the episode found its way into some re-elaborations of the Romance, such as those of Pfaffe Lamprecht (Alexanderlied, c. 1150) and Johann Hartlieb (Alexanderbuch, c. 1452)104. It is worth noticing that the notion of Alexander murdering Darius and Porus is in conflict with the historical tradition, where Alexander shows mercy towards Darius (who is betrayed and killed by his own kinsmen) and Porus (who is wounded and defeated, but not killed by Alexander). Indeed, from the sixteenth century onwards, the magnanimity shown by Alexander towards the two defeated kings is significantly stressed, and the meeting with the dead Darius – whose vilified body Alexander covers with his own cloak – and the wounded Porus – whose valour Alexander rewards by reinstating him in power over Indian lands – entered the visual repertoire as two of the most popular examples of Alexander’s virtuous behaviour. The Triads of Castel Roncolo

Perched on the top of a rocky spur near Bolzano, in the South-Tyrol/Alto Adige region of northeast Italy, the fortress of Castel Roncolo (Runkelstein Castle) had its golden age under the brothers Niklaus and Franz Vintler, who acquired the castle in 1385 and

101 See the facsimile reproduction of the pages in Le Roman d’Alexandre: riproduzione del ms. Venezia, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, fol. 8 r-v. 102 Some examples are illustrated in Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany, fig. 193, 227, 256, 279b, 300, 324, 342, 358. 103 The idea of Darius being murdered by Alexander originates from a passage in the first book of Maccabees (I.1) and the book of Daniel (8.7), where it is said that Alexander “percussit” Darius; authors commenting or relying on these texts, such as Jerome, the Ravenna Cosmographer and Rabanus Maurus, mis-interpreted the verb “percussit” as “occidit”, transmitting to some later sources the idea of Alexander being directly responsible for Darius’s death. See F. Pfister, “Dareios von Alexander getötet”, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 101 (1958), p. 97-104, and A. Cipolla, Hystoria de Alexandro Magno (Vorauer Alexander): studi sulla costituzione del testo, Verona, 2013, p. 25 and 49-50. 104 Pictures of Alexander beheading Darius are rarely found in the visual tradition; examples are in Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany, fig. 81 and 136. A notable fourteenth-century depiction of Alexander plunging his sword into Darius’s face marks the beginning of the first book of Maccabees in the Breviary of Pope Martin V (ms. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 14701, fol. 251 r), illustrated in A. M. Piemontese, La Persia istoriata in Roma, Vatican City, 2014, p. 411, pl. 29; for the dating and decoration of the codex see F. Manzari, “Da Avignone a Roma: committenza e decorazione di alcuni codici liturgici”, in Liturgia in figura: codici liturgici rinascimentali della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ed. G. Morello and S. Maddalo, Rome, 1995, p. 59-65.

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three years later undertook a vast campaign of renovation, enlargement and decoration of the entire complex105. Under the wooden balcony of the Casa d’Estate, overlooking the inner courtyard, is a scene of thirty figures, divided into nine groups of “triads”. The frescoes, painted by an unidentified artist, have been variously dated between 1393 and 1405106. On the far left, the series begins with the Nine Worthies arranged in the canonical order of Heathens, Jews and Christians, as in the Sala Baronale at La Manta and in the Castelnuovo frescoes that will be discussed later on. These three triads, and above all the first one, have suffered considerably from the damage of time, to the point that the figure of Hector has almost completely vanished. Still visible, though not in good condition, Alexander stands in full armour between Hector and Julius Caesar; he is bearded, wears a crown and holds a banner and shield in his hands (Fig. 27). The coat of arms once depicted on his shield had already disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century, since it is not present on the watercolour copy of the frescoes made by Ignaz Seelos in 1857107. What is distinctive about the frescoes at Castel Roncolo is not the presence of the Nine Worthies in itself, but rather the general iconographic context of which they are part. The figures which complete the series of nine triads in the Casa d’Estate have no real counterparts in other decorative schemes of this kind and are likely to have been personally selected by the Vintlers. The fourth to ninth triads present in succession: three Arthurian knights (Percival, Gawain and Ywain); the most famous lovers of the Middle Ages (Wilhelm von Österreich and Aglye, Tristan and Iseult, Wilhelm von Orleans and Amelei); three heroes from the German sagas (Dietrich von Bern, Siegfried and Dietleib), with their magic swords; and the three most famous giants, giantesses and dwarves108. This unusual juxtaposition of historical figures, legendary heroes and mythical creatures seems to reflect the history of the world as presented in the Heldenbücher (“Books of Heroes”). According to this German epic tradition, dwarves, giants and giantesses were the first beings to be created by God; and only when they were in need of help and protection did the heroes and courageous knights appear109. The fifth triad, depicting the exemplary lovers, represents the culmination of a scheme celebrating the chivalric ideals and popular romances of contemporary European society, which serve as the inspiration

105 See the exhaustive study Castel Roncolo: il maniero illustrato, Bolzano, 2000. Despite the apparently limited focus that the title may suggest, Artus a Castel Roncolo: l’eterno sogno del Buon Governo, Bolzano, 2014 contains useful material on the whole decoration of the castle and the iconographic theme of the Nine Worthies. 106 The Casa d’Estate was built between 1390 and 1393, and was probably decorated shortly afterwards. Paolo D’Ancona (“Gli affreschi del Castello di Manta”, p. 105) suggested that the frescoes should be dated to the beginning of the fifteenth century and, in any case, before Niklaus Vintler’s death, which he wrongly placed in 1414 rather than 1413. These are the grounds, I believe, on which Noëlle-Christine Rebichon recently dated the frescoes to the years around 1400-1405: see her “Le cycle des Neuf Preux”, p. 177, n. 26. 107 See I. V. Zingerle, Fresken-Cyklus des schlosses Runkelstein bei Bozen: Gezeichnet und lithografirt von Ignaz Seelos, Innsbruck, 1857, pl. III. 108 The giants and giantesses have recently been identified thanks to the inscriptions above their heads which are still legible; however, no inscriptions for the dwarves remain. See K. Domanski and M. Krenn, “I cicli profani nella Casa d’Estate”, in Castel Roncolo, p. 99-154, at p. 104-109. 109 See ibid., p. 109, and R. Wetzel, “L’image du monde dans un monde d’images: les fresques littéraires et courtoises de Castelroncolo dans leur contexte socioculturel et historique (Haute Adige, xive-xve siècles)”, in L’histoire dans la littérature, ed. L. Adert and E. Eigenmann, Geneva, 2000, p. 139-150, at p. 148-149.

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for the decoration of the Casa d’Estate as a whole, with rooms devoted to the adventures of Tristan, Garel and Wigalois110. Within the broader context of the Castel Roncolo triads, the Nine Worthies occupy no special position. Although they begin the visual sequence of figures on the balcony, no distinction is made between them and the heroes of the Northern sagas and legends. Nor is the arrangement in any way hierarchical: historical kings and commanders are presented to the viewer as equals to knights of medieval epic and vice-versa: Alexander is as worthy as Siegfried, and Dietrich (the legendary transfiguration of Theodoric the Great) is equivalent to Julius Caesar. The court society of medieval Europe, so unmistakably mirrored in the Castel Roncolo frescoes, had no concern for the historical authenticity of these exemplary figures, who, as mentioned above, were chosen by virtue of their military valour and courage, regardless of their historical or fictional identity. Niklaus Vintler, a bourgeois who had become counsellor and financier of the dukes of Tyrol, was long considered a parvenu at the Habsburg court, although he had been ennobled in 1393. It is not surprising, therefore, that the decoration he commissioned for the Castel Roncolo celebrated and reflected the moral values and chivalric ideals of the aristocratic society which Vintler had entered111. The Castelnuovo Cycle

The fresco cycle which once decorated a room in the castle of Castelnuovo (at Castelnuovo Nigra, 40 km north of Turin in Piedmont) was discovered around 1980 by a group of boys on a school trip, who noticed traces of paint on a scratched wall of the medieval castle, locally known as “il castellaccio”. Those traces were the remnants of a fresco cycle representing eight warriors, who were depicted on the two opposite walls of a “saletta pitturata” (“painted room”) at the very centre of the castle112. Given the poor condition of the castle, which had been in ruins for almost two centuries, the restorers were urged to detach the frescoes from the walls; and, since 2005, they have been displayed in the nearby Museo Archeologico del Canavese at Cuorgnè113.

110 The decoration of these rooms is examined in the volume Castel Roncolo, and in particular: Domanski and Krenn, “I cicli profani”, p. 109-146 (rooms of Garel and Tristan); A. Gräber, “Il ciclo di Wigalois a Castel Roncolo”, p. 155-171, and V. Schupp, “Il ciclo di Tristano e Isotta nella Casa d’Estate”, p. 331-350. 111 Wetzel, “L’image du monde”, p. 143-146. On the Vintler family and the decoration of the castle, see also Id., “La famille des Vintler et le programme des peintures murales de Castelroncolo (Runkelstein) près Bolzano dans le contexte de la civilisation courtoise”, in Paroles de murs: Peinture murale, Littérature et Histoire au Moyen Âge/Sprechende Wände: Wandmalerei, Literatur und Geschichte im Mittelalter, ed. E. C. Lutz and D. Rigaux, Grenoble, 2007, p. 75-89. 112 A notarial act signed in the castle on 10 March 1485 mentions a “saletta pitturata”; see M. Cima and L. Ghedin, “Il lavoro di recupero e restauro degli affreschi”, in Il ciclo gotico di Villa Castelnuovo: intervento di salvataggio e valorizzazione, ed. C. Bertolotto, M. Cima, L. Ghedin, F. Gualano and G. Scalva, Turin, 2006, p. 49-57, at p. 51. This document is of crucial importance for the history of Castelnuovo and of the frescoes themselves, as it decreed the division of the castle between two owners; the property was only reunited in 1980 when it passed into the ownership of the municipality of Castelnuovo Nigra. 113 Not much has been published on the Castelnuovo cycle; apart from Rebichon, “Le cycle des Neuf Preux”, see Il ciclo gotico, issued at the conclusion of the 2005 restoration campaign, in which there is a useful account of the historical background of Castelnuovo at the turn of the fourteenth century: M. Cima, “L’ambiente storico di origine del ciclo pittorico”, ibid., p. 13-23.

the persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century italian art

The cycle was executed around 1430-1440, on commission from Count Uberto di San Martino di Castelnuovo, and has been attributed on stylistic grounds to the Piemontese painter Giacomino da Ivrea114. It is preserved in a fragmentary state: while the east and west walls are entirely lost, a large fragment with trees and the barely identifiable figures of two armoured knights has been detached from the south wall. The frescoes from the north wall are in far better condition: six warriors are lined up, side by side, their legs partially hidden by the Ghibelline merlons of a city wall (Fig. 28). The figures are almost identical: all young, standing in full armour and helmeted. Two of them (the second and third from the left) wear a crown on top of their helmet. The warriors are, however, distinguished by the coats of arms on the broad shields which they hold. Three of them are named in the inscriptions above their heads as Julius Caesar, David and Judas Maccabeus; and on this basis, the six warriors have been identified as the surviving segment of a Nine Worthies sequence. Identifying the three unnamed figures proved to be more difficult, since there was no apparent connection between the coats of arms on the shields and the standard iconography of the Nine Worthies115. The riddle has been solved by Noëlle-Christine Rebichon, who examined the coats of arms of the Nine Worthies in two fifteenth-century illuminated heraldic manuscripts from the Lorraine (e.g., ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 18651, fol. 1 r) which, like the Castelnuovo paintings, reflect French chivalric culture. As the names of the Worthies are written above their shields, the sequence in the manuscripts can be reconstructed as follows: Hector has a shield with three arrows, Alexander with three crowns and Julius Caesar with the heads of three deer; Joshua has the sun, David the harp and Judas Maccabeus two arms wielding swords. The coats of arms in the manuscripts match perfectly those of the six Castelnuovo Worthies, enabling Rebichon to identify the three unnamed Worthies on the north wall and to show that the six heroes are portrayed in their usual order: first the Heathen, then the Jews. To complete the canon, the Christian Worthies were painted on the south wall: once again in complete accordance with the coats of arms in the manuscripts, the visible remains of two shields are sufficient to identify the two surviving knights with Arthur and Charlemagne; however, the third, presumably Godfrey of Bouillon, is definitively lost116. The Castelnuovo cycle is an eloquent example of the variability of attributes and iconographic details of the Worthies within the established canon – or better, they testify to the existence of different canons in the collections of heraldic devices of the Neuf Preux and Preuses that constituted a literary sub-genre of fifteenth-century Europe. In the Castelnuovo frescoes, some of the six Worthies have unusual coats of arms (Hector with the arrows, Julius Caesar with the deer heads, Joshua with the sun); as for Alexander, the three crowns depicted on his shield are not merely unusual but are normally attributed to Arthur. The crowns on Arthur’s shield symbolised the three kingdoms which he governed:

114 See C. Bertolotto, “Dati di stile e di costume per la lettura del ciclo dei prodi: una proposta per Giacomino da Ivrea”, in Il ciclo gotico, p. 45-47. On Giacomino, see the entry by A. J. Martin in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, ed. G. Meissner, vol. 53, Munich and Leipzig, 2007, p. 151. 115 See F. Gualano, “Una sfilata di Prodi da Villa Castelnuovo al Museo Archeologico di Cuorgnè”, in Il ciclo gotico, p. 35-43. 116 Rebichon, “Le cycle des Neuf Preux”, p. 181-184.

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Scotland, England and Brittany. When assigned to Alexander, their meaning is less certain. Rebichon has argued that the crowns might represent the three continents or parts of the world ruled by him: Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa117. I would suggest, instead, that the crowns on Alexander’s shield, like those on Arthur’s, were intended to symbolise the three kingdoms over which he acquired sovereignty: Macedon-Greece (the throne of his ancestors), Egypt (the throne of the pharaohs) and Persia-Asia (the throne of Darius III)118. The “Cavalcavia” with the Worthies of Palazzo Trinci

Ugolino III Trinci was lord of Foligno (near Perugia in Umbria) from 1386 until his death in 1415. Nearly twenty years of his reign were taken up with the major building works he commissioned in order to transform the sprawling houses and shops beside the city cathedral of San Feliciano into the imposing Palazzo Trinci. Ugolino’s “domi novae” were completed in 1407, and their fresco decoration was undertaken shortly afterwards119. One of the first spaces to be painted was the newly built corridor connecting the second floor of Palazzo Trinci to the Palazzo delle Canoniche adjacent to the cathedral, where the Trinci had been living since 1379120. The “ponte sopre la strata de Sancto Iacomo”, as it was referred to in the documents121, is a covered, roughly L-shaped passage, which was decorated sometime between 1407 and 1410. On the left wall a local artist depicted en-grisaille the Seven Ages of Man, a theme which appears twice more in the palace122. Ugolino’s change of plans with regard to the decoration of the palace and his commissioning of Gentile da Fabriano in 1411 to paint the “monumental quarter” on the second floor (that is, the Sala Imperatorum, the Room of the Arts and Planets and the loggia with the story of Romulus and Remus) also resulted in a decisive alteration to the decorative scheme of the corridor123. Around 1411-1412 the frescoes with the Seven Ages of Man were whitewashed and replaced by a series of eleven life-size figures, standing in a painted architectural frame representing a pointed-arch loggia124. Many of the figures are only partially preserved: over time portions of paint have fallen off, incidentally revealing

117 Ibid., p. 181. 118 I owe this suggestion to Paolo Sachet. 119 The phrase “ante domos novas magnifici domini Ugolini de Trinciis de Fulgineo etc., positas in civitate Fulginei” appears in a document dated 23 February 1411: see C. Cardinali and S. Felicetti, “La fabbrica del palazzo: testimonianze archivistiche (secc. XV-XIX)”, in Il Palazzo Trinci di Foligno, ed. G. Benazzi and F. F. Mancini, Perugia, 2001, p. 647-694, at p. 651, doc. 3. The dates of beginning and end of the works (1389-1407) can be inferred from the epigram inscribed on an ancient relief once attached to the wall at the entrance of the palace: see L. Sensi, “Priscorum hic poteris venerandos cernere vultus”, in Nuovi studi sulla pittura tardogotica: Palazzo Trinci, ed. A. Caleca and B. Toscano, Livorno, 2009, p. 95-106, at p. 96-97. 120 See S. Nessi, I Trinci: signori di Foligno, Foligno, 2006, p. 75-76. 121 See Cardinali and Felicetti, “La fabbrica del palazzo”, p. 654, doc. 14. 122 For the original decoration of the corridor and an overview of its problematic attribution, see G. Benazzi, “I cicli pittorici del tempo di Ugolino e Corrado Trinci”, in Il Palazzo Trinci di Foligno, p. 459-494, at p. 469-471. 123 The documents attesting the commission to Gentile are known only through a partial transcription in the so-called Taccuino Coltellini, a manuscript of 1780 discovered in 2000 by Laura Lametti in a private archive; see L. Lametti, “Il manoscritto intitolato Appunti sopra la città di Fuligno: scritti da Ludovico Coltellini accademico fulginio. Parte nona: 1770-1780”, in Il Palazzo Trinci di Foligno, p. 427-445, esp. p. 428. 124 After they were whitewashed in their original location on the left wall, the Seven Ages of Man were replicated with some changes onto the opposite wall at the right-hand side of the corridor, where they can still be seen.

the persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century italian art

large fragments of the Seven Ages underneath. Nevertheless, the eleven figures are still identifiable, thanks to either their inscriptions or the coats of arms on their shields. The series begins with two figures from Roman history, Romulus and Scipio Africanus125, and continues with the Nine Worthies, presented in the unusual order of Jews, Heathens and Christians. The pagan triad, no doubt, began with Hector, who is entirely lost, and continued with Julius Caesar, very little of whom survives, apart from the shield bearing his distinctive crowned eagle. After Julius Caesar comes Alexander, shown as a young knight, holding a shield and a pike and wearing a crown identical to those of the other kings depicted in the corridor (Fig. 29). As in the miniature of Le Chevalier Errant, the Palazzo Trinci Alexander occupies the third position, instead of the second, in the pagan triad; the same unusual disposition could be found in a manuscript, which is likely to have been known at the Trinci court: a Latin version of the Voeux du Paon, written around 1400 and owned by Cardinal Giordano Orsini, where the three Heathens of the Nine Worthies are listed in the order Hector-Julius Caesar-Alexander126. A Papal condottiere and vicar, Ugolino Trinci may arguably have been contact with Cardinal Giordano Orsini, to whose family his wife Costanza, daughter of Aldobrando count of Pitigliano, belonged; if not directly, at least through the humanist Francesco da Fiano, who had been employed as scriptor apostolicus in the Roman Curia since 1379 and was later involved in the redecoration of Palazzo Trinci by writing the epigrams of the Sala Imperatorum127. The order of the Nine Worthies of Foligno is doubly unusual: because of the three Jews preceding, rather than following, the Heathens – surely a way to stress the importance of the pagan triad, which is painted in central position between the Jews and the Christians; and because of Julius Caesar preceding, rather than following, Alexander – an inversion resulting in the juxtaposition of the figures of Hector and Julius Caesar and in Hector being placed at the very centre of the series of eleven figures frescoed on the corridor wall. It has been suggested that this arrangement reflects Ugolino’s will to celebrate his family, who claimed descent from Tros, the eponymous hero of Troy: by placing the Trojan Hector shoulder to shoulder with Julius Caesar, whose family, the gens Julia, traced back their lineage to the son of Aeneas,

125 The figure with the inscription “Sipio” has been identified by Mario Salmi (“Gli affreschi del Palazzo Trinci a Foligno”, Bollettino d’Arte, 13 [1919], p. 139-180, at p. 155 and n. 2) as Scipio Nasica. I agree with Cristina Galassi (“Un signore e il suo palazzo: iconografia, cronologia e committenza dei cicli pittorici nelle ‘case nuove’ di Ugolino Trinci”, in Il Palazzo Trinci di Foligno, p. 269-298, at p. 289-290), who argues persuasively that he is instead Scipio Africanus. 126 The text, contained in the miscellaneous ms. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio Capitolare di San Pietro E 36, fol. 12 v-63 v, is edited in V. Licitra, “Una redazione latina inedita dei Voti del Pavone”, Studi medievali, 2.1 (1961), p. 321-362, and 2.2, p. 711-743 (the passage on the Nine Worthies is at p. 736-737). On the codex, see H. Bellon-Méguelle and G. Châtelain, “‘Chanter en son latin’: des Voeux du Paon français à leur traduction latine en prose (Vatican, Archivio di San Pietro, E 36)”, in Traduire de vernaculaire en latin au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance: méthodes et finalités, ed. F. Fery-Hue, Paris, 2013, p. 149-182; and P. Rinoldi, “Le tradizioni dei Voeux du paon in Italia fra latino e volgari”, in Il viaggio del testo: atti del Convegno Internazionale di Filologia italiana e romanza (Brno, 19-21 giugno 2014), ed. P. Divizia and L. Pericoli, Alessandria, 2017, p. 477-492, esp. p. 489-490. For the library of Cardinal Orsini, see G. Lombardi and F. Onofri, “La biblioteca di Giordano Orsini (c. 1360-1438)”, in Scrittura, biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel Quattrocento: aspetti e problemi. Atti del seminario 1-2 giugno 1979, ed. C. Bianca, P. Farenga, G. Lombardi, A. G. Luciani and M. Miglio, 2 vol., Vatican City, 1980, I, p. 371-382. 127 On Francesco da Fiano, see the entry by F. Bacchelli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 49, Rome, 1997, p. 747-750. For Francesco da Fiano’s relationship with Ugolino and Giordano Orsini see Rebichon, “Diffusion et réception”, p. 110-114.

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Iulus, Ugolino gave special emphasis to the two Worthies who, like (allegedly) the Trinci family, had their origins in the city of Troy128. It should be noted, however, that the peculiar L-shape of the corridor in the Palazzo Trinci results in Alexander, and neither Hector nor Julius Caesar, being given some sort of prominent position; to anyone entering the corridor and walking from the new palace to the old one, only three Worthies are immediately visible on the wall directly opposite the entrance: Julius Caesar, Arthur and, in between them, Alexander (Fig. 30). Military skills and valour are the defining qualities of each of the Nine Worthies; but those who have been given some pride of place in the Trinci corridor are the greatest conquerors. Among them are: Julius Caesar who subdued the West as far as Spain, Alexander who seized the East and the city of Babylon, and Arthur, who ruled over the British Isles on the very border of the known world129. For the lord of Foligno, the great men of the past were apt exemplars to call upon, both as military leaders and magnanimous kings. In the poem Legenda di San Feliciano, a panegyric of the Trinci family written by Pier Angelo Bucciolini at the court of Ugolino, the virtues of the lord of Foligno are praised in octave CLXIX and the poem itself has often been seen as reflecting, if not describing, the iconographic programme of Palazzo Trinci130. Bucciolini portrays Ugolino as a disciple of the Liberal Arts (“vestise delle septe liberali”), surpassing the Roman emperors in his magnanimity (“Cesari avança per magnanimitade”) and outdoing Alexander in his royalty: “passò Alesandro de realetade”131. The unprecedented juxtaposition of Romulus and Scipio, both allegedly connected to the origin of the Trinci family and the city of Foligno132, with the Nine Worthies is the most notable aspect of the frescoes in the Trinci corridor. It is important to bear in mind that the redecoration of the corridor in 1411-1412 was part of the overall iconographic programme for the palace commissioned by Ugolino. The series of Nine Worthies and two Roman figures was clearly intended to be read in connection with the nearby Sala Imperatorum, where a selection of twenty Uomini famosi drawn from Roman history (five of whom are not preserved) was set into a painted loggia which recalls the loggia framing the heroes in the corridor. Of the rooms painted by Gentile da Fabriano and his workshop in Palazzo Trinci, the Sala Imperatorum was the most highly praised and was inspired by the Sala Virorum Illustrium, painted in the Reggia Carrarese in Padua in the 1370s and based on Petrarch’s De viris illustribus133. In Palazzo Trinci, Romulus and Scipio Africanus were depicted both in the corridor and in the Sala Imperatorum134; they therefore create a visual continuum between the old 128 See Rebichon, “Diffusion et réception”, p. 110. 129 In the Voeux du Paon and the literary tradition of the Dits des Neuf Preux, these conquests are indeed recorded as chief achievements of Julius Caesar, Alexander and Arthur; see The Buik of Alexander, IV. 130 See e.g. Galassi, “Un signore e il suo palazzo”, p. 271. 131 Pier Angelo Bucciolini, Legenda di San Feliciano, ed. S. Nessi, Foligno, 2003, p. 69. On Bucciolini, see the entry by M. Pieri in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 14, Rome, 1972, p. 783-784. 132 This connection, based on a passage of Il Quadriregio by Federico Frezzi and a local tradition reported by Ludovico Jacobilli, is discussed by Galassi, “Un signore e il suo palazzo”, p. 289-290. 133 On the Sala of the Reggia Carrarese (now Sala dei Giganti), see Chapter 4 below. 134 Romulus is one of the five gigantic figures now lost, but his presence is documented by the epigrams of Francesco da Fiano once accompanying the heroes: see R. Guerrini, “‘Uomini di pace e di guerra che l’aurea Roma generò’: fonti antiche e tradizione classica negli epigrammi di Francesco da Fiano per la Sala degli Imperatori (Anthologia Latina, Riese, 1906, 831-855d)”, in Il Palazzo Trinci di Foligno, p. 375-400, at p. 376.

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Worthies of the chivalric tradition and the new Uomini Famosi of the humanist canon135. It is worth mentioning that in the poem Il Quadriregio, written around 1400 by Federico Frezzi – the most influential man of letters at the court of Ugolino, alongside Francesco da Fiano – Roman emperors and heroes of the Republic are presented alongside Hercules, Hector, Alexander, Arthur and Godfrey of Bouillon. All of them appear to the author in a vision “de’ Magnanimi, e Valentissimi, ne’ quali risplendette la Virtù della Fortezza” (IV.7)136. The continuity between the series of frescoes in the corridor and those in the Sala Imperatorum was so evident that in 1646 the historian Ludovico Jacobilli, when describing Palazzo Trinci in his Discorso sopra la città di Foligno, listed twenty-nine figures: the twenty gigantic heroes in the Sala Imperatorum and the Nine Worthies in the corridor. He clearly considered the two series to be intertwined; and since Romulus and Scipio Africanus were mentioned as part of the decoration of the Sala Imperatorum, he did not refer to the paintings of them in the corridor137. To sum up: the legendary tradition derived from the Romance persisted in a limited number of Italian artworks of the fifteenth century. Although very different in nature, all of them adhere to the medieval imagery of Alexander, either by illustrating his marvellous adventures (‘The Flight with Griffins’ in the Curtius Rufus manuscript; the ‘Submarine Voyage’ in the Louvre drawing; and both the episodes in the Doria tapestries), or by alluding to his mysterious birth, half divine and half magic, as recounted in the Romance (in the Sola-Busca tarot deck) or by presenting Alexander in a way which clearly reflects the Romance (in the four cycles of Nine Worthies). Yet hints of the dramatic change in Alexander iconography which I shall examine in the following chapters can be detected in some of these artworks: the text which the Madrid ‘Flight with Griffins’ illustrates is the newly recovered Curtius Rufus, and the ‘Submarine Voyage’ in the Louvre sheet reveals an interest in the technical aspects of the episode which is not found in previous representations of the theme. The lack of significant novelty in the ‘Alexander group’ of tarot cards in the Sola-Busca deck can be explained by the fact that, despite the refined quality and possibly prestigious commission of the deck (as indicated by the inclusion of an ‘Alexander group’), tarot cards tended to stick to the standardised repertoire of forms and subjects which were long established in the tradition. The most significant of the artworks discussed in this chapter are the four cycles of Nine Worthies. They were all commissioned to occupy important spaces, often the main hall, of castles and palaces; and, as part of major decorative projects, they were clearly charged with much larger aims and purposes than the other pieces. That they were steeped in the legendary tradition is proved by the way in which figures from myth and story are 135 This connection has been repeatedly stressed by Cristina Galassi (“Un signore e il suo palazzo”, p. 289-290), who definitely disproved Salmi’s dismissal of Romulus and Scipio as heroes “messi, io credo, a completare le pareti del corridoio” (Salmi, “Gli affreschi del Palazzo Trinci”, p. 158). 136 Federico Frezzi, Il Quadriregio o poema de’ Quattro Regni, 2 vol., Foligno, 1725; for the chapter referred to, see I, p. 282-287. See also E. Laureti, “Il ciclo decorativo negli edifici trinciani e il ‘Quadriregio’ di Federico Frezzi”, Bollettino storico della città di Foligno, 29-30 (2005-2006), p. 71-86. On Frezzi, see S. Foà’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 50, Rome, 1998, p. 520-523. 137 Jacobilli’s list is reported by M. Faloci Pulignani, Le arti e le lettere alla corte dei Trinci: ricerche storiche, Foligno, 1888, p. 19.

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juxtaposed – a feature which is particularly evident in the Castel Roncolo cycle. Solid references explicitly linking the images of Alexander to the Romance are found only at La Manta, where episodes from it, as we have seen, are mentioned in the titulus. The new attitude towards Alexander, and more generally towards the past, which emerged in the fifteenth century can be seen in the presentation of him among the Heathens: no longer assimilated to, and therefore confused with, a Christian hero, he is restored to his rightful place in the pagan era ante legem. In the Manta cycle, he is even located accurately in time, as the titulus ends by saying that he lived “three hundred years before Christ was born” (“ce fut iii.c ans devant que Diu fut nee”). In the Palazzo Trinci frescoes there is a further step forward: the introduction of Roman figures, a characteristic feature of the humanist cycles of Uomini famosi, which will be discussed in Chapter 4.

the persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century italian art

Fig. 20: Alexander as King of Swords, from the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, c. 1470-1491; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera

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Fig. 21 and 22: Olympias as Queen of Swords and Ammon as Knight of Swords, from the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, c. 1470-1491; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera

Fig. 23 and 24: Nectanebo as Knight of Cups and Philip as King of Coins, from the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, c. 1470-1491; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera

the persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century italian art

Fig. 25: Raphael (attr.), The Submarine Voyage (detail), c. 1494; Paris, Musée du Louvre

Fig. 26: Master of La Manta, The Cycle of the Neuf Preux and Preuses, c. 1420-1425; Manta (Saluzzo, Cuneo), Castle della Manta, Sala Baronale

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Fig. 27: Hector (lost), Alexander and Julius Caesar, c. 1393-1405; Bolzano, Castel Roncolo, Casa d’Estate

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Fig. 28: Giacomino da Ivrea, Six Worthies, from Castelnuovo, c. 1430-1440; Cuorgnè (Turin), Museo Archeologico del Canavese

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Fig. 29: Workshop of Gentile da Fabriano, Alexander, from The Cycle of Worthies, c. 1411-1412; Foligno, Palazzo Trinci, Corridor

Fig. 30: The corridor connecting Palazzo Trinci to Palazzo delle Canoniche (seen from Palazzo Trinci); Foligno, Palazzo Trinci

Chapter 3

The Humanist Recovery of Ancient Historical Sources and Its Impact on the Reception of Alexander

Starting in the early fifteenth century, the humanist recovery of ancient sources had a significant impact on the received view of Alexander and marked a decisive turning point in the tradition. As we have seen in Chapter 1, the visual imagery of Alexander in the Middle Ages was almost entirely based on the Alexander Romance, a body of texts deriving from the Pseudo-Callisthenes. These previously unavailable or enthusiastically revived ancient sources, in which Alexander was portrayed neither as the son of the magician Nectanebo nor as a miraculous adventurer who had travelled up to the heavens and down to the bottom of the sea, were instrumental in producing an entirely new image of him. This new historical portrait of Alexander gradually eclipsed the medieval legendary tradition, which was initially questioned and criticised, before falling into oblivion, so that no significant trace of it can be detected in the Italian visual tradition after the end of the fifteenth century. Among the sources on Alexander which came to light or assumed new urgency in the Quattrocento were the four main ancient accounts of his life. Written either in Greek or Latin between the first century bc and the second century ad, they circulated in the fifteenth century in Latin or vernacular translation and later on made their way into print. These sources are: Book XVII of the Bibliotheca Historica by Diodorus Siculus (in Greek, first century bc); the Historiae Alexandri Magni by Quintus Curtius Rufus (in Latin, early first century ad); the Life of Alexander by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives (in Greek, early second century ad) and the Anabasis by Arrian (in Greek, mid-second century ad). To these works, a fifth source should be added, as it is often referred to by humanists in conjunction with Curtius Rufus: Books XI and XII of Justin’s Epitoma of the lost Historiae Philippicae by Pompeius Trogus (in Latin, third century ad). Other references to Alexander are, of course, scattered throughout the ancient Greek and Latin literature known to humanists (for instance, in the works of Valerius Maximus, Pliny the Elder, Quintilian, Strabo). These are mainly presented in the form of anecdotes and exemplary moral episodes, framed within works which are not about Alexander. Such references did not affect the overall image of Alexander which emerged in the Renaissance, but they did contribute some significant details.

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The Recovery of the Ancient Greek Sources Plutarch’s Life of Alexander

The Life of Alexander was the first of the Greek ancient accounts on Alexander to become available in fifteenth-century Italy. Written by Plutarch of Chaeronea (before ad 50-after 120) as part of the Parallel Lives, the Life of Alexander is paired with that of Julius Caesar; however, the synkrisis, or comparatio, which usually concludes each pair of lives, is missing1. The Life of Alexander was translated from Greek into Latin by Guarino of Verona (1374-1460) before 1408, during his stay in Constantinople2. Guarino’s version had a wide circulation in the first half of the century and was included in the editio princeps of the Lives, edited by Giovanni Antonio Campano and printed in Rome by Ulrich Han in 14703. An Italian translation of the entire corpus of the Lives was printed in Rieti in 1482, and the original Greek text appeared in Florence in 15174. In addition, several compendia of the Lives were compiled during the fifteenth century; these were mainly intended, however, for personal use and had no claim to completeness5. An epitome of the Latin version of all the Lives was produced by the humanist Dario Tiberti of Cesena in 1492 and enjoyed considerable success until the early nineteenth century6. 1 On Plutarch’s life and work, see the collection of essays in A Companion to Plutarch, ed. M. Beck, Chichester, 2014, as well as K. Ziegler, Plutarchos von Chaironeia, Stuttgart, 1964; see also T. Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice, Oxford, 1999, and T. Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity, Cambridge, 2012, p. 239-281. 2 The Life of Caesar was also translated by Guarino around 1411-1412. On the tradition of Plutarch in the fifteenth century, see M. Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2 vol., Copenhagen, 2007 (on Guarino’s translation of the Lives of Alexander and Caesar, see I, p. 172-177; and II, p. 133-135, for a list of relevant manuscripts). See also V. R. Giustiniani, “Sulle traduzioni latine delle ‘Vite’ di Plutarco nel Quattrocento”, Rinascimento, 1 (1961), p. 3-62, and Resta, Le epitomi di Plutarco. Useful remarks are in M. Manfredini, “Codici plutarchei di umanisti italiani”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 17 (1987), p. 1001-1043. An Aragonese translation of 39 of the 46 Plutarch’s Lives, including that of Alexander, was made in Avignon around 1387-1388 on commission from Juan Fernández de Heredia; this version was the first translation of the Lives to appear in the Latin West and was instrumental in rousing the interest of Coluccio Salutati – and of other humanists – in the work of Plutarch. See Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives, I, p. 76-87; R. Weiss, “Lo studio di Plutarco nel Trecento”, La parola del passato, 32 (1953), p. 321-342; and G. Di Stefano, La découverte de Plutarque en Occident: aspects de la vie intellectuelle en Avignon au xive siècle, Turin, 1968. For a broader and still useful overview, see N. Criniti, “Per una storia del plutarchismo occidentale”, Nuova rivista storica, 63 (1979), p. 187-203. On Guarino, see G. Pistilli, “Guarini, Guarino”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 60, Rome, 2003, p. 357-369. 3 No modern edition of Guarino’s translation of the Life of Alexander has been provided as yet, although its first chapters have been published by M. Materni, “Tracce plutarchee fra due penisole nella scia di Decembrio: umanesimi e umanesimi volgari”, Revista de literatura medieval, 26 (2014), p. 245-297, at p. 260-269. The whole text by Guarino can be read in the editio princeps of the Lives, which I have consulted in the copy now at the British Library ([Plutarch, Vitae illustrium virorum], ed. G. A. Campano, 2 vol., Rome, 1470). The Life of Alexander is in vol. II, fol. 374 r-393 v, followed by the Life of Caesar. The Campano edition was reprinted several times in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: see Giustiniani, “Sulle traduzioni latine”, p. 10-47. 4 See Resta, Le epitomi di Plutarco, p. 92, n. 1. 5 Ibid., p. 12-22. 6 Ibid., p. 76-100 and 109-122. The ambitious project of epitomising Plutarch’s Lives was first conceived by Pier Candido Decembrio, whose work, probably begun around 1437, was never completed. It survives in three manuscripts, two of them beautifully illuminated, but without the Life of Alexander. See ibid., p. 23-75, and Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 82. On one of the three manuscripts, now in Verona, see L. Locatelli, Gli uomini illustri di Plutarco nelle miniature del compendio di Pier Candido Decembrio: codice CCXXXIX della Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona, Verona, 2003. Tiberti’s epitome was printed several times in the sixteenth century (editio princeps: Ferrara, 1501) and was also translated into Italian (Venice, 1543) and French (Paris, 1558). See Resta, Le epitomi di Plutarco, p. 92-100.

T he H uman ist Recovery of A ncient Historica l S ources

Plutarch provides a vivid portrait of Alexander, from his birth to the immediate aftermath of his death. He depicts Alexander as an exceptionally gifted man, whose actions are driven by great passions, which can be noble and generous as well as cruel and vengeful. As we shall see, the impact of Plutarch on the Renaissance image of Alexander was huge. The reason for this success probably lies in the nature of the Lives: the Life of Alexander, rather than presenting the reader with an accurate and linear succession of events, consists of selected, often minor, episodes which offer an insight into his personality and character7. It is these episodes which influenced the literature and the art of the Renaissance. In addition to the Life, Plutarch devoted an opusculum from the Moralia to Alexander, De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute, which also circulated among humanists. It was first translated into Latin around 1405 by Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia (c. 1360-1411) and again around 1449 by Niccolò Perotti8. This opusculum also contributed to the humanist conception of Alexander, since it was considered to be a supplement to the Life and was often transmitted together with it. Arrian’s Anabasis

A local governor and administrator, as well as a trusted friend of the Emperor Hadrian, Arrian of Nicomedia (c. ad 85/90-175) wrote the Anabasis Alexandri with the intention, as he clearly states at the beginning of the work, of giving a reliable account of Alexander’s military expedition. Among the many and contradictory traditions concerning Alexander, Arrian writes, he has relied exclusively on the most trustworthy and credible sources – the accounts of the eyewitnesses Ptolemy and Aristobulus9. Other events, or different versions of the same events, reported by various authors, are also referred to by Arrian, but only

7 Plutarch, Alexander I.2-3: “It is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities […] So I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests”. This and following references to Plutarch’s Lives are to the English translation offered in the Loeb edition edited by B. Perrin. On this famous passage, see Hägg, The Art of Biography, p. 268-272; see also, in general, F. Muccioli, La storia attraverso gli esempi: protagonisti e interpretazioni del mondo greco in Plutarco, Milan and Udine, 2012. 8 See Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives, I, p. 114. On Jacopo Angeli and his translation, see G. Abbamonte and F. Stok, Iacopo d’Angelo traduttore di Plutarco: De Alexandri fortuna aut virtute e De fortuna Romanorum, Pisa, 2017; see also F. Stok, “Le traduzioni di Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia”, in Plutarco nelle traduzioni latine di età umanistica, ed. P. Volpe Cacciatore, Naples, 2009, p. 147-187. Useful is P. Falzone’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 62, Rome, 2004, p. 28-35. On the translation of the Moralia, which were partially known in the Middle Ages, see F. Becchi, “Le traduzioni latine dei Moralia di Plutarco tra XIII e XVI secolo”, in Plutarco nelle traduzioni latine, p. 9-52. The text of Perotti’s translation is offered by Valentina Gritti in her edition of Plutarch, La fortuna o la virtù di Alessandro Magno e il volgarizzamento di Ludovico Sandeo, Milan, 2020, p. 116-310 ; worthy of mention is also Gritti’s introduction (p. 9-59), with important remarks on the reception of Alexander in fifteenth-century Ferrara. In addition, see A. D’Angelo, “N. Perotti traduttore di Plutarco: il ‘de Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute, oratio I’”, Studi umanistici piceni, 14 (1994), p. 39-47. 9 Both Ptolemy and Aristobulus followed Alexander in his expedition against the Persian Empire. Upon Alexander’s death, his lieutenant Ptolemy assumed the sovereignty on Egypt as Ptolemy I Soter and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty. Not much is known about Aristobulus, who was likely enrolled in Alexander’s army with logistic and engineering responsibilities.

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as “tales told of Alexander” (legomena)10. From the fifteenth century, when the text was recovered by humanists, the Anabasis was considered, as it is still today, the most important and reliable account of Alexander’s career. The focus, from Alexander’s accession to the throne of Macedon to his death thirteenth years later, is always on his military expedition and related matters. Unlike other authors such as Curtius Rufus, Arrian does not show any interest in the wider context of the campaign against the Persian Empire. As an appendix to the seven books of the Anabasis, Arrian also wrote a shorter composition entitled Indike11. It consists of a geo-ethnographic description of India, which is presented as a digression from an account of the journey of Alexander’s fleet from the Indus to the Persian Gulf. The majority of the surviving manuscripts of the Anabasis also contain the Indike12. The first known copy of the Anabasis to arrive in Western Europe was brought from Constantinople by Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459) in 141313. Around 1433-1437 Pier Paolo Vergerio (c. 1370-c. 1444)14, then at the court of the Emperor Sigismund in Buda, translated both the Anabasis and the Indike from Greek into Latin on commission from Sigismund15. This work, written in a simple and unsophisticated style, lay forgotten in the imperial library until the mid-1440s, when it was found by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, then a secretary in the chancellery of Frederick III – the appointed guardian, it is worth remembering, to the addressee of Piccolomini’s De liberorum educatione, Ladislaus. Enea

10 Arrian, Anabasis I, 2-3: “In fact other writers [than Ptolemy and Aristobulus] have given a variety of accounts of Alexander, nor is there any other figure of whom there are more historians who are more contradictory of each other, but in my view Ptolemy and Aristobulus are more trustworthy in their narrative […] However, I have also recorded some statements made in other accounts of others, when I thought them worth mention and not entirely untrustworthy, but only as tales told of Alexander”. I quote from P. A. Brunt’s English translation in the Loeb edition of Arrian. 11 Useful is the commentary in the Italian edition, L’Indiké di Arriano: introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento, ed. N. Biffi, Bari, 2000. 12 On the tradition of Arrian, see P. A. Stadter, “Arrianus, Flavius”, in Catalogus translationum et commentariorum. Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, 11 vol., Washington DC, 1960-2016, III, ed. F. E. Cranz, p. 1-20. 13 On Giovanni Aurispa, see E. Bigi’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 4, Rome, 1962, p. 593-595. He was in Constantinople in 1405-1413 and again in 1421-1423. A copy of the Anabasis was in his possession in 1421 (see Giovanni Aurispa, Carteggio, ed. R. Sabbadini, Rome, 1931, p. 159: “Arianus, De ascensu Alexandri, suavissimus et diligentissimus scriptor”) and it is mentioned again in 1424 among the Greek books he owned (letter to Ambrogio Traversari, Bologna, 27 August 1424, in ibid., p. 10-15, at p. 13: “Historia Arriani de Alexandro”). No work of Arrian is listed in the 1459 inventory of Aurispa’s library published by A. Franceschini, Giovanni Aurispa e la sua biblioteca: notizie e documenti, Padua, 1976, p. 53-169. It is worth noting, however, that other works concerning Alexander were owned by Aurispa: the inventory records a copy of “Quintus Curcius, de Hystoria Alexandri, sine albis” and a “Guicherus, Litteris latinis, in membranis sine albis”, which is likely to be Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis (ibid., p. 140, no. 469, and p. 96, no. 202, respectively). Copies of the Greek text of Arrian, whether in a complete or partial form, could be found in the Medici library and are today in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana; see E. B. Fryde, Greek Manuscripts in the Private Library of the Medici 1469-1510, 2 vol., Aberystwyth, 1996, I, p. 351-352. 14 For a biography of Vergerio, see Stadter, “Arrianus, Flavius”, p. 5-6. 15 For a discussion of the chronology of Vergerio’s translation, see Vergerio, Epistolario, p. 379-381, n. 1; the editor Leonardo Smith (ibid., p. lix-lx, n. 2) speculates that Sigismund got a copy of Arrian, in the original Greek, when he went to Rome in 1433 for his imperial coronation. Vergerio’s work was never printed, nor is there a modern edition of it. The two manuscripts which preserve it, in Brussels and Paris – the latter a copy made for the papal legate in Germany Tommaso Parentucelli, the future Pope Nicholas V – are listed by P. O. Kristeller, Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, 6 vol., Leiden, 1963-1997, III, p. 117b and 289a.

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Silvio was fully aware of the poor style adopted by Vergerio in his translation, written in a manner that he later described to his friend Panormita as “neque altus neque admodum ornatus”16; yet, in January 1454 he sent Vergerio’s autograph manuscript as a gift to Alfonso I the Magnanimous of Naples – who seems, however, to have been rather unimpressed with the homage17. Vergerio’s work appeared so crude to the learned Neapolitan court that Alfonso commissioned his historiographer Bartolomeo Facio (c. 1405/1410-1457) to revise and improve it – a task he undertook with the help of the Greek scholars Theodore Gaza and Niccolò Sagundino18. The revised edition was completed by a collaborator of Facio, the Genoese Giacomo Curlo (c. 1400-c. 1463), only in 1461, after the death of both Facio and Alfonso19. It was this final version, as corrected by Ludovico Odassi, which finally went into print in 1508 at Pesaro; and Pietro Lauro’s vernacular translation came out in Venice in 154420. Presenting Arrian’s De gestis Alexandri Macedonis21 to Emperor Sigismund, Vergerio wrote a prefatory letter which is one of the most eloquent testimonies of the humanist recovery of ancient sources on Alexander. Translating the Anabasis – with its telling exposition of the principles and method of work – gave Vergerio an opportunity to reflect on the craft of writing history. Even more importantly for the purpose of my argument, in his dedicatory letter to Sigismund Vergerio not only maintained that Arrian was the most trustworthy of the newly recovered sources on Alexander, but, as will be shown later on in this chapter, he also discussed and passed judgement on the entire Alexander tradition available to him. Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca Historica

The earliest surviving historical account of Alexander was written by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (first century bc). Book XVII of his monumental Bibliotheca Historica, a

16 Piccolomini’s letter from Wiener Neustadt to Panormita in Naples, dated 26 January 1454, is published in Der Briefwechsel des Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, ed. R. Wolkan, 3 vol., Vienna, 1909-1918, III.I, p. 433, no. 245. 17 Writing to Panormita in Naples, Piccolomini complained that his gift to Alfonso had gone unrewarded, for no sign of the king’s benevolence, let alone a thank-you letter, had reached him; the letter (from Wiener Neustadt, 30 June 1454), can be read in G. Tournoy, “La storiografia greca nell’Umanesimo: Arriano, Pier Paolo Vergerio e Enea Silvio Piccolomini”, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 55 (2006), p. 1-8, at p. 7-8. 18 In the dedicatory letter preceding his work, Facio eloquently qualifies Vergerio’s translation as “non satis latina neque Alexandri nomine gloriaque digna” (see Stadter, “Arrianus, Flavius”, p. 8). 19 On Bartolomeo Facio, see P. Viti’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 44, Rome, 1994, p. 113-121; on Giacomo Curlo, see G. Petti Balbi, “Curlo, Giacomo (Iacopo)”, ibid., vol. 31, Rome, 1985, p. 457-461. It has been noted that Facio’s revision was carried out “to such effect that the original Arrian was almost completely obscured in the process, but at least it was now elegant Latin” (A. M. Woodward, “Greek History at the Renaissance”, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 63 (1943), p. 1-14, at p. 8). 20 For the vicissitudes that led to the Latin translation of the Anabasis, see Vergerio, Epistolario, p. 379-382, n. 1, and Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 81. See also J. M. McManamon, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder: The Humanist as Orator, Tempe, 1996, p. 157-158, and Stadter, “Arrianus, Flavius”, esp. p. 3-12; in 1454 Niccolò Perotti began another Latin translation of Arrian, but it seems that he never completed his work: ibid., p. 6-7. For an additional, little-influential Latin version of the text, made by Carlo Valgulio and published in Venice also in 1508, see ibid., p. 12-14 and L. W. Daly, “Charolus Valgulius’ Latin Version of Arrian’s ‘Anabasis’”, The Library Chronicle of the University of Pennsylvania, 17 (1951), p. 83-89. 21 This is the title of the work as can be read in the incipit of Vergerio’s translation in the Paris manuscript (Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1302); see Vergerio, Epistolario, p. 382, n. 1.

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history of the world in forty books, is devoted to Alexander. Like Arrian, Diodorus starts his account with the crowning of Alexander and terminates it with his death at Babylon. Books XVI and XVIII to XX also concern Alexander, as they tell of the rise to power of his father Philip II and of the reigns of the Diadochi. Information on the immediate aftermath of Alexander’s death appears in Book XVIII, which begins with the only extant description of Alexander’s coffin and funeral carriage22. Unknown to Western Europe until the Renaissance, Diodorus Siculus had very little influence on the reception of Alexander, as the recovery of his work was rather late. Around 1454 Pope Nicholas V commissioned a Latin translation of all the surviving books of the Bibliotheca Historica. Three scholars were appointed to share the task, and Books XVI to XX – what we might call the ‘Macedonian section’ of the Bibliotheca – were entrusted to Pier Candido Decembrio23. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned, due to the death of the pope in March 1455, and was never resumed24. What Decembrio had completed by then – the translation of the first 48 chapters of Book XVI, concerning the life of Alexander’s father Philip – was later presented by him to Alfonso of Aragon king of Naples25. In a letter to Cicco Simonetta of 10 May 1459, Decembrio lamented the sudden interruption of his work: the five books he was asked to translate would have been extremely valuable, as “the entire story of Alexander was told” in them26. Diodorus’s account of the life of Alexander became available in 1516, when a Latin version of Books XVI and XVII by the Bolognese humanist Angelo Cospi was published in Vienna with a dedication to Emperor Maximilian I27. The choice of translating the two books focusing on the lives of Philip and Alexander must have been suggested by Cospi’s wish to ingratiate himself with the Emperor, who surely had an interest in the deeds of such notable ancient conquerors. When in 1539 a Greek edition of Books XVI to XX was printed in Basel by Vincentius Opsopoeus, the manuscript used as a source was likely the same codex (or a transcription of it) that Cospi himself had been given to translate from28. A Greek-Latin edition of all the surviving books of the Bibliotheca Historica came out in Hanau as late as 1604.

22 An excellent introduction to Book XVII is in the French edition of Diodorus Siculus, Bibliothèque Historique, Livre XVII, ed. P. Goukowsky, Paris, 1976, p. ix-lviii; see also L. Prandi, Diodoro Siculo, Biblioteca storica, libro XVII: commento storico, Milan, 2013. 23 Of the other surviving parts, Books I to V were given to Poggio Bracciolini, and Books XI to XV to George of Trebizond. 24 Poggio alone completed his task, and his translation of Books I to V was first printed in Bologna in 1472, proving to be extremely successful; see J. Monfasani, “Diodorus Siculus”, in Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, XI, ed. G. Dinkova-Bruun, p. 61-152, at p. 94-105. 25 On Decembrio’s work on Diodorus, see ibid., p. 115-121, as well as G. Pomano, “Codici di Diodoro Siculo in latino: traduttori e dediche”, Filologia mediolatina, 17 (2010), p. 151-175, and P. Viti, “Decembrio, Pier Candido”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 33, Rome, 1987, p. 488-498, at p. 496. 26 The letter is published in M. Simonetta, “Esilio, astuzia e silenzio: Pier Candido Decembrio fra Roma e Milano”, in Roma donne libri tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: in ricordo di Pino Lombardi, Rome, 2004, p. 81-107, at p. 103-104, letter XV: “Nam tota in eo historia Alexandri Magni descripta erat”. 27 Monfasani, “Diodorus Siculus”, p. 128-135, which includes a biography of little-studied Cospi. The princeps was immediately followed by two editions printed in Venice (Giovanni Tacuino, 1517 and Giorgio Rusconi, 1518). 28 As Monfasani (“Diodorus Siculus”, p. 128-129) explains, this manuscript once belonged to the humanist Janus Pannonius, and ended up in the library of King of Hungary Matthias Corvinus and from there to the Habsburg library. The codex is now ms. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Suppl. gr. 30, and contains Diodorus’s Book XVII to XX only.

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The Revived Interest in the Ancient Latin Sources Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni

Nothing is known about Quintus Curtius Rufus, the author of the Historiae Alexandri Magni. Although his identity remains obscure and the exact period in which he lived and wrote cannot be fully ascertained, it is generally agreed that the Historiae Alexandri was composed at the beginning of the first century ad, under the Julio-Claudian dynasty29. The longest ancient account of Alexander’s life which has come down to us, it is also the only Latin work from antiquity entirely devoted to Alexander. The text consists of ten books, but the first two are lost and other parts are lacking – the end of the fifth book (a lacuna which deprives us of the crucial account of Darius’s death), the beginning of the sixth and various bits of the tenth book (including the account of Alexander’s fatal illness)30. What remains is an account of Alexander’s career from his arrival in Phrygia to his death in Babylon. The loss of the first two books, in particular, was greatly lamented by humanists. In a letter of 1429 to Niccolò Niccoli, for instance, Poggio Bracciolini shared with his friend the exciting news he had just learned: a complete volume of Curtius’s Historiae Alexandri seemed to exist in the library of Nicholas of Cusa31. Sadly, this was not the case, for what Poggio had hoped to be the beginning of Curtius’s account turned out to be a “ridiculous and silly” sheet of no importance32.

29 On the vexed question of Curtius Rufus’s identity, see J. E. Atkinson, A Commentary on Q. Curtius Rufus’ Historiae Alexandri Magni Books 3 and 4, Amsterdam, 1980, p. 50-57. On his work and tradition, see Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce; S. P. Oakley, Studies in the Transmission of Latin Texts, I: Quintus Curtius Rufus and Dictys Cretensis, Oxford, 2020, p. 9-284; L’histoire d’Alexandre selon Quinte Curce, ed. M. Simon and J. Trinquier, Paris, 2014; the still important S. Dosson, Étude sur Quinte Curce, sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris, 1887; and E. Baynham, Alexander the Great: The Unique History of Quintus Curtius, Ann Arbor, 1998. The characteristics and limitations of the Historiae were discussed by W. W. Tarn, Alexander the Great, 2 vol., Cambridge, 1948, II: Sources and Studies, p. 91-122. 30 These losses are common to the entire textual tradition, as they are already present in the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Historiae, dating to the ninth century. One of these earliest manuscripts (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, ms. plut. 64.35) deserves a mention, as it preserves 105 verses which are the only extant fragment of the earliest known Roman d’Alexandre in the vernacular, a Franco-Provençal poem by Alberic of Pisançon. For the verses, written by a twelfth-century hand on two blank pages of the Curtius codex (fol. 115 v-116 r), see The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, vol. 3, p. 2-8 and 37-60. See Meyer, Alexandre le Grand, II, p. 69-101, and Alessandro nel Medioevo occidentale, p. 535-542. 31 Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. H. Hart, 3 vol., Florence, 1984-1987, I: Lettere a Niccolò Niccoli, p. 78, no. 28 (letter from Rome, 26 February 1429): “Nicolaus ille Treverensis scripsit litteras cum inventario librorum, quos habet. […] Item aliud volumen […] quo magis gaudeas, Q. Curtium, in quo sit primus liber; de fine nil scribit, sed existimo postquam principium est, non deesse reliqua” (“Nicholas of Trier has written a letter with an inventory of the books he possesses. […] To your greatest joy, [among them] there is a volume of Curtius Rufus, containing the first book; he says nothing about the end, but I believe that since the beginning is there, the rest of it must not be missing”). For the English translation, I have slightly modified the one offered in Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis, trans. P. W. G. Gordan, New York, 1974, p. 135-137, no. LXVI, at p. 135. 32 Ibid., p. 104, no. 38 (letter from Rome, 27 May 1430): “De A. Gellio et Curtio ridicula quedam attulit; A. Gellium scilicet truncum et mancum, et cui finis sit pro principio, et unam chartam, quam credebat esse principium Curtii, rem insulsam et ineptam” (“He [Nicholas of Trier] reported certain ridiculous things about the books of Aulus Gellius and of Curtius; that the Aulus Gellius was incomplete and imperfect and that its end was in fact its beginning, and that one leaf that he thought was the beginning of Curtius was ridiculous and silly”). For the English translation, I quote (with some changes) from Two Renaissance Book Hunters, p. 159-161, no. LXXXI, at p. 161 (where the letter, however, is dated 25 December 1429, for reasons explained at p. 338-339, n. 14).

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Strictly speaking, Curtius is not one of those ancient historians recovered from secular oblivion by fifteenth-century humanists, as the account he gave of the life of Alexander was well known in the Middle Ages. And yet, there is an urgency in the way in which, in the Quattrocento, his Historiae was presented, discussed, and called upon as a key trustworthy reference about Alexander that cannot be overlooked. Curtius’s Historiae was certainly read in antiquity, although we may infer it was not particularly successful, for no ancient author ever refers to him33. Unlike the works of Greek historians Plutarch, Arrian and Diodorus, the Historiae Alexandri did circulate in medieval Europe34. There was also an expanded version known as the ‘interpolated Curtius’, of which six exemplars survive35, in which material from various sources (mainly Justin, Solinus and Julius Valerius’s translation of the Pseudo-Callisthenes) were used to fill the lacunae in Curtius’s text and, more importantly, to replace the lost Books I and II. Between 1178 and 1182, the French cleric Walter of Châtillon composed a Latin epic poem in ten books devoted to Alexander, the Alexandreis, which is largely based on Curtius, whose text it follows very closely36. A hugely popular work for at least two centuries, which was also taught in schools and commented upon instead of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Alexandreis played an essential role in the reception of Curtius37, inspiring also some Alexander sagas, most notably the Spanish Libro de Alexandre, which are based on it38. Yet, as Robert Bossuat has noted, this did not contribute to a wider knowledge of the

33 Dosson, Étude, p. 357-360, has shown that before the twelfth century Curtius exerted an “influence anonyme”, as materials from the Historiae found their way into Latin and early medieval literature, but without an explicit mention of Curtius’s name. 34 S. Franzoni, “La tradition manuscrite des Historiae de Quinte-Curce au Bas Moyen Âge”, in Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce, p. 33-53. 35 Five out of the six manuscripts, now in Paris, Oxford, and the Vatican Library, originate from France and Italy and date from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The key reference is E. R. Smits, “A Medieval Supplement to the Beginning of Curtius Rufus’s Historia Alexandri: An Edition with Introduction”, Viator, 18 (1987), p. 89-124. See also Dosson, Étude, p. 322-324, 337-338 and 344; Meyer, Alexandre le Grand, II, p. 381-386 (Appendix 1, focusing on Oxford, Corpus Christi College, ms. 82), and Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 68. On the sixth, unique manuscript of the interpolated Curtius, now in Cambridge, which was copied in Bruges around 1471-1478, see A. Derolez, The Library of Raphael de Mercatellis, Abbot of St Bavon’s, Ghent, 1438-1508, Ghent, 1979, p. 41-44, and E. R. Smits, “A Medieval Epitome of the Historia Alexandri by Quintus Curtius Rufus: MS London BL Cotton Titus D.XX and MS Oxford Corpus Christi College 82”, Classica et mediaevalia, 42 (1991), p. 279-300, at p. 282-283, n. 21. The interpolated Curtius was first printed in Lyon in 1615. 36 The standard modern edition is Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, ed. M. L. Colker, Padua, 1978. See also Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 72, and the work of Jean-Yves Tilliette in La fascination pour Alexandre, IV, p. 13-22 (with bibliography) and in Alexandre le Grand à la lumière des manuscrits (“L’Alexandréide de Gautier de Châtillon dans son context: les manuscrits et leur(s) usage(s)”, p. 135-152). On the Alexandreis in general, see M. Lafferty, “Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis”, in A Companion to Alexander Literature, p. 177-199, and S. A. Parsons, “Poet, Protagonist, and the Epic Alexander in Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis”, in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transcultural Perspectives, p. 177-199. 37 Over 210 manuscripts of the Alexandreis survive, mostly from the thirteenth century: see Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, pp. xxxiii-xxxviii. The explanatory glosses and marginalia which are usually found in them have been studied by R. De Cesare, Glosse latine e antico-francesi all’Alexandreis di Gautier de Châtillon, Milan, 1951; see also An Epitome of Biblical History: Glosses on Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis 4.176-274, ed. D. Townsend, Toronto, 2008. As a text used in schools, the Alexandreis was not illustrated, but a few manuscripts contain drawings of a map of the world conquered by Alexander; more on this is in M. Destombes, “The Mappamundi of the Poem Alexandreidos by Gautier de Châtillon (ca. A.D. 1180)”, Imago mundi, 19 (1965), p. 10-12. 38 For the Spanish tradition, including the role played in it by the Libro de Alexandre, see Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 63-67, as well as Zuwiyya’s essay “The Alexander Tradition in Spain”.

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Historiae Alexandri per se, since it was from Walter, rather than directly from Curtius himself, that several medieval authors took material and inspiration for their Alexander books39. A new surge of interest in Curtius’s Historiae Alexandri – the non-interpolated, albeit lacunous text surviving from antiquity – can be detected in the fifteenth century40. The Latin text was printed in 1470-1471, almost simultaneously in Venice (Vindelinus de Spira) and Rome (Georgius Lauer)41; but the key moment marking the first significant circulation of Curtius’s account far and wide in the Italian peninsula dates to some thirty years before. In 1438 the Lombard humanist Pier Candido Decembrio (1399-1477) presented his patron, Filippo Maria Visconti Duke of Milan, with a vernacular (Lombard) translation of the Historiae Alexandri, which triggered an enormous popularity of Curtius’s work, first in Italy, then more widely in Europe, spreading well beyond the learned circles and reaching all those interested readers unfamiliar with the Latin language42. Decembrio did more than merely translate Curtius’s text; working from a Latin manuscript of the non-interpolated version that had once belonged to Petrarch43, he filled the internal lacunae with appropriate material from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander44 and wrote a Comparatione di Cesare et d’Alexandro, in imitation of the synkriseis usually found at the conclusion of Plutarch’s paired biographies. This vernacular version of Curtius, followed (or, in some codices, preceded) by the Comparatione, circulated widely in manuscript; it was also translated into Tuscan, Spanish, French and Portuguese and was printed several times,

39 R. Bossuat, “Vasque de Lucène, traducteur de Quinte-Curce (1468)”, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 8 (1946), p. 197-245, at p. 199. 40 For a list of surviving codices, nearly 100 of which are dated to the fifteenth century alone, see Dosson, Étude, p. 315-356, and the latest critical edition of Curtius’s Historiae, ed. C. M. Lucarini, Berlin, 2009, p. viii-xxv. 41 For an overview of the Latin editions printed between 1470 and 1639, including the one edited by Erasmus (Strasbourg, 1518), see the two essays by L. Claire, “Les éditions latines des Historiae de Quinte-Curce, de la princeps à Johannes Freinsheim”, and “Bibliographie des éditions latines des Historiae de Quinte-Curce, de la princeps à Johannes Freinsheim”, in Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce, p. 99-126 and 127-147, respectively. 42 On Decembrio’s translation of Curtius, see M. Pade, “Curzio Rufo e Plutarco nell’Istoria d’Alexandro Magno: volgarizzamento e compilazione in un testo di Pier Candido Decembrio”, Studi umanistici piceni, 18 (1998), p. 101-113 (with bibliography and a list of manuscripts and printed editions), M. Zaggia, “Appunti sulla cultura letteraria in volgare a Milano nell’età di Filippo Maria Visconti”, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 170 (1993), p. 161-219, at p. 199-219, and M. Materni, “Pier Candido Decembrio: un émule de Plutarque entraîné à l’école de Quinte-Curce”, in Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce, p. 169-187. See also Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives, I, p. 251-254, and Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 68. On Decembrio, see Viti, “Decembrio, Pier Candido”, and V. Zaccaria, “Sulle opere di Pier Candido Decembrio”, Rinascimento, 7 (1956), p. 13-74. 43 After Petrarch’s death in 1374, his Curtius codex, now ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 5720, passed to the famed library of the dukes of Milan in the castle of Pavia, where it was kept in the 1430s when Decembrio was secretary to Filippo Maria Visconti. The identification of this codex with the one used by Decembrio for his translation, first suggested by Resta (Le epitomi di Plutarco, p. 33-34, n. 2), has been demonstrated by E. Fenzi, “Petrarca lettore di Curzio Rufo”, in his Saggi petrarcheschi, Fiesole, 2003, p. 417-445. Of a different opinion is P. Ponzù Donato, “MS Varia 131 of the Biblioteca Reale di Torino and Decembrio’s Translation of Curtius Rufus”, Translat Library, 1.4 (2019), p. 1-15, at p. 2-3. On the library of Pavia, see E. Pellegrin, La Bibliothèque des Visconti et des Sforza, ducs de Milan au xve siècle, Paris, 1955, and the more recent M. G. Albertini Ottolenghi, “Note sulla biblioteca dei Visconti e degli Sforza nel castello di Pavia”, Bollettino della Società Pavese di Storia Patria, 113 (2013), p. 35-68. 44 For example, the account of Darius’s death (taken from Plutarch, Alexander XLIII) and Alexander’s illness (Alexander LXXV-LXXVI), which can now be read in M. Materni, “Pier Candido Decembrio: un émule de Plutarque”, p. 178 and 180-181.

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first in 1478 in Florence45. But Decembrio’s version of Curtius was still missing the two initial books, which he supplemented around 1450 by translating into the vernacular chapters 2 to 17 of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander (from Alexander’s birth to the immediate aftermath of the battle of the Granicus)46. Only four manuscripts contain the supplement from Plutarch in addition to the translation of Curtius and the Comparatione47; nevertheless, Decembrio conceived the three texts as a whole, referring to them as the “Istoria d’Alexandro Magno”. Decembrio took great care to present his work as a learned attempt to make a classical account accessible, through use of the vernacular, to a wider public, as well as to his patron Filippo Maria Visconti, who was fond of ancient works but not in command of Latin or Greek. It is no accident that several manuscripts of Decembrio’s translation are written in a humanist ‘littera antiqua’ hand, normally employed in Latin manuscripts48. Moreover, Decembrio began his translation by stating that, for the life of Alexander, only authoritative sources should be trusted, making it clear that Curtius was just such a source49. Even though Curtius’s work was known throughout the Middle Ages, the new interest it aroused in the Quattrocento and the high consideration it enjoyed at the time as an auctoritas allow us to discuss it here in close relation with the newly recovered sources from antiquity. Not only because, until the fourteenth century, knowledge of the Historiae Alexandri was largely indirect – that is, through intermediary sources such as Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis – but also, and more importantly, because humanists themselves presented Curtius as a newly available and more reliable account of Alexander’s life, as if it was one of the newly recovered sources from antiquity, well worthy of a place, in the humanists’s eye, next to those of the Greek historians. As we have seen, Poggio was eager to find a complete manuscript of the Historiae Alexandri, the first two missing books of which were particularly sought after. Dedicating his vernacular translation of the

45 For the notable popularity enjoyed by Decembrio’s text in the Spanish peninsula, see C. Pascual-Argente and R. M. Rodríguez Porto, “Ad Hispaniae fines: The Iberian Translations of Quintus Curtius Rufus and FifteenthCentury Vernacular Humanism”, in Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce, p. 189-211, and M. Materni, “Pier Candido Decembrio: una ‘biblioteca’ ibérica de historia clásica”, in Rumbos del hispanismo en el umbral del Cincuentenario de la AIH, vol. 7, Historia, ed. L. Guarnieri Calò Carducci, Rome, 2012, p. 35-41. As pointed out by Materni elsewhere (“Pier Candido Decembrio: un émule de Plutarque”, p. 186), the Comparatione had some circulation as an independent text, being printed as such in Perugia in 1520. 46 A transcription has been published by Materni, “Tracce plutarchee”, p. 269-279. As Pade has shown (“Curzio Rufo e Plutarco”, p. 107-109), Decembrio translated Plutarch from Guarino’s Latin version of the Life of Alexander, and not from the Greek – despite owning a Greek text of the Lives, now mss. Heidelberg, University Library, Palat. gr. 168 and 169, on which see Resta, Le epitomi di Plutarco, p. 103-108, and M. Petoletti, “Pier Candido Decembrio e i suoi libri: primi appunti”, in Retter der Antike: Marquand Gude (1635-1689) auf der Suche nach den Klassikern, ed. P. Carmassi, Wiesbaden, 2016, p. 147-190, at p. 162. 47 Pade, “Curzio Rufo e Plutarco”, p. 107-108 and 111-113. 48 Marianne Pade (ibid., p. 110-111) has noted that the Turin copy of the vernacular Curtius by Decembrio (ms. Biblioteca Reale, Varia 131), written before 1440, is “tra i primi esempi di un testo in volgare copiato in scrittura umanistica” (“among the earliest examples of a vernacular text written in a humanistic handwriting”. My translation). On that richly illuminated codex, see Ponzù Donato, “MS Varia 131”. 49 The passage, which I transcribe from ms. Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, I.VII.23, fol. 1 r, reads as follows: “Nelorigine antiqua dalexandro magno si come neglialtre vetustate sole evenire piu alautoritate cha ad altra ragione credere nebisogna poi che daletate e noticia nostra son molto distante” (“In the case of Alexander the Great, as much as in similar ancient examples, only the most authoritative sources should be trusted, as these facts are greatly distant from us both in terms of time and knowledge”. My translation).

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Historiae Alexandri to the duke of Milan, Pier Candido Decembrio presented Curtius as an auctoritas, while in the De politia litteraria, as we shall see, his brother Angelo called on Curtius to disprove and ridicule the fabulous tales of the medieval Alexander legend50. Most European rulers commissioned at least one copy of Curtius’s Historiae51, and humanist educational treatises advised children to peruse the work – not least because of its polished Latin. This is the case of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s De liberorum educatione for Ladislaus the Posthumous, discussed in the Introduction, as well as of the first humanistic educational treatise written for a woman, rather than for a man: namely, Leonardo Bruni’s De studiis et litteris liber. Dated around 1424, Bruni’s work is addressed to the gifted and learned Battista di Montefeltro, wife of the lord of Pesaro Galeazzo Malatesta, but was possibly intended for the benefit of her daughter Elisabetta Malatesta Varano52. Like Piccolomini, Bruni recommends his pupil to read the work of ancient historians and includes Curtius among them53. Clearly, the Historiae Alexandri was regarded as suitable reading for the young generations, for girls as much as for boys54. If both the instructive content and the refinement of language would make of Curtius an appropriate subject for youth to study, his dramatic, powerful account of Alexander’s life surely contributed to the entertainment he provided to older readers, too. Alfonso I of Naples and Ercole I d’Este were not alone in benefitting from the reading of Curtius – which, as we have seen in Chapter 2, was reportedly so effective as to make them cured from an illness. We know that the fifty-year-old Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent and wife of Jacopo Salviati, spent several evenings enjoining the story of Alexander being read to her from the pages of Curtius and Justin55. And several sources attest that Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, took delight in having read to him every day the works of a 50 North of the Alps, something similar was done by Vasque de Lucène, who translated Curtius’s Historiae Alexandri into French for the Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bold in 1468. The prologue and epilogue of his work are one of the most carefully constructed attacks on the fabulous tales of the medieval legend, for which see Bossuat, “Vasque de Lucène”, and Gaullier-Bougassas “Le projet humaniste de Vasque”, esp. p. 232-238, with ample bibliography. 51 See, for instance, the Curtius made for Federico da Montefeltro (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Urb. lat. 427), which will be discussed later on in Chapter 4, and the two codices owned by Matthias Corvinus and still in Budapest today (National Széchényi Library, Cod. Lat. 160, and Eötvös Loránd University Library, Cod. Lat. 4). 52 Alongside Kallendorf ’s introduction to his edited volume Humanist Educational Treatises, p. vii-xvi, which contains Bruni’s text (p. 92-125), see V. Cox, “Leonardo Bruni on Women and Rhetoric: De studiis et litteris Revisited”, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 27.1 (2009), p. 47-75, esp. p. 48. 53 Leonardo Bruni, “De studiis et litteris liber ad Baptistam de Malatestis/The Study of Literature to Lady Battista of Montefeltro”, in Humanist Educational Treatises, p. 92-125, at p. 108-109: “Placet ergo ad studia illa, de quibus supra dixi, in primis historiae cognitionem adiungere […]. Livium dico et Sallustium Tacitumque et Curtium et in primis Caesarem” (“To the aforesaid subjects there should first be joined, in my view, a knowledge of history […]. Livy, I mean, and Sallust and Tacitus and Curtius, and especially Julius Caesar”). In Vasque de Lucène’s 1468 translation of the Historiae Alexandri, Livy, Sallust and Curtius are also singled out as “les meilleurs historiens de la langue latine”; the relevant passage is quoted in Gaullier-Bougassas, “Le projet humaniste de Vasque”, p. 233. 54 On education in the Renaissance in general, see R. Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge, 2001, and W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance 1400-1600, New York, 1965; see also P. F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600, Baltimore and London, 1989, and The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. J. Feros Ruys, J. O. Ward and M. Heyworth, Turnhout, 2013. 55 Letter of Filippo de’ Nerli to Niccolò Machiavelli (from Rome, 17 November 1520): “Sappiate che io legho la sera a m.a Lucretia Justino et Quinto Curtio De rebus gestis Alexandri”. The letter is published in Niccolò Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. M. Martelli, Florence, 1971, p. 1200-1201, no. 256.

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number of ancient historians, including Curtius56. The high esteem in which Curtius was held in the Renaissance as an authoritative historian had even a visual sanction, which is found in the 1501-1503 fresco cycle decorating the Biblioteca Albèri, built next to the Orvieto Cathedral by archdeacon Antonio Albèri on the model of the Piccolomini Library in Siena57. Along the walls, monochrome portraits are painted of the most important representatives of each discipline, and for History, alongside the Roman Sallust and the 1470 editor of Plutarch’s Lives Giovanni Antonio Campano, the auctoritas appearing with his (imaginary) portrait is our Curtius. If the Historiae Alexandri provided its readers with plenty of detail, epic, suspense and drama, it also offered an ambiguous portrait of Alexander, at the same time good and evil. The figure of the great conqueror who showed himself to be merciful towards the captive family of Darius is overshadowed by the unforgivable crimes against his innocent companions, Callisthenes, Cleitus and Philotas. Curtius does not spare any detail of their murders, drawing attention to and commenting on disgraceful aspects which were merely touched on by other authors. He also stressed the negative influence that adopting Persian customs had on Alexander (the so-called ‘Persianisation’, emblematically expressed in the introduction of proskynesis at court, on which more in Chapter 4) and in this way warned his readers about the dangers of excessive power. This ambivalence lies behind, I believe, the diametrically opposed use of Curtius in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when his authority was employed in support of both a positive and a negative view of Alexander. Justin’s Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum

In the early first century ad, a certain Pompeius Trogus (or Trogus Pompeius) wrote the Historiae Philippicae, an immense world history in 44 books, in which special attention was given to the history of Macedon, from Philip II to Alexander and the Diadochi58. This compilation, which is lost apart from the summary prologues to each of the books, survives in an epitomized version compiled by the otherwise unknown Justin (Marcus Junianus Justinus) in the third century ad. Books XI and XII of his Epitoma are concerned with Alexander59.

56 While explicit mention of the name of Curtius is made only by Jacopo Languschi (Excidio e presa di Costantinopoli published in A. Pertusi, Testi inediti e poco noti sulla caduta di Costantinopoli, ed. A. Carile, Bologna, 1983, p. 169-180, at p. 172-173), additional evidence exists of Latin accounts of Alexander’s life being read to Mehmed II, which are surely to be identified as Curtius’s; see, for instance, the letter of 6 July 1453 that Isidore of Kiev sent from Crete to Cardinal Bessarion, published and commented in La caduta di Costantinopoli, ed. A. Pertusi, 2 vol., Milan, 1976, I: Le testimonianze dei contemporanei, p. 64-81 and 381-382. For Mehmed II’s interest in ancient history and his connections with Italian humanists, see F. Babinger, “Mehmed II, der Eroberer, und Italien”, Byzantion, 21 (1951), p. 127-170. 57 See L. Andreani and A. Cannistrà, “La Libreria Albèri nel duomo di Orvieto”, in Luca Signorelli (exhibition catalogue, Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria; Orvieto, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo; Città di Castello, Pinacoteca Comunale, 2012), ed. F. De Chirico, V. Garibaldi, T. Henry and F. F. Mancini, Cinisello Balsamo, 2012, p. 152-163. 58 See L. Braccesi, A. Coppola, G. Cresci Marrone and C. Franco, L’Alessandro di Giustino (dagli antichi ai moderni), Rome, 1993, esp. the essay by G. Cresci Marrone, “L’Alessandro di Trogo: per una definizione dell’ideologia”, p. 11-43. 59 See the essays collected in the recent Studi sull’Epitome di Giustino, ed. C. Bearzot and F. Landucci, 3 vol., Milan 2014-2016 (for Alexander in particular, see L. Prandi, “Alessandro il Grande e Giustino”, in the second volume II. Da Alessandro Magno a Filippo V di Macedonia, p. 3-15). A modern edition of the Alexander section of Justin’s Epitoma is

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The textual tradition of Justin’s work (often referred to as Trogus-Justin) has not received much scholarly attention60. The Epitoma was well known in the Middle Ages and was used as a source by influential writers such as Orosius, Vincent of Beauvais and the authors of some vernacular Alexander books. The popularity of Justin, however, really began in the fifteenth century. According to Ross, at least 175 manuscripts (that is, three-quarters of the overall 230 codices he traced) were produced in Italy in the fifteenth century61. These figures make Justin’s Epitoma stand out as by far the most popular ancient historical account of Alexander in the Italian Quattrocento62. Alongside the Latin texts, three different vernacular translations also circulated from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and were printed several times between 1477 and 159063. Although brief and in many respects inaccurate, Justin’s Epitoma nevertheless had some authority as the work of a respected historian. More importantly for my purposes, Justin presents Alexander as the conqueror of the world who never lost a battle or failed to subdue a besieged city – only death triumphed over him. According to Justin, Alexander, from the very start of his military expedition, made no secret of his intention to conquer “the entire world” (“universus terrarum orbis”: XI.6.3). Justin is the ancient source in which Alexander’s bold political ambitions are most clearly expressed64. Justin is often mentioned in Quattrocento literature, though usually side by side with Curtius Rufus. I think the reason for this conjunction might be that they complemented each other, in that Justin was regarded as the most useful supplement to the fragmentary Curtius Rufus, since he reports on events and episodes which are lost in Curtius – such as, for example, the death of Darius. In conclusion, the various classical sources on Alexander which became available starting in the early fifteenth century were not all, strictly speaking, new acquisitions. Nevertheless, they were enthusiastically welcomed by humanists as reliable historical accounts which were worth reading, recommending and teaching. Each of them contributed in different ways to the development of a new conception of Alexander, one which ultimately replaced

available: Justin, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, vol. 1: Books 11-12: Alexander the Great, ed. J. C. Yardley and W. Heckel, Oxford, 1997. 60 F. Rühl, “Die Textesquellen des Justinus”, Jahrbücher für classische Philologie, suppl. VI, Leipzig, 1872, p. 1-160; L. D. Reynolds, “Justin”, in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, p. 197-199. See also Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 76-77. 61 Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 76. 62 Fewer than 40 manuscripts of Arrian and nearly 100 of Curtius from the fifteenth century are known at present. Justin’s Epitoma was occasionally illustrated in the fifteenth century and richly illuminated manuscripts do survive, although with little consequence for the depiction of Alexander; see, e.g., mss. Ottob. lat. 1529 and 1417 in the Vatican Library discussed by Riccardo Scarcia in Vedere i classici, p. 315-317, no. 70 and 415-417, no. 112, respectively. A famous, though unillustrated, copy owned and annotated by Coluccio Salutati is today in the British Library, ms. Harley 4822; see G. Billanovich, “Lovato Lovati e il Giustino e il Beda di Pomposa”, in Pomposia monasterium modo in Italia primum: la biblioteca di Pomposa, ed. G. Billanovich, Padua, 1994, p. 181-212, at p. 199 and 202-203. 63 The fourteenth-century version, printed in Venice in 1477 and several times after that, can be read in Justin, Delle istorie di Giustino abbreviatore di Trogo Pompejo volgarizzamento del buon secolo tratto dai codici Riccardiano e Laurenziano e migliorato nella lezione colla scorta del testo latino, ed. L. Calori, Bologna, 1968. Reference to three (unillustrated) manuscripts of a humanist Italian version of Justin is made by Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 77. 64 See Tarn, Alexander the Great, II, p. 122-127, esp. p. 126.

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the adventures and tales recounted in the Romance and its tradition with deeds recorded by ancient historians. Humanist Use of Ancient Sources The humanist critical approach towards ancient sources made the discrepancy between the image of Alexander inherited from the Middle Ages and the very different one found in the newly recovered historical texts all the more evident. The myth of Alexander was subjected to a scholarly revision aiming at repossessing the ‘true Alexander’ as described by the ancients. In order to do so, the medieval tradition based on the Romance had to be rejected, and a clear distinction between ‘legend’ and ‘history’ had to be drawn. As I will show below, this attempt did not result in a fifteenth-century ‘debate on Alexander’ in humanist and learned circles; instead, the rejection of the legendary tradition seems to have been carried out largely, and all the more significantly, ex silentio. Among the many references to Alexander found in humanist writings, however, there are a few examples where an opposition between the legendary and the historical tradition is clearly articulated, using the terms fabula and historia, that is, ‘legend’ and ‘history’. Petrarch

The humanist attitude towards Alexander and his literary tradition has a prelude in the work of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374)65. Petrarch wrote at a time when the ancient Greek historical sources on Alexander had not yet been discovered, but showed a notable interest in the account of Curtius Rufus, whose Historiae Alexandri Petrarch was one of very few scholars to possess. Despite his limited access to historical accounts from antiquity, Petrarch shows the same critical and sceptical approach to the medieval legendary tradition which is central to the humanist conception of Alexander. Mentions of Alexander, mainly anecdotes from a variety of sources, are scattered throughout Petrarch’s oeuvre66. His real interest in the figure of Alexander, however, developed fairly late in his life, around the 1350s, and can be seen in the Collatio ducum67 and, more importantly, in De Alexandro Macedone, a biography written around 1355-1356 and included in his major historical work, De viris illustribus (composed around 13411343)68. The portrait of Alexander drawn by Petrarch is one of the harshest ever attacks

65 See, above all, the work of Enrico Fenzi, Saggi petrarcheschi, esp. “Alessandro nel De viris”, p. 447-468, and “Grandi infelici: Alessandro e Cesare”, p. 469-490. Valuable is also his “Petrarca e Alessandro: dal mito alla storia”, in Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce, p. 55-97. 66 A partial but useful list of references is in Petrarch, Triumphi, ed. M. Ariani, Milan, 1988, p. 309; see also Fenzi, “Petrarca e Alessandro”, p. 59, n. 8. 67 See E. Fenzi, “Scipione e la Collatio ducum: dal confronto con Annibale a quello con Alessandro Magno”, in his Saggi petrarcheschi, p. 365-416 (references to previous bibliography, especially the studies of Guido Martellotti and Giuliana Crevatin, are at p. 395, n. 24). 68 The life of Alexander is the fifteenth biography in De viris illustribus, ed. G. Martellotti, Florence, 1964, p. 58-71. On its date of composition, see E. Fenzi, “Le postille al Livio Parigino e la revisione del De viris”, in Reliquiarum servator: il manoscritto Parigino latino 5690 e la storia di Roma nel Livio dei Colonna e di Francesco Petrarca, ed. M. Ciccuto, G. Crevatin and E. Fenzi, Pisa, 2012, p. 175-202, at p. 190-191. For more on De viris illustribus, see Chapter 4 below.

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on him69. Alexander is presented as a vicious and ferocious man, prepared to indulge in any form of moral turpitude. Petrarch openly doubts his military valour, questions his reputation for liberality and makes no mention whatever of the good actions for which Alexander had usually been praised in medieval literature. For instance, the kindness he showed to the family of Darius captured at Issus – an episode that still centuries after Petrarch would be regarded as the example par excellence of the virtue of magnanimity – is “dismissed as an example of youthful and unrepeated mercy”70. Petrarch even accuses him of insanity and lust – vices typical of a tyrant which were rarely ascribed to Alexander in the historical tradition71. His negative attitude towards Alexander, however, was largely due to the nature of De viris illustribus, a work conceived in praise of Rome and based on the authority of Livy72, who had also attacked Alexander in a famous excursus (Ab urbe condita IX.17-19), claiming that had he got as far as Europe and encountered the Romans on the battlefield, he would doubtless have lost to them73. In Petrarch’s collection of biographies of famous men, there are only three non-Romans: Alexander, Hannibal and Pyrrhus, whose lives and deeds greatly undermined the (self-) promotion of Rome as the mightiest empire of all times; these externi viri were included only to prove the unquestionable superiority of Rome, and this explains Petrarch’s hostility to Alexander74. The sources on which De Alexandro Macedone is based are Justin and Curtius Rufus, whom Petrarch occasionally cites in the text. If Justin’s Epitoma provided him with much of the material to rely on75, it is nevertheless certain that Petrarch’s interest in Alexander really took off after 1355-1356, when he got hold of a manuscript of Curtius’s Historiae76. This personal copy is the heavily annotated ms. Par. lat. 5720, made for him from a codex of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona thanks to his friend Guglielmo

69 See G. Cary, “Petrarch and Alexander the Great”, Italian Studies, 5 (1950), p. 43-55. For the less harsh view of Alexander developed by Petrarch later in life, see G. Martellotti, “Linee di sviluppo dell’umanesimo petrarchesco”, Studi petrarcheschi, 2 (1949), p. 51-80. 70 I quote from Cary, “Petrarch and Alexander the Great”, p. 50. 71 See L. Braccesi, “Giustino e l’Alessandro del Petrarca”, in Braccesi, Coppola, Cresci Marrone and Franco, L’Alessandro di Giustino, p. 99-145, esp. p. 104-108. In presenting Alexander as a madman, Petrarch certainly had in mind the Alexander “vesanus” of Seneca, De beneficiis I.13.3. 72 For the crucial role played by Petrarch during the 1320s in the recovery of the work of Livy, see G. Billanovich, “Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (1951), p. 137-208. 73 On Petrarch, Livy and the relationship between Alexander and Rome, see L. Braccesi, L’ultimo Alessandro (dagli antichi ai moderni), Padua, 1986, and his L’Alessandro occidentale: il Macedone e Roma, Rome, 2006. See also Treves, Il mito di Alessandro; Fenzi, “Scipione e la Collatio ducum”, p. 390-394; and N. Biffi, “L’excursus liviano su Alessandro Magno”, Bollettino di studi latini, 25 (1995), p. 462-476. 74 As noted by Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 115, and G. Bodon, Heroum Imagines. La Sala dei Giganti a Padova: un monumento della tradizione classica e della cultura antiquaria, Venice, 2009, p. 19, n. 62, Petrarch was clearly drawing on Livy, who introduced Alexander, Pyrrhus and Hannibal in Ab Urbe Condita solely to demonstrate the pre-eminence of Rome. 75 As convincingly shown by Braccesi, “Giustino e l’Alessandro del Petrarca”. A copy of the Epitoma was in Petrarch’s library in Vaucluse in 1355, as noted by Pierre de Nolhac (Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 2 vol., Paris, 1907, II, p. 294). 76 See Fenzi, “Petrarca lettore di Curzio Rufo” and G. Billanovich, “Petrarca e i libri della cattedrale di Verona”, in Petrarca, Verona e l’Europa: atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Verona 19-23 settembre 1991), ed. G. Billanovich and G. Frasso, Padua, 1997, p. 117-178, at p. 150-154 and 174.

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da Pastrengo77; the extent of the handwritten marginalia is an adamant indication of the interest that Curtius’s text aroused in Petrarch and their content also reveals a less harsh attitude towards Alexander than that underpinning the biography of De viris illustribus78. The more we consider how accurate, but somehow dry, the account of Justin is, the more we come to realize just how much the dramatic story of Curtius, so full of details, lengthy descriptions and digressions, must have felt as a gift to Petrarch and the very few others that managed to get a copy of the text. In many passages of De Alexandro Macedone, Curtius and Justin are instrumental in establishing the historical truth (or what Petrarch thought to be the historical truth) of events or in dismissing popular beliefs concerning Alexander. Nevertheless, he did not regard either of them as infallible sources; and the general thesis underpinning De viris illustribus – the celebration of Rome as the supreme power of all times – remained Petrarch’s overriding interest79. Alexander’s virtues and good deeds were therefore stripped from Curtius’s ambiguous portrait, while Justin’s presentation of Alexander as a world conqueror, a communis opinio openly in conflict with the fact that he did not set foot in the West, was completely rejected. On the same grounds, Petrarch went so far as to contest the opening of the first book of Maccabees (1-3) where it is said that on Alexander’s death, “siluit terra in conspectus eius”80. In writing his De viris illustribus, Petrarch had a clear intention in mind, which he set out in the “Prohemium”: not to dream up fables, but rather to recount history (“neque michi fabulam fingere sed historiam renarrare propositum est”)81. This is a key point: not only because he mentions here the two categories of fabula and historia that fifteenth-century humanists will also employ, but because the reference to the fabulous tradition that had grown around Alexander, which is here condemned and rejected as untrue, couldn’t have been any clearer. With regard to history, Petrarch chose the most reliable sources on Alexander available to him; and it is precisely the reading of Curtius, as Enrico Fenzi has conclusively shown, that allows him to restore Alexander to the realm of history, as a credible figure as opposed to the almost super-natural hero

77 Ms. Par. lat. 5720 is among the nine codices from the fourteenth century traced by Dosson, Étude, p. 327; it was identified as Petrarch’s copy by de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, II, p. 94-98. 78 See Fenzi, “Petrarca e Alessandro”, p. 75-83, also with important remarks on the disjunction between Petrarch’s private, milder reaction to Curtius’s Alexander and his official, highly negative depiction of De Alexandro Macedone. 79 See ibid., esp. p. 58-76. 80 Petrarch, “De Alexandro Macedone” 45, in his De viris illustribus, p. 69: “Scio persuasum vulgo Alexandrum mundi dominum fuisse, que opinio extirpanda est. Sunt, fateor, scriptores aliqui prima fronte in hanc sententiam proni. Iam primum illud notissimum principium libri Machabeorum ‘siluit’ inquit ‘terra in conspectu eius’. Siluit, inquam, terra quam domuit, usitatum est enim ut victus sileat in conspectu victoris; at non omnis terra siluit quia non omnen vicit” (my emphasis) (“I know that the common people were persuaded that Alexander was the lord of the word, which is a belief that must be eradicated. I confess that there are a few authors that at first followed this opinion. First of all, that most famous opening of the book of Maccabees says ‘the earth fell silent before him’. I say, it is indeed customary that the earth that he subdued would lie quiet just like the defeated would lie quiet before the victor, but not the whole earth fell silent for he did not conquer it all”. My translation). 81 See Petrarch, “Prohemium”, ed. G. Martellotti, in his Prose, ed. G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara and E. Bianchi, Milan and Naples, 1955, p. 218-227, at p. 220.

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of the Romance retellings82. Yet, despite his concern with establishing the historical truth, Petrarch’s preoccupation with the glory of Rome was even more important to him. Exemplary of his biased attitude towards Alexander are his criticisms of Curtius Rufus and Justin, whom he reproached for excusing the vices of Alexander on account of his youth83. Petrarch also accused Walter of Châtillon, the twelfth-century author of the Alexandreis, of celebrating Alexander out of pure envy of Rome, in a passage which was taken almost verbatim from Livy84. What, then, was Petrarch’s attitude towards fabula, the legendary tradition of Alexander, which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, was still very popular in the fourteenth century? We can assume that he was well aware of the tales concerning Alexander; but, as with later humanists, his criticisms and disbelief are not stated expressly but instead conveyed ex silentio85. So, in De Alexandro Macedone, rather than mentioning the legend of Alexander, Petrarch simply ignored it. In other works, however, he mocked the beliefs connected to Alexander’s divine begetting by Ammon/Nectanebo. In De remediis utriusque fortune, Petrarch wrote that Olympias candidly confessed to Philip that Alexander was not his son86. For Petrarch, these stories were mere fabulae, which merited no belief whatever; as for the others – the Indian adventures, the ‘Flight with Griffins’, the ‘Submarine Voyage’ and so on – they were not even worth mentioning.

82 Fenzi, “Petrarca e Alessandro”, esp. p. 55-60; see also Cary, “Petrarch and Alexander”, p. 55, where it is stated that “Petrarch told a narrative which bears some semblance of historical veracity, and describes an historically possible Alexander” (my emphasis). 83 Petrarch, “De Alexandro Macedone” 43, in his De viris illustribus, p. 68: “Quem [scil. ebrietatem] miror scriptores quosdam nobiles et – quod est mirabilius – latinos, sui operis amore deceptos et quasi sortem iuvenis miseratos, non tantum excusare sed laudare etiam voluisse”) (“I am amazed that some authors who are not only distinguished but, even more astonishing, Latin, deceived [as they were] by the love for his [Alexander’s] doings and almost pitying the fate of that youth [scil. Alexander’s untimely death], still wanted not only to excuse his drunkenness but also to praise it”. My translation). On this famous passage, in which the “scriptores nobiles et latini” have been identified as Curtius Rufus and Justin, see Braccesi, L’ultimo Alessandro, p. 100-111. 84 Petrarch, “De Alexandro Macedone” 50, in his De viris illustribus, p. 70: “Livius tamen hanc assertionem levissimorum dicit esse Grecorum contra romanum nomen Parthorum etiam glorie faventium; que quidem, quod ille nescivit, levissimorum quorundam similiter est Gallorum, quos non veri studium non fides rerum non denique Alexandri amor ullus sed Romanorum invidia atque odium impellit” (“Livy maintains that the most frivolous among the Greeks exalted the reputation of the Parthians against the name of the Romans; he didn’t know, however, that similarly there are some most frivolous among the French who celebrate Alexander not out of sincere fondness or genuine historical truth, and not even out of love for him, but merely out of envy and hatred of the Romans”. My translation). It has long been established that behind the unnamed “most frivolous among the French” is Walter of Châtillon, whom Petrarch attacked several times (see, e.g. “Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italie”, ed. P. G. Ricci, in his Prose, p. 768-807, at p. 790-791) without ever mentioning him by name; see Braccesi, L’ultimo Alessandro, p. 111-120. Despite the open contempt shown by Petrarch for Walter, his own Africa was influenced by the Alexandreis; see G. Velli, “Petrarca e la grande poesia latina del XII secolo”, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 28 (1985), p. 295-310, esp. p. 300-306. For the passage of Livy upon which Petrarch’s attack is based, see F. Muccioli, “La rappresentazione dei Parti nelle fonti tra II e I secolo a.C. e la polemica di Livio contro i levissimi ex Graecis”, in Incontri tra culture nell’Oriente ellenistico e romano, ed. T. Gnoli and F. Muccioli, Milan, 2007, p. 87-115. 85 What Arnaldo Momigliano (“Erodoto e la storiografia moderna: alcuni problemi presentati ad un convegno di umanisti”, Aevum, 31 [1957], p. 74-84, at p. 76) noted in relation to the humanist attitude towards Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius (regarded as so blatantly false to be even unworthy of disproving) seems to be applicable here, too: “È perciò caratteristico del modo con cui l’alta cultura umanistica opera che essa non si disturbi nemmeno a dimostrare la falsità degli scritti di Dares e Dictys. Come mi faceva osservare un giorno il mio dotto amico Otto Kurz, quem honoris causa nomino, era una delle caratteristiche della aristocrazia di quella cultura di non occuparsi di argomenti troppo ovvi”. 86 Petrarch, Les remèdes aux deux fortunes/De remediis utriusque fortune, ed. and trans. C. Carraud, 2 vol., Grenoble, 2002, I, p. 768 (II.50: “De filio qui alienus inventus est”).

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As in Petrarch’s writings, so, too, in Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313-1375), there are frequent references to Alexander, which are found in both his early and later works87. His most significant assessment of Alexander’s life is in the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante of 1373-1375: believing that the “Alessandro” placed among the tyrants in Inferno XII.107 is none other than Alexander the Great, Boccaccio writes a biographical digression, describing him as a cruel and violent figure88. His portrait is not as harsh as Petrarch’s; but Alexander is nevertheless presented as a restless and ambitious conqueror, who stripped Asia of its riches and freedom and who did not hesitate to make his way by means of deceit and to murder enemies and friends alike. In order to show the true extent of Alexander’s wickedness, Boccaccio related an episode which he very likely took from his main source for this biography, Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni (III.1.11-8): the ‘Cutting of the Gordian Knot’89. Nowadays the most famous of Alexander’s deeds, this episode was extremely rare in the medieval tradition, since it was absent from the Pseudo-Callisthenes and its derivatives. The ‘Cutting of the Gordian Knot’ is morally ambiguous, showing Alexander as both a resourceful and a crafty man; Boccaccio, however, presented it in a totally negative light as an example of trickery – in contrast, it is worth noting, to the later tradition, where the episode took on a completely positive connotation90. The portrait of Alexander which emerges from Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (written in 1355-1360 but revised up until 1374), a moral composition centring on the misfortunes and tragic ends of famous men and women, is also quite negative91. There is no life of Alexander in this work, but Book IV includes the biographies of five people who

87 See R. Morosini, “‘Quell’antica pazzia’ di Alessandro e i ‘passaggi’ di Olimpiade: dal De casibus e De mulieribus alle Genealogie”, Critica del testo, 16.3 (2013), p. 273-305, and M. Campopiano, “Langues et genres littéraires de l’Alexandre italien”, in La fascination pour Alexandre, I, p. 323-362, at p. 352-354. 88 Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. G. Padoan, Milan, 1965, p. 574-577. Which Alexander Dante had in mind was not certain in Boccaccio’s time, as he begins by saying (ibid., p. 574-575): “Non dice l’autore quale, con ciò sia cosa che assai tiranni stati sieni, li quali questo nome hanno avuto; e, però che nel maggiore si contengono tutti i mali fatti da’ minori, credo sia da intendere che egli abbia voluto dire d’Alessandro, re di Macedonia” (“The author does not say which Alexander this is, although there were many tyrants who had this name. Because all evils done by the lesser ones are contained in the greatest, I believe that we are to understand that the author is alluding to Alexander, king of Macedonia”. I quote the English translation from Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, trans. M. Papio, Toronto, 2009, p. 485). Today scholars generally agree on the identification of Dante’s “Alessandro” as Alexander of Pherae; see G. Martellotti, “Alessandro Magno”, in Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vol., Rome, 1970-1978, I, p. 117-119, at p. 118-119. I am inclined, however, to think that the person intended is, in fact, Alexander the Great, as was clearly stated by the first commentators on the Commedia, such as Guido da Pisa (Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis or Commentary on Dante’s Inferno, ed. V. Cioffari, Albany, 1974, p. 219 and 229-230) and l’Ottimo (L’Ottimo commento della Divina Commedia. Testo inedito d’un contemporaneo di Dante, ed. A. Torri, 3 vol., [s. l.] 1995, I, p. 228-229) as well as the most influential Cristoforo Landino (Comento sopra la Comedia, ed. P. Procaccioli, 4 vol., Rome, 2001, II, p. 632). 89 Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, p. 575. On the episode, see L. E. Roller, “Midas and the Gordian Knot”, Classical Antiquity, 3 (1984), p. 256-271, and Alessandro nel Medioevo occidentale, p. 560-562 (M. Liborio); still useful is Carraroli, La leggenda di Alessandro, p. 318-339. 90 See Chapter 5, n. 81 below. A tyrannical Alexander, stripped of the generosity, which was his distinguishing characteristic throughout the Middle Ages, also appears in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris LXIX (“De Busa canusina apula muliere”), ed. V. Zaccaria, Milan, 1967, p. 274-279, at p. 276. 91 See M. Campopiano, “Les multiples portraits du roi Alexandre en Italie”, in La fascination pour Alexandre, II, p. 927954, at p. 940-941.

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were either his friends (Callisthenes and Eumenes of Cardia: IV.7 and IV.11 respectively), his relatives (his mother Olympias and her brother Alexander the Molossus king of Epirus: IV.12 and IV.8)92 or his enemy (the Persian King Darius: IV.9). Boccaccio credits Alexander with a single act of magnanimity, recounted by Justin (Epitoma XI.15.14-15), and that is when, on hearing of Darius’s death, he ordered the body to be solemnly buried according to Persian custom93. This merciful behaviour, however, could do little to redeem the overall image of Alexander as a greedy conqueror and a tyrant, as shown especially in the life of the philosopher Callisthenes, the official historian of the Asian expedition, who refused to give Alexander the divine honours he claimed for himself and paid for this opposition with imprisonment and, finally, his own life94. It seems significant that Alexander, whom Boccaccio denied a biography of his own, is very much present in De casibus virorum illustrium, the events of his life appearing all the more disreputable because narrated by some of the people for whose misfortunes, or even death, he was responsible. Not only did he order Callisthenes’s murder and wage war on Darius, but, in Boccaccio’s view, the terrible fates of his successors – Eumenes of Cardia, ruler of Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, and Olympias, who both died in the civil wars fought over the throne of Macedon95 – were in retribution for Alexander’s overweening ambition and insatiable thirst for glory96. Doom seemed to touch everyone connected to Alexander, as Boccaccio makes clear in two additional chapters: on the miserable destiny of the Diadochi (IV.10); and on Alexander’s wife and legitimate child (IV.14). Even his uncle, Alexander Molossus, who died in the attempted conquest of Magna Grecia, shared the same destiny97. Like Petrarch, Boccaccio made extensive use of Curtius Rufus and Justin, whose works he possessed98; but he also referred to a “Guiglielmo d’Inghilterra”, who is none other than Walter of Châtillon, an author dismissed by Petrarch99. Boccaccio was, of course, well aware of the legendary tradition, and in his youth he personally transcribed texts related to the Romance in his Zibaldone Laurenziano100. As with Petrarch, he never

92 Morosini, “‘Quell’antica pazzia’ di Alessandro”, p. 275, n. 9, mistakenly identifies this Alexander with Alexander the Great; but the biography leaves no doubt about his identity, starting with the title: “De Alexandro Epyrotarum rege”. For Alexander Molossus, see Braccesi, L’Alessandro occidentale, p. 43-54. 93 Giovanni Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium IV.9 (“De Dario Persarum rege”), ed. P. G. Ricci and V. Zaccaria, Milan, 1983, p. 316-322, at p. 320-322. A copy of Justin’s Epitoma was in Boccaccio’s library: see A. Mazza, “L’inventario della ‘parva libraria’ di Santo Spirito e la biblioteca di Boccaccio”, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 9 (1966), p. 1-74, at p. 33. 94 See Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium IV.7 (“De Callisthene phylosopho”), p. 306-312. For more on Callisthenes, see Chapter 4 below. 95 A second and even more dramatic biography of Olympias is in De mulieribus claris LXI (“De Olympiade regina Macedonie”), p. 246-251. 96 As noted by Campopiano, “Les multiples portraits”, p. 941. 97 On the confusion between, and occasionally conflation of, Alexander and his uncle in the Middle Ages, see Braccesi, L’ultimo Alessandro, p. 34-35. 98 See Mazza, “L’inventario della ‘parva libraria’”, p. 50; Boccaccio prides himself on his in-depth knowledge of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri in his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, p. 641: “Io abbia non una volta ma più veduto Quinto Curzio, che di lui [Alessandro] pienamente scrive”. 99 Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, p. 641. 100 Now ms. plut. 29. 8 in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. See Morosini, “‘Quell’antica pazzia’ di Alessandro”, p. 281, and F. Di Benedetto, “Presenza di testi minori negli zibaldoni”, in Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: memoria, scrittura, riscrittura, ed. M. Picone and C. Cazalé Bérard, Florence, 1998, p. 13-28, at p. 14, 26 and 28.

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mentioned the ‘Flight with Griffins’ or the ‘Submarine Voyage’; but the attention he gave to the reputedly divine birth of Alexander is particularly interesting. In the Amorosa visione (VII.82), an early work composed in 1341-1343 and revised around 1360, Boccaccio explicitly mentions Nectanebo riding alongside King Philip, both of them proudly gazing at Alexander, who precedes them on horseback101. In later references to the birth of Alexander, however, the name of Nectanebo no longer appears, and the idea of Alexander’s marvellous begetting is vehemently rejected. Towards the end of his Genealogiae deorum gentilium (XIII.71.1-2), Boccaccio explains why he did not include Alexander in his work102: the story that he was fathered by Zeus in the guise of a serpent is a “fabula” and a “stultitia” which should not be believed103. Not only did Alexander allow this fable to circulate, according to Boccaccio, but he bribed the priests of Zeus Ammon at the temple of Siwa into confirming his birth from the god104. Alexander was therefore willing for his mother to be considered an adulteress105, and he himself a bastard, in order to justify his claim to be immortal. Boccaccio finishes by stating that Alexander was denied a place in the Genealogiae, firstly, because he was not the son of Zeus and, secondly, because he tried to gain immortality through deceit rather than virtue. Both Petrarch and Boccaccio dismissed Alexander’s divine birth as a fabula which was not to be believed, but whereas Petrarch did it ex silentio, Boccaccio formulated a response which is particularly significant for my purposes because of his reassessment of the word fabula in Book XIV of the Genealogiae deorum gentilium106. As part of his battle in defence of poetry, Boccaccio distinguished four types of fabulae, each containing a different combination of fact and fiction and a certain degree of truth; none of them is contemptible, he says, apart from those belonging to the fourth type, which have no truth whatever in them and are concocted by deranged old women (“delirantium vetularum inventio”). Boccaccio does not provide examples of such foolish fables; but the legendary stories of Alexander might well belong to this fourth type, as suggested by the words he

101 Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione, ed. V. Branca, Milan, 1974, p. 167; Darius of Persia also follows the group: “Venia sopra un caval leggiadro e isnello / Dario tutto cruccioso nell’aspetto / e con sembiante dispietato e fello, / e sanza aver di tal andar diletto” (VII.85-88). 102 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogiae deorum gentilium, ed. V. Zaccaria, Milan, 1998, p. 1350-1353. Boccaccio similarly excluded Scipio Africanus, who, in a story modelled on Alexander’s which I mentioned earlier in Chapter 1, was also rumoured to have been fathered by a divine serpent. 103 Alexander’s begetting by a serpent is in Justin, Epitoma XII.16.2. 104 Boccaccio’s source is here Justin, Epitoma XI.11.6, who is the only source stating Alexander’s bribery. 105 As such Olympias is depicted also in De mulieribus claris LXI, p. 248. 106 See esp. Genealogiae deorum gentilium XIV.9, p. 1410-1418. From among the vast bibliography on this theme, see P. Pionchon, “La Généalogie des dieux païens entre le Décaméron et les nouvelles des humanistes du premier xve siècle”, Cahiers d’études italiennes, 10 (2010), p. 55-78, esp. p. 56-61, and F. Tateo, ‘Retorica’ e ‘poetica’ fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Bari, 1960, p. 116-160; see also P. G. Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age, Leiden and New York, 1994 (on Boccaccio, see p. 151-153), and A. Hortis, Studj sulle opere latine del Boccaccio, Trieste, 1879, p. 174-197. Though focussing on the matière de Troie and not on the Alexander tradition, valuable insights are in A. Punzi, “Omero sire?”, in Posthomerica I: tradizioni omeriche dall’Antichità al Rinascimento, ed. F. Montanari and S. Pittaluga, Genoa, 1997, p. 85-98, esp. p. 97-98, and F. Guidetti, “Appunti sulla fortuna del mito troiano: riflessioni a margine di un libro recente”, Status Quaestionis, 8 (2015), p. 141-176. On the situation before Boccaccio, see S. Sarteschi, “Valenze lessicali di ‘novella’, ‘favola’, ‘istoria’ nella cultura volgare fino a Boccaccio”, in Favole parabole istorie: le forme della scrittura novellistica dal Medioevo al Rinascimento. Atti del Convegno di Pisa, 26-28 ottobre 1998, ed. G. Albanese, L. Battaglia Ricci and R. Bessi, Rome, 2000, p. 85-108.

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uses to describe the story of his divine birth (“fabula”, “stultitia” and even “mendaciorum fascinationes”) and by his silent omission of episodes such as the ‘Flight with Griffins’. Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria

Like his older brother Pier Candido, Angelo Decembrio (c. 1415-post 1467) greatly valued Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni107. In the 1440s, he copied the entire Latin text (Books III-X) twice: the autograph manuscripts, both heavily annotated by Angelo, are now in Budapest (National Library, ms. Clmae 161, written in 1444) and in the Vatican Library (ms. Vat. lat. 4597, written between 1446 and 1450)108. In the latter, he also attempted to reconstruct the content of the lost Books I and II by drawing on the accounts of Arrian, Plutarch and Justin109. The Budapest autograph manuscript contains a short treatise composed by Angelo himself, entitled Disputatio de condicionibus pacis inter Alexandrum et Darium reges (or Disputatio egregia), which is also preserved in ms. 343 of the Bibliothèque Municipale of Caen110. The Disputatio is a learned discussion of an episode reported by Curtius; it was reworked a few years later by Decembrio, who included it in his major work, De politia litteraria (or literaria) (VI.67)111. In the Disputatio Angelo points out contradictions in the account of Curtius and concludes that such inaccuracies are not acceptable in a text which claims to be the work of a true historian112; in De politia litteraria he condemns vernacular translations of classical authors – in his opinion, a practice which should not be encouraged113 – clearly referring to the work of his brother Pier Candido, whose Italian version of Curtius, as we have seen above, had been completed only a few years before. Nevertheless, when it came to disproving the fabulous tales of the medieval legend of Alexander, Angelo invoked the authority of Curtius. Chapter 68 in Book VI of his De politia litteraria, written in the 1450s but set in the court of Leonello d’Este in Ferrara in the 1430s and presented as a dialogue between Leonello and his courtiers114, contains 107 See P. Viti, “Decembrio, Angelo Camillo”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 33, Rome, 1987, p. 483-488, with bibliography. 108 The two manuscripts are described by Dosson, Étude, p. 333 and 348. See also P. Scarcia Piacentini, “Angelo Decembrio e la sua scrittura”, Scrittura e civiltà, 4 (1980), p. 247-277, and E. Giua, “Un nuovo codice autografo della Disputatio egregia di Angelo Decembrio (Caen, Bibl. Municipale 343)”, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 45 (2004), p. 211-241, at p. 213-218. 109 For the incipit of ms. Vat. lat. 4597, containing Decembrio’s discussion of the lost books of Curtius, see Dosson, Étude, p. 348. 110 See Giua, “Un nuovo codice”; on the decoration of the Caen manuscript copied in 1447, see A. Melograni, “Tra Milano e Napoli a metà Quattrocento: la Disputatio egregia di Angelo Decembrio e la bottega del Magister Vitae Imperatorum”, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 45 (2004), p. 187-209; see also F. Gualdoni, “Sulle tracce di Angelo Decembrio, umanista milanese tra Napoli e Spagna (1447-1462)”, ibid., 49 (2008), p. 125-155. 111 The text of the Disputatio was published by the Hungarian historian and collector Miklós Jankovich, who owned the Caen manuscript in the early nineteenth century: Angelo Decembrio, De conditionibus pacis inter Alexandrum M. et Darium reges, ut apud Q. Curtium legitur Disputatio, ex mss. codd. Jankowichianis nunc primum edita, Budapest, 1825. 112 Ibid., p. 2. See also Giua, “Un nuovo codice”, p. 218-219. 113 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, p. 163 (I.6.1). 114 Giua, “Un nuovo codice”, p. 211-212, n. 2, provides a list of bibliographical references on the book and its composition, among which it is worth mentioning A. Biondi, “Angelo Decembrio e la cultura del principe”, in La corte e lo spazio: Ferrara estense, ed. G. Papagno and A. Quondam, 3 vol., Rome, 1982, II, p. 637-657, and D. Friggè, “Redazioni e

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an attack on the tapestries produced at the time in northern Europe which hung on the walls of many Italian palaces. Weavers and designers, writes Decembrio, are clumsy and ignorant, because they are concerned only with the opulence and colour of the tapestry and do not care about what they actually depict. Many of the subjects of their tapestries are popular absurdities, like the tale of Trajan and the widow or that of Pope Gregory, and no attention is given to what ancient historians have, in fact, recorded. For example, Decembrio continues: “[The weavers] represent Bucephalus, Alexander’s horse, not with the jaws of an ox, as Curtius describes him and as his very name in Greek makes clear, but rather as some hell-horse of Pluto’s or Charon’s, or like Jason’s fettered fire-breathing bulls. And so it goes on, wherever one looks, through the folly of these northern people”115. In the context of the present discussion, it is important to note that Decembrio, in order to disprove the legendary representation of Bucephalus as a horned and monstrous beast, turned to a source which, albeit not new, was now regarded as the most authoritative of all – Curtius, even though, as Michael Baxandall pointed out, there is no relevant description of Bucephalus in what survives of the Historiae Alexandri. Decembrio’s actual source remains obscure; Baxandall suggested that a possible inspiration might have been a passage from Arrian’s Anabasis (V.19.5), in which Bucephalus is said to have a brand with an ox-head, after which he took his name116. As mentioned above in Chapter 1, however, this explanation for Bucephalus’s name is found in several ancient authors, including Pliny (Naturalis Historia VIII.64.154), who was often quoted by Decembrio in De politia litteraria. The description of the monstrous and savage Bucephalus is so vivid that Decembrio very likely had a visual source in mind, if not before his eyes – presumably a Northern tapestry of the type he was attacking. A tapestry very close to the one described by Decembrio still exists: it is part of the Doria tapestries two-piece set, which has already been discussed in Chapter 2. If one of the tapestries, as we have seen, depicts the marvellous adventures of Alexander in the East, including the flight with griffins and the descent into the sea, the other one (Plate IV) illustrates episodes from the childhood and youth of Alexander, among which is the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ (Plate X). Alexander’s horse is first brought to Philip and then mounted by his young master; it is depicted as a ferocious creature with twisted horns and sharp teeth, fettered with chains and clearly, as the human remains scattered on the ground of his iron cage testify, a man-eating beast. This corroborates Decembrio’s observation that, around the mid-fifteenth century, the Bucephalus depicted north of the Alps was still the legendary monster of the Romance.

tradizione della ‘Politia litteraria’ di Angelo Decembrio”, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 37 (1994), p. 27-65. For the first publication of Chapter 68, with an English translation, see M. Baxandall, “A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Leonello d’Este: Angelo Decembrio’s De Politia Litteraria Pars LXVIII”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 26 (1963), p. 304-326. On the Ferrara court under Leonello and Borso d’Este and its artistic taste and patronage, see Le muse e il principe, esp. the essays of Charles Rosenberg and Nello Forti Grazzini, in I, p. 39-52 and 53-62, respectively. On Decembrio and the use of Curtius at Ferrara, see Grafton, What was History?, p. 49-61. 115 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, p. 428 (VI.68.10): “Inde Alexandri Bucephalum equum, non cuiusmodi Curtius exponit et animalis Graeca declarat appellatio, quod rictus bovis exhiberet, sed ut infernalem Plutonis vel Charontis equum; aut Iasonis tauros ore flammas evomentes, cathenatos cruribus; et reliqua passim pro eius transalpinae gentis vanitate”. 116 Baxandall, “A Dialogue on Art”, p. 317, n. 46.

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Decembrio provides the best eyewitness testimony we have for the dramatic change from ‘legend’ to ‘history’ in the Alexander tradition. He dismisses the artistic production based on the countless versions of the Romance, still so popular in the Italian courts of the time, as contemptible “vanitas” flourishing north of the Alps, and relegates “inter fabulosa” all vernacular books, which, in his view, should be banished from the ideal library and are useful only for entertaining women and children on winter nights117. Even the vernacular works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, alongside texts written in French and Spanish, are placed “cum Gualfredis, Gualteriisque similibus, cum Cassiodoris et Isidoris118”, in an undistinguished group of medieval authors including Walter of Châtillon (“Gualterius”) and ‘Gualfredus’ – probably Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Vita Merlini and Historia regum Britanniae were at the origin of the Arthurian literature. All of them, as Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti has noted, are scornfully referred to in the plural119. There was no room in De politia litteraria for the medieval legend of Alexander in any form. It should be emphasised that this was wishful thinking on Decembrio’s part: on the shelves of fifteenth-century libraries, including that of the Este in Ferrara, where Decembrio composed De politia litteraria, chivalric literature and Italian poets continued to have their place alongside Latin and Greek works, which were usually present in vernacular translation such as the Italian version of Curtius Rufus by Angelo’s brother Pier Candido120. Pier Paolo Vergerio

We have seen earlier that a Latin translation of Arrian’s Anabasis and Indike was made by Pier Paolo Vergerio in the 1430s. Although it was neglected for nearly twenty years after its 117 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, p. 163 (I.6.1): [Leonello is speaking about Feltrino Boiardo’s vernacular version of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass] “Equidem inter fabulosa recipiendum arbitror […] Denique cum iam in omnium media turba consistimus, huius Asini mentio, quoniam abs te vulgaris effectus est, menti subiecit eos nunc libros memorare, quos apud uxores et liberos nostros nonnunquam hybernis noctibus exponamus”. In his Genealogiae deorum gentilium XIV.10, Boccaccio employed a similar image when he spoke of a “delirantem aniculam, circa foculum domestici laris una cum vigilantibus ybernis noctibus” recounting tales (“fabellas Orci, seu Fatarum, vel Lammiarum”) to scare and entertain the young and the elderly (“velit aut terrorem incutere parvulis, aut oblectare puellulas, aut senes ludere”). 118 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, p. 163-164 (I.6.2-3): “Caeterum vulgarium actorum frequentissima sunt Dantis, Petrarchae Boccaciique volumina. Sunt et gallica hispaniaque lingua intra nationem nostram advecta […] Alius quippe eis locus assignandus est cum Gualfredis Guateriisque similibus, cum Cassiodoris et Isidoris palatini stili lampade coruscantibus”. 119 A. Tissoni Benvenuti, “Guarino, i suoi libri, e le letture della corte estense”, in Le muse e il principe, I, p. 63-82, at p. 76: “tutti sprezzantemente al plurale”. For Decembrio’s ideal library, as envisioned in De politia litteraria, see C. S. Celenza, “Creating Canons in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara: Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria, 1.10”, Renaissance Quarterly, 57 (2004), p. 43-98 (see esp. p. 60-61 for the passages discussed above), as well as Id., “An Imagined Library in the Italian Renaissance: The Presence of Greek in Angelo Decembrio’s De politia literaria”, in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. A. Blair and A.-S. Goeing, 2 vol., Leiden, 2016, I, p. 393-403. 120 See Tissoni Benvenuti, “Guarino, i suoi libri”. A significant number of ancient authors in their vernacular translations are listed, for instance, in the 1495 inventory of the library of Ercole I d’Este, on which see G. M. Anselmi, “La storiografia delle corti padane”, in La storiografia umanistica: convegno internazionale di studi, Messina, 22-25 ottobre 1987, ed. A. Di Stefano, G. Faraone, P. Megna and A. Tramontana, 3 vol., Messina, 1992, I.1, p. 205-232, at p. 211. On the complex nature of De politia litteraria and the discrepancy between the actual cultural life at the Ferrara court and Decembrio’s depiction of it, an eloquent passage can be found in Biondi, “Angelo Decembrio e la cultura del principe”, p. 641.

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completion, this work is important for my discussion because of the dedicatory letter to his patron, Emperor Sigismund121. According to Vergerio, Arrian, in recounting the deeds of Alexander, “followed the most reliable authors and therefore seems worthy of trust”122. Immediately afterwards, Vergerio takes into consideration the tradition which had grown up around Alexander, with the aim of contrasting other accounts unfavourably with that of Arrian. Vergerio divides this tradition into three categories123. The first comprises writers who have reported popular legends and tales about Alexander as if they were true – Leonardo Smith, the editor of Vergerio’s correspondence, suggested that this was a reference to the Pseudo-Callisthenes, his Latin translator Julius Valerius and probably other medieval authors associated with the Romance. Vergerio’s second category consists of authors who either praised Alexander or detracted from his glory in accordance with their own personal interests – according to Smith, an allusion to Plutarch, but I would also suggest the name of Walter of Châtillon, whom Petrarch similarly accused, as seen above, of celebrating Alexander in order to hide his personal envy of Rome. The third category, says Vergerio, includes those historians who cared little about the content of their work and paid attention only to the style – surely Curtius Rufus and Justin, as Smith has also suggested124. As I have explained in the Introduction, the end result, Vergerio concludes, is that readers of such stories about Alexander are unable to tell whether they are being presented with a legend or with a true history (“fabulasve an historia vera”). The clear implication is that Arrian, whom Vergerio has chosen to translate, provides the most authoritative and reliable account of Alexander. Vergerio was not alone in admiring Arrian, whose Anabasis is still nowadays regarded as the most accurate and trustworthy account of Alexander’s life. But it is significant that, in presenting his translation to his patron, Vergerio ventured to judge the entire Alexander tradition available in his time, dismissing not only the legendary tradition deriving from the Pseudo-Callisthenes, but also Curtius and Justin, whom the previous generation had regarded as highly reliable historians of Alexander. Of course, his critical judgement may, however, have been influenced by a desire to promote his own translation of Arrian by denigrating the Greek author’s Roman competitors. Arrian was also commended as a respectable historian by Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Not only did he praise his account in De liberorum educatione written for Ladislaus the Posthumous, as mentioned earlier on in the Introduction, but he listed the Latin translation

121 Despite its inclusion in appendix to Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 375-377, Vergerio’s dedicatory letter has attracted very little scholarly attention. 122 Vergerio, Epistolario, p. 381-382: “In eis describendis [scil. the deeds of Alexander] certiores secutus sit auctores, atque ideo fide dignus videatur”. 123 Ibid., p. 382: “Nam ex ceteris quidem historie scriptoribus, qui multi fuerunt multumque sibi invicem dissonantes, aliqui, vulgarem famam secuti, non que gessit Alexander, sed que de eo passim ferebantur, ea tanquam vere gesta conscripserunt. Alii favore gentis et domestice glorie studio in enarrandis ad laudem eius operibus modum excesserunt. Nonnulli e contra, odio vel invidia, sive ut aliis morem gererent, qui tanti nominis splendore offendebantur, detrahere rebus gestis conati sunt; quidam insuper, privatim ambitione querendi nominis et proprie laudis cupiditate, non quid gestum ab eo fuerit, sed quid decore de illo scriptum memorie posterorum mandari posset, hoc solum extimaverunt; nec tam veritatem rerum quam figmentorum lenocinium amplexi sunt”. The letter is also summarised by McManamon, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder, p. 157. 124 For Smith’s comments, see Vergerio, Epistolario, p. 382, n. 1.

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of Arrian among the achievements of Vergerio’s life125. It will be remembered that Piccolomini was the man who discovered Vergerio’s Arrian after years of neglect, and later donated it to Alfonso of Naples. In the accompanying letter to the king, Piccolomini presented his gift as a most rare book which he himself had found while exploring the famously rich libraries north of the Alps (“inter bibliothecas, que multe sunt apud Theutones”); he also stressed its being all the more valuable because it was Vergerio’s holograph (“prima editio est Pauli, sua manu conscripta”), something that made excusable its old and unassuming appearance (“volumen est papyreum, lacerum et vetustate consumptum”). Most importantly, Piccolomini described the work as an excellent account of Alexander’s deeds, being his author “Arrianum veracem auctorem”126. In much the same terms Piccolomini described Arrian’s text to Panormita as an “historiam et veracem et bene contextam127.

125 See Enea Silvio Piccolomini, De Europa, ed. A. Van Heck, Vatican City, 2001, p. 55. 126 The letter, written from Wiener Neustadt on 27 January 1454, is published in Piccolomini, Der Briefwechsel, III.I, p. 435-437, no. 249, from which my quotations are taken. 127 For Piccolomini’s letter to Panormita (from Wiener Neustadt, 26 January 1454), see ibid., p. 433, no. 245.

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Plate I: The Birth of Alexander, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna

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Plate II: The Flight with Griffins and the Submarine Voyage, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1250-1275; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Rep. II.143, fol. 101 r-v

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Plate III: The Visit to the Tree of the Sun, c. 1260s-1270s; Quart (Aosta), Castle, Donjon, Main hall (detail)

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Plate IV: Episodes from the Childhood and Youth of Alexander, c. 1460; Genoa, Villa del Principe, Sala della Caduta dei Giganti

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Plate V: Alexander’s Adventures in the East, c. 1460; Genoa, Villa del Principe, Sala della Caduta dei Giganti

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Plate VI: Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, c. 1468; Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, ms. Vitr. 22.9, fol. 1 r

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Plate VII: The Flight with Griffins and The Earth Contemplated from the Heavens, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, c. 1468; Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, ms. Vitr. 22.9, fol. 1 r (detail)

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Plate VIII: Raphael (attr.), The Submarine Voyage, c. 1494; Paris, Musée du Louvre

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Plate IX: Master of La Manta, Hector and Alexander, from The Cycle of the Neuf Preux and Preuses (detail), c. 1420-1425; Manta (Saluzzo, Cuneo), Castle della Manta, Sala Baronale

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Plate X: The Taming of Bucephalus, details from Episodes from the Childhood and Youth of Alexander, c. 1460; Genoa, Villa del Principe, Sala della Caduta dei Giganti

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Plate XI: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; London, British Museum

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Plate XII: Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Davide Ghirlandaio and Sebastiano Mainardi), Episodes from the Life of Alexander the Great, c. 1493-1494; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, on permanent loan to Longleat House, Wiltshire

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Plate XIII: Leonardo da Besozzo, The Crespi Chronicle, page showing Alexander with Aristotle, Demosthenes and Philip of Macedon, 1442-1449; Milan, Crespi Collection, fol. 10 v

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Plate XIV: Leonardo da Besozzo, The Crespi Chronicle, page showing Darius with Jaddus, Porus and Candace, 1442-1449; Milan, Crespi Collection, fol. 11 r

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Plate XVa: Francesco Xanto Avelli, The Marriage of Ninus and Semiramis, 1533; London, Victoria and Albert Museum

Plate XVb: Francesco Xanto Avelli, Mucius Scaevola Before Porsenna, 1534; Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria

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Plate XVI: Giorgio Vasari, Alexander Offering Campaspe to Apelles, 1548; Arezzo, Casa del Vasari, Sala del Camino

Chapter 4

The Emergence of a New Renaissance Iconography in the Fifteenth Century

The humanist recovery of ancient historical sources discussed in the previous chapter had a significant impact on the iconographic representation of Alexander. Over the fifteenth century, the illustration of fabulous episodes based on the Romance tradition was progressively replaced by an entirely different repertoire of themes drawn from the historical sources. In Chapter 2 I have presented the limited number of artworks which show the persistence of the legendary Alexander in Quattrocento Italy; in this chapter I shall examine the emergence of the new historical iconography in that same century, while its definitive establishment in the Cinquecento will be the subject of Chapter 5. The body of works depicting Alexander in fifteenth-century Italian art is relatively small. When compared to the widespread popularity of the image of Alexander from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, discussed in Chapter 1, and the rich variety of pictures made from the sixteenth century onwards, which are the subject of the next chapter, the iconographic evidence from the Quattrocento is scarce and limited to only a few types of objects, connected either to the furnishing of domestic interiors – panels belonging to cassoni (marriage chests) and spalliere, which were hung on walls at shoulder-height1 – or to cycles of ‘Famous Men’ (bronze and marble reliefs, easel and fresco paintings). In manu­ scripts and early printed books, portraits of Alexander often appear in decorated initials, and, significantly, some of them are based on ancient numismatic effigies. Illustrations of stories about him, however, are very much the exception: one such is an illuminated codex



1 Italian inventories and documents from the fifteenth century usually refer to marriage chests with the term “forziere/ pl. forzieri”, whereas “cassone/pl. cassoni” starts to be employed from the sixteenth century (as attested by a famous passage in Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. R. Bettarini and P. Barocchi, 6 vol., Florence, 1966-1987, III, p. 37-38). Nevertheless, I shall use the term “cassone” as it is usually adopted by scholars to indicate chests from both the fifteenth and the sixteenth century; see P. Thornton, “Cassoni, Forzieri, Goffani and Cassette: Terminology and its Problems”, Apollo, 120 (1984), p. 246-251; G. Hughes, Renaissance Cassoni. Masterpieces of Early Italian Art: Painted Marriage Chests 1400-1550, Polegate, Sussex, and London, 1997, p. 42-49 and 241-243; C. Campbell, Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests (exhibition catalogue, London, The Courtauld Gallery, 2009), London, 2009, p. 12-14. On Renaissance domestic interiors, see At Home in Renaissance Italy (exhibition catalogue, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006-2007), ed. M. Ajmar-Wollheim and F. Dennis, London, 2006. For spalliere, see E. Callmann, “Spalliera”, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. J. Turner, 34 vol., New York, 1996, XXIX, p. 359-363, and A. B. Barriault, Spalliera Paintings of Renaissance Tuscany: Fables of Poets for Patrician Homes, University Park PA, 1994. Recent contributions on cassoni and the ancient exemplary themes they illustrate include: Le opere e i giorni: exempla virtutis, favole antiche e vita quotidiana nel racconto dei cassoni rinascimentali (exhibition catalogue, Florence, Museo Stibbert, 2015-2016), ed. A. De Marchi and L. Sbaraglio, Signa (Florence), 2015, J. Miziołek, Renaissance Weddings and the Antique: Italian Domestic Paintings from the Lanckoroński Collection, Rome, 2018, and M. Vinco, Cassoni: pittura profana del Rinascimento a Verona, Milan, 2018.

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in the Biblioteca Comunale of Siena, containing Decembrio’s translation of the Historiae Alexandri Magni of Curtius Rufus, to which I shall return later on. Alexander on Cassone Panels Three main types of cassoni were produced in Italy from the fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth century: pastiglia, painted and carved cassoni. Of these, only the painted cassoni are relevant for our purposes, since those which depict stories of Alexander fall into this category2. The vast majority of painted cassoni were made in Tuscany, with Florence as the undisputed centre of this trade, followed by Siena3. Given the nature of these objects – “the fruits of the first batch production in the history of art”, as Graham Hughes put it4 – it is not surprising to find a specific subject repeated several times with only minor variations. This repetitiveness, however, should not be confused with a lack of inventiveness. On the contrary, cassoni have long been recognised as an important means for introducing new subjects and iconographic themes into painting5. This is also true in the case of the representation of Alexander, as his appearance in episodes drawn from historical sources, rather than from the medieval literature, first occurs in a number of cassone panels. Most of these works are dated to around 14506 and ascribed to the most fashionable workshop in Florence specialising in this branch of artistic production: the prolific bottega run by Apollonio di Giovanni (c. 1416-1465) and Marco del Buono Giamberti (1402-1489)7.

2 For the different types of Renaissance cassoni, see E. Callmann and J. W. Taylor, “Cassone”, in The Dictionary of Art, VI, p. 1-7; Hughes, Renaissance Cassoni, p. 22-31. While no representation of stories of Alexander is found in Renaissance deschi da parto (birth trays), he can sometimes be identified among the knights accompanying the ‘Chariot of Fame’ in depictions inspired by Petrarch’s Triumphi, which frequently appear on Renaissance furnishings. 3 Campbell, Love and Marriage, p. 12, has pointed out that painted cassoni “were made throughout Italy, and for courts as well as cities. However, the largest single number of surviving chests can be associated with Florence”. 4 Hughes, Renaissance Cassoni, p. 10. 5 See Callmann and Taylor, “Cassone”, p. 1-5. On the most popular themes depicted on cassone panels, Vasari, Le vite, III, p. 37, famously attests: “E le storie che nel corpo dinanzi [on the cassone front] si facevano, erano per lo più di favole tolte da Ovidio e da altri poeti; ovvero storie raccontate dagli storici greci o latini; e similmente caccie, giostre, novelle d’amore, ed altre cose somiglianti, secondo che meglio amava ciascuno”) (“And the stories that were wrought on the front were for the most part fables taken from Ovid and from other poets, or rather, stories related by the Greek and Latin historians, and likewise chases, jousts, tales of love, and other similar subjects, according to each man’s particular pleasure”. The English translation is taken from Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, intr. and notes D. Ekserdjian, 2 vol., London, 1996, II, p. 108). 6 It is notoriously difficult to establish the authorship and, even more importantly for my argument, the chronology of cassone panels with any degree of certainty. Since my intention is to discuss iconographic issues, I rely on the work of Ellen Callmann and other more recent scholarly contributions for matters concerning attribution and dating. 7 E. Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, Oxford, 1974, with bibliography; E. H. Gombrich, “Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine Cassone Workshop Seen through the Eyes of a Humanist Poet”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 18 (1955), p. 16-34. For Marco del Buono, who remains an enigmatic figure in art history, see E. Callmann’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 54, Rome, 2000, p. 300-301. A copy of an account book recording the commissions given to the bottega between 1446 and 1463 was famously discovered in Florence by Heinrich Brockhaus and published by Paul Schubring, Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienischen Frührenaissance. Ein Beitrag zur Profanmalerei im Quattrocento, Leipzig, 1915, p. 430-437 (with Aby Warburg’s annotations). For an emended and more accurate transcription of the account book, see Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 76-81.

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century The Battle of Issus and the Meeting with the Family of Darius

From this workshop came a cassone front which depicts two episodes from the life of Alexander and which “perhaps should be considered the progenitor of a successful series”8. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this panel was the pride of the remarkable art collection of the Earl of Crawford in London, but its present whereabouts are unknown (Fig. 31). Nearly three-quarters of the panel is occupied by a great battle scene, and a meeting between a group of women and a young man takes place before a military tent on the left-hand side. The subject matter can be discerned with the aid of inscriptions labelling the main characters of the story: a young knight fighting on a rearing horse on the right-hand side bears the name ‘[A] LESADR [OS]’, the king seated in a chariot next to the top frame of the picture is identified as ‘DARIUS’ and the young man depicted on the left-hand side, lifting a lady called ‘SAEGHAMBI’ from the ground, is labelled ‘ALESANDER’9. Of the three major battles fought by Alexander and Darius’s armies in Asia (Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela or Arbela), this one can be identified with certainty as the battle of Issus, won by Alexander in 333 bc. At Issus, Alexander and Darius met for the very first time; while Alexander engaged battle on horseback, shoulder to shoulder with his men, as he is clearly shown doing on the right-hand side of the panel, the Persian king led his forces from his towering war chariot, before fleeing from the battlefield after a frontal attack by Alexander’s cavalry. On the left-hand side of the panel is the meeting of Alexander with the family of the defeated king Darius, which in the literary sources is said to have happened immediately after the battle of Issus. Curtius Rufus (Historiae Alexandri Magni III.12.1-26) reports that in the aftermath of the battle, Alexander learned that the women of Darius’s family – his mother Sisygambis, his wife and two unmarried daughters – were among the captives; he went to meet them and, deciding to show mercy, reassured them that Darius was alive and that their own lives would be spared and their royal status respected. In the panel, Alexander is shown raising the kneeling queen mother Sisygambis from the ground – a gesture of which Curtius Rufus, alone among the Alexander historians, speaks. She is surrounded by the rest of the royal family: two young women wearing Northern European-style headdresses, a girl with hair falling loose on her shoulders, as used to be the custom for brides-to-be, and a little boy, Darius’s younger son, who was reportedly present at the meeting, too. From the virtue displayed by Alexander on this occasion, the episode is also known as the ‘Magnanimity (or the Generosity or Clemency) of Alexander’10. The same composition is found on five other cassone panels, four of which are also attributed to Apollonio’s workshop. While many details vary from one another, the iconographic structure remains identical in its essentials. A simplified version of the image on the Crawford chest appears on a cassone front panel in the British Museum

8 In the Light of Apollo: Italian Renaissance and Greece (exhibition catalogue, Athens, National Gallery, 2003-2004), ed. M. Gregori, 2 vol., Milan, 2003, I, p. 177-178, no. I.65, at p. 177 (C. Filippini). 9 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 70, no. 41. 10 On the visual tradition of the theme, see B. Aikema, “Exemplum Virtutis: ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ in Renaissance and Baroque Art”, in Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 164-170, as well as N. Penny, National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, II: Venice 1540-1600, London, 2008, p. 354-387, esp. p. 379-380, and C. Terribile, Del piacere della virtù: Paolo Veronese, Alessandro Magno e il patriziato veneziano, Venice, 2009, p. 60-69.

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(Plate XI), the only one in its holdings11. Despite the less refined quality of the piece and its poor state of preser­­­­­vation, the iconography can be easily read. The animated battle of knights and infantrymen is so closely packed that Alexander, in the absence of inscriptions or any distinctive features, cannot be identified for certain. But the similarity to the Crawford composition and the presence of the meeting with the Persian royal family leave little doubt as to the subject. In the British Museum panel, the entire royal family is prostrated before Alexander in homage, while the surrounding courtiers and attendants gesture towards this scene, drawing the viewer’s attention to it as the meaningful core of the image (Fig. 32). In the other four cassone panels, a variation in the figure of Darius is introduced: the Persian king, instead of sitting in his chariot, is depicted standing up in it, which makes a visually more effective representation of urging his troops to battle. Two of these panels have been ascribed to Apollonio’s workshop: the first piece was in the George R. Hann Collection at Sewickley, Pennsylvania, until 1980 and is now in an unknown location12. The second panel passed from the art collection of the Hungarian-British painter Philip A. De László, where it was until 1937, through several private hands and a complex attribution history, before ending up in its present home in a private collection in Fiesole (Fig. 33)13. Although the disposition of the narrative is almost identical in the third cassone panel (Fig. 34), this has never been connected to Apollonio, and its subject has only recently been identified as The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius. On stylistic grounds, the work has been ascribed to Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, called Lo Scheggia (1406-1486), the younger brother of Masaccio, who specialised in the painting of cassoni and whose work was appreciated by patrons as distinguished as Lorenzo the Magnificent14. Active in Florence in almost the same years as Apollonio and Marco del Buono, and pursuing the same trade, Lo Scheggia was in contact with their workshop15. The panel was first published in 1843 by its owner,

11 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 71, no. 45; see also L. Syson and D. Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy, London, 2001, p. 73. I wish to thank Dora Thornton, former curator of the Renaissance Europe collection at the British Museum, for allowing me to study the panel then in her care, which is not usually on public display. 12 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 71, no. 44. The panel was sold in New York in 1980: Christie’s, New York, Important Paintings by Old Masters, 5 June 1980, lot. 82. 13 The panel was sold at Sotheby’s in 1938 (Sotheby’s, London, Paintings and Drawings Mainly of the Continental Schools, 15 June 1938, lot. 119) with an attribution to Apollonio di Giovanni which was rejected by Callman in 1974 (Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 86: the panel is listed as “London, collection Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Merton, Battle of Issus”). Ascribed to the so-called ‘Brucianesi Master’ by Everett Fahy on occasion of the 1985 Christie’s auction (Christie’s, London, Important Old Master Pictures, 5 July 1985, lot. 68), the piece has been reassigned to Apollonio by Maria Pia Mannini (Da Bernardo Daddi a Giorgio Vasari [exhibition catalogue, Florence, Galleria Moretti, 1999], ed. M. P. Mannini, Florence, 1999, p. 138-141). As a work by Apollonio, the panel is also discussed by Filippini in In the Light of Apollo, I, p. 177-178, no. I.65. In such a controversial situation, it seems safer to me to maintain a more general attribution to Apollonio’s workshop. The panel was presented at Christie’s in 1985 alongside a second panel, also attributed to the Brucianesi Master, depicting “The Triumph of a Roman Emperor ( Julius Caesar?)”, bearing inscriptions “S.P.Q.R.” (Christie’s, London, Important Old Master Pictures, 5 July 1985, lot. 67). 14 The panel was attributed to Lo Scheggia by Everett Fahy in 1997: Christie’s, London, Important Old Master Pictures, 4 July 1997, lot. 74. On Lo Scheggia, see the entry by L. Cavazzini in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 56, Rome, 2001, p. 222-226; L. Bellosi and M. Haines, Lo Scheggia, Florence, 1999; Il fratello di Masaccio: Giovanni di Ser Giovanni detto lo Scheggia (exhibition catalogue, San Giovanni Valdarno, 1999), ed. L. Cavazzini, Florence, 1999. 15 For documentary evidence suggesting a close relationship between Lo Scheggia and the workshop of Apollonio and Marco del Buono, see M. Haines, “Il mondo dello Scheggia: persone e luoghi di una carriera”, in Bellosi and Haines, Lo Scheggia, p. 35-64, esp. p. 41-42.

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century

Alexis-François Artaud de Montor, who provided a detailed description of the scene but did not attempt to identify the subject; moreover, the etching of the panel which Artaud included in his book showed only the left-hand side of the panel, omitting the battle scene on the right16. This partial and therefore misleading picture induced Paul Schubring to label this picture “The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba” – a scene often depicted on cassoni and illustrating a similar theme, that is, the encounter of a king and a queen17. A resemblance to the iconography of the ‘Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius’ was first noted by Jerzy Miziołek more than eighty years later, and credit for restoring the correct identification goes to Everett Fahy and Andrea Staderini18. To this group of cassone panels, a fourth, still unpublished, piece should be added, which I have located in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon (Fig. 35). While still unattributed and generally dated to the fifteenth century, the similarities it shows with the panels discussed above, both in stylistic and compositional terms, make me suggest a date around 1450 and an attribution to the workshop, or the circle, of Apollonio di Giovanni19. Representations of battle scenes and moral themes are extremely common in fifteenth-century cassone paintings; so, it is not surprising to find them in this series of cassone panels20. Yet, if we consider these works from a different perspective, that of the iconographic tradition of Alexander, they are of considerable significance. Battles between Alexander and Darius had long been part of the iconographic repertoire; but the ‘Meeting of Alexander with the family of Darius’ had never previously been illustrated and was an entirely new iconographic episode at that time, which made its first appearance on cassone panels. The battles between Alexander and Darius were often illustrated in medieval manuscripts of the Romance tradition, usually in a repetitive and standardised form. They were not meant to depict a specific event but instead a generic ‘battle scene’, either as single combat or a chaotic muddle of cavalrymen21. The only way to tell these battles apart is by means of

16 A.-F. Artaud de Montor, Peintres primitifs: collection de tableaux rapportée d’Italie et publiée par M. le chevalier Artaud de Montor, Paris, 1843, p. 40 and pl. 37 (with an attribution to Andrea Orcagna). 17 Schubring, Cassoni, p. 266, no. 192, and pl. XLI. A. Schmarsow, “Maitres italiens à la galerie d’Altenburg et dans la collection A. de Montor”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 20 (1898), p. 494-510, at p. 501, was of the same opinion. 18 See J. Miziołek, “The Queen of Sheba and Solomon on Some Early-Renaissance Cassone Panels A Pastiglia Dorata”, Antichità viva, 36.4 (1997), p. 6-23, at p. 20, n. 22: “There are some doubts about both the Artaud de Montor and the Schubring identification of the subject, as quite similar iconography can be found in some representations of the Generosity of Alexander the Great”. As mentioned above (n. 14), Everett Fahy first suggested the attribution to Lo Scheggia and identified the correct subject matter. See A. Staderini, “Un contesto per la collezione di ‘primitivi’ di Alexis-François Artaud de Montor”, Proporzioni, 5 (2004), p. 23-62, at p. 45-46, no. 27, and pl. 44. 19 I wish to thank the museum’s Director Joaquim Oliveira Caetano, who first provided me with a picture of the still unstudied panel. 20 For an overview, see Hughes, Renaissance Cassoni. 21 In medieval illuminated manuscripts of the Alexander Romance and derivatives, for example, the majority of battle scenes do not involve Darius. In the narrative of the text, as well as in its illustrations, preference is given to his encounters with the monstrous creatures of the East; the battle against the ‘exotic’ King Porus of India is also a favourite topic. As far as Darius is concerned, a certain emphasis is also put on Alexander’s pursuit of his murderers. See Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany. In the iconographic tradition, from the sixteenth century onwards the battle of Issus, in particular, came to be seen as the representation par excellence of Alexander’s military prowess.

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the accompanying captions or of the passage in the text which they illustrate22. The battles of Alexander depicted on the cassone panels seem to fall into the same category as their illuminated predecessors. While they differ greatly in terms of style, composition, function and purpose, manuscript illuminations and cassone paintings share the same generic way of depicting such battle scenes, so that the specific event can be precisely identified only when additional elements are present – a caption or the text in the case of the manuscripts, a complementary scene, as we shall see, in the case of the cassone panels23. On the panels under scrutiny here, the battle scenes have no distinctive features, apart from the presence of Darius himself on his chariot. According to the historical accounts, Darius was at the battles of both Issus and Gaugamela, riding in his war chariot and escaping on either a horse or a chariot. The only feature, therefore, allowing us to identify these battles for certain is the proximity of the ‘Meeting of Alexander with the Family of Darius’, which happened after the battle of Issus and has no connection with Gaugamela24. As mentioned above, the episode of the ‘Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius’ did not come into its own iconographically until the mid-fifteenth century. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the theme became hugely popular from the early sixteenth century onwards; but around 1450, when it was introduced into cassone painting, it could offer no visual models for the painters to rely on. In the Middle Ages the incident with Darius’s family was not unheard of: it was touched on in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.41) and sometimes illustrated in manuscripts, as well as mentioned by Walter of Châtillon in his (unillustrated) Alexandreis (III.283-293). But it had little significance in the narrative and, what matters the most here, no iconographic tradition grew out of it25. The key question of where this theme comes from – the sources, in other words, to which cassone painters turned when creating this new iconographic theme – has rarely 22 Battle scenes between Alexander and Darius from antiquity seem to be a synthesis of various battles. The most famous example is the second-century bc mosaic from the House of the Faun at Pompeii (Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale). Since its excavation in 1831, it has been identified as the ‘Battle of Issus’; but scholars now largely agree that it is a combination of events from the battles of Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela; see A. Cohen, The Alexander Mosaic: Stories of Victory and Defeat, Cambridge, 1997, p. 130-138 and 224, n. 171, with further bibliography. For a different line of argument leading to its identification as the battle of Gaugamela, see P. Moreno, Apelle, la Battaglia di Alessandro, Milan, 2000. 23 These additional elements can also be crucial in identifying stories of other figures from ancient history such as Julius Caesar, Aemilius Paulus, Darius and Cyrus. See Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 46: “There are several panels of most of these battles and of the subsequent triumphs but none of them forms pairs, and the battles and the triumphs themselves can be identified only when the protagonists are labelled by inscriptions, when well-known symbols are displayed, or when related events are represented with them”. 24 Despite the presence of Darius, which might have led to its identification as the battle of Gaugamela, two of the panels were first published as depictions of the battle of the Granicus: for the British Museum panel, see T. Borenius, “Unpublished Cassone Panels-VI”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 41 (1922), p. 256-259, and Schubring, Cassoni, p. 260, no. 160; for the Crawford panel, see ibid., p. 257, no. 150. It is, in fact, the presence of Darius which disproves the hypothesis that the scenes are of the battle of the Granicus – fought in 334 bc on the banks of the river by that name in present-day Turkey – since he did not fight there, sending his local satraps to repel Alexander instead. Also, in the British Museum panel there is no trace of the essential feature of the episode: a river or at least a watery area. 25 The small number of illustrations of the episode in the manuscript tradition can be identified as depicting the meeting with the family of Darius only by the captions; as far as the iconographic composition is concerned, not much distinguishes this encounter from other meetings with noble ladies (i.e. Candace, or the Queen of the Amazons) also narrated in the Pseudo-Callisthenes and its derivatives. Some examples are in Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany.

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century

been addressed in the scholarly literature and depends largely on the 1974 discussion of the topic by Ellen Callmann. She examined the possible influence of Plutarch and Arrian, who both recount the meeting of Alexander with the family of Darius; but she does not come to a clear conclusion about the sources used by Apollonio26. Callmann ruled out Plutarch because, in his Alexander XXI.1, Alexander did not actually meet the royal family: aware of the notorious beauty of Persian women, he deliberately avoided seeing them so as not to be tempted and instead sent his general Leonnatus as a messenger. Arrian, in the Anabasis II.12.3-8, reports this version of the story alongside another one, according to which Alexander went to see the women accompanied only by his bosom friend Hephaestion; the queen mother Sisygambis mistook the king’s friend for the king himself and prostrated herself at Hephaestion’s feet. The moral exemplarity of the episode comes at the end: forgiving her mistake and showing magnanimity and compassion, Alexander raised Sisygambis from the ground and told her that there was no mistake at all, for Hephaestion was, in fact, “another Alexander” (Anabasis, II.12.7). This second version is clearly closest to the scene represented on the cassone fronts, and Callmann implicitly argues that Arrian is the most likely source of inspiration for Apollonio. Although this conclusion has generally won support, some authors have continued to cite both Plutarch and Arrian as possible sources for the episode27. The entire problem, however, needs to be reconsidered in light of the availability around 1450 of accounts of the meeting of Alexander and the family of Darius. In the absence of any significant mention of the episode in medieval literature, the newly recovered historical works of Plutarch, Curtius Rufus, Arrian and Diodorus Siculus are the likeliest sources. In Chapter 3, I set out a chronology of their recovery in the course of the fifteenth century, and this will provide the basis for my discussion of the matter. In the attempt to identify which source might have inspired cassone painters in their creation of a new iconographic theme, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander should definitively be dismissed as a possible candidate. Even though it has sometimes been misinterpreted, the point made by Callmann in 1974 is correct28: Plutarch does not mention a meeting between Alexander and Darius’s family, but, on the contrary, emphasises Alexander’s resolution not to see the Persian women and, therefore, his role as an exemplum pudicitiae29. Arrian, 26 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 44. She also noted that although Boccaccio, a source commonly drawn on by cassone painters, had a chapter in his De casibus virorum illustrium (IV.9) devoted to Darius king of Persia, he made no mention of the meeting of Alexander with the family of Darius. 27 See Hughes, Renaissance Cassoni, p. 157-158, and J. Klein Morrison, “Apollonio di Giovanni’s Aeneid Cassoni and the Virgil Commentators”, Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (1992), p. 27-47, at p. 44, n. 17: “The source is probably either Plutarch’s Life of Alexander (XXI.1), or Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander (II.12-14)”. Earlier scholars most often name Plutarch alone, for example, Schubring, Cassoni, p. 257, nos 150 and 151, p. 259-60, nos 158 and 159 (“Quelle: Plutarch, Alexander”). 28 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 44. 29 This does not diminish, of course, the major role played by Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in cassone painting. Known to have been circulating in Latin translation well before the 1470 Campano edition, the Lives remained the main point of reference for the stories of Roman rulers such as Julius Caesar, Pompey and Scipio, frequently depicted on this type of object. For Plutarch’s impact on the visual arts of the Renaissance, see Biografia dipinta. Plutarco e l’arte del Rinascimento: 1400-1550, ed. R. Guerrini, La Spezia, 2001; on cassone painting, in particular, see M. Caciorgna, “Immagini di eroi ed eroine nell’arte del Rinascimento: moduli plutarchei in fronti di cassoni e spalliere”, in ibid., p. 209-344.

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too, should probably be ruled out: his version of the story in the Anabasis accurately matches the scene on the cassoni; but this work was not yet available around 1450. As we have seen, a Latin translation of the original Greek text was completed in 1461 and not printed until 150830. True, a Greek manuscript of the Anabasis was in the possession of Giovanni Aurispa in Florence in 1413; however, it seems a remote and unlikely possibility that a painter such as Apollonio, or anyone from his circle, would have had access to it and been able to make use of a work which was virtually unknown until the second half of the fifteenth century31. Diodorus Siculus also reported the meeting with the family of Darius (Bibliotheca Historica XVII.37.3-38.7); but this portion of his work did not become available until 1516, when Angelo Cospi’s Latin version was published – too late a date to make it of any relevance here32. Although it has been neglected in the scholarly literature, there is a work which meets all the requirements needed to be the perfect candidate for the source of the iconography of the ‘Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius’. The Historiae Alexandri Magni by Curtius Rufus was available in both the original Latin and the vernacular in the mid-fifteenth century and includes an historical account of the meeting which matches the depiction on the cassone panels33. As indicated in Chapter 3 above, this work, though not unknown in the Middle Ages, only began to circulate widely in Latin in the early fifteenth century and was translated into the vernacular by Pier Candido Decembrio in 1438. Curtius’s account of the meeting of Alexander and the family of Darius is very similar to Arrian’s second version of the story, since both historians were drawing on the same earlier source. It therefore seems far more plausible that the source of the new iconographic theme on the cassone panels was the widely accessible Curtius Rufus, available in Latin and the vernacular, rather than the still rare Arrian, available, at best, in Greek34.

30 As discussed in Chapter 3, Vergerio’s Latin version of 1433-1437 remained de facto unknown until 1454, when a new translation was undertaken by Bartolomeo Facio and Giacomo Curlo and completed in 1461. 31 The copy of the Anabasis belonging to Aurispa is untraced and very little is known about it. As discussed in Chapter 3, the codex was brought by Aurispa from Constantinople in 1413: mention of it is made twice in Aurispa’s correspondence of 1421 and 1424, but the manuscript does no longer appear in the 1459 inventory of Aurispa’s library. It remains pure guesswork whether the copy had some sort of circulation, and therefore influence, within the Florentine circle of humanists when it was in Aurispa’s hands in the first half of the fifteenth century. 32 As I have discussed in Chapter 3, Pier Candido Decembrio’s translation of Books XVI to XX (the ‘Macedonian section’ of the Bibliotheca Historica) stopped at chapter 48 of Book XVI, and so did not include Book XVII, in which the episode is reported. 33 The only reference to Curtius Rufus as a possible source for the episode in the cassone panels was made by Filippini in In the Light of Apollo, I, p. 177-178, no. I.65, at p. 177. Discussing the panel in the Paolo Fresco collection, Fiesole (Fig. 33), she mentions Curtius Rufus along with Diodorus Siculus but does not expand further on this possibility. 34 See the relevant passage in Pier Candido Decembrio’s translation, which I quote from ms. I.VII.23 of the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, Siena, fol. 31 v: “Le Regine Ephestione Alexandro esser credendo a sua mainera lonorareno. Doppo uno deli suoi schiavi et presoni quale er Re fusse monstrando i Sysigambi matre di Dario alipiedi dalexandro ingenochiata perche may veduto non lhavesse sincomincio ad excusare. Alexandro ley con la mano elevando. Non hay fallito dice matre perche costuy e come io Alexandro” (“Mistaking Hephaestion for Alexander, the Queens paid homage to him according to their custom [of the proskynesis]. After one of their servants and prisoners showed them the true king, Darius’s mother Sisygambis, who was kneeling at the feet of the supposed Alexander whom she had never seen, began to plead for forgiveness. Raising her from the ground, Alexander told her: ‘You are not mistaken, mother, for this man is another Alexander’”. My translation).

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century

This claim is strengthened by the fact that cassoni were normally produced in pairs (one for the bride, the other for the groom), and the companion to the representation of ‘The Battle of Issus and the Meeting with the Family of Darius’ was usually ‘Darius Setting Out for the Battle of Issus’ (sometimes inaccurately called ‘The Triumph of Darius’). Several examples of this scene attributed to Apollonio’s workshop survive, though none of them forms a pair with any of the extant Alexander panels. The best preserved of these works is today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam35. Inscriptions bearing the names of the protagonists and other symbolic features make the identification of the subject matter certain – Darius sitting on his chariot, his wife and mother on the cart behind him, the Zoroastrian sacred fire and a statue of Apollo leading what looks like a triumphal procession. Three similar compositions are known36. No doubt the choice of this subject has to be seen in light of the great popularity of triumphs and processional parades on cassone panels37. But Callmann has convincingly argued that the depictions on these panels of Darius, whose dishonourable flight from the battlefield would hardly earn him a triumph, show him setting out for the battle of Issus – that is, heading to the event represented in the companion panel. The analogy to a Roman triumph in the composition ironically illustrates Darius’s cowardice, as well as the biblical moral “pride goes before a fall” (Proverbs 16.18), which is completed in the companion panel38. What is even more significant for my argument is that the iconography of this triumph-like composition is based on a passage of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni (III.3.8-28)39. Among the historical accounts of Alexander’s life, only Curtius Rufus describes at length Darius’s preparation for the battle of Issus, picturing a chariot parade which corresponds exactly to the procession in the cassone panels, down to the last, and seemingly problematic, 35 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 70-71, no. 42, with previous bibliography. A comprehensive study of the representation of Darius III in Renaissance art remains to be written; some useful material can be found in P. Briant, Darius in the Shadow of Alexander, Cambridge MA and London, 2015. 36 These panels have been labelled either as Triumph of Darius or as Triumph of Alexander, probably because of the lack of inscriptions, which are found only in the Amsterdam panel. I believe that the identification of Darius can be confirmed on the grounds of their similarities to the Amsterdam panel, in which the subject matter is certain. The panels are in: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Landau Finaly Bequest (see C. Acidini Luchinat, “Appendice V. I cassoni della donazione Landau Finaly”, in Lorenzo dopo Lorenzo: la fortuna storica di Lorenzo il Magnifico [exhibition catalogue, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, 1992], ed. P. Pirolo, Milan, 1992, p. 241-247, at p. 241, no. 2; for its attribution to Lo Scheggia, see Bellosi and Haines, Lo Scheggia, p. 80); Los Angeles, County Museum of Art (see The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance [exhibition catalogue, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2008-2009, and Sarasota, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2009], ed. C. Baskins, Boston, 2008, p. 121-126, no. 8); and formerly in the Collection of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres (see Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 70, no. 41). The difficulty in identifying the protagonist of these triumphal processions is shown by a panel ascribed to Lo Scheggia in the Luzzetti Collection, Florence, which has been labelled as A Roman Triumph (Christie’s, London, Old Master Pictures, 18 April 1997, lot. 154), Triumph of Darius (Bellosi and Haines, Lo Scheggia, p. 85) and Triumph of Alexander (Filippini in In the Light of Apollo, I, p. 178-179, no. I.67). The identification with Alexander seems to me unsupported by sufficient proof. Dubious remains also a triumphant procession on a cassone front in Reggio Emilia, illustrated in La Galleria Parmeggiani di Reggio Emilia: guida alla collezione, ed. E. Farioli, Reggio Emilia, 2002, p. 110-111. 37 See G. Carandente, I trionfi nel primo Rinascimento, Turin, 1963. 38 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 44, points out that in the pair of cassoni formerly in the Earl of Crawford’s collection, the end panels depict two further episodes of pride humbled, both taken from mythology: Phaeton and Apollo, and Apollo and Daphne. 39 See The Florentine Paintings in Holland 1300-1500, ed. H. W. van Os and M. Prakken, Maarssen, 1974, p. 31-33, no. 3, esp. p. 32.

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iconographic detail40. Curtius, therefore, provided the inspiration for the ‘marriage sets’ portraying the Alexander stories, not only those in the panels depicting his victory over Darius and magnanimity towards his family, but also the scenes illustrating the prelude to these events, in which Darius is the protagonist. I believe, therefore, that there are very strong grounds to maintain that the representation of Alexander in this series of cassone panels depends on the Historiae Alexandri Magni of Curtius Rufus rather than on the accounts of Plutarch and Arrian, as is usually assumed. In comparison to Plutarch and Arrian (the recovery of the relevant section of Diodorus Siculus is too late to be taken into consideration here), Curtius provides a far more dramatic account of the life of Alexander: his narrative is full of coups de théâtre and moral lessons, and, most importantly, his stories are rich in the kind of detail which could easily be transferred to the visual arts. With these characteristics, Curtius’s biography of Alexander must have appealed greatly to artists and especially painters. Arrian, with his balanced and critically measured narrative, focuses almost exclusively on military facts and therefore had only a limited influence on iconography. Plutarch, however, makes intentional use of episodes and events to underline virtues and to cast light on the personalities of his protagonists. As we shall see in Chapter 5 below, from the late fifteenth century onwards, Plutarch, far more than Arrian, exerted a powerful influence on the Renaissance use of Alexander as a moral exemplum. Yet, as far as iconographic themes were concerned, Curtius offered a varied and detailed repository of material to select from and, in the case of the ‘Meeting of Alexander with the Family of Darius’, his account is richer than Plutarch’s. The destination and function of these objects are also key elements to be taken into account. Cassoni were made on the occasion of a marriage and, therefore, always present stories with a moral appropriate to this event. What Curtius highlights in the episode of the meeting with the family of Darius is Alexander’s continence and clemency – virtues which make this cassone appropriate for a bride and a groom41. Furthermore, the juxtaposition on the same panel with the Battle of Issus, where Alexander won the day, strengthens the moral value of the story, as Callmann has rightly pointed out: “Here the message is that the all-powerful male is to be praised for his forbearance and kindliness to the weaker sex”42. Two Sienese Panels Based on Plutarch

As we shall see in Chapter 5, from the beginning of the sixteenth century there was a considerable increase in the number of episodes from the life of Alexander which entered the iconographic repertoire. Among these, the ‘Meeting of Alexander and the

40 See ibid., p. 32, where the two women accompanying Darius’s chariot, the sacred fire and the statue of the winged Apollo being carried in the procession have been convincingly connected to Curtius’s text. A different, though rather confused, interpretation of these iconographic features, is in S. L. Caroselli, Italian Panel Painting of the Early Renaissance in the Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1994, p. 114-116, no. 15. 41 Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni III.12.21: “Tunc quidem ita se gessit, ut omnes ante eum reges et continentia et clementia vincerentur”. See Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 44: “It is because of this scene [the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius] that the pair of panels deserve such a prominent position within the context of marriage”. 42 E. Callmann, “The Growing Threat to Marital Bliss as Seen in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Paintings”, Studies in Iconography, 5 (1979), p. 73-92, at p. 82.

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century

Family of Darius’ was one of the most popular and continued for the most part to be based, as it had from its very first appearance in cassone painting, on the text of Curtius. But there are exceptions to every rule; and two representations of the ‘Meeting’ from the last decade of the fifteenth century were based, not on Curtius, but instead on Plutarch, resulting in an unconventional illustration of the subject. The first example is the Alexander painting belonging to the series of Famous Men and Women known as the ‘Piccolomini (or Spannocchi-Piccolomini) cycle’, today in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (Fig. 36)43. The other is a spalliera panel acquired alongside its companion in 1874 by the Fourth Marquess of Bath and since then displayed in the family residence at Longleat House, Wiltshire (Plate XII)44. Although the first panel is ascribed to the Master of the Story of Griselda and the second to the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, the paintings have a similar provenance and date: they were both made for Sienese patrician families in about 1493-1494 on the occasion of a marriage. If the circumstances of the commission of the Longleat panel, as we shall see, are now clear, those of the Piccolomini cycle are less so45. What can be said for certain is that the two paintings belong to the same artistic and cultural milieu: the closely connected Piccolomini and Spannocchi families in Siena. Later in this chapter the Birmingham Alexander painting will be discussed as part of one of the most remarkable cycles of Famous Men and Women to have survived from the fifteenth century. For now, I would like to focus on the background of the picture, where a scene split in two at either side of Alexander’s body takes place (Fig. 37). Marilena Caciorgna has shown that the usual identification of the episode as The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius is imprecise, since no meeting of Alexander with the Persian women is actually taking place. Rather, she argued, a more appropriate title would be “The Family of Darius Treated with Great Respect”46. The source for the event painted here is not Curtius Rufus, but Plutarch’s Life of Alexander XXI.1: on the left-hand side of the picture 43 On the Alexander panel and the notoriously problematic ‘Piccolomini cycle’, see Renaissance Siena: Art for a City (exhibition catalogue, London, National Gallery, 2007-2008), ed. L. Syson, A. Angelini, P. Jackson, F. Nevola and C. Plazzotta, London, 2007, p. 234-245 (L. Syson); J. Dunkerton, C. Christensen and L. Syson, “The Master of the Story of Griselda and Paintings for Sienese Palaces”, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 27 (2006), p. 4-71, at p. 18-61, with bibliography. 44 Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax in 2005 and allocated to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Alexander panel and its pendant remain on permanent loan to Longleat House. See Christie’s, London, Catalogue of the Renowned Collection of Works of Art Formed by that Distinguished Connoisseur, Alexander Barker, Esq., 6 and 8-11 June 1874, lots 82 and 83. More on the panel is in Siena e Roma: Raffaello, Caravaggio e i protagonisti di un legame antico (exhibition catalogue, Siena, Santa Maria della Scala, Palazzo Squarcialupi, 2005-2006), ed. B. Santi and C. Strinati, Siena, 2005, p. 199-205, at p. 201-203 (L. Syson); and in At Home in Renaissance Italy, p. 275-277. 45 See Dunkerton, Christensen and Syson, “The Master of the Story of Griselda”, p. 24, and Francesco di Giorgio e il Rinascimento a Siena 1450-1500 (exhibition catalogue, Siena, Church of Sant’Agostino, 1993), ed. L. Bellosi, Milan, 1993, p. 462-469, no. 103 (R. Bartalini). 46 Caciorgna, “Immagini di eroi ed eroine”, p. 298-313, esp. p. 310-311: “Le donne di Dario trattate con estremo riguardo”. A similar suggestion was made by V. Tátrai, “Il Maestro della Storia di Griselda e una famiglia senese di mecenati dimenticata”, Acta historiae artium Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 25 (1979), p. 27-66, at p. 32: “Dame prigioniere trattate con ogni riguardo”. See also R. Guerrini, “Alessandro Magno: il conquistatore del mondo”, in M. Caciorgna and R. Guerrini, La virtù figurata: eroi ed eroine dell’antichità nell’arte senese tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Siena, 2003, p. 17-27, at p. 17-21. The first scholar to draw attention to the background scene, labelling it as “Alexander spares the family of Darius”, was R. L. Mode, “Ancient Paragons in a Piccolomini Scheme”, in Hortus Imaginum: Essays in Western Art, ed. R. Enggass and M. Stokstad, Lawrence, 1974, p. 73-83, at p. 80, n. 7.

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Alexander is shown talking to his general Leonnatus, while on the right the Persian women are respectfully accompanied out of their military tent. The reason behind the choice of this unusual iconography was, no doubt, Plutarch’s presentation of the episode as an exemplum pudicitiae – Alexander expressly avoids seeing the female prisoners so as not to be tempted by their beauty. Visually exemplified in the background of the panel, Alexander’s chaste behaviour is verbally praised in the foreground in the verses inscribed on the pedestal on which his towering statue-like figure stands. Because this episode is based on Plutarch rather than the more conventional Curtius Rufus, Caciorgna concluded that the iconography of the Birmingham Alexander was not merely rare, but very possibly unique47. There is, however, another example of this uncommon iconography, and that is the Alexander panel at Longleat House (Plate XII)48. The identification of the subject matter of this painting puzzled several connoisseurs and art historians49, before the first accurate analysis of it (along with its pendant, also at Longleat) was made by Luke Syson in 200550. He argued that the subject was “episodes from the life of Alexander the Great, taken from Plutarch’s Lives (XX.5-XXI.5): his magnanimity towards the family of the defeated Darius”51. In addition, he connected the Alexander panel and its pendant, representing Julius Caesar Crossing the Rubicon, with a passage in Vasari’s 1568 life of Ghirlandaio, where a commission for the Palazzo Spannocchi in Siena is recorded on the occasion of the sumptuous double wedding of Ambrogio Spannocchi’s sons and heirs, Antonio and Giulio, to Alessandra Placidi and Giovanna Mellini, held on 17-19 January 149452. This suggestion has been widely 47 Caciorgna, “Immagini di eroi ed eroine”, p. 311: “Allo stato attuale delle conoscenze, sembrerebbe allora di poter concludere che l’Alessandro di Birmingham costituisce una rarità iconografica, se non una sorta di vero e proprio unicum”. There is another, much later depiction of the ‘Meeting’ based on Plutarch: the 1641-1642 lunette by Pietro da Cortona in the Sala di Venere in the Pitti Palace of Florence. Cortona’s picture differs greatly from the examples discussed here, as it combines the visual tradition based on Curtius Rufus with Plutarch’s emphasis on Alexander’s chastity. It cannot therefore be connected to the Sienese paintings and remains, as far as I am aware, an unprecedented rendering of the episode of the ‘Meeting’. For more on the lunette, see M. Campbell, Pietro da Cortona at the Pitti Palace: A Study of the Planetary Rooms and Related Projects, Princeton, 1977, p. 100-103 and fig. 35. 48 I have discussed the Longleat panel, and its iconography in particular, in “Tra fabula e historia: sulla ricezione del mito di Alessandro il Grande nel Quattrocento”, Schifanoia, 42-43 (2012), pp. 227-239. 49 See, e.g., B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works with an Index of Places: Florentine School, I, London, 1963, p. 26, who presented the panel as a “Feast”; or Hughes, Renaissance Cassoni, p. 46-47 and 224, who entitled the painting “The Lapiths and the Centaurs”. For a complete list of suggested identifications of the subject, see Daniotti, “Tra fabula e historia”, p. 229-230. 50 First presented in Siena e Roma, p. 201-203, Syson’s research is also discussed in At Home in Renaissance Italy, p. 275-277, Dunkerton, Christensen and L. Syson, “The Master of the Story of Griselda”, p. 6-7, and Renaissance Siena, p. 231. 51 Siena e Roma, p. 202: “Episodi della vita di Alessandro Magno, presi dalle Vite Parallele di Plutarco (XX.5-XXI.5): la sua generosità verso la famiglia dello sconfitto Dario”. 52 Vasari, Le vite, III, p. 495: “Domenico [Ghirlandaio] e Bastiano [Mainardi] insieme dipinsono in Siena nel palazzo degli Spannocchi, in una camera, molte storie di figure piccole a tempera”. The Spannocchi coat of arms (three ears of corn quartered with the crescent moons of the Piccolomini) was identified by Syson, Siena e Roma, p. 202, on Alexander’s tent at the centre of the panel. On the 1494 wedding and the artistic commissions of the Spannocchi, see Tátrai, “Il Maestro della Storia di Griselda”; A. Lisini, “Medaglia d’Antonio Spannocchi”, in Fascicolo-omaggio per il primo centenario del R. Gabinetto Numismatico e medagliere nazionale di Brera in occasione delle onoranze a Solone Ambrosoli, Milan, 1908, p. 79-86; U. Morandi, “Gli Spannocchi: piccoli proprietari terrieri, artigiani, piccoli, medi e grandi mercanti-banchieri”, in Studi in memoria di Federigo Melis, 5 vol., Naples, 1978, III, p. 91-120; I. Ait, “Mercantibanchieri nella città del papa: gli eredi di Ambrogio Spannocchi fra XV e XVI secolo”, in Mercanti stranieri a Roma tra ‘400 e ‘500 [= Archivi e cultura, XXXVII, n.s., 2004], p. 7-44; K. P. Clarke, “Marrying Word and Image: Visualizing Boccaccio at the Spannocchi Wedding, Siena”, Studi sul Boccaccio, 40 (2012), p. 315-390, esp. p. 319-335.

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accepted – though the panel is usually described merely as a Magnanimity of Alexander without reference to the “episodes” mentioned by Syson, which, in my view, are crucial for establishing what exactly the Longleat painting is about53. The composition follows the text of Plutarch closely, which allows us to identify, reading from the right to the left of the panel: the battle of Issus; the chariot taken from Darius and surmounted by his armour and bow; the royal treasures displayed in Darius’s tent as part of Alexander’s booty; an imposing banquet table ordered by Alexander and ready for the guests to arrive; and the captive women from the royal family escorted before Leonnatus, who is speaking to them (Fig. 38). An important piece of evidence, confirming the almost verbatim use of Plutarch, is provided by an overlooked iconographical detail54. It is a Latin inscription on the tablecloth covering the banquet table, at the left-hand side of the painting, next to Alexander (Fig. 39), which reads: “OCCINEMPERAR / ERAT”; according to Martin Davies, it should be emended to: “HOCCINE IMPERARE ERAT” (“Is this what it was to rule?”). The emended inscription corresponds to a passage from the Latin version of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, which, as we have seen in Chapter 3, was translated from the Greek by Guarino before 1408 and later included in the 1470 Campano edition of the Lives55. In the text, these words are spoken by Alexander at a precise moment: having contemplated the Persian riches now in his hands and the magnificent banquet just about to start, he turns to his companions and asks: “Is this what it was to rule?”. After these words have been spoken, Alexander learns that Darius’s women have been captured and later decides to send Leonnatus in his place and show them mercy. The appearance of these words in the panel is remarkable, firstly, because no other example of a similar inscription is known56, and, secondly, because the phrase puts the emphasis of the entire composition, not on the magnanimity shown to the Persian women, which takes place in the background, but rather on Alexander’s contemplation of the booty lawfully acquired in war from Darius, which is displayed in the foreground across the length of the panel. The words spoken by Alexander and inscribed on the banquet table provide a focal point for the painting and also serve as a moral commentary, reminding the viewer of the illusory value of worldly goods. This episode and its accompanying inscription, combining a display of splendour with a moral lesson from antiquity, was very well suited to the occasion for which it was commissioned: the lavish wedding of the Spannocchi brothers.

53 Labelled as The Magnanimity of Alexander the Great, the panel was exhibited in London in 2006 alongside its pendant: At Home in Renaissance Italy, p. 359, no. 111 and p. 275-277. The painting is briefly discussed by N. Pons, “Problemi di collaborazione e compagnie di artisti: cassoni e spalliere di Jacopo del Sellaio, Biagio d’Antonio e Bartolomeo di Giovanni”, in Virtù d’amore: pittura nuziale nel Quattrocento fiorentino (exhibition catalogue, Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia-Museo Horne, 2010), ed. C. Paolini, D. Parenti and L. Sebregondi, Florence, 2010, p. 127-137, at p. 136. It is also mentioned in Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 45-46. 54 For an earlier discussion, see Daniotti, “Tra fabula e historia”, p. 235-236. 55 Guarino’s translation reads: “Post hec sublime cubiculum magnifice conditum subiens ubi stratum ad socios conversus [ed.: conversos] hoccine inquit imperare erat” ([Plutarch, Vitae illustrium virorum], ed. Campano, II, fol. 379 v) (Plutarch, Alexander XX.8). 56 Inscriptions with the names of the protagonists on cassone paintings are intended for an entirely different purpose and cannot therefore be compared to the Longleat inscription.

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Alexander and the Cycles of Uomini famosi An Introduction to the Uomini famosi Cycles in Italian Art

In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Alexander appeared in cycles of Uomini famosi (‘Famous Men’), an iconographic theme which has long been recognised as one of the most prominent in the secular art of Renaissance Italy57. The majority of these cycles were made in the Quattrocento, but the chronological span of their popularity was much longer: the earliest documented painted cycle dates to the 1330s, and notable series of Uomini famosi were still being commissioned some six hundred years later58. The subject has been studied extensively59, but an examination devoted specifically to the presence of Alexander among the Uomini famosi has not previously been attempted. To carry out such an investigation, I shall focus only on those cycles which include Alexander. There are, however, only a few of these, since Alexander was more often absent from, than present in, Uomini famosi series. Also, many of the cycles which will be taken into consideration are now lost, so that we know about them exclusively through literary or archival sources, which only occasionally preserve drawings or other visual records. In one case, moreover, the only thing we know about the cycle is that Alexander was included in it. Even though the presence of Alexander among Uomini famosi is sporadic and the evidence fragmentary, the subject is worth exploring. As we shall see, with regard to the iconography of Alexander, this is a transitional theme, and his inclusion in or exclusion from these series helps us to trace a significant change in the tradition. The phrase ‘Uomini famosi’ is customarily used in connection with both the literary genre of biographies of famous men (and women), favoured by humanists, the origins of which go back to antiquity60, and an iconographic theme largely indebted to these humanist collections of lives, above all Petrarch’s De viris illustribus. In the painted cycles of Uomini famosi, selected famous men are represented side by side in succession, usually 57 Attention was first drawn to this subject by Julius von Schlosser, “Ein veronesisches Bilderbuch”, and by Paul Schubring, “Uomini famosi”, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, 23 (1900), p. 424-425. 58 See, e.g., the “Uomini famosi aretini” painted by Adolfo De Carolis in 1922-1923 in the Palazzo della Provincia at Arezzo. Late cycles such as this are usually localized versions of the Uomini famosi theme, including memorable figures from the distant and recent past of a city or of a particular area. The famous eighteenth-century Cafè Florian on St Mark’s Square in Venice has a “Sala degli Uomini famosi”, lined with ten medallion portraits of illustrious Venetians, from Marco Polo to Carlo Goldoni, by painter Giulio Carlini. 59 For a general overview and further bibliography, see the survey of Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, and R. W. Scheller, “Uomini Famosi”, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 10 (1962), p. 56-67. From the more recent work of Paolo Di Simone, see “Giotto, Petrarca e il tema degli uomini illustri tra Napoli, Milano e Padova: prolegomeni a un’indagine”, Parts 1-2, Rivista d’arte, 2 (2012), p. 39-76 and 3 (2013), p. 35-55; Id., “‘Gente di ferro e di valore armata’: postille al tema degli Uomini Illustri, e qualche riflessione marginale”, Predella, 9 (2014) (= The Survival of the Trecento in the Fifteenth Century, ed. L. Bourdua), p. 31-64. Despite its main focus on the Trinci family, useful material on the Italian tradition is in J.-B. Delzant, “La compagnie des hommes illustres: mobilisation et usages d’un thème (Italie, xive-xve siècle)”, in La politique de l’histoire en Italie. Arts et pratiques du réemploi: xive-xviie siècle, ed. C. Callard, É. Crouzet-Pavan and A. Tallon, Paris, 2014, p. 211-247. 60 C. L. Joost-Gaugier, “The Early Beginnings of the Notion of ‘Uomini Famosi’ and the ‘De viris illustribus’ in Greco-Roman Literary Tradition”, Artibus et historiae, 6 (1982), p. 97-115. Of course, the enumeration of great men (and women) from the past counts as one of the most recurrent topoi in medieval literature, spanning at least from Ermoldus Nigellus to Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pizan.

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standing upright and on a larger-than-life, if not monumental, scale. Under the figures, there was often a titulus, giving the name and a short biographical account of the person; sometimes one of their deeds or a memorable event from their life was also depicted. We know that many of these cycles are nowadays lost: countless references to Uomini famosi series no longer in existence appear in contemporary treatises, collections of tituli, archival material and inventories. Apart from such evidence, for instance, nothing remains of the Uomini famosi of Lorenzo di Bicci in the old Casa Medici in Florence, Paolo Uccello’s ‘giganti’ in Casa Vitaliani at Padua, or the “capitani che meritarono eterna fama nei secoli” painted for the Malatesta in the Castle of Gradara61. There are, in addition, several painted cycles which survive only in fragments. Very little can be said about them, however, since what remains is usually a depiction of men in armour so generic or badly damaged that any attempt at identification is almost entirely speculative. In the Sala degli Affreschi of the Ducal Palace in Urbino, for example, figures of warriors were discovered along the walls in 1939. Attributed to the painter Giovanni Boccati, who worked in the palace for Federico da Montefeltro in 1459-1460, the murals are in a bad state of preservation, so that the warriors cannot be easily identified, though two of them have been tentatively identified as Horatius Cocles and Mucius Scaevola62. Finally, a considerable number of easel paintings depict a “Warrior” or a “Roman Hero” which may originally have formed part of a Uomini famosi cycle: this is the case, for example, of a painting in the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum (c. 1465, ascribed to the circle of Antonio Vivarini)63 and of two panels in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (dated c. 1496 and attributed to Neroccio de’ Landi)64. It is important to bear in mind that we are dealing with an iconographic theme, and not a prescriptive canon. Generally speaking, the men included in these series came from Greco-Roman antiquity or the Bible; they were sometimes paired with a selection of Donne famose (‘Famous Women’) and they were depicted in both princely homes and public spaces such as the civic palaces. As the label “uomini famosi” clearly indicates, they

61 See Vasari, Le vite, II, p. 315-316 (Lorenzo di Bicci), and III, p. 69 (Paolo Uccello). For Casa Vitaliani, see G. Fiocco, “I Giganti di Paolo Uccello”, Rivista d’arte, 17 (1935), p. 385-404, and C. L. Ragghianti, “Casa Vitaliani”, Critica d’arte, 2 (1937), p. 236-250. For the Gradara cycle, known to us only through a poem, see A. Campana, “Poesie umanistiche sul castello di Gradara”, Studi romagnoli, 20 (1969), p. 501-520, at p. 507. Fragments of what appears to have been a similar cycle survive in the “Sala dell’Imperatore” of the Castle of Montefiore Conca, also belonging to the Malatesta, on which see P. G. Pasini, “Jacopo Avanzi e i Malatesti: la ‘camera picta’ di Montefiore Conca”, Romagna arte e storia, 16 (1986), p. 5-30. Other examples of lost cycles are in Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 99-100. 62 P. Rotondi, Il Palazzo Ducale di Urbino, 2 vol., Urbino, 1950-1951, I, p. 155-160, 427-428, n. 102-103, and II, pl. 40, 48, 52-56. For colour pictures of the frescoes, see D. Diotallevi, “I rapporti con la cultura urbinate nei dipinti d’arme di Raffaello giovane”, in Raffaello e Urbino: la formazione giovanile e i rapporti con la città natale (exhibition catalogue, Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 2009), ed. L. Mochi Onori, Milan, 2009, p. 84-89, at p. 85-86, fig. 2-4. 63 C. L. Joost-Gaugier, “A Rediscovered Series of Uomini famosi from Quattrocento Venice”, The Art Bulletin, 58 (1976), p. 184-195, suggests the possible identification of the warrior as Julius Caesar; this hypothesis has been accepted only by M. Lucco, “Venezia”, in La pittura nel Veneto: il Quattrocento, ed. M. Lucco, 2 vol., Milan, 1989-1990, II, p. 395-480, at p. 400. More recently, the painting has been briefly discussed by J. Spicer, “The Abduction of Helen: A Monumental Series Celebrating the Wedding of Caterina Corner in 1468”, The Journal of the Walters Art Museum, 74 (2019), n. 95 (on-line journal: https://journal.thewalters.org/volume/74/essay/the-abduction-of-helen-venetian-spallierecelebrating-the-wedding-of-catarina-corner-1468/) [last accessed 24 November 2021]. 64 For pictures of the panels, see F. Calderai and A. Chong, Furnishing a Museum: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Collection of Italian Furniture, Boston, 2011, p. 115, fig. e.

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were chosen, above all, by virtue of their fame, which in itself made them worthy of being remembered. But once this criterion of selection had been fulfilled, there were no rules as to who should, or should not, be included. This resulted in innumerable variations within a broad iconographic framework, each of which needs to be understood in light of the particular circumstances and motives which gave rise to its commission. Many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century cycles of Uomini famosi, which continued to be influenced by representations of the Nine Worthies, made no distinction between mythical or legendary figures, on the one hand, and historical ones, on the other65. They included famous men as diverse as Hercules and Achilles, Samson and Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar and an array of consuls and commanders of the Roman Republic. The selection could be wide-ranging, as in the Sala del Consiglio of the Palazzo Comunale of Lucignano (Arezzo), now converted into the local museum66; or a depiction of the Madonna and Child might be placed next to images of angels and saints, as in the so-called ‘scrittoio’ of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Croce at Montalcino (Siena)67. Politicians and condottieri from the recent past can also be found among the Uomini famosi, as in Andrea del Castagno’s cycle of 1448-1451 in Villa Carducci di Legnaia, Florence, which include Pippo Spano, Farinata degli Uberti and Niccolò Acciaiuoli68. Although the emphasis was usually on warriors and commanders, other types, most notably learned men, sometimes made an appearance. Apart from the famous cycle on panels in the Studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro in the Ducal Palace of Urbino69, however, the inclusion of poets among the Uomini famosi seems to have been a speciality of Tuscany and, particularly, of Florence70.

65 On the continuity and interrelations between the canon of the Neuf Preux and the Famous Men, see A. Salamon, “Les Neuf Preux: des Hommes illustres?”, Questes, 17 (2009), p. 84-88. 66 The cycle, which is unattributed, was painted between 1438 and 1479 and now comprises twenty-three figures (out of an estimated thirty-one) from the Bible and Roman history, as well as Virgil and Boethius, Lucretia and Judith. It is also an unusual variation on the theme because of its source: C. L. Joost-Gaugier, “Dante and the History of Art: The Case of a Tuscan Commune”, Parts I-II, Artibus et historiae, 21 (1990), p. 15-30 and 22 (1990), p. 23-46, has shown that the images are closely connected to Dante’s Commedia. See also L. B. T. Houghton, “A Fresco Portrait of Virgil at Lucignano”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 66 (2003), p. 1-28, and E. Hlawitschka-Roth, Die “Uomini Famosi” der Sala di Udienza im Palazzo Comunale zu Lucignano: Staatsverständnis und Tugendlehre im Spiegel einer toskanischen Freskenfolge des Quattrocento, Neuried, 1998. 67 The cycle, painted by Vincenzo Tamagni in 1507-1510, depicts en grisaille Aristotle, Cicero, Judith, Lucretia, Scipio, Plato, David and Joshua. A Madonna and Child with angels, alongside St Jerome and St Gregory, complete the decoration. See R. Guerrini, Vincenzo Tamagni e lo scrittoio di Montalcino, Siena, [1991], esp. p. 15-38. 68 See C. L. Joost-Gaugier, “Castagno’s Humanistic Program at Legnaia and its Possible Inventor”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 45 (1982), p. 274-282, and C. Gilbert, “On Castagno’s Nine Famous Men and Women: Sword and Book as the Basis for Public Service”, in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. M. Tetel, R. G. Witt and R. Goffen, Durham, 1989, p. 174-192. The frescoes, discovered in 1847 on the walls of the main hall of the Villa under a coat of whitewash, have been detached and are now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. A century later, three additional figures (Adam and Eve, and a Madonna and Child with angels) were also recovered: they remain in situ. 69 The panels, depicting a total of twenty-eight philosophers, poets and Church Fathers, have been attributed to Justus of Ghent and Pedro Berruguete and dated to around 1473-1476; they are now split between the Studiolo and the Louvre. See Lo Studiolo del Duca: il ritorno degli Uomini illustri alla Corte di Urbino (exhibition catalogue, Urbino, Palazzo Ducale, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 2015), ed. A. Marchi, Milan, 2015, as well as L. Cheles, “The ‘Uomini famosi’ in the Studiolo of Urbino: An Iconographic Study”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 102 (1983), p. 1-7, and Id., Lo studiolo di Urbino: iconografia di un microcosmo principesco, Modena, 1991, p. 15-20 and 37-54. 70 See M. M. Donato, “Famosi cives: testi, frammenti e cicli perduti a Firenze fra Tre e Quattrocento”, Ricerche di storia dell’arte, 30 (1986), p. 27-42, who also presents some comparisons with portraits found in manuscript marginalia.

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Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio are part of the series of Villa Carducci, and they were also present in the lost cycle of the Aula Minor in Palazzo Vecchio, alongside Claudian and Zanobi da Strada71. Petrarch’s De viris illustribus had a significant impact on these cycles. The composition of this historical work was notoriously lengthy: largely written around 1341-1343, as mentioned in Chapter 3, it was still unfinished at Petrarch’s death in 1374, when it fell to his disciple and secretary, Lombardo della Seta, to complete it by producing a Supplementum in 137972. The conception of history underpinning De viris illustribus was not only widely influential, but also affected the Uomini famosi theme73. In Petrarch’s view, not all famous, wealthy or powerful men of the past could lay claim to the title vir illustris, since fame and power were not enough to make them memorable to future generations74. He maintained instead that only those who had distinguished themselves by their virtue, or their vice, merited a place in his De viris illustribus75. His basic assumption was that the figures from the past which he had selected had something to teach us, encouraging us to imitate virtuous behaviour and warning us to avoid the path of evil76. Petrarch’s category of viri illustres applied only to generals and statemen, that is, men of action; so, writers, philosophers and other thinkers – as well as women – were excluded77. Furthermore, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the past Petrarch was talking about was not a generic and undistinguished flow of time, but a precise moment in history: the history of Rome, especially the Roman Republic. This conception of Rome as the summit of antiquity (his own times were so decadent that they were not even worth considering) is articulated in a famous passage from his Invectiva against Jean de Hesdin, written in 1373: “What else, then, is all history if not the praise of Rome?”78. The inclusion among Petrarch’s series of Roman heroes of three externi – Alexander, Pyrrhus and Hannibal – who are presented in a highly unfavourable light merely serves to demonstrate the indisputable

71 Although born in Alexandria in Egypt, Claudian was firmly believed to be of Florentine origin and was therefore included among the Florentine poets; see Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 133. A similar group was also depicted in the Palazzo del Proconsolo (Palazzo dell’Arte dei Giudici e Notai) in Florence. Starting with the discovery in 1882 of traces of paint on a lunette, subsequent restoration campaigns have revealed a larger, though fragmentary, decorative scheme, including the earliest known portraits of Dante and Boccaccio; the identity of two other badly damaged figures remains uncertain. The frescoes, dated to the late fourteenth century, were probably repainted in the fifteenth: see Ead., “Famosi cives”, p. 35-40, and U. Montano and M. M. Donato, Il cibo e la bellezza: un ciclo di affreschi, il volto di Dante e una grande cucina, Florence, 2015. 72 For Lombardo della Seta, see E. Pasquini’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 37, Rome, 1989, p. 481-485. 73 On Petrarch’s conception of history, see R. G. Witt, “The Rebirth of the Romans as Models of Character”, in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. V. Kirkham and A. Maggi, Chicago and London, 2009, p. 103-111. 74 Petrarch (“Prohemium”, p. 222) writes that “neque enim quisquis opulentus et potens confestim simul illustris est; alterum enim fortune, alterum virtutis et glorie munus est; neque ego fortunatos sed illustres sum pollicitus viros”. 75 Ibid., p. 224: “apud me ista frustra requiruntur, nisi quatenus ad virtutes vel virtutum contraria trahi possunt” (my emphasis). 76 Ibid., “hic enim, nisi fallor, fructuosus historici finis est, illa prosequi que vel sectanda legentibus vel fugienda sunt, ut in utranque partem copia suppetat illustrium exemplorum”. 77 These categories are however, included in Petrarch’s Rerum memorandarum libri, ed. M. Petoletti, Florence, 2014. On a larger scale than the one considered here, Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 115, has noted that Petrarch’s drastic limitation to a specific category of famous men resulted in the exclusion of figures like Cicero and Cato the Younger, who had been regarded as venerable authorities throughout the Middle Ages. 78 Petrarch, “Invectiva”, p. 790: “Quid est enim aliud omnis historia, quam romana laus?”. The English translation is mine.

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and unparalleled superiority of the Romans. In conclusion, the canon of famous men established by Petrarch in De viris illustribus was not only restricted almost exclusively to Rome, but also, in open disagreement with the previous tradition, alloted no place to women, contemporary figures, philosophers or learned men. While the iconographic tradition of Uomini famosi did not turn into a visual transposition of Petrarch’s ideas, it is undeniable that it was powerfully influenced by them. In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the focus of these cycles tended to become Rome, with a number of long-forgotten heroes from the Roman Republic, recovered by Petrarch from Livy, entering the decorative reportoire of Renaissance Italian art. More significant for my argument, however, is that, in this shift of balance towards Roman history, the figure of Alexander was lost. Included in the earliest cycles of Uomini famosi from the fourteenth century, he increasingly disappeared from those painted in the second half of the fifteenth century; and no series in which Alexander appears is known from sixteenth-century Italy. Representations of Alexander in Uomini famosi Cycles

Three cycles of Uomini famosi from the fourteenth century included Alexander, as did three from the fifteenth. Though limited in number, we can say that in all the areas throughout the peninsula where such cycles appeared – Naples, Padua, Florence, Rome and Milan – there was at least one which included Alexander. As we shall see, the earliest cycle featuring Alexander (Castel Nuovo, Naples) was still strongly under the influence of the medieval tradition of the Nine Worthies, discussed in Chapter 2 above. The cycles of the Aula Minor in Florence and of Monte Giordano in Rome can be categorised as transitional in that they introduced new elements of Petrarchan origin but combined them with the lingering presence of a medieval conception of history. Finally, the cycles painted for the Reggia Carrarese in Padua, for the Arengo Palace in Milan and for the Piccolomini family in Siena signal the beginning of a significant change in the tradition, with the image of Alexander now based on the ancient sources recovered by humanists. Mention should also be made of a fragmentary cycle of 1391 in the Palazzo Datini in Prato near Florence, the residence of the wealthy merchant Francesco di Marco Datini (1335-1410)79. Part of this larger decoration was a lunette, painted a secco by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini in the courtyard, which has been detached and is now displayed in a room nearby. It shows a series of four Uomini famosi, including an armoured figure, holding a sword and an orb and wearing a crown, who has been identified as either Julius Caesar or Alexander80. It is difficult to find conclusive proof one way or the other, not least because

79 On the decoration of the Palazzo Datini, see B. Cole, “The Interior Decoration of the Palazzo Datini in Prato”, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 13 (1967), p. 61-82; Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 15-41; T. Bastianich, An Illustrious Man and his Uomini Illustri: Francesco di Marco Datini and the Decoration of His Palace in Prato, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. The most recent contribution on the frescoes is M. Romagnoli, “Gli ambienti esterni: proposte per una lettura iconografica”, in Palazzo Datini a Prato: una casa fatta per durare mille anni, ed. J. Hayez and D. Toccafondi, 2 vol., Florence, 2012, I, p. 124-139. I thank Sonia Cavaciocchi for kindly providing me with a copy of this article. 80 For Julius Caesar, see Cole, “The Interior Decoration”, p. 74, n. 32, who is followed by Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 126. For Alexander, see Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 30, Bastianich, An Illustrious Man, p. 212-213, and Romagnoli, “Gli ambienti esterni”, p. 129.

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the patchy survival of the courtyard decoration means that the reconstruction of its iconographic programme remains a subject for speculation. An in situ examination of the lunette has reinforced my belief that neither the generic features of this figure nor his conventional attributes as a ruler are sufficient to identify him beyond doubt as Alexander. Medieval Cycles The Castel Nuovo Cycle, Naples

The earliest of the cycles, now lost, is especially important in the iconographic tradition because it is the first documented Uomini famosi cycle in Italian art. It was painted by Giotto around 1333 in the Sala Maior of Castel Nuovo (also known as Maschio Angioino) in Naples81. Commissioned by King Robert of Anjou, the frescoes were probably made in connection with the marriage of his grandaughter and heiress to the throne, Giovanna (the future Giovanna I), to Andrea of Hungary in 1333: an occasion which would explain the inclusion of famous women accompanying their male counterparts82. The cycle, which was recorded by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari among other sources, was destroyed in the mid-fifteenth century, when the Sala Maior was demolished as part of the building works undertaken in the castle by Alfonso the Magnanimous83. Despite the loss of the frescoes, we know something about them thanks to a collection of nine sonnets surviving, partially or fully, in nine Florentine manuscripts84. The sonnets, written in Italian, have been attributed to Giovanni Fiorentino, alias the jester Malizia Barattone, who was active in Naples at the court of Queen Giovanna I in the 1360s and who, later in his life, wrote the collection of novelle known as Il pecorone85. As the heading of one of the manuscripts states, the sonnets were directly inspired by Giotto’s cycle in the Sala Maior. Having admired the frescoes, Giovanni Fiorentino resolved to write sonnets dedicated to each of the nine Uomini famosi painted on the walls: Alexander, Solomon, Hector, Aeneas, Achilles, Paris, Hercules, Samson and Julius Caesar86.

81 See P. Leone de Castris, Giotto a Napoli, Naples, 2006, p. 217-233, and Di Simone, “Giotto, Petrarca e il tema degli uomini illustri – 1”, p. 44-62. Still essential is C. L. Joost-Gaugier, “Giotto’s Hero Cycle in Naples: A Prototype of Donne Illustri and a Possible Literary Connection”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 43 (1980), p. 311-318. 82 The hypothesis that the cycle was commissioned to celebrate Giovanna’s marriage was suggested by Joost-Gaugier, “Giotto’s Hero Cycle”, p. 317, and discussed further by Leone de Castris, Giotto a Napoli, p. 222-224. 83 Leone de Castris, Giotto a Napoli, p. 217 and 226, n. 3. 84 The sonnets were first published by G. De Blasiis, “Immagini di uomini famosi in una sala di Castelnuovo attribuite a Giotto”, Napoli nobilissima, 9 (1900), p. 65-67; they can also be read in Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 263-266, n. 76 (with an English translation) and Leone de Castris, Giotto a Napoli, p. 228-229, n. 13 (with a list of the nine extant manuscripts). 85 See F. Pignatti, “Giovanni Fiorentino (da Firenze)”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 56, Rome, 2001, p. 29-34. 86 De Blasiis, “Immagini di uomini famosi”, p. 65, states that in ms. Laur. Red. 184, dated to the first half of the fifteenth century, the sonnets are accompanied by the following heading: “Sonetti composti per [blank] il quale essendo nella sala del re Roberto a Napoli vide dipinti questi famosi huomini. E lui fè a ciaschuno il suo sonetto chome qui apresso”. This codex is the only one to mention the ‘sala’ in Castel Nuovo as the location of the frescoes; the absence of this information in the other manuscripts suggests that they are likely to be copies; see C. Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes”, in The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, ed. G. P. Weisberg and L. S. Dixon, Syracuse NY, 1987, p. 225-241, at p. 232.

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In the scholarly literature, it is often said or assumed that Giotto’s Uomini famosi were accompanied by tituli and that Giovanni Fiorentino’s sonnets are merely a transcription of these87. This idea can be dismissed, first and foremost on linguistic grounds, which seem not to have been taken into consideration so far. No evidence exists of the presence of tituli painted below the famous men of the Castel Nuovo cycle; but even if Giotto’s figures were actually accompanied by tituli, these would surely have been in Latin or possibly in French, the language of the ruling family of Anjou. They would certainly not have been written in the Italian vernacular of the sonnets88. All we know for sure about Giotto’s cycle is the identity of the Uomini famosi he painted. It is reasonable to assume that the sonnets preserve Giovanni’s memory of the frescoes he had seen with some degree of accuracy. But the extent to which these verses give us glimpse of the iconography of the cycle or instead reflect Giovanni’s own knowledge of the figures painted by Giotto remains unclear. The only illuminated manuscript containing the sonnets, ms. Strozzi 174 in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, is, unfortunately, of no use for our purposes. Ascribed to Apollonio di Giovanni, the three pictures of famous men paired with the sonnets are the only visual record connected, though indirectly, to Giotto’s cycle which has come down to us but, despite what has been suggested, Alexander is not among them. On fol. 2 v there is an image of a bearded old man, looking downwards in sadness and holding a book in his hands with three others scattered at his feet. The figure has been identified as Alexander89; however, this hypothesis is untenable, not least because the sonnet of Giovanni Fiorentino to which this image is paired (quoted below) describes Alexander in a totally different way. The picture on fol. 2 v, instead, matches perfectly the description in Giovanni’s sonnet on Solomon90, and I therefore suggest that it should be identified as an image of him. A plausible reconstruction of the arrangement of the figures in the Sala Maior was suggested in 1987 by Creighton Gilbert: by analysing the (variable) order of the sonnets

87 See, e.g., Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 167; M. Ceccanti, “Un inedito Plutarco laurenziano con note per il miniatore”, Rivista di storia della miniatura, 1-2 (1996-1997), p. 69-76, at p. 76, n. 36; Bodon, Heroum Imagines, p. 17, n. 54. 88 Credit for this linguistic argument is given to Lorenzo Bonoldi, whom I thank for sharing his thoughts on this point with me. 89 See the image, with the caption “Alessandro Magno”, in Ceccanti, “Un inedito Plutarco”, p. 74. Doubts about this identification have been raised by Leone de Castris, Giotto a Napoli, p. 232, n. 30: “Un sovrano dotto e circondato di libri la cui identificazione col grande condottiero [scil. Alessandro] risulta per lo meno dubbia”. Ms. Strozzi 174 contains the text of Petrarch’s Triumphi preceded by a collection of sonnets, among which are three of the nine composed by Giovanni Fiorentino on the Castel Nuovo cycle. 90 For the text, based on a comparative study of the manuscripts, see De Blasiis, “Immagini di uomini famosi”, p. 66: “Io fui ultramirabil Salamone, / di cui saver riluce tutto il mondo: / molte question solvetti di gran pondo, / e ‘l tempio edificai per mia ragione. / Tengon le genti elloro opinione, / s’io sono in cielo o s’io gravai giù al fondo: / a questo punto, lettor, non rispondo, / ma vo’ che ‘l ver ne sia mio testimone. / Molti libri scriss’io di mia dottrina: / trattai di Re e recai in figura/ el cielo, el mondo e ciò che ne diclina. / Ma questa maledetta creatura, / nemica della spezie masculina, / mi fe creder per mia disavventura: / onde mia fama luce assai più scura” (“I was the preternatural Solomon, / whose wisdom is known throughout the world: / many weighty problems did I solve, / and I built the Temple thanks to my ingenuity. / People have their own opinions / on whether I rose to heaven or sank in the earth below: / to this question, reader, I refuse to respond, / but I wish the truth to be my witness. / I wrote many books recording my teachings: / I wrote of kings and I showed in figures / the heavens, the earth, and what depends from them. / But this damned creature, / enemy of all men, / made me believe, to my great misfortune: / and from this my fame glows rather less bright”). I quote, with some changes, from the English translation provided by Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 263, n. 76.

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in the different manuscripts, he concluded that Alexander was depicted at the beginning of the sequence and Julius Caesar at the end91. The sonnet on Alexander, which has not previously been discussed in detail, deserves attention. Giovanni describes Alexander as a bold conqueror and lord of the world: Sono Alessandro, e mostro in questa storia Signor del mondo, e non senza cagione, Ché, combattendo in ver settentrione, Di tutto l’universo ebbi vittoria. Sazia non fu l’ardita mia memoria: Avendo vinte tutte le persone, Oltre all’umana abitazione Insino all’Uzian mostrai mia gloria. Ancor più fece l’animo mio magno: Salii nell’aria e mostrai ch’io non volli A mia gran signoria par né compagno. Quivi, cresciuto il mio voler sui colli, Entrai nel mare, e nel più chiuso stagno, E vidi tutto il fondo e pesci molli. Lettor, se pigro sei, mio esempio tolli92. In these verses it is said that Alexander, after making his victorious way through to the northern regions of the earth, triumphed even beyond the areas permanently inhabited by men and reached as far as “Uzian”, a reference either to the ocean encircling those lands or possibly to the battle won by Alexander shortly after Gaugamela against the remote and still unconquered Uxian tribe93. After the account of his military deeds, the sonnet goes on to mention Alexander’s two most famous legendary adventures: the ‘Flight to the Heavens with Griffins’ (“salii nell’aria”) and the ‘Submarine Voyage’ into the ocean (“entrai nel mare, e nel più chiuso stagno, / e vidi tutto il fondo e pesci molli”)94. While the ‘Flight’ is presented as the ultimate proof of Alexander’s unparalleled power and universal

91 Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes”: the author made a few interesting points on the cycle, despite the disputable general conclusions to which he came. According to him, the Castel Nuovo cycle does not belong to the Uomini famosi theme; because of the presence of famous women alongside the nine men, the cycle should rather be connected to the imagery of the power of women and the ‘Slaves of Love’ motif (see ibid., p. 235 and 240-241, n. 17). I strongly disagree with this conclusion. 92 De Blasiis, “Immagini di uomini famosi”, p. 66-67. 93 On the episode, see Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni V.3.1-16. A discussion of its sources is in Atkinson, A Commentary on Q. Curtius Rufus, p. 69-72. 94 Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes”, p. 236-237, sees in the mention of the ‘Submarine Voyage’ an indirect reference to the unfaithful mistress of Alexander, who, according to an anomalous, thirteenth-century German version of the episode, which has been mentioned in Chapter 1, nearly caused his death during the descent into the sea. According to Gilbert, the submarine adventure is merely an excuse to include an untrustworthy woman in Alexander’s story, which confirms his interpretation of the Castel Nuovo cycle as a representation of ‘Slaves of Love’. I find this hypothesis far-fetched, and I would argue instead that the episode was included in the sonnet because it was one of the best-known of Alexander’s legendary adventures; my interpretation is bolstered by its pairing with the most popular adventure of all, the ‘Flight with Griffins’.

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sovereignity, his descent into the sea in a vessel is envisaged as undertaken on account of his curiosity to see the bottom of the ocean and the wonders there95. It is possible that these episodes were somehow alluded to in the fresco, but less likely that they were actually depicted. The opening verse of the sonnet (“Sono Alessandro, e mostro in questa storia”) suggests a strong connection between what is related in the text and what was shown in the picture. All the nine Uomini famosi introduce themselves in the first person (“Io fui il magnifico Achille”, “Ercole fui, fortissimo gigante”) and also refer to their own painted image (“Son per Enea qui figurato e scorto”, “I’ son Paris dell’alto re Priamo / Qui figurato”). Furthermore, seven of them – the two exceptions are Alexander and Julius Caesar – mention women who may have been depicted as their companions (Solomon calls on “questa maledetta creatura”, while Hector points to Penthesilea as “costei qui, che sì fiso mi mira”)96. These features indicate that the sonnets were not intended for independent manuscript circulation, but rather as a commentary on Giotto’s fresco cycle – it is conceivable that Giovanni Fiorentino intended to use them in his performance as court jester. Whatever the case, it is remarkable that, as far as we can tell from the evidence of Giovanni’s sonnets, Alexander, in the Castel Nuovo cycle, which is regarded as the first example of the humanist theme of Uomini famosi, seems to have been portrayed as the hero of the medieval legend: the kosmokrator who, after subjugating the entire earth to his power, explored both the heavens and the depths of the sea. The sources on which Giovanni drew are not easy to determine. For Paris and Aeneas, Gilbert has shown that there are specific references to Dante and Boccaccio97. As for Alexander, any re-elaboration of the Alexander Romance could well have supplied the material. It is worth pointing out, however, that the reference to the Uxians (in the text, “Uzian”), if that identification is correct, is quite unusual: the episode appears in Curtius Rufus98, as well as in Walter of Chatillon’s Alexandreis VI. 63-76.

95 The expression “nel più chiuso stagno” has been translated as “closed tight in tin” (Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 263, n. 76) and “in a closed tin” (Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes”, p. 236). In my opinion both these translations are inaccurate. In no version of the ‘Submarine Voyage’ is the vessel in which Alexander is lowered into the sea made of tin or of any other metal, which would prevent Alexander from achieving the aim of his adventure: viewing and admiring the bottom of the sea. For this reason, in both the literary and the iconographic tradition, the vessel is invariably made of transparent and water-repellent glass. The Italian word “stagno” means not only “tin”, but also “waterproof, water-resistant” and therefore “perfectly sealed” (see Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. S. Battaglia, gen. ed. G. Barberi Squarotti, 24 vol., Turin, 1961-2009, XX, p. 47); so, a more appropriate translation of the expression “nel più chiuso stagno” would be “in a perfectly sealed vessel”. 96 For the first person as the standardised form of texts accompanying a visual composition, see N. De Blasi, “Iscrizioni in volgare nell’Italia meridionale: prime esplorazioni”, in ‘Visibile parlare’: le scritture esposte nei volgari italiani dal Medioevo al Rinascimento, ed. C. Ciociola, Naples, 1997, p. 261-301, at p. 261-265. In general, see also C. Ciociola, “‘Visibile parlare’: agenda”, Rivista di letteratura italiana, 7 (1989), p. 9-77, at p. 29-32. Despite the fact that no woman is mentioned by either Alexander or Julius Caesar, F. Bologna, I pittori alla corte angioina di Napoli 1266-1414 e un riesame dell’arte nell’età fridericiana, Rome, 1969, p. 220, claimed that they may have had female companions and suggested Roxane for Alexander and Cleopatra for Caesar. This hypothesis, which has been further elaborated by Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes”, remains insufficiently supported by evidence to be convincing. 97 Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes”, p. 235. A general ‘Dantesque atmosphere’ underpinning all the sonnets has been detected by De Blasiis, “Immagini di uomini famosi”, and it does not seem accidental that in ms. Magliab. II.IV.114, fol. 26 the sonnets are entitled: “Sonetti di Dante Alighieri di Firenze”. 98 See n. 93 above.

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The conclusion of the sonnet is also significant: “Lettor, se pigro sei, mio esempio tolli” (“reader, if you are idle, take up my example”). Alexander’s pothos and achievements are not merely presented in a positive light – which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, is characteristic of the medieval conception of Alexander – but put forward as an example to be admired and emulated. A few years after the Castel Nuovo frescoes were painted, Petrarch firmly rejected the belief that Alexander was lord of the world and thought that his wondrous adventures were so obviously fanciful that they did not even deserve to be mentioned. Yet, in Giotto’s cycle, to the extent that Giovanni Fiorentino’s sonnets allow us to reconstruct it, there was no trace of Petrarch’s sceptical and dismissive attitude. Furthermore, Alexander is the only figure who presents himself to the reader of the sonnets – and, arguably, to the viewer of the Uomini famosi in the Sala Maior – as a moral exemplar and a model for combatting one of the Seven Deadly Sins: laziness or acedia99. Transitional Cycles The Cycle in the Aula Minor, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

In the 1380s, a fresco cycle of Uomini famosi was painted in the so-called ‘Aula Minor’ or ‘Saletta’, a room located on the second floor of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence; it was used for the meetings of the Signoria, and possibly as waiting room for visitors and petitioners100. Restored in 1451, the frescoes were destroyed in the 1470s101, when the Aula Minor was demolished in order to make space for the Sala dei Gigli and the adjacent Sala delle Udienze102. Despite the absence of any visual record of the cycle, an early fifteenth-century manuscript survives (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 99 After the destruction of Giotto’s paintings in the 1450s, stories of Alexander were included in the new decoration of the Sala Maior. A pamphlet dated between 1474 and 1475, written by the Florentine humanist Pier Andrea da Verrazzano in honour of soon-to-be queen of Hungary and wife of Matthias Corvinus, Beatrice of Aragon, contains a description of the room; while there is no mention of the lost cycle, some tapestries are recorded, depicting “diverse historie, maxime di Alexandro Magno, di Alcibiade, di Sansone e d’altri principi famosi”; see T. De Marinis and C. Dionisotti, “Un opuscolo di Pier Andrea da Verrazano per Beatrice d’Aragona”, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 10 (1967), p. 321-343, at p. 331. See also B. De Divitiis, “Castel Nuovo and Castel Capuano in Naples: The Transformation of Two Medieval Castles Into ‘all’antica’ Residencies for the Aragonese Royals”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 76.4 (2013), p. 441-474, esp. p. 450-459 and 471-472 (Appendix I). 100 N. Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic, Oxford, 1995, p. 52, dated the cycle to after 1385. An earlier date, not after 1380, was put forward by A. Bernacchioni, “Alcune precisazioni su un perduto ciclo di ‘Uomini illustri’ in Palazzo Vecchio”, Paragone Arte, 44-46 (1994), p. 17-22, esp. p. 18-19. According to Bernacchioni, a payment made to the painters Cecco Lapi and Piero di Giovanni on 30 December 1380 for a “pittura della saletta del palazzo de’ Signori” refers to the Uomini famosi frescoes in the Aula Minor; this provides not only a date ante quem for the completion of the cycle, but also identifies the artists responsible for it. The archival document is published in Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, ed. G. Gaye, 3 vol., Florence, 1839-1840, I, p. 530. 101 Filippo Lippi himself carried out the restoration, which suggests that the cycle was highly valued at the time; if not, he would certainly have entrusted the job to a pupil from his workshop, as was common practice in such cases. For the document of payment, dated 19 April 1451, see J. Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work with a Complete Catalogue, London, 1993, p. 526, no. 12. 102 See Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, p. 52-54, and Id., “Classical Themes in the Decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50 (1987), p. 29-43, at p. 29-33. See also G. Lensi Orlandi, Il Palazzo Vecchio di Firenze, Florence, 1977, p. 76-78. Archival evidence shows that the Aula Minor was still extant in 1468, when work was done on the image of a Madonna placed above the door: see Bernacchioni, “Alcune precisazioni”,

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ms. Conv. Soppr. 79), which contains copies of the tituli once accompanying the twenty-two figures along the walls. The tituli are in the form of Latin epigrams in hexameters and have come down to us with an attribution to Coluccio Salutati, Chancellor of the Florentine Republic from 1375 until his death in 1406103. The iconographic programme, which is also assumed to have been devised by Salutati, included generals from the Roman Republic (its founder Brutus and those who fought against tyranny) as well as non-Roman leaders (Pyrrhus and Hannibal), emperors (e.g., Augustus, Constantine and Charlemagne) and five Florentine poets (Claudian, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Zanobi da Strada). Alexander was also included in the series, and one of the epigrams is devoted to him104. For the composition of the programme, Salutati drew on Petrarch’s De viris illustribus ­(over half of the twenty-two figures in the Aula Minor, mainly from the Roman Republic, are found in this work) and Filippo Villani’s De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus, his source for the local poets105. Salutati also had an iconographic model: the cycle of Uomini famosi painted in the Reggia Carrarese in 1368-1379 under the direct inspiration of Petrarch, to which I shall return below. There are, however, several differences between the two cycles. In contrast to the Paduan frescoes, the selection of Uomini famosi in the Aula Minor is not limited to military leaders of Roman antiquity: Constantine and Charlemagne, who were well beyond the chronological framework of Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, were included, as were literary figures such as Cicero and the Florentine poets106. In the Aula Minor, the historical perspective and the local dimension intertwined, resulting in a cycle which is essentially a pictorial celebration of Florence – as opposed, in Padua, to the illustration per figuras of the history of Rome. In the Aula Minor, the heroes of the Roman Republic, who defeated its internal and external enemies, are followed by the Roman and Christian emperors, whose legacy finds its way to Florence, a city celebrated for its culture (hence the presence of its poets) as well as for its political institutions107. Alexander is

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p. 20. The stories of great men of the past were the subject of the decoration of both the Sala dei Gigli (Domenico Ghirlandaio, Roman Heroes, 1482-1485) and the Sala delle Udienze (Francesco Salviati, Stories of Furius Camillus, 1550s). The epigrams are attributed to Coluccio by his friend Domenico di Bandino (c. 1335-1418), who transcribed seventeen of them in his encyclopedia, Fons memorabilium universi. On the miscellaneous ms. Conv. Soppr. 79, see Coluccio Salutati e l’invenzione dell’Umanesimo (exhibition catalogue, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 2008-2009), ed. T. De Robertis, G. Tanturli and S. Zamponi, Florence, 2008, p. 185-186. T. Hankey, “Salutati’s Epigrams for the Palazzo Vecchio”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 22 (1959), p. 363-365. Some of the epigrams, but not the one for Alexander, were first published by L. Mehus, “Vita Ambrosii Traversarii generalis Camaldulensis”, in A. Traversari, Latinae Epistolae, ed. L. Mehus, 2 vol., Florence, 1759, I, p. cxlv-cccxxxvi, at p. cccxiii-cccxv. See Rubinstein, “Classical Themes”, p. 30, who proved Coluccio’s first-hand knowledge of both works – and, in the case of Villani’s, his direct intervention in the correction of the text. The inclusion of Charlemagne in the Aula Minor cycle would certainly have displeased Petrarch, who, in his Familiares, ed. V. Rossi, 4 vol., Florence, 1933-1942, I, p. 25 (I.4.7), said that he was unworthy of sharing the title of “magnus” with Alexander and Pompey. For the iconographic interpretation of the cycle, see Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 126-148, esp. p. 135-136, and R. Guerrini, “Orbis moderamina: echi di Claudiano negli epigrammi del Salutati per Palazzo Vecchio a Firenze”, Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia. Università di Siena, 13 (1992), p. 319-329, esp. p. 323-324. In contrast to the medieval tradition, which also influenced the iconography of Uomini famosi, Julius Caesar appears in the Aula Minor as a victorious general and not as the first emperor of Rome; see Rubinstein, “Classical Themes”, p. 31.

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part of this iconographic context, but the role he plays in it has barely been touched on in the scholarly literature108. A starting point for its examination is the epigram on him: Magnus Alexander rex Macedonum Clarus Alexander patris ultus fata, rebelles Evertit Thebas, doctisque pepercit Athenis. Persas, et Scithios, Bactrasque subegit, et Indos, Qui sacra deposcens periit Babilone veneno109. [Alexander the Great, King of Macedon. (This is) the famous Alexander, who vindicated his father’s fate, destroyed rebellious Thebes and spared learned Athens, subdued the Persians, the Scythians, the Bactrians and the Indians; (this is) he who, demanding sacred honours for himself, died of poisoning in Babylon] (My translation). In these verses, the main deeds of Alexander are related in chronological order: after vindicating the murder of his father Philip, he repressed the revolt of the Greek city states, burning Thebes to the ground, but showing mercy to Athens, which he spared. He then conquered Persia, Bactria, the northern lands of the Scythians and reached as far as India. In the concluding verse of the epigram, Alexander’s claim to divine honours is mentioned (“qui sacra deposcens”): a reference, I believe, to his assumption of the title “son of Ammon” after the visit to the Oracle of Siwa in 331 bc. It may also refer to his later attempt to introduce the Persian practice of proskynesis (or prostration) at court, which failed, as we shall see, because the Macedonians, who regarded it as a gesture of respect towards the gods, refused to perform it before Alexander. The epigram ends by mentioning his death in Babylon, which was generally believed to have been caused by poison110. The cycle of the Aula Minor has been often considered as a sort of expanded version of the Paduan cycle; and yet the figure of Alexander plays a very different role in the two compositions. In the Sala Virorum Illustrium of the Reggia Carrarese, Alexander is part of the group of the externi, including also Pyrrhus and Hannibal, whose prowess succumbed to the military valour of Rome. In the Aula Minor, Alexander does not appear as a non-Roman leader, but rather as one of the world emperors. We know that the order of the epigrams in ms. Conv. Soppr. 79 followed the arrangement of the figures on the walls of the Aula Minor111; as the epigram of Alexander comes after that of the mythical King Ninus, we can be sure that their images were painted side by side, with Ninus preceding Alexander. According to 108 See, for instance, G. Tanturli, “Postilla agli epigrammi e ritratti d’uomini illustri nel Palazzo della Signoria a Firenze”, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 19 (2008), p. 23-31, who makes interesting points about the epigrams, but not about the one for Alexander. 109 Hankey, “Salutati’s Epigrams”, p. 364 (I have altered the capitalization where necessary). For an Italian translation of the epigram, see Caciorgna, “Immagini di eroi ed eroine”, p. 310, as well as Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 136-138, who also provides some insights into Salutati’s sources for the Alexander titulus. 110 Rumours as to the cause of Alexander’s sudden death (fever, excessive drinking, poison) spread immediately, and the problem has been debated since antiquity; for a useful summary, see E. Visser, “Alexander’s Last Days in Hellenistic and Roman Tradition”, in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Ten Studies on the Last Days of Alexander in Literary and Historical Writing (Symposium Proceedings, Groningen, Interfacultaire Werkgroep Mediaevistiek, 12-15 October 1977), ed. W. J. Aerts, J. M. M. Hermans and E. Visser, Nijmegen, 1978, p. 1-20. 111 In the manuscript, the heading to the epigrams states that the hexameters follow the order of the figures along the walls: “epigrammata Virorum illustrium posita in aula minori pal[a]tii fiorentini. Ut sunt per ordinem. Tetrasticon monocolos” (my emphasis).

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a well-established tradition, Ninus, the king of Assyria, was regarded as the founder of the city of Nineveh and, more importantly, of the first world empire112. The association between Alexander and Ninus in the Aula Minor is reinforced by the text of the epigrams. In his titulus, Ninus is described as the conqueror who ruled over all the Asians, except for the Indians – death preventing him from achieving this ultimate goal113. Alexander succeeded where Ninus failed, for his hexameter verse says that he conquered not only the Persians, the Scythians, the Bactrians but also the Indians. Alexander’s achievements, therefore, complete and surpass those of Ninus. The cycle of the Aula Minor illustrates the translatio imperii, the transfer of power vested in a person or institution, moving from the Assyrian (Ninus) to the Greco-Macedonian empire (Alexander), to Rome (Octavian-Augustus), Constantinople (Constantine) and the Holy Roman Empire (Charlemagne). With regard to Alexander, the cycle of the Aula Minor is an example of what I call a ‘transitional cycle’ of Uomini famosi. On the one hand, the influence of the new approach to history championed by Petrarch, and the emphasis on the Roman Republic in particular, is apparent114. On the other hand, the representation of the world emperors, among whom Alexander is depicted, belongs to a medieval tradition reflecting a different conception of history, which goes back ultimately to the biblical-patristic theory of the Four Monarchies. In his Commentarius in Danielem, St Jerome interpreted chapters 2 and 7 (relating Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue with parts made of different metals and Daniel’s vision of four beasts emerging from the sea) as an allusion to four great kingdoms: the Assyrian-Babylonian empire of Ninus, the Medo-Persian empire of Cyrus, the Greek empire of Alexander and the Roman empire (whose representative varied)115. As far as we can tell from Salutati’s epigrams, there was no intention in the Aula Minor to depict the four monarchs as a series – the Persian king Cyrus, for one, is not present. But the inclusion of the founders of empires in the iconographic programme – from the earliest, Ninus, to the Christians Constantine and Charlemagne – reflects a providential conception of history, based on Scripture and the Church Fathers, which is peculiar to the whole of Christian history and especially of the Middle Ages116.

112 On the semi-legendary figure of Ninus and his spouse Semiramis, see D. Levi, “The Novel of Ninus and Semiramis”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 87 (1944), p. 420-428. 113 Hankey, “Salutati’s Epigrams”, p. 364: “Ninus Assiriorum rex. / Assirium Beli proles clarissima Ninus / Imperium genui, mundi turbando quietem. / India restabat magico çoroastre perempto / Quam solam ex Asia vincendam morte reliqui”. 114 The influence of Petrarch’s De viris illustribus has also been detected in the general tone of Coluccio’s epigrams – occasionally, in the phraseology as well: see ibid., p. 363. 115 On the theory of the Four Monarchies, see M. A. Travassos Valdez, Historical Interpretations of the ‘Fifth Empire’: The Dynamics of Periodization from Daniel to António Vieira, S.J., Leiden, 2011, esp. p. 53-71 and 157-166; still important are H. H. Rowley, Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel: A Historical Study of Contemporary Theories, Cardiff, 1935, J. W. Swain, “The Theory of the Four Monarchies: Opposition History Under the Roman Empire”, Classical Philology, 35 (1940), p. 1-21, and A. Momigliano, “Daniele e la teoria greca della successione degli imperi”, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti della Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 35 (1980), p. 157-162. In Byzantium, patristic commentaries on Daniel’s prophecy of the four beasts gave rise to depictions of the Last Judgment which include Alexander and the other three kings, either standing or riding a monstrous creature. For examples of this iconographic tradition, see G. Galavaris, “Alexander the Great Conqueror and Captive of Death: His Various Images in Byzantine Art”, RACAR/Revue d’art canadienne, 16 (1989), p. 12-18, at p. 15-16, with further references. 116 See Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 136.

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As I have indicated, Petrarch’s De viris illustribus provided a crucial reference for Salutati in the composition of the epigrams, not only in terms of the selection of the Uomini famosi, but also stylistically, in the tone of the verses and in many expressions and formulae which are borrowed from it. In the case of the epigram on Alexander, the similarities to Petrarch’s biography have recently been examined in detail: the choice of episodes from Alexander’s life and their order closely follow Petrarch’s text, and several terms and expressions come directly, though not exclusively, from him117. The only two scholars who have commented on Salutati’s description of Alexander have interpreted it in conflicting ways. According to Teresa Hankey, his portrait of Alexander is far milder that Petrarch’s118. Roberto Guerrini, however, stresses Salutati’s “bare” enumeration of Alexander’s deeds and conquests, with no explicit mention of any virtue119. I believe that neither of these interpretations is entirely correct. While it is doubtless true that the harsh criticism expressed by Petrarch in his De Alexandro Macedone – one of the most severe and venomous attacks ever made on him – is absent from Salutati’s epigram, he does nonetheless criticise Alexander on one specific count: his claim to be treated with divine honours. I have already explained that the expression “qui sacra deposcens” in the last verse most likely refers to Alexander’s assumption of the title “son of Ammon” after Siwa and to his wish, which remained unfulfilled, to be greeted at court with the Persian proskynesis, which, for Greeks and Macedonians, meant to be worshipped as a god. In levelling this criticism, Salutati went beyond a ‘bare’ account of Alexander’s deeds. His claim to divinity had been a controversial issue since antiquity120 and Petrarch had discussed in some detail the audacity which led him to equate himself to the gods. In De Alexandro Macedone 16-25, he treats the episode of the visit to the Oracle of Siwa as a sort of prelude to his account of the death of Callisthenes, the historian and friend of Alexander (and kinsman of Aristotle) who fiercely opposed the introduction of proskynesis at court121. Callisthenes paid for this opposition with his life: falsely accused of connivance in the so-called ‘squires’s conspiracy’ of 327 bc, he was imprisoned, tortured and finally put to death without trial. His murder had been regarded since antiquity as one of the cruellest and cold-hearted crimes ever committed by Alexander; this was “Alexander’s everlasting crime, which no virtue, no success in war, will redeem”, as Seneca had powerfully put it122. Petrarch recounted it in all its horrific details, which he largely took from the dramatic account of Curtius Rufus (Historiae

117 See Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 136-138. 118 Hankey, “Salutati’s Epigrams”, p. 363, who says that the life of Alexander “is more gently handled by Salutati than by the poet [sc. Petrarch]”. 119 Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 137: “Da Petrarca sembrerebbe derivare anche la valutazione ‘asettica’ delle imprese del re macedone, descritte senza che emerga esplicitamente qualche virtù, come accade nella tradizione degli Uomini famosi e come si verifica nella stessa Aula Minor”. 120 See Fredricksmeyer, “Alexander’s Religion and Divinity”, esp. p. 270-278, with bibliography. 121 On Callisthenes and the role he played in Alexander’s controversial claim to divinity, see F. Pownall, “Callisthenes in Africa: The Historian’s Role at Siwah and in the Proskynesis Controversy”, in Alexander in Africa, ed. P. Bosman, Pretoria, 2014, p. 56-71. On Curtius’s account of the proskynesis issue, see C. Pérez, “Curtius Rufus’ Roman Reading of the Proskynesis Debate: Theatricality of Power and Free Eloquence in the Histories of Alexander the Great”, New Classicists, 3 (2020), p. 1-17. 122 Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones VI.23.2-3: “Hic est Alexandri crimen aeternum, quod nulla virtus, nulla bellorum felicitas redimet”.

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Alexandri Magni VIII.5.5-8.23). According to Petrarch, the death of Callisthenes – as well as those of his generals and friends Cleitus, Philotas and Parmenion, which are recounted in the same section of De Alexandro Macedone – was the result of Alexander’s hybris and blasphemous desire to be worshipped as a god. Medieval commentators also argued that Alexander’s pride finally caused his own death by poison123. It is significant that Boccaccio, as already noted in Chapter 3, did not include a biography of Alexander in his De casibus virorum illustrium, but instead wrote an account of Callisthenes’s downfall. In doing so, he presented Alexander as a tyrant who acted out of vanity and was disrespectful of the sacred bond of friendship. All in all, the Alexander of the Aula Minor is shown in a positive light: the epigram celebrates him as a conqueror who created one of the greatest empires in history and began his career by vindicating the murder of his father. Nevertheless, Salutati also took into account the severe judgements on Alexander voiced only a few years before by Petrarch and Boccaccio – particularly with regard to an issue in which he, as the author of a treatise on tyranny, would certainly be interested124. His representation of Alexander would be consistent with the context to which the frescoes belonged, as decorations of the Republic of Florence’s main palace, in a room which was also a celebration of two of the city’s leading literary figures, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Painted in a civic hall, moreover, this image of Alexander had the status of a public statement. The Cycle in the Orsini Palace of Monte Giordano, Rome

Alexander was also among the Uomini famosi painted in 1430-1432 by Masolino da Panicale for Cardinal Giordano Orsini (c. 1360/1370-1438) in the Sala Theatri of his family palace at Monte Giordano in Rome125. The room was decorated with an impressive cycle of over three hundred figures, ranging from Adam to Tamerlane (d. 1405)126. The full-length portraits illustrated the entire history of the world and, given their number and monumental size, were probably arranged in three bands running all around the four walls of the room.

123 See Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 110-117 and 290-292, who also discusses the important contribution of Vincent de Beauvais to the transmission of the story of Callisthenes. See also his “Petrarch and Alexander the Great”. 124 Salutati’s De tyranno (in his Political Writings, ed. S. U. Baldassarri, trans. R. Bagemihl, Cambridge MA and London, 2014, p. 64-143), written in 1400, however, makes no mention of Alexander and focuses on Julius Caesar instead. 125 See A. Amberger, Giordano Orsinis uomini famosi in Rom: Helden der Weltgeschichte im Frühhumanismus, Munich, 2003. From a vast bibliography, the following are particularly valuable: M. Ferro, “Masolino da Panicale e gli affreschi perduti di Montegiordano”, La Diana: annuario della Scuola di Specializzazione in Archeologia e Storia dell’arte dell’Università degli studi di Siena, 1 (1995), p. 95-124, and M. Ciccuto, “Le cronache universali illustrate”, in his Figure d’artista: la nascita delle immagini alle origini della letteratura, Fiesole, 2002, p. 201-212. See also B. Degenhart and A. Schmitt, Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen 1300-1450, 4 vol., Berlin, 1968-1982, I.2, p. 590-621; Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle; Id., “Masolino, Uccello and the Orsini ‘Uomini famosi’”, The Burlington Magazine, 114 (1972), p. 369-378; Scalabroni, “Masolino a Montegiordano”; P. Joannides, Masaccio and Masolino: A Complete Catalogue, London, 1993, p. 452-455, no. L9; A. Delle Foglie, “Leonardo da Besozzo e Masolino: un dialogo tra Roma, Castiglione Olona e Napoli”, Arte lombarda, 140 (2004), p. 56-63. At the time of writing, the long-awaited monograph by K. A. Triff, The Orsini Palace at Monte Giordano: Patronage and Public Image in Renaissance Rome, has been announced as forthcoming. 126 R. L. Mode, “The Orsini Sala Theatri at Monte Giordano in Rome”, Renaissance Quarterly, 26 (1973), p. 167-172, has convincingly suggested that the Sala Theatri served as a reading room adjoining the cardinal’s library, which was also open to humanists of his circle.

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century

Nothing of them remains today, however: the frescoes were destroyed fifty years after their completion, during one of the attacks on the Orsini palace by their longstanding enemies, the Colonna family in 1482 and 1485127. Six illustrated copies and two manuscript descriptions of the cycle survive, dating from the 1440s to the 1530s. None of them records the disposition and setting of the frescoes; but they nevertheless allow us to reconstruct the iconographic programme of the room128. Four out of the six illustrated copies, even though most of them are fragmentary, preserve the image of Alexander129. They are: the so-called Crespi chronicle (Milan, Crespi Collection), illuminated by Leonardo da Besozzo between 1442 and 1449 on commission from Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples130; a sketchbook of the 1440s, made up of 16 leaves and known as the Libro di Giusto, now in Rome, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica131; a manuscript of the 1450s auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1984 (which I shall refer to as the ‘Sotheby’s chronicle’)132; and ms. Varia 102, dated to 1460-1480, of the Biblioteca Reale of Turin133. The Crespi chronicle is the most important surviving iconographic record, since it was made directly from the frescoes and is the only complete copy, reproducing the entire cycle of Monte Giordano, seemingly with great accuracy134.

127 For the reports by a contemporary chronicler of the two attacks, which reduced the palace to a pile of rubble, see Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 34-37. 128 For the two descriptions, see W. A. Simpson, “Cardinal Giordano Orsini (d. 1438) as a Prince of the Church and a Patron of the Arts: A Contemporary Panegyric and Two Descriptions of the Lost Frescoes in Monte Giordano”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29 (1966), p. 135-159. The six illustrated copies are listed and discussed by Ferro, “Masolino da Panicale”, esp. p. 95-100 and 108. The popularity of the cycle is suggested by the fact that it was described by Giovanni Rucellai in 1459 and mentioned by both Vasari and Filarete: see Simpson, “Cardinal Giordano Orsini”, p. 136-137. 129 There is no image of Alexander in two of the illustrated copies of the frescoes: the Cockerell chronicle, today scattered in a number of public and private collections (see Sotheby’s, London, Important Old Master Drawings and Paintings, 2 July 1958, lots 15-22, with previous bibliography); and some twenty-fives leaves derived from it which are now in France (see N. Reynaud, “Barthélemy d’Eyck avant 1450”, Revue de l’Art, 84 [1989], p. 22-43). 130 On Leonardo da Besozzo, the son and collaborator of the more famous Michelino, see G. Toscano’s entry in Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani, p. 371-376. For the chronology and circumstances of commission, I follow the convincing argument made by Ferro, “Masolino da Panicale”, p. 109, n. 7. 131 See A. Venturi, “Galleria Nazionale e Gabinetto delle Stampe in Roma: il Libro di Giusto per la Cappella degli Eremitani in Padova”, Le Gallerie Nazionali italiane, 4 (1899), p. 345-376, and Id., “Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe in Roma: il libro dei disegni di Giusto”, ibid., 5 (1902), p. 391-392 and pl. I-XXXIII. Venturi mistakenly believed that the sketchbook belonged to the painter Giusto de’ Menabuoi, hence the name by which the codex is known. I have not been able to consult Anna Delle Foglie, Il Libretto degli Anacoreti e il Libro di Giusto: due taccuini di disegni tra Tardogotico e Rinascimento, Rome, 2019. 132 Sotheby’s, London, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts and Miniatures, 3 July 1984, lot. 64. According to S. Tomasi Velli, “Scipio’s Wounds”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995), p. 216-234, at p. 228, n. 74, the codex was bought by the dealer H. P. Kraus of New York; I do not know its present whereabouts. 133 The existence of ms. Varia 102 was first reported by P. Toesca, La pittura e la miniatura nella Lombardia dai più antichi monumenti alla metà del Quattrocento, Milan, 1912, p. 489, n. 1. It remains virtually unstudied to this day; some information can be found in Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 52-54 and 281, with a list of the figures at p. 261-277. 134 There is no complete edition of the manuscript, which is in private hands and therefore not easy to access. I am extremely grateful to its owners, who kindly allowed me to reproduce here two images from it. A list of the miniatures was first given by H. Brockhaus, “Leonardo da Bissucio”, in Gesammelte Studien zur Kunstgeschichte: eine Festgabe zum 4. Mai 1885 für Anton Springer, Leipzig, 1885, p. 42-63, at p. 52-58; see also Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 261-277. On the exact correspondence between the fresco cycle and the arrangement of the Crespi chronicle, see Scheller, “Uomini Famosi”.

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In the four manuscripts which include his picture, Alexander is depicted standing upright, fully armed, holding a halberd and a shield, and wearing a crown135. The accompanying inscriptions give his name and the epoch in which he lived – 3618, counting from the origin of the world136. While the posture and the attributes remain identical in their essentials (except for the ornamentation of the shield), what changes is the age of Alexander: from an old man with a long grey-white beard in the Crespi chronicle (Plate XIII), to a mature adult with a short beard in the Libro di Giusto, to a young man in the Sotheby’s chronicle – the 1984 auction catalogue describes him as “a handsome young king in golden armour”. It is likely that the Alexander depicted in the Sala Theatri was the old man shown in the Crespi chronicle, our most trustworthy copy. As we have seen in Chapter 2, depictions of Alexander as an elderly or middle-aged man are rare but not exceptional in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, usually influenced by his inclusion in the canon of the Nine Worthies. I believe that this is also the reason in the case of the Monte Giordano cycle137, especially since, in the Crespi chronicle, Alexander is represented with the same heraldic devices which traditionally identified him in a canonical series of the Nine Worthies (the rampant lion on his shield)138. This also applies to the other eight Worthies, who are scattered throughout the Crespi chronicle and can be easily singled out by virtue of their distinctive coats of arms139. We should also note that in the Crespi chronicle a few figures closely connected to Alexander are grouped together, as if clustering around his image140. At fol. 10 v, Alexander is preceded by Aristotle, Demosthenes and Philip of Macedon; on the following page, fol. 11 r (Plate XIV), we find Darius, the high priest Jaddus, the Indian King Porus and Candace, queen of Meroe. The name of Alexander also appears in two of the inscriptions: Darius is labelled as “rex Persarum qui victus fuit ab Alexandro” and Jaddus as the “pontifex Judeorum qui adoratus fuit ab Alexandro”. In the library of Cardinal Giordano Orsini, there were several books about Alexander, most importantly Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni and a “Ystoria Alexandri Magni”, which is probably one of the medieval versions of

135 I have not been able to consult the Alexander picture in ms. Varia 102 of Turin. Apart from presenting the figures of the Uomini famosi separately, one per page, the manuscript does not differ much from the other three copies iconographically. I shall not discuss or illustrate it here; but I think it can be safely assumed that it depicts Alexander very similarly to the other three codices. 136 The figure of an emperor with sceptre, globe and a wreath of laurel, also named as Alexander in the inscription, is found in the Crespi chronicle (fol. 17 r), the Libro di Giusto (fol. 7 v) and in ms. Varia 102. Its location among rulers and learned men of the second to the fourth century, however, makes me think that this is not Alexander the Great, but rather the Roman emperor Severus Alexander. Cf., however, Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 138, who identifies him as Alexander the Great. For the picture in the Crespi chronicle, see Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 317, pl. XVIIIa; for the Libro di Giusto, see Venturi, “Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe in Roma”, pl. XII. 137 As far as I am aware, there is no other explanation in the literature for this portrayal of Alexander as an old man; see, e.g., Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 127: “for some unknown reason the young conqueror [sc. Alexander] was given an almost completely white beard”. 138 In the Libro di Giusto, the lion is replaced by roses – possibly an allusion to the Orsini family, whose heraldic device was the rose. 139 See Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 110 and n. 16. 140 Only Mode, The Monte Giordano Famous Men Cycle, p. 128, seems to have noticed this, but without developing it further.

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century

the Romance141. While no account of the life of Alexander fails to mention Aristotle, Philip, Darius and Porus142, only the Romance and its derivatives mention Queen Candace, who was famous for her beauty and often confused with the Queen of Sheba143. As for Demosthenes, whose notoriously harsh orations were directed as much against Philip as Alexander, he, too, featured in the medieval Alexander tradition: his name is mentioned in some versions of the Romance, one of which was later used to supplement the text of Curtius Rufus in the medieval interpolated versions of his Historiae Alexandri Magni144. Finally, although the main source for Jaddus, the high priest of the Jews, receiving Alexander’s homage at the gates of Jerusalem is the account by Flavius Josephus in his Antiquitates Judaicae (XI.325-39), the encounter is also reported by Vincent of Beauvais, whose Speculum historiale Giordano Orsini possessed in two manuscript copies145. In the Sala Theatri, the representation of Alexander as an aged man – so clearly in contrast with the fact that he died very young – surrounded by figures drawn partly from the historical sources and partly from the legendary tradition, is perfectly consistent with the general context of the Monte Giordano cycle as documented by the Crespi chronicle. The arrangement of the figures follows the medieval chronological scheme of the Six Ages of the World (sex aetates mundi) – each era being marked at the start by a roundel with an inscription146. Also, underneath each figure is a date calculated from the supposed Creation of the world. The Christian division of history into Six Ages originated in the works of the Church Fathers and was given a theoretical justification by St Augustine, Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede. It became the standard chronological framework in universal histories throughout the Middle Ages – including the most likely source of inspiration for the Monte Giordano cycle, Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale147. It is therefore not surprising that, within an iconographic programme so deeply indebted to the medieval 141 Other minor sources for the life of Alexander such as Orosius’s Historiae adversum Paganos and Justin’s Epitoma were also in the cardinal’s library; in addition, there were three copies of Plutarch’s Lives, both in Greek and Latin, but it is hard to tell whether they included the Life of Alexander. For the library inventory, see Ferro, “Masolino da Panicale”, p. 120-124. 142 In one of the descriptions of the frescoes published by Simpson, “Cardinal Giordano Orsini”, p. 155, Porus is recorded as “rex Indie nigerrimus” – the dark colour of his skin alluding to the far distant, exotic lands he ruled over. 143 The anonymous compiler of one of the descriptions of the frescoes calls her “Candax regina formosissima”: see ibid. According to the Pseudo-Callisthenes (III.18), Candace dwelt in the palace which once belonged to another beautiful queen of the past, Semiramis. For the story of Candace and its medieval tradition, see Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 134-138. 144 See D. Tangri, “Demosthenes in the Renaissance: A Case Study on the Origins and Development of Scholarship on Athenian Oratory”, Viator, 37 (2006), p. 545-582, at p. 551-552. I am grateful to Paolo Sachet for bringing this study to my attention. 145 For the presence of the book in the Orsini library, see Ferro, “Masolino da Panicale”, p. 120-124, and Tomasi Velli, “Scipio’s Wounds”, p. 219-220. On the meeting of Alexander and Jaddus, see A. Momigliano, “Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s Visit to Jerusalem”, in his Settimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Rome, 1979, p. 319-329, and S. J. D. Cohen, “Alexander the Great and Jaddus the High Priest According to Josephus”, AJS Review, 7-8 (1982-1983), p. 41-68. 146 The Six Ages scheme is not strictly followed in the other five copies of the cycle. The most eloquent example of this is the Libro di Giusto: being conceived as a book of models for painting and not as a visual record of the frescoes, not only does it alter the order of succession of the figures, but it also includes totally unrelated materials (e.g., drawings from ancient monuments). See Venturi, “Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe in Roma”, p. 391. 147 See Tomasi Velli, “Scipio’s Wounds”, p. 218-220. On the Six Ages, see Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, p. 148-154; H. L. C. Tristram, Sex aetates mundi: die Weltzeitalter bei den Angelsachsen und den Iren. Untersuchungen und Texte, Heidelberg, 1985; and P. Richet, L’âge du monde: à la découverte de l’immensité du temps, Paris, 1999.

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conception of history, Alexander is represented as the exemplary conqueror belonging to the medieval chivalric canon of the Nine Worthies. Many of the figures represented in the Sala Theatri are also found in contemporary humanist cycles of Uomini famosi (e.g., the heroes of the Roman Republic) and yet they, too, are placed into the chronological framework of the Six Ages, in which no distinction is made between characters from the myth, the Bible and history up to contemporary times. This helps to locate the cycle of Monte Giordano halfway between the medieval tradition and the humanist recovery of antiquity148. Humanist Cycles The Sala dei Giganti, Padua

The most famous fresco cycle of Uomini famosi was doubtless the one commissioned by the lord of Padua, Francesco I il Vecchio da Carrara, for the great hall of his palace in the heart of the city, the Reggia Carrarese149. The cycle was probably painted between 1368 and 1379 by Jacopo Avanzi and Altichiero da Zevio150; but it was irremediably damaged by fire around the turn of the fifteenth century, so that only fragments of it were still extant when the hall was completely renovated in 1539-1541151. The Venetian governor Girolamo Corner commissioned Domenico Campagnola and his workshop to execute the new fresco decoration, which was conceived as a restitutio, a restoration, of the earlier painted cycle.152 The original theme of Uomini famosi was preserved and forty-four larger-than-life male figures were painted along the walls – their imposing size earning the hall the name ‘Sala dei Giganti’153. Nevertheless, the original cycle and its sixteenth-century version differ in many respects, most notably the different selection of Uomini famosi included in the two series. From my perspective, the key change is the inclusion of Alexander in the earlier cycle and his exclusion from the later version. Given the loss of the fourteenth-century cycle154, we can only speculate about the general scheme and arrangement of the Uomini Famosi in the hall. We do, however, know

148 See Ferro, “Masolino da Panicale”, p. 101. 149 The essential reference remains T. E. Mommsen, “Petrarch and the Decoration of the Sala Virorum Illustrium in Padua”, The Art Bulletin, 34 (1952), p. 95-116, complemented by the excellent Bodon, Heroum Imagines. 150 The question of the attribution of the cycle, in which the name of Guariento is also involved, is still debated; for a summary, see Bodon, Heroum Imagines, p. 15-16. 151 See G. Lorenzoni, “L’intervento dei Carraresi, la reggia e il castello”, in Padova: case e palazzi, ed. L. Puppi and F. Zuliani, Vicenza, 1977, p. 29-49, at p. 29-45. After the end of the signoria of the Carraresi, conquered by the Republic of Venice in 1405, the Reggia became the seat of the Venetian governor and was renamed Palazzo del Capitanio. For the vast campaign of renovation works undertaken in the palace during the sixteenth century, see L. Puppi, “Il rinnovamento tipologico del Cinquecento”, in ibid., p. 101-140, at p. 110-119. Today the former great hall belongs to the University of Padua; see C. Anti, Descrizione delle sale accademiche al Bo, del Liviano e di altre sedi, Padua, 1968, p. 50-54. 152 An inscription above the main door on the north wall, marking the conclusion of the works, states that Girolamo Corner “hanc aulam vetustate pene collapsam in hunc egregium nitorem restituit”; see Bodon, Heroum Imagines, p. 36-37. 153 There is no hint that the heroes in the original fourteenth-century cycle were of monumental size; see ibid., p. 11. 154 The only surviving fragment is the famous portrait of Petrarch in his study, which completed the series of Uomini famosi, alongside an image of his disciple and secretary, Lombardo della Seta. The portrait of Petrarch was preserved during the 1539-1541 restoration and can still be seen today, though it has been partially repainted.

the emergence of a new renaissance iconography in the fifteenth century

that the cycle was directly inspired by Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, and that this scheme received great support, in its final stages, from the patron of the frescoes, Francesco I da Carrara, to whom Lombardo della Seta dedicated his Supplementum in 1379. In his preface to the work, Lombardo gives us to understand that the hall in the Reggia Carrarese was conceived as a figurative counterpart to the text of De viris illustribus – a sort of visual transposition of Petrarch’s collection of biographies. Furthermore, two Paduan documents of 1382 and 1390 refer to the hall as “Sala Virorum Illustrium”, indicating that the parallel between the hall decoration and Petrarch’s text was obvious to contemporaries155. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that the thirty-six Uomini famosi written about by Petrarch were replicated in the frescoes156. This means that figures from Romulus to Trajan would have faced each other on the north and south walls and that Alexander would be among them157. Nothing can be said about the physical appearance of Alexander in this first version. Nor am I able to conclude very much on the basis of the Alexander pictures in Darmstadt, Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek, ms. 101, an illuminated manuscript of De viris illustribus which is likely to preserve some record of the episodes accompanying the figures of the famous men along the walls. In the case of Alexander, the rationale behind the selection of the five episodes from fol. 19 r to 22 r is by no means obvious158. Alongside traditional subjects like the siege of a city (Tyre?) and a battle against Darius, there are scenes which are less straightforward to understand: the meaning in this context of the finding of Darius’s body is unclear; the identity of the prisoner being brought before Alexander (possibly Philotas or Bessus?) has to be ascertained before we can draw any conclusions and the representation of Alexander kneeling in a temple before the statue of a goddess remains difficult to connect to one specific episode. As for the sixteenth-century cycle, the reasons for the exclusion of Alexander are unclear; but it is probably because the selection of figures was purposely limited to the history of Rome159. This new criterion is significant, because over the course of the Quattrocento, and more decisively in the sixteenth century, cycles of Uomini famosi generally tend to focus solely on Roman history – once again, following the lead of Petrarch. The result of this change of perspective on history was the disappearance of Alexander from later series of Uomini famosi: he is not present in the most important and famous sixteenth-century cycles. Nevetheless, as I will show later on, Alexander would again be side by side with ancient Romans; but this was due to the influence of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. 155 See Mommsen, “Petrarch and the Decoration”, p. 95-101. 156 Although this assumption is generally accepted, the parallel between text and decoration has been questioned by Bodon, Heroum Imagines, p. 10-14. 157 See the reconstruction, partially revising the one suggested by Mommsen, “Petrarch and the Decoration”, p. 103-104, by L. Armstrong, “Copie di miniature del Libro degli Uomini Famosi, Poiano 1476, di Francesco Petrarca, e il ciclo perduto di affreschi nella reggia carrarese di Padova”, in La miniatura a Padova dal Medioevo al Settecento (exhibition catalogue, Padua, Palazzo della Ragione, Palazzo del Monte; Rovigo, Accademia dei Concordi, 1999), ed. G. Baldissin Molli, G. Mariani Canova and F. Toniolo, Modena, 1999, p. 513-522, at p. 517-519. 158 The pictures were published by Mommsen, “Petrarch and the Decoration”, fig. 22-26, who, however, did not provide any commentary on them. At the present state of research, the limited usefulness of ms. 101 in the reconstruction of the lost cycle has been also pointed out by Bodon, Heroum Imagines, p. 10-16 and Di Simone, “Giotto, Petrarca e il tema degli uomini illustri – 2”, p. 36. 159 See Mommsen, “Petrarch and the Decoration”, p. 104, and Bodon, Heroum Imagines, p. 63.

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c h a p t er   4 The Cycle in the Corte Ducale, Palazzo dell’Arengo, Milan

Around 1455, the Duke of Milan, Francesco I Sforza, commissioned a fresco cycle of ‘Famous Men and Women’ for the courtyard (‘Corte Ducale’) of the Palazzo dell’Arengo, his residence, located by the Duomo in the heart of the city160. The work was entrusted to the court painter, Bonifacio Bembo, and to the chief poet and resident humanist, Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), who devised the iconographic programme and composed the tituli in the form of epigrams accompanying the figures on the walls. Completed in 1461, the frescoes were whitewashed in the seventeenth century; but Filelfo’s epigrams survive in several manuscripts, enabling us to reconstruct the cycle161. Eighteen figures – six men and twelve women – were painted in pairs on the walls of the courtyard, above the pillars of the loggia facing the central court. The predominance of female figures, unusual in such cycles, could possibly be an homage to the duchess, Bianca Maria Visconti, wife of Francesco Sforza162. The series of figures began with the couples Ninus and Semiramis and Cyrus and Thomyris, followed by Alexander and Myrina – a rather obscure mythical figure whose pairing with Alexander is, as far as I am aware, unique in the visual tradition163. In Filelfo’s verses, Alexander is described as a great conqueror, without rival in glory or renown: Magnus Alexander bellisque horrendus et armis, Qui terrore mei trepidantem nominis orbem Usque sub Eoum parvo cum milite Gangen Undique concussi: nulli sum laude secundus. [(I am) the great Alexander, formidable for my deeds in battle and in war, who, with a small army, caused the entire earth, up to the Eastern Ganges, trembling in fear at my name, to shudder; I am second to none in glory]164.

160 The palace was first the seat of the medieval commune and then the residence of the Visconti and the Sforza; today, the building known as Palazzo Reale stands on its site. A previous cycle depicting Vanagloria surrounded by six Famous Men (who did not include Alexander) was famously painted in this palace by Giotto for Azzo Visconti in 1335. The cycle is lost but written and iconographic documentation survives: see C. Gilbert, “The Fresco by Giotto in Milan”, Arte lombarda, 47-48 (1977), p. 31-72, and Di Simone, “Giotto, Petrarca e il tema degli uomini illustri – 2”, p. 38-49. 161 See F. Caglioti, “Francesco Sforza e il Filelfo, Bonifacio Bembo e ‘compagni’: nove prosopopee inedite per il ciclo di antichi eroi ed eroine nella Corte Ducale dell’Arengo a Milano (1456-61 circa)”, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 38 (1994), p. 183-217. On the whitewashing of the frescoes, by order of the local Spanish governor around the mid-seventeenth century, see ibid., p. 186-187. 162 Ibid., p. 192-193. 163 The name of Alexander also appears in the epigram of Timoclea (“me barbarus ille prophanus / novit Alexander”); as noted by Caglioti, ibid., p. 216, n. 127, this Alexander, however, is not Alexander the Great, but a Thracian commander from his army, who raped the noble Timoclea of Thebes and was later murdered by her. This commander is usually left unnamed in the sources: only Plutarch, Mulierum virtutes 259E (in Id., Moralia, trans. F. C. Babbitt, 16 vol., Cambridge MA and London, 1927-2004, III, p. 471-581, at p. 563), says that he bore the same name as king Alexander. 164 The English translation is mine. For the literary sources of Alexander’s epigram and an Italian translation, see A. Ferranti, “Ricerche sugli epigrammi latini di Francesco Filelfo (Reggia dell’Arengo, Milano, 1450 ca.). I sei eroi: Nino, Ciro, Alessandro, Cesare, Annibale e Scipione”, Fontes. Rivista di filologia, iconografia e storia della tradizione classica, 27-28 (2011), p. 15-32, at p. 20-22; see also Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 138-141, who focuses solely on Alexander’s epigram.

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The presentation of Alexander as a conqueror of unparalleled fame is not surprising in a cycle of Famous Men – his prodigious conquests were, after all, the primary reason for his inclusion in the series. Yet, the emphasis on Alexander’s name striking fear throughout the world is far less usual and it has been claimed that this had a negative connotation165. I argue, however, that the phrases in the epigram are not stricto sensu negative; rather, they are voces mediae, neither positive nor negative, reflecting the perception that military prowess and strategic skills are both heroic and frightening. This same attitude towards Alexander can also be found in Filelfo’s other writings, where Alexander is often mentioned, but never in negative terms166. Filelfo’s use in the epigram of powerful expressions such as “horrendus” and “orbem […] concussi” presents the Alexander of the Palazzo dell’Arengo as a fearful warrior of epic proportions, whose achievements are as great as they are terrifying. I do not know any other example of Alexander being described as “horrendus”167 but it is worth remembering that the primary meaning of the Latin verb ‘horreo’ is ‘to stand erect, to bristle’: Alexander is therefore portrayed as a warrior who makes the hair on the back of the neck of his enemies stand on end168. In Filelfo’s epigram on Julius Caesar, moreover, Alexander is referred to as a “fierce young man from Macedon” (“Macedo ferox juvenis”) – the adjective “ferox” is a vox media frequently used to refer to military men and meaning both ‘bold’ and ‘savage’169. It is in this intentionally ambiguous sense, I believe, that the figure of Alexander was presented in the cycle of the Palazzo dell’Arengo, where Filelfo makes no moral judgement on him – as opposed to the Aula Minor in Florence, where Coluccio’s reference to his blasphemous claim to divine honours is unambiguously negative. Linguistically, Filelfo seems to have borrowed terms and expressions from a number of texts, some of them totally unrelated to Alexander, from the Bible and Tacitus to Virgil and the medieval chroniclers170. It is unsurprising that a humanist of his calibre was able to compose an epigram on Alexander by drawing on a variety of authors; but it is worth trying to investigate in greater depth those on which Filelfo specifically relied. The image of the earth trembling before Alexander, in the second verse of the epigram, recurs twice in Orosius’s Historiae adversum Paganos, a vastly influential historical work completed around ad 416-417, which includes a section on the life of Alexander (Book III, chapters 16 to 20)171. Orosius depicted Alexander as a frightening character who relentlessly conquered

165 See Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 139-140. 166 On only one occasion, while discussing the consequences of abusing wine, Filelfo refers to the murder of Cleitus: “When drunk, Alexander slew his best and closest friends”, in Francesco Filelfo, On Exile, ed. J. De Keyser, trans. W. Scott Blanchard, Cambridge MA and London, 2013, p. 127 (I.174). 167 Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 139, lists several occurences of the adjective in the Roman literature, but none of them refers to Alexander. 168 I am grateful to Guido Giglioni for this suggestion and for discussing this epigram with me. 169 For the epigram on Julius Caesar, see Caglioti, “Francesco Sforza e il Filelfo”, p. 198. Cf. the similar but unquestionably negative references to Cyrus and Hannibal, who are both described as “ferus” (‘wild, untamed’) in the epigrams on Thomyris and Scipio Africanus: ibid., p. 197 and 200. 170 See Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 139-140, and Ferranti, “Ricerche sugli epigrammi – I sei eroi”, p. 21-22. 171 Much material from Orosius was interpolated into recension J2 of the Historia de Preliis, which for this reason is also known as the ‘Orosius redaction’. The Alexander section in the Historiae also became a canonical reference for preachers and theologians who discussed the life of Alexander; see Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 118-162.

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and killed: a man driven by vengeance and behaving in a bloodthirsty manner towards enemies and friends alike172. He adds that, before such a terrifying figure, “the whole world trembled either from death or the fear of death”173. He then concludes by saying that the Diadochi fought for power and tore the empire apart “after Alexander had crushed the trembling world beneath his sword for twelve years”174. This potent image was perhaps influenced a contrario by the opening verses of the first book of Maccabees, where the earth, once subdued by Alexander, is represented as lying silently before him (v. 3: “he reached the farthest point of the earth. He despoiled many nations, until the world lay quiet under his rule”). Orosius’s portrait of Alexander derives ultimately from a negative tradition which existed in antiquity and which was mainly represented by Seneca and Lucan. They voiced the Stoic condemnation of Alexander as a ferocious and insane man, whose insatiable ambition resulted in innumerable crimes and caused the plundering of entire nations175. Despite his bitter criticism of Alexander, however, only occasionally does Orosius’s tone become as harsh as that of Seneca and Lucan. Orosius’s main source of information for the life of Alexander was Justin’s Epitoma of the Historiae Philippicae of Pompeius Trogus – which Filelfo may have known first-hand or via Orosius. In Justin’s account, as in the second verse of Filelfo’s epigram, the terror inspired by the mere sound of Alexander’s name is mentioned. After his victory at the Granicus river, Alexander engaged in a series of battles with Darius’s satraps, who were defeated, according to Justin (XI.6.15), “more by the panic inspired by his name than actual force of arms” (“gessit et plura bella cum praefectis Darei, quos iam non tam armis quam terrore nominis sui vicit”). Further on (XII.13.2), Justin writes: “so far had the terror of his name pervaded the whole world” that embassies of every nation began to gather in Babylon to pay homage to Alexander (“adeo universum terrarium orbem nominis eius terror invaserat, ut cunctae velut gentes destinato sibi regi adularetur”176). We would naturally expect a humanist like Filelfo to have employed newly recovered ancient sources for his epigram on Alexander. In the 1450s, when the epigrams were composed, the works of Plutarch and Curtius Rufus, as we have seen in Chapter 3, were available. What is more, as one of the few scholars of his generation with an excellent command of Greek, Filelfo would also have had direct access to the accounts of Arrian and possibly of Diodorus Siculus – either in Italy or in Constantinople, where he spent several 172 See Orosius’s famous description of Alexander as “humani sanguinis inexsaturabilis sive hostium sive etiam sociorum” (III.18.10). For the Latin text, see Orosius, Historiarum adversum Paganos, ed. K. F. W. Zangemeister, Vienna, 1882, p. 86; an English translation is in Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, trans. A. T. Fear, Liverpool, 2010, p. 137. 173 Orosius, Seven Books, p. 140 (III.20.5); the original Latin reads: “vel morte ipsa vel formidine mortis accepta totus mundus intremuit” (ed. Zangemeister, p. 88). 174 Orosius, Seven Books, p. 146 (III.23.6); the Latin passage (“igitur Alexander per duodecim annos trementem sub se orbem ferro pressit”) can be read in the edition by Zangemeister, p. 92. 175 See G. Celotto, “Alexander the Great in Seneca’s Works and in Lucan’s Bellum Civile”, in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander, p. 325-354, with bibliography, and D. Lassandro, “La figura di Alessandro Magno nell’opera di Seneca”, in Alessandro Magno tra storia e mito, ed. Sordi, p. 155-168. 176 The power both fascinating and terrifying of the name is of course a commonplace for military leaders. In the case of Alexander, however, this is eloquently exemplified by an episode reported by Plutarch (Pyrrhus XI.2): on the eve of battle for the conquest of Macedon, Alexander appeared in a dream to Pyrrhus and, when asked what help a ghost could provide, answered: “I lend you my name”. I quote Alexander’s reply from the account of the episode given by R. Lane Fox, Alexander the Great, London, 1973, p. 25-26.

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years177. Yet he drew on none of these authors and chose instead to rely on Orosius, the conventional authority on Alexander’s life in the Middle Ages. As for Justin, we have seen in Chapter 3 that he was one of the ancient authors much relied upon by humanists belonging to the generation of Petrarch or immediately afterwards; but in the mid-Quattrocento, it could no longer be considered a newly recovered text178. The portrait of Alexander in the Palazzo dell’Arengo cannot therefore be considered innovative or representative of a new iconography, as there is no indication that Filelfo drew on anything other than the customary authorities which had been used throughout the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, there is a novel element in the cycle because Alexander is paired with an entirely new figure from antiquity, Myrina, the queen of the Amazons, who was totally unknown to medieval authors and was a humanist recovery of the fifteenth century. The story of a queen of the Amazons called Myrina is recounted by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca Historica III.52-55179. According to him, it was generally believed that the Amazons who reportedly dwelt around the Thermodon river on the Pontus in ancient times were the only representatives of this warlike race of women180. But this was not so, says Diodorus, for the Amazons of Libya were much earlier and accomplished great deeds which have unfairly been forgotten. These Amazons lived on the island of Hespera in the marsh of Triton, near Ethiopia and Mount Atlas and Myrina was their queen. Diodorus recounted her glorious military conquests in detail, from North Africa and Egypt to the coast of Asia Minor and the Greek islands, until her sudden death in battle against an army of Thracians and Scythians. The epigram composed by Filelfo for her image in the Palazzo dell’Arengo follows the account of Diodorus Siculus closely and presents Myrina as a little-known figure (“If anyone says that he does not know Myrina […] he should declare himself unaware of a great glory”)181. She was, indeed, little known, for in the 1450s Diodorus Siculus was almost completely unheard of in Europe. The text could only be read in the original Greek182:

177 As seen in Chapter 3, in the 1450s, neither Arrian nor Diodorus Siculus (including Book XVII on Alexander) were available in Latin. 178 Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 139-140, pointed out that the expression “parvo cum milite” and the reference to the oriental Gange (“Eoum Gangen”) in the epigram are found in Curtius Rufus and echoed in Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis. This is not, however, conclusive proof that Filelfo relied on Curtius, since these expressions occur in several other authors and tend to get repeated in various texts about Alexander. 179 The first mention of Myrina is in Homer, Iliad II.811-814, where a hill in the plain of Troy is identified as her tomb. The notion is reported by several authors, including Strabo, Geography XII.8.6 and XIII.3.6, whose work was much sought after in the Quattrocento. None of these texts, however, says much about Myrina apart from her name, and the only full account of her story remains that in Diodorus Siculus. 180 For these more famous Amazons, see Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica II.44-46. 181 For the text of the epigram, see Caglioti, “Francesco Sforza e il Filelfo”, p. 197: “Qui me nescire Myrinam / Dixerit, ignarum sese fateatur oportet / Eximiae laudis”. The epigram has also been discussed by A. Ferranti, Gli epigrammi del Filelfo per il ciclo di uomini famosi nella corte dell’Arengo a Milano: tradizione letteraria e iconografica, tesi di laurea specialistica, Università degli Studi di Siena, 2008-2009, p. 75-78. Three other ‘Famous Women’ in the cycle (Panthea, Megisto and Timoclea) were introduced to the viewer as little-known figures: see their epigrams in Caglioti, “Francesco Sforza e il Filelfo”, p. 198-200, who has also shown (ibid., p. 190-193) that their lives were known to Filelfo through Plutarch’s Mulierum virtutes. 182 As I have shown in Chapter 3, Book III of the Bibliotheca Historica, which contains the story of Myrina, was translated into Latin by Poggio Bracciolini in 1454-1455 for Pope Nicholas V and became available only after it was printed in 1472. It no doubt circulated in manuscript and, in that way, might been known to Filelfo; but no evidence of this has turned up.

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apart from Filelfo, very few scholars could confidently tackle it183. The significant novelty of the cycle in the Palazzo dell’Arengo becomes evident not only in light of the inclusion of Myrina, an obscure figure taken from an obscure Greek author, but also, and more importantly for my purposes, because of her coupling with Alexander. There is, in fact, no connection between the two figures, nor is there any source (not even Diodorus Siculus, who mentions both of them) which puts them in relation with each other. It has been suggested that Myrina was included in the cycle of the Palazzo dell’Arengo as a mythical prefiguration of Alexander himself: her remarkable achievements, military valour and sudden death would make such a comparison with Alexander appropriate184. I think there is more to it than that, however, because Alexander did have an encounter with the queen of the Amazons – only that queen was not Myrina from Libya, but Thalestris from Pontus. The meeting of Alexander with Thalestris, the queen of those Amazons who lived in Pontus, was a well-known episode in the tradition. Not only is it recorded in the main historical accounts of Alexander which Filelfo no doubt knew185, but it is also in Justin (Epitoma XII.3.5-7) and Orosius (Historiae adversum Paganos III.18.5) – his chief sources, as we have seen, for the epigram on Alexander. In light of this, I think that the unique coupling of Alexander and Myrina in the cycle of Milan was a case of scholarly one-upmanship on the part of Filelfo. Instead of the more famous Thalestris, queen of the Amazons par excellence, whose meeting with Alexander was renowned, he chose Myrina, the queen of an almost forgotten tribe of Amazons, whose story was told by a single author, to whom he, as one of the leading Greek scholars of the day, had privileged access. Furthermore, since Justin says that the queen was called “Thalestris or Minithya” (Epitoma XII.3.5), and Orosius follows suit (“Halestris or Minothea”: Historiae adversum Paganos III.18.5), it is possible that the similarity of the name Minithya/Minothea to Myrina suggested the unusual choice to Filelfo in the first place. When discussed in the scholarly literature on Famous Men, the frescoes in the Palazzo dell’Arengo are often treated as a transitional cycle, in which the medieval iconography of the Four Monarchies (Ninus, Cyrus, Alexander and Julius Caesar are all included) is combined with heroines from the Neuf Preuses and with previously unknown or neglected figures from antiquity186. As far as the image of Alexander is concerned, the idea that he was included in the series as a representative of the Four Monarchies is consistent 183 The epigrams for the Palazzo dell’Arengo, which are anonymous in the entire manuscript tradition and were thought to be ancient, were first identified as the work of a humanist, and of Filelfo in particular, precisely because of the rarity of Diodorus Siculus in Western libraries before the fifteenth century; see C. Picci, “L’Anthologia latina e gli epigrammi del Filelfo per le pitture milanesi”, Archivio storico lombardo, 8 (1907), p. 399-403, and Caglioti, “Francesco Sforza e il Filelfo”, p. 206-207, n. 56. 184 Ibid., p. 213, n. 106. 185 These are: Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni VI.5.24-32; Plutarch, Alexander XLVI; and Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica XVII.77.1-3. Plutarch does not actually name the queen, simply referring to her as “the Amazon”; but he clearly means Thalestris, because the meeting takes place in Scythia, at its border with Thalestris’s dominion. The episode of the meeting is also briefly reported by Strabo, Geography XI.5.4 (where the queen is called “Thalestria”). The version in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (III.25-6) is completely different: there is no meeting with any queen, but merely an exchange of letters between Alexander and “the Amazons” as a whole; for the medieval tradition of Alexander and the Amazons, see Stoneman, Alexander the Great, p. 128-134. 186 See, e.g., Donato, “Gli eroi romani”, p. 103, and A. Ferranti, “Ricerche sugli epigrammi latini di Francesco Filelfo (Reggia dell’Arengo, Milano, 1450 ca.). Tre eroine appartenenti alla tradizione delle Neuf Preuses: Semiramide, Tomiride, Pentesilea”, Fontes. Rivista di filologia, iconografia e storia della tradizione classica, 21-26 (2008-2010), p. 35-54.

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with his image being based, as I have shown, on medieval sources, while his pairing with Myrina introduces a previously unknown figure from antiquity. What is most surprising is that, when entrusted with the iconographic programme of an important decorative cycle, Filelfo, who had direct access to newly recovered Greek authors, did not use these sources to revise the medieval account of Alexander, one of the most prominent figures in ancient history, but used them instead to revive Myrina, a long-forgotten and insignificant figure. The ‘Piccolomini Cycle’ of the Famous Men and Women

Among the fifteenth-century decorative schemes of ‘Famous Men and Women’ which include Alexander, the so-called ‘Piccolomini cycle’ is the only one that has been preserved to the present day in its entirety. Unlike those which I have discussed so far, it was not frescoed directly on the walls, but rather painted on wooden panels, one for each of its eight figures – four men and four women. Made in Siena by a team of painters whose identities are only partially known, the panels were probably hung on the walls together, as a sort of spalliere, and today are held in several museums in Europe and the United States187. The exact circumstances of the commission are still disputed, though it was probably around 1493-1494, for a Piccolomini family wedding – their coat of arms, the crescent moon, appears on the majority of the paintings188. The eight panels have the same compositional arrangement: each figure stands on a plinth bearing a Latin inscription, seemingly in imitation of an ancient polychrome statue, with an episode from his or her life in the background. Taken from classical history, mainly inspired by Valerius Maximus, as well as from the Bible, the eight ‘Famous Men and Women’ exemplify virtues which were highly appropriate for a couple about to wed, such as continence, chastity and marital love189. The most magnificent of the eight panels is the one placed at the beginning of the chronological series, which depicts Alexander190. As mentioned above, it has been ascribed to the so-called Master of the Story of Griselda and is now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (Fig. 36).

187 From the vast literature on the panels, see the bibliography cited in n. 43 above, and Roberto Bartalini’s entry in Francesco di Giorgio, p. 462-469, no. 103. 188 The marriage of Silvio di Bartolomeo Piccolomini and Battista Placidi on 18 January 1493 seems the most likely occasion for the commission, as suggested by Bartalini in Francesco di Giorgio, p. 464-468. Cf., however, Dunkerton, Christensen and Syson, “The Master of the Story of Griselda”, p. 24, who argue, as mentioned above, that it was commissioned in connection with the double wedding of the Spannocchi brothers on 17-19 January 1494. 189 The eight figures are: Alexander, Joseph of Egypt (or Eunostos of Tanagra), Scipio Africanus, Tiberius Gracchus, Judith with the head of Holofernes (or Thomyris of Scythia with the head of Cyrus), Artemisia, Sulpitia and Claudia Quinta. Although the inclusion of Judith or Thomyris in a series exemplifying conjugal virtues might seem inappropriate, Bartalini (in Francesco di Giorgio, p. 462) has pointed out that Judith appears as an example of chastity on several cassone panels. As for Thomyris, who is also among the ‘Famous Women’ of Andrea del Castagno’s cycle in Villa Carducci di Legnaia, “her virtue lay in her blood revenge of her son’s death at the hands of Cyrus”, according to Dunkerton, Christensen and Syson, “The Master of the Story of Griselda”, p. 24. 190 On the back of the panel, the word “primo” (‘first’) is still legible, making it certain that it occupied the first position in the series. See ibid., p. 31.

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Central to my argument is the scene painted in the background of the panel – a rare representation of ‘The Family of Darius Treated with Great Respect’ (Fig. 37) which I have discussed earlier in this chapter – together with the inscription in elegiac distichs by an anonymous author which is placed on Alexander’s plinth. The inscription praises him for his ability to control his passions and therefore reinforces the message of the scene in the background. It states that, driven by the conviction that it was more important for a king to conquer himself than his enemies, Alexander banished Cupid’s flames from his heart and became an exemplum continentiae191. Although stylistic echoes of Ovid, Virgil and Lucan have been detected in the verses192, it is evident that the final section of chapter XXI in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, in which his encounter with the women of Darius is narrated, was the main source for both the inscription and the episode in the background: Alexander is said never to have laid a hand on the Persian women, since he thought that defeating himself was more important than conquering his enemies193. In the Birmingham panel (as in the closely connected one now in Longleat, discussed earlier in this chapter: Plate XII), the choice of presenting Alexander and the women of Darius according to Plutarch’s version, as opposed to the more common account of Curtius Rufus, served to highlight Alexander’s continence rather than his magnanimity. This is perfectly in keeping with the general context of the ‘Piccolomini cycle’, where the ‘Famous Men and Women’ were all selected as exemplars of continence and self-restraint194. In the artistic and cultural milieu of Siena in the late Quattrocento, to which the ‘Piccolomini cycle’ belongs, the Lives of Plutarch were widely known and read, and provided an important visual repertoire for artists and patrons. The 1470 editio princeps of the Lives was associated with Siena, since the editor, Giovanni Antonio Campano, was secretary to Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, later Pius III, to whom the edition was dedicated195. In this environment and in connection to a marriage, Plutarch’s unusual treatment of the meeting of Alexander with the family of Darius, via an intermediary, as an exemplum pudicitiae would no doubt have seemed more fitting than that of Curtius Rufus, which was already on its way to becoming the standard iconography. When compared to the images in the Aula Minor in Florence and the Palazzo dell’Arengo in Milan, the remarkable originality of the Birmingham Alexander is even more apparent. It is not only the reliance on Plutarch which earns this panel a place in my category of the

191 See the Latin verses and their English translation in Renaissance Siena, p. 234: “Alexander / Qui propriis totum superavi viribus orbem / excussi flammas corde cupidineas / nil iuvat externis belli gaudere triumphis / si mens aegra iacet interius que furit” (“[I am] Alexander, who with my own strength conquered the whole world and banished Cupid’s flames from my heart. Rejoicing in the external triumphs of war is useless, if the mind lies sick and rages inside”). 192 See Caciorgna, “Immagini di eroi ed eroine”, p. 303 and Guerrini, “Dagli Uomini famosi alla Biografia dipinta”, p. 141-142. 193 See Guarino’s Latin translation of the passage in Plutarch, [Vitae illustrium virorum], ed. Campano, fol. 379 v: “Alexander seipsum magisquam hostes domare regium opus existimans, non has […] attingit”. 194 According to Syson, in Renaissance Siena, p. 242, Alexander’s exemplary magnanimity and chastity were the reasons for his inclusion in the Piccolomini cycle: “Alexander was selected for his magnanimous (and chaste) behaviour towards the women of the family of the defeated Darius”. 195 On Campano, who had previously been secretary to Pius II, see S. de Beer, The Poetics of Patronage: Poetry as Self-Advancement in Giannantonio Campano, Turnhout, 2013. Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini was even credited with the commission of the ‘Piccolomini cycle’ by R. Longhi, “Un intervento raffaellesco nella serie ‘eroica’ di casa Piccolomini”, Paragone Arte, 175 (1964), p. 5-8, at p. 8; his suggestion has recently been revived by Caciorgna, “Immagini di eroi ed eroine”, p. 301-302.

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‘humanist cycles of Famous Men’, but also the new imagery of Alexander which resulted from it. In the tituli of both the Aula Minor and the Arengo the emphasis is on Alexander’s conquests, to which he owes his fame. In the Birmingham panel, however, these military achievements are surpassed by the moral virtues – above all, continence – which he displayed and which are at the core of Plutarch’s portrayal of Alexander. The Birmingham panel is the earliest significant instance of this Plutarchan image of Alexander as a moral exemplum, which was to become the dominant iconography in the sixteenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 5196. Images of Alexander in Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts In the vast corpus of fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts and incunables, there are many images of Alexander. A systematic exploration of this field is far beyond the scope of this research and would, in any case, be a Herculean task, given the scale and scattered nature of the material. There are, however, some points of reference, most importantly D. J. A. Ross’s 1963 pioneering survey of the Alexander illustrated manuscript tradition197; since then, moreover, a number of studies have provided new information and further discussion on individual items. I shall limit my discussion to manuscripts and printed books recounting the life of Alexander, that is, those containing the works of Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian198. Although there are also portraits of Alexander in texts loosely concerned with him such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics199 or the Pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetoric to Alexander200, I shall not take these into consideration, since they mostly consist of generic portraits which are not relevant to the case I am trying to make in this chapter. Manuscripts of Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian copied in the fifteenth century were not normally illustrated; but when they were, it was usually in the all’antica style of humanist book decoration, with ornamentation limited to initials and borders, frequently adopting the bianchi girari pattern201. Portraits of Alexander, if present, were on the title-page: they

196 See Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 47 and 98-105. 197 Ross, Alexander Historiatus (in particular, on the visual apparatus of ancient historical texts on Alexander from the fifteenth century: p. 80-82), complemented by Id., “Alexander Historiatus: A Supplement”. 198 I shall not take into account Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca Historica because of the late recovery of Book XVII, where the life of Alexander is recounted, as I discussed in Chapter 3. 199 A fine example is a manuscript from the library of Duke Alfonso of Calabria, commissioned in Florence around 1480 and probably illuminated by Francesco Rosselli: the codex, a Latin translation of the Greek text of the Nicomachean Ethics, has on its title-page images of Aristotle and his young pupil Alexander in laurel medallions; see C. De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 2nd edition, London, 1994, p. 247. 200 See, e.g., the two standardized portraits of Aristotle and Alexander in a Greek manuscript of the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, ms. plut. 60.18, fol. 1 r). The codex was copied in Constantinople for Filelfo, who brought it with him to Italy in 1427 and later translated the work into Latin; on his death in 1481, the manuscript entered the Medici library; see Fryde, Greek Manuscripts in the Private Library of the Medici, I, p. 221 and II, p. 792-793. 201 On the emergence of humanist book decoration, see The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450-1550 (exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, and New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1994-1995), ed. J. J. G. Alexander, Munich and New York, 1994; and L. Armstrong, Renaissance Miniature Painters and Classical Imagery: The Master of the Putti and His Venetian Workshop, London and Philadelphia, 1981.

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differ greatly in their depiction of Alexander, so there is no iconographic consistency. By way of example, see a few manuscripts from the Medici library, now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence: in a rare illustrated exemplar of the Italian translation of Plutarch’s Lives, Alexander is represented as an elderly man with a short white beard (ms. plut. 61.11, fol. 21 v)202; in another copy of Plutarch, in Latin, he is depicted as a fully armoured warrior with a sword, a globe identifying him as a kosmokrator and a fanciful helmet on his head (ms. plut. 65.27)203; finally, at the beginning of a manuscript of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae, he appears as a young king, holding a globe, dressed in fifteenth-century alla greca fashion (ms. plut. 64.28: Fig. 40)204. These diverse figures can be identified as Alexander solely because they illustrate texts which are about him. This applies to other equally deluxe but even more generic pictures of him such as, for instance, two manuscripts of Curtius Rufus, one from the library of Federico da Montefeltro (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Urb. lat. 427, fol. 2 r)205, and the other bearing the ex-libris of Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, ms. plut. 64.32, fol. 1 r)206. They both present Alexander as a warrior standing in full armour; were it not for the fact that they illustrate the Historiae Alexandri Magni of Curtius Rufus, neither figure could be identified as Alexander, since they have no distinctive features or attributes. These conventional representations owe more to the iconographic tradition of the Uomini famosi than to a specific visual repertoire associated with Alexander207. Images of Alexander Based on Ancient Numismatic Prototypes

More interesting for my argument are the numerous portraits in fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts which are based on ancient coins or cameos bearing the effigy of Alexander – or

202 On this codex, see Ceccanti, “Un inedito Plutarco”, esp. p. 74; see also C. Filippini, “Plutarco istoriato: le Vite parallele nella miniatura italiana del Quattrocento e la morte di Cesare nei cassoni fiorentini”, in Biografia dipinta, p. 155-208, at p. 188. A similar example is in a Curtius Rufus manuscript from the library of Federico da Montefeltro (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Urb. lat. 887, fol. 1 v), illustrated in S. Poeschel, “Alexander Magnus Maximus: Neue Aspekte zur Ikonographie Alexanders des Grossen im Quattrocento”, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 23-24 (1988), p. 61-74, at p. 67, fig. 6. 203 On the two-volume manuscript of Plutarch’s Lives (mss. plut. 65.26 and 65.27) made for Piero de’ Medici, see F. Ames-Lewis, The Library and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, New York and London, 1984, p. 113-117 and 297-298, no. 56, and Miniatura fiorentina del Rinascimento 1440-1525: un primo censimento, ed. A. Garzelli, 2 vol., Florence, 1985, I, p. 136-137. The image of Alexander is mentioned by Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 105, n. 439. 204 See Ceccanti, “Un inedito Plutarco”, p. 74 and 76, n. 34. 205 Copied by Matteo Contugi, this codex was decorated by an unknown master close to Bartolomeo della Gatta; the lively figure of Alexander has been attributed to Bartolomeo himself. See Ornatissimo codice: la biblioteca di Federico di Montefeltro (exhibition catalogue, Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 2008), ed. M. Peruzzi, Milan, 2008, p. 169-173, no. 8 (C. Martelli). See also C. Martelli, Bartolomeo della Gatta: pittore e miniatore tra Arezzo, Roma e Urbino, Florence, 2013, p. 282-284 and 340-341, no. 5. For a description of the manuscript, see Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae: codices Urbinates Latini, ed. C. Stornajolo, 3 vol., Rome, 1902-1921, I, p. 432-433. 206 This codex was copied by Nicolaus Antonii de Ricciis; as far as I am aware, its decoration is still unattributed. See Miniatura fiorentina del Rinascimento, I, p. 431-432 and 519. 207 The same can be said of pictures of knights in full armour on horseback, which can be identified as Alexander riding Bucephalus only by the text they decorate. An example is a codex of the Tuscan translation of Curtius Rufus, illuminated by Francesco Rosselli, from the Biblioteca del Convento dei Girolamini, Naples, ms. P.VI.XV, illustrated in Miniatura fiorentina del Rinascimento, II, p. 319, fig. 570.

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believed to be of him. In antiquity, coins became an important vehicle for the widespread diffusion of Alexander’s likeness; from the mid-fifteenth century, portraits modelled on or inspired by these effigies started to appear in illuminated manuscripts and incunables – as well as sculptural reliefs and other similar artefacts. It has long been established that the main reason for using these numismatic effigies was the auctoritas which ancient coins and artefacts possessed in the eyes of humanists208. As for Alexander, interest in researching and reproducing his true likeness did not take off until much later – well into the sixteenth century and beyond, when the amount and variety of available material from antiquity grew substantially and a scientific method of approach slowly developed; it therefore lies largely beyond the chronological boundaries and scope of this book209. Nevertheless, some fifteenth-century images of Alexander were modelled on ancient prototypes, reflecting the humanist desire to possess an authentic representation of him. As I will show, the recovery of this ancient iconographic tradition made an important contribution to the creation of the new Renaissance portrait of Alexander. Alexander Wearing the Lion-Skin of Hercules

One of the earliest and most famous examples of an image based on ancient models is contained in the monumental three-volume Lives of Plutarch now in the Biblioteca Malatestiana of Cesena, which was commissioned by Domenico Malatesta Novello and lavishly decorated by a team of illuminators between 1446 and 1465210. The image of Alexander, because it appears on the first leaf of the first volume, has been somewhat damaged, but is still perfectly legible: the bust-length portrait shows Alexander in profile, wearing a cuirass, with his head covered by a lion-skin, which is tied around his neck (Fig. 41). The lion-skin is a distinctive attribute which Alexander borrowed from Hercules, the mythical ancestor of the Macedonian Argead kings. In order to encourage his own identification with Hercules for propagandistic purposes, Alexander adopted his main attribute, the skin of the Nemean lion, reportedly wearing it on special occasions. Moreover, Alexander issued silver coins bearing the head of a young Hercules with the lion-skin, on the obverse, and the figure of Zeus seated with eagle and sceptre, on the reverse. Shortly after Alexander’s death, this ‘Hercules/Zeus type’ coin underwent

208 On the Renaissance use of Alexander images from ancient coins, see K. Dahmen, The Legend of Alexander the Great on Greek and Roman Coins, London and New York, 2007, p. 56-57, with bibliography; see also K. Fittschen, “Sul ruolo del ritratto antico nell’arte italiana”, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, II: I generi e i temi ritrovati, p. 381-412, esp. p. 388-394. The earliest such examples (c. 1320) are the well-known effigies of Roman emperors drawn by Giovanni Mansionario in the margins of his Historiae Imperiales (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Chig. I.VII.259); see G. Bodon, “Interesse antiquario e numismatico nel primo Trecento veneto: i disegni nei codici delle Historiae Imperiales di Giovanni Mansionario”, in his Veneranda antiquitas: studi sull’eredità dell’antico nella Rinascenza veneta, Berne and Oxford, 2005, p. 203-217, with bibliography. 209 The first step was, of course, compiling a corpus of ancient coins, e.g., those of Andrea Fulvio (Illustrium imagines, Rome, 1517) and Sebastiano Erizzo (Discorso sopra le medaglie antiche, Rome, 1559). For a recent overview, see Dahmen, The Legend of Alexander, p. 56-57. 210 As one of the treasures of the Biblioteca Malatestiana, the bibliography on the Lives is extensive; but see at least Le muse e il principe, II, p. 121-129, no. 29 (G. Mariani Canova) and Gli Este a Ferrara: una corte nel Rinascimento (exhibition catalogue, Ferrara, Castello, 2004), ed. J. Bentini, Milan, 2004, p. 276-277 (F. Lollini), with a status quaestionis of the research and previous bibliography.

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a significant change: the features of Hercules were assimilated to those of Alexander, resulting in an idealized portrait, which survives in a vast number of specimens (Fig. 42). The image of ‘Alexander as Hercules’ became extremely popular and is well attested in sculpture and terracotta211. Coins of this type, whether they depicted Hercules or an idealized Alexander, were widely accepted in the fifteenth century as portraits of Alexander212; and, as such, they were copied by artists like Pisanello, who probably turned for inspiration to the collection of his patron, Leonello d’Este, a famously avid collector of coins and gems and an admirer of Alexander213. Several depictions of Alexander in fifteenth-century manuscripts are modelled on the numismatic portrait of him wearing Hercules’s lion-skin. These are either re-elaborations of effigies found on coins – for example, the portrait in the Biblioteca Malatestiana codex, where the head is worked into a cuirassed bust – or straight-forward transpositions such as the copy of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae from the library of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Chig. H.VII.228214. Similar portraits of Alexander were also used as a means of political iconography. An example is found on the portal from the Vimercati Palace in Milan, carved between 1450 and 1466 for Count Gaspare Vimercati, condottiero of the lord of Milan, Francesco I Sforza. The portal was designed as an homage to the military power of Francesco; his portrait in the centre of the arch is flanked by those of two ancient generals, whose lives had been paired by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives and who are labelled Julius Caesar and Alexander, the latter wearing a lion-skin, 211 For coins with the effigy of Hercules and of Alexander as Hercules, issued by Alexander and his successors, see M. Bieber, Alexander the Great in Greek and Roman Art, Chicago, 1964, p. 48-49; A. Stewart, Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics, Berkeley, 1993, p. 158-161. Particularly useful is Dahmen, The Legend of Alexander, p. 39-41. A large number of sculpted heads of Alexander with the lion skin from as distant as Greece and Tajikistan survive; they provided an important model for the official portraits of Hellenistic rulers and Roman emperors. For examples of these sculptures, see Bieber, Alexander the Great, pl. XVIII-XX; Moreno, Alessandro Magno, esp. p. 76-81, 137-139 and 294-297; and A. Trofimova, Imitatio Alexandri in Hellenistic Art: Portraits of Alexander the Great and Mythological Images, Rome, 2012, p. 59-80. 212 See, e.g., a letter by Ambrogio Traversari to Niccolò Niccoli of 1432, where he mentions several ancient coins and gems which he saw in the houses of many friends in Venice; it is published in Ambrogio Traversari, Latinae Epistolae, ed. L. Mehus, 2 vol., Florence, 1759, II, p. 412: “argenteos nummos, sed nihil aeque, ac Alexandri effigiem sum admiratus, quam esse Macedonis illius Magni plurima sunt, qua suadeant, ante omnia vetustissimae literae grecae ΑΛΕΧΑΝΔΡΟΣ […] atque inferius M. praeterea leonis pelle obvolutum caput, et alia”. 213 For his (or his entourage’s) famous drawing in the Louvre (Département des Arts Graphiques, inv. 2315) showing four medallion portraits from ancient coins, see Pisanello (exhibition catalogue, Verona, Museo di Castelvecchio, 1996), ed. P. Marini, Milan, 1996, p. 256-259, no. 37 (D. Cordellier), with bibliography. Alongside Alexander, the portraits in the Louvre sheet depict Julius Caesar, Augustus and Hercules (in the mature, bearded type known mainly through ancient cameos). On Leonello’s passion for antiquities, see Decembrio, De politia litteraria, p. 431 (VI.68.20-21). It has been convincingly argued that the mass of curly hair seen in official portraits of Leonello, both in medals and paintings, is not only a play on his name, which means ‘little lion’, but also a direct allusion to Alexander’s leonine mane; see L. Syson and D. Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (exhibition catalogue, London, National Gallery, 2001-2002), London, 2001, p. 89-91, and B. L. Brown, “Portraiture at the Courts of Italy”, in The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (exhibition catalogue, Berlin, Bode-Museum and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011-2012), ed. K. Christiansen and S. Weppelmann, New York, New Haven and London, 2011, p. 26-47, at p. 27. 214 See Miniatura fiorentina del Rinascimento, I, p. 534 and II, fig. 406. The decoration of the codex has been attributed to Raffaele Berti da Pistoia, who is documented in Mantua and Parma between 1456 and 1464: see G. Z. Zanichelli’s entry in Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani, p. 883-885; cf., however, Ceccanti, “Un inedito Plutarco”, p. 75, who attributes it to the Florentine Francesco di Antonio del Chierico. The manuscipt, which I have not been able to see in person, is described as richly illuminated at the beginning of each book by Dosson, Étude, p. 350.

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as in Hellenistic coins (Fig. 43)215. A comparable example is found in Wrocław, Poland, where the Italianate tomb of Canon Stanislaus Sauer (d. 1535) in the collegiate church of the Holy Cross is surmounted by a tympanum bearing the medallion image of Matthias Corvinus, accompanied by those of Alexander (this time of the ‘helmeted type’ discussed below) and Emperor Augustus216. The Helmeted Alexander

A particularly interesting case is the portrait of Alexander found in a copy of Arrian’s Anabasis from the library of Urbino, ms. Urb. lat. 415 of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, bearing the coat of arms of Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Calabria, the most important patron of the arts in Naples from the 1480s to his death in 1495217. The dating, attribution and circumstances of commission of the manuscript are still unclear; but an epigram written on the last leaf, stating that the scribe finished copying the text after Alfonso’s death in 1495, suggests a post-1495 for the decoration as well218. It has been argued that the manuscript was intended as a double posthumous homage: to Bartolomeo Facio (d. 1457), who began the Latin translation of the Anabasis copied in the manuscript, and to Alfonso I the Magnanimous (d. 1458), who commissioned the translation and was also eulogized at court as a new Alexander. The portraits of the two, Alfonso I on the left and Facio on the right, appear in two medallions placed in a prominent position at the top of the page (Fig. 44)219. Framed by a laurel wreath in the initial below, there is also a portrait of Alexander, with his name inscribed on a ribbon trailing around him: he has long curly hair, wears a helmet decorated with the figure of a Triton and a cuirass with the gorgoneion (Medusa’s head) on the breastplate. An identical image of Alexander is found in bindings, as shown by four vellum copies of the 1494 editio princeps of the Planudean Anthology, printed in Florence under the supervision of the most distinguished of the

215 See J. G. Bernstein, “Milanese and Antique Aspects of the Colleoni Chapel: Site and Symbolism”, Arte lombarda, 100 (1992), p. 45-52, at p. 50; A. Burnett and R. Schofield, “The Medallions of the Basamento of the Certosa di Pavia: Sources and Influence”, Arte lombarda, 120 (1997), p. 5-28, at p. 10, suggest that it is a head of Hercules interpreted as an Alexander. The question, which remains open, is however immaterial for my discussion. 216 See Matthias Corvinus, the King: Tradition and Renewal in the Hungarian Royal Court 1458-1490 (exhibition catalogue, Budapest, Budapest History Museum, 2008), ed. P. Farbaky, E. Spekner, K. Szende and A. Végh, Budapest, 2008, p. 85-86. 217 For a description of ms. Urb. lat. 415, see Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae, p. 427, and De Marinis, La biblioteca napoletana, II, p. 18-19. 218 The epigram which provides this post quem date was pointed out by Poeschel, “Alexander Magnus Maximus”, p. 70, n. 20. Recent contributions on ms. Urb. lat. 415, however, seem not to have taken this finding into account and suggest a much earlier date, around 1480, on stylistic grounds; see G. Toscano, “Le biblioteche dei sovrani aragonesi di Napoli”, in Principi e signori: le biblioteche nella seconda metà del Quattrocento, ed. G. Arbizzoni, C. Bianca and M. Peruzzi, Urbino, 2010, p. 163-216, at p. 205-207, and the otherwise useful G. Albanese and D. Pietragalla, “‘In honorem regis edidit’: lo scrittoio di Bartolomeo Facio alla corte napoletana di Alfonso il Magnanimo”, Rinascimento, 39 (1999), p. 293-336, at p. 322-323 (with an attribution of the illuminated title-page to Cristoforo Majorana and Nardo Rapicano). 219 Other identifications, with Ferrante/Alfonso Duke of Calabria and Federico da Montefeltro, have been suggested; but the hypothesis that they represent Alfonso I and Facio, already in De Marinis, La biblioteca napoletana, p. 18, seems most convincing to me; see Albanese and Pietragalla, “‘In honorem regis edidit’”, p. 323.

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Byzantine émigré scholars in Italy, Janus Lascaris220. The medallion bindings of the four incunabula, among which is a beautiful copy owned by Matteo Battiferri of Urbino, are decorated with the same portrait, which is identified as Alexander by his name inscribed in Greek characters (Fig. 45)221. These portrait busts of Alexander are clearly based on the same source: an ancient cameo, which in the late Quattrocento was in the Medici collection222. Images of this engraved gem appear in a number of works of Florentine origin, usually among other Renaissance cameos owned by the Medici. One is found, for example, in the border decoration of a lavishly illuminated manuscript made in Florence around 1476-1480: a Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia for Matthias Corvinus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 8834, fol. 1 r). A second version of the cameo, also in the Medici collection, was reproduced on the Missal of Thomas James, Bishop of Dol in Brittany, made in Florence and now in Lyon (Bibliothèque Municipal, ms. 5123, fol. 6 v)223. The two lost, or at any rate untraced, versions of the Medici cameo are known to us through several all’antica plaquettes, among which is a particularly fine example in Washington DC224. The crucial point for my argument, however, is that these plaquettes do not, in fact, represent Alexander, but rather the warrior goddess Athena (Fig. 46)225.

220 My thanks are due to Anna Gialdini and Paolo Sachet for bringing this material to my attention and for sharing their knowledge of bindings and printed books with me. 221 See A. Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders: The Origin and Diffusion of the Humanistic Bookbinding 1459-1559, with a Census of Historiated Plaquette and Medallion Bindings of the Renaissance, Cambridge and New York, 1989, p. 219, no. 12; similar examples of bindings with an Alexander plaquette are listed at p. 219-221, nos 13-14. On Matteo Battiferri, see the entry by P. Zambelli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 7, Rome, 1965, p. 245-246. On his copy of the Planudean Anthology, illuminated by Attavante degli Attavanti, see M. J. Husung, “Aus der Zeit des Übergangs von der Handschrift zum Druck”, in Mittelalterliche Handschriften: Paläographische, kunsthistorische, literarische und bibliotheksgeschichtliche Untersuchungen. Festgabe zum 60. Geburtstage von Hermann Degering, Leipzig, 1926, p. 155-159. 222 For a reassessment of the somewhat confused literature on the topic, see L. Fusco and G. Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici Collector and Antiquarian, Cambridge, 2006, p. 102-103. On the importance of the Medici glyptic collection for Renaissance art, see N. Dacos, “La fortuna delle gemme medicee nel Rinascimento”, in Il tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico: le gemme (exhibition catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, 1972), ed. N. Dacos, A. Giuliano and U. Pannuti, Florence, 1973, p. 131-156; in general, see also T. Yuen, “Glyptic Sources of Renaissance Art”, Studies in the History of Art, 54 (1997) (= Engraved Gems: Survivals and Revivals, ed. C. M. Brown), p. 136-157. 223 On Ptolemy’s Cosmographia, from the workshop of Vespasiano de’ Bisticci, see Mattia Corvino e Firenze: arte e umanesimo alla corte del re d’Ungheria (exhibition catalogue, Florence, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca di Michelozzo, 2013-2014), ed. P. Farbaky, D. Pócs, M. Scudieri, L. Brunori, E. Spekner and A. Végh, Florence, 2013, p. 217-219, no. 65 (C. Denoël), with bibliography. On the Missal of Thomas James, illuminated by Attavante degli Attavanti in 1483, see The Painted Page, p. 56, no. 3a ( J. J. G. Alexander). For the identification of the Medici cameos in these manuscripts, see N. Dacos, “Saggio di inventario delle opere ispirate da gemme Medici nel Rinascimento”, in Il tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico, p. 157-167, at p. 158, no. 6, and pl. 88-89. 224 The Medici cameo was reproduced in engraving by A. F. Gori, Museum Florentinum: exhibens insigniora vetustatis monumenta quae Florentiae sunt in thesauro Mediceo, 3 vol., Florence, 1731-1734, I, pl. 60, no. 10. For its correct identification, see Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 241, no. 209. 225 See J. Pope-Hennessy, Renaissance Bronzes from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation: Reliefs, Plaquettes, Statuettes, Utensils and Mortars, London, 1965, p. 76, no. 259; see also É. Molinier, Les bronzes de la Renaissance: les plaquettes, catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1886, p. 22, no. 43 and p. 23-24, no. 45. The image of Athena known through the Washington DC plaquette seems to have enjoyed considerable popularity, as it is reproduced alongside other Medici engraved gems in the 1497 silver shrine of Saint Simeon in Zadar, Croatia; see S. Kokole, “The Silver Shrine of Saint Simeon in Zadar: Collecting Ancient Coins and Casts After the Antique in Fifteenth-Century Dalmatia”, Studies in the History of Art, 70 (2008) (= Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe, ed. N. Penny and E. D. Schmidt), p. 110-127, esp. p. 112 and 114.

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That a portrait of Alexander, the god-like general of unrivalled prowess and courage, is based on an effigy of Athena, the fully armed goddess of war and wisdom, is by no means surprising; and we know that in the fifteenth century effigies of Athena found on ancient coins and gems were often mistaken for representations of Alexander. This is the case, for instance, with the golden staters issued by Alexander, which were well known in the Quattrocento; the head of the helmeted Athena on them was generally believed to be a portrait of Alexander, whose name was inscribed on the reverse (Fig. 47)226. A famous example of this misunderstanding concerns Cyriac of Ancona: while travelling on a Venetian ship off Crete in autumn 1445, he was offered an intaglio seal engraved with a head of Athena, which he mistakenly took for a helmeted Alexander227. Such errors can easily be understood: many images of Alexander and Athena in this style do look similar, since they both represent a beautiful young figure with long hair, a helmet and, in portrait busts, a cuirass often decorated with the gorgoneion. Among the rulers of antiquity, only Alexander could ever be confused with Athena – above all, because of his clean-shaven face, a distinctive feature of his portraits which set him apart, for example, from the bearded representations of the Roman emperors228. It is also worth bearing in mind that Alexander’s assimilation to Athena is attested very early on in the tradition: the gorgoneion borrowed from the goddess appears on Alexander’s breastplate in the famous mosaic of the Battle of Alexander and Darius from the House of the Faun at Pompeii (now in Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale); and there are several statuettes of ‘Alexander Aigiochos’, which show him wearing Athena’s aegis decorated with the gorgoneion229. Yet, how precisely did this Renaissance portrait of the helmeted Alexander, based on the image of Athena, come about? According to a plausible hypothesis suggested by Anthony Hobson230, a crucial role was played by Janus Lascaris and the 1494 editio princeps of the Planudean Anthology. Regarding this text as an essential contribution to his larger programme of popularizing Greek literature among Western readers, Lascaris designed a special font for the book and chose an alla greca binding for the presentation copy to Piero de’ Medici, so as to make it look like a product of classical antiquity. In line with that aim, Lascaris may have wished to decorate the covers with an image of Alexander – the “zenith of Greek empire”, as Hobson put it231. The natural place to look for such an image was the collection of ancient gems belonging to Lorenzo the Magnificent, but Lascaris

226 For this coin type, known as ‘Athena/Nike’ type because of the figure of Nike on the reverse, see Dahmen, The Legend of Alexander, p. 109; for its Renaissance identification with Alexander, ibid., p. 56-57. 227 See B. Ashmole, “Cyriac of Ancona”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 45 (1957), p. 25-41, at p. 38-39. The gem, which is now in Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Antikensammlung, is illustrated in M. Vickers, “The Changing Image of Alexander the Great”, in Classicism to Neo-classicism: Essays Dedicated to Gertrud Seidmann, ed. M. Henig and D. Plantzos, Oxford, 1999, p. 29-37, at p. 35, fig. 5. See also P. Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past, New Haven and London, 1996, p. 85. 228 Alexander was the first ruler to be portrayed as a beardless young man, his official portraits marking a significant change in the iconography; before him, kings were always portrayed as mature and bearded. 229 The ‘Alexander Aigiochos’ type, in which he is also holding a spear in one hand and the Palladion in the other, is connected with an Egyptian cult of Alexander as founder of the city of Alexandria, promoted by the Ptolemaic dynasty. For a discussion of the topic and a list of surviving statuettes, including two famously iconic examples in the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum, see Stewart, Faces of Power, p. 246-252 and 421-422. 230 Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders, p. 100-103. 231 Ibid., p. 103.

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had no luck in finding a portrait of Alexander; what he found instead, however, was the cameo of Athena, which was used as a model and transformed into an Alexander by adding his name in Greek lettering. If Hobson’s speculations are correct, Lascaris deliberately turned Athena into Alexander. The ground for this transformation was prepared by the common misidentification of the effigy on Alexander’s staters; but the fact that Alexander’s name was added to the portrait on the Planudean Anthology binding shows that, whatever the identity of the effigy taken as a model, the image was intentionally presented as a portrait of Alexander. A number of similar sixteenth-century plaquettes followed, representing the profile of Athena transformed into Alexander and labelled “ALISANDRO”232. This image of Alexander as a helmeted young man went on to became one of the canonical depictions of him and by far the most popular in Italian and European art from the early sixteenth century onwards233. Innumerable examples can be found, from Sodoma and Giulio Romano to Le Brun and Rembrandt, some of which will be discussed in Chapter 5. It is also significant that for many helmeted figures, bronze and marble busts in particular, it remains difficult to tell with certainty whether they represent Alexander or Athena234. It is tempting to suggest, as Hobson does, that the iconographic tradition of the helmeted Alexander originating from the effigy of Athena was almost single-handedly down to Lascaris, a Greek refugee who strove to rescue his native culture by finding a

232 See Pope-Hennessy, Renaissance Bronzes, p. 76, no. 261. Three centuries later, a nineteenth-century plaster impression of an ancient gem of Athena was made which bears on the reverse the identification “Capitano greco”; on this item, which is now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, see Vickers, “The Changing Image of Alexander”, p. 30 and 37, fig. 7. 233 On the helmeted Alexander, see K. Kraft, “Der behelmte Alexander der Grosse”, Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte, 15 (1965), p. 7-32; J.-B. Giard, “L’image d’Alexandre le Grand à la Renaissance”, Numismatica e antichità classiche (Quaderni ticinesi), 20 (1991), p. 309-315. The portrait of the helmeted Alexander taken from the Medici Athena is also found in Andrea Fulvio’s repertoire Illustrium imagines (fol. 5 v of the editio princeps, Rome, 1517), on which see J. Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance, Princeton NJ, 1999, p. 52-69. 234 See, e.g., an Italian bronze bust of about 1550, known in several examples (London, Victoria and Albert Museum; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli; etc.); in all probability, it represents Alexander (and the Milan exemplar is, in fact, paired with a bust of Athena), but a number of replicas of lesser quality exist, which are usually identified as Athena. See Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 54, no. I.4 (M. Leithe-Jasper). A similar example is provided by a second-century porphyry bust of Athena in the Louvre, which is also known as ‘Mazarin Alexander’ because of a seventeenth-century identification. With regard to painting, the case of Rembrandt, although outside the geographical and chronological boundaries of this book, is worth mentioning: the names of both Alexander and Athena have been put forward for the fully armed figures in his Man in Armour (1655; Glasgow, City Art Gallery and Museum) and Pallas Athena (c. 1657; Lisbon, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian). That doubts are occasionally raised about their current identification as Alexander and Athena testifies to the ambiguity of such representations. See E. van de Wetering, Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey (= Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, VI), The Hague and London, 2015, p. 629, no. 239 (on Alexander) and p. 380 and 639, no. 253 (on Pallas Athena, which is here suggested to be part of a triptych together with the goddesses Venus and Juno). On the Glasgow Alexander, see also J. Bikker, “Contemplation”, in J. Bikker, G. J. M. Weber, M. E. Wieseman and E. Hinterding, Rembrandt: The Late Works (exhibition catalogue, London, National Gallery, 2014-2015, and Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 2015), London, 2014, p. 214-233, at p. 219-221. In addition, Aristotle in Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) is identified by the medallion hanging from his gold chain, bearing the image of his pupil Alexander, which is modelled on the effigy of the helmeted Athena. See T. Rousseau, “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 20 (1962), p. 149-156; the identification of Aristotle’s medallion as depicting Alexander was first made by J. Rosenberg, Rembrandt, 2 vol., Cambridge MA, 1948, I, p. 165-168.

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safe harbour in the very centre of humanism, Florence235. This is not to say that the visual tradition depends on the particular effigy of Alexander devised by Lascaris after a Medici cameo, nor that images of Alexander wearing a helmet do not occur before the medallion on the Planudean Anthology binding. Nevertheless, within the broader context of this iconographic type, Lascaris’s contribution was vital: by adding the name of Alexander to an effigy which could conceivably have been of him and was largely accepted as such, he launched a new portrait of Alexander, which was all the more valued because it was based on an ancient model. Profiles of the helmeted Alexander spread in late fifteenth-century manuscripts of relevant historical texts, particularly the Historiae Alexandri of Curtius Rufus and the Anabasis of Arrian. Alongside ms. Urb. lat. 415 discussed above, two fine manuscripts deserve a mention: a Curtius Rufus from the library of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa (Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Auct. F. 6.28, fol. 1 r)236 and an important copy of the Latin translation of Arrian, made in Naples as a gift for Matthias Corvinus (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 5268; Fig. 48)237. While the decorative elements on the helmet and the facial features of Alexander are not entirely fixed, the iconography in its essentials remains stable. From these first illuminated examples, and more decisively from the early sixteenth century onwards, the image of a youthful Alexander, almost effeminate in appearance, becomes the standard Renaissance portrait of him, with the helmet serving as an important distinguishing feature. This imagery put paid to the variability of previous representations. The warrior’s helmet comes to replace the royal crown, which Alexander had so often worn in the medieval tradition (both in the illuminated manuscripts and in the Nine Worthies cycles which I examined in Chapter 2). Furthermore, the occasional depictions in the past of Alexander as a mature or elderly man (e.g., in the La Manta frescoes and in ms. plut. 61.11 of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence) become less and less frequent, as the new youthful type gains prominence. Of the many fifteenth-century images of the helmeted Alexander, Andrea del Verrocchio’s marble relief, now in Washington DC, is a particularly interesting case238. It was made in Florence, either by Verrocchio himself or his workshop, in around 1480-1485 – that is to say, a few years before and in the same cultural context from which, as I have tried to show, the new Renaissance type of Alexander, based on the effigy of Athena, took shape (Fig. 49). The work has long been connected to a bronze relief which, according to Vasari, was commissioned to Verrocchio by Lorenzo de’ Medici and then sent to Matthias Corvinus in Hungary, together with its pendant of Darius239. The two reliefs are now lost, but we can 235 See Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders, p. 103. 236 The manuscript was copied in Florence around 1430-1440; in the late fifteenth century, when in possession of Cardinal Carafa in Naples, it had a historiated border added at fol. 1 r, including a medallion portrait of a helmeted Alexander. See O. Pächt and J. J. G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library Oxford, 3 vol., Oxford, 1966-1973, II, p. 23, no. 226 and 37, no. 372, pl. XX and XXXV. 237 See Matthias Corvinus, p. 235-236, no. 4.11 (D. Pócs); still essential is D. J. A. Ross, “A Corvinus Manuscript Recovered”, Scriptorium, 11 (1957), p. 104-108. 238 See Mattia Corvino e Firenze, p. 156-158, no. 39 (A. Luchs); D. A. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio: Life and Work, Florence, 2005, p. 138-143. 239 Vasari, Le vite, III, p. 535: “[Verrocchio] fece anco due teste di metallo, una d’Alessandro Magno in proffilo, l’altra d’un Dario a suo capriccio, pur di mezzo rilievo, e ciascuna da per sé, variando l’un dall’altro ne’ cimieri, nell’armadure et in ogni cosa”.

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get some idea of the appearance of Alexander from the marble relief in Washington and of Darius from a terracotta relief ascribed to the Della Robbia workshop, which perished in Berlin in 1945 but is known through photographic documentation240. The profile portrait in Washington bears all the features of the helmeted type mentioned above: Alexander has a youthful and effeminate appearance, long curly hair and a fanciful helmet and cuirass, on which the gorgoneion has been transformed into a screaming Fury. While his head is perfectly in profile, the bust is represented in three-quarters: a feature which has no parallel among contemporary reliefs of ancient “paired captains” but which does appear in the Athena plaquette (Fig. 46) and presumably in the Medici cameo on which it is modelled241. Although it is difficult to determine whether Verrocchio found direct inspiration in Lorenzo’s collection of antiquities or in some intermediate source, this issue is not important for my interpretation, since it is evident that the Washington relief belongs to the group of Florentine artefacts deriving ultimately from the Medici Athena gem, which, as we have seen, was reproduced in another work made for Matthias Corvinus, the manuscript of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia now in Paris. According to Vasari, the reliefs for the Hungarian king differed from one another not only because of the decorations on their armour and helmets, but also because Verrocchio represented Alexander “in profile”, while he portrayed Darius “according to his whim”242. Vasari seems to be suggesting that although there was no ancient prototype for Darius, there was one for representing Alexander “in profile”. The most striking decorations of Alexander’s helmet and cuirass – on the spaulder, an image of Triton and a Nereid embracing; and on the helmet, a winged dragon – have sometimes been interpreted as allusions to Alexander’s life and to his medieval legend. Triton and Nereid have been associated with the sea creatures admired by Alexander in his exploration of the ocean,243 and the dragon with the report in the Pseudo-Callisthenes that he was fathered by Zeus Ammon disguised as a monstrous serpent or dragon244. Both these hypotheses, though intriguing, seem far-fetched to me. I believe these images to be generic all’antica elements, rather than decorations specifically connected to Alexander. Triton and Nereid belong to the common repertoire of ancient sarcophagi, coins and gems, and could have been adapted from material available at the time245. As for helmet crests in the shape of winged dragons, these are frequently found in Florentine art of 240 On the two reliefs and other similar representations of ancient captains, see F. Caglioti, “Andrea del Verrocchio e i profili di condottieri antichi per Mattia Corvino”, in Italy and Hungary: Humanism and Art in the Early Renaissance, ed. P. Farbaky and L. A. Waldman, Florence, 2011, p. 504-551, with a status quaestionis of research and bibliography. The latest contribution on the reliefs is in Verrocchio: il maestro di Leonardo (exhibiton catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 2019), ed. F. Caglioti and A. De Marchi, Venice, 2019, p. 102-105 (P. Parmiggiani), where the Washington marble relief is discussed alongside a glazed terracotta of Darius (Della Robbia workshop, c. 1500-1515, Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga), which is also connected to the Medici commission. 241 For an alternative interpretation of Alexander’s unusual posture, which is interesting but not entirely persuasive, see Caglioti, “Andrea del Verrocchio”, p. 539-540. The expression “paired captains” goes back to A. Chastel, “Les capitaines antiques affrontés dans l’art florentin du xve siècle”, Mémoires de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France, 3 (1954), p. 279-289. 242 Vasari, Le vite, III, p. 535; for the Italian text, see above, n. 239. 243 See Alison Luchs’s entry in Mattia Corvino e Firenze, p. 158. 244 L. Pisani, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci: itinerari di uno scultore fiorentino fra Toscana, Romagna e Montefeltro, Florence, 2007, p. 42, no. 206. 245 Also suggested in ibid., and in Mattia Corvino e Firenze, p. 158.

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the late fifteenth century, most famously in the representations of Mehmed II known as El Gran Turco. That these are generic decorative elements is further confirmed by their appearance in a number of representations of “paired captains”, as well as in surviving parade armour worn in jousts246. In the Washington relief, however, there is a feature which is genuinely derived from an ancient effigy of Alexander: the shell-like decoration on the side of his helmet. I believe that it is taken from a Lysimachus coin bearing the image of the deified Alexander with the ram’s horns of Ammon (e.g., Fig. 50). As I shall explain below, coins and cameos of this type were well known in Florence at the time. There is also evidence that this effigy circulated in Verrocchio’s circle: a leaf in Chantilly (Musée Condé, inv. DE 21) from the so-called ‘Verrocchio sketchbook’, ascribed to his pupil Francesco di Simone Ferrucci and dated around 1487, shows on its verso the profile of the horned Alexander copied from an ancient coin or gem (Fig. 51)247. It seems all the more significant then that Paolo Parmiggiani has recently attributed the Washington relief to Francesco di Simone Ferrucci himself, arguing that, if the design of the piece must surely be credited to Verrocchio, the execution was probably entrusted to his collaborator Ferrucci248. Whatever the solution to the vexata questio of the authorship may be, it is highly probable that images of the horned Alexander were taken into account when devising the relief for Matthias Corvinus. Of course, this type of shell-like decoration on helmets was greatly elaborated over the course of the Renaissance and was frequently employed as a generic feature in many military portraits, culminating in the fantastic helmets drawn by Marco Zoppo in a series of all’antica heads249. Nonetheless, it seems plausible to me that the origin of the motif, which also appears in the Washington relief, lies in the numismatic effigy of Alexander with ram’s horns. The Verrocchio relief of Alexander was warmly welcomed at the court of Buda, especially since Matthias Corvinus was known not only for admiring and emulating Alexander, but also for having his official portraits modelled on him250. For the Hungarian king, the example of Alexander was not just another Renaissance commonplace but had a special significance: just as Alexander had conquered and subdued the Persians, Matthias was seen (and saw himself) as the new Alexander who would eventually defeat the Turks and repel them for good from the Eastern frontier of Christianity. Lajos Vayer has shown that the idea of Matthias Corvinus as the new Alexander was cultivated at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, where poets and humanists, chief among them Angelo Poliziano, encouraged and reinforced this identification251. Matthias’s court at Buda was, in fact, an 246 See Bellini and the East (exhibition catalogue, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and London, National Gallery, 2005-2006), ed. C. Campbell and A. Chong, London and Boston, 2005, p. 66-69, no. 14 (A. Chong). 247 See Pisani, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 145-146 and fig. 165. In the Washington relief, a possible portrait of Ammon himself with ram’s horns is carved on one of the pendent straps of Alexander’s pauldrons, as is pointed out, though in a rather confused way, by Luchs in Mattia Corvino e Firenze, p. 156. 248 See Parmiggiani’s entry in Verrocchio: il maestro di Leonardo, esp. p. 103. 249 See L. Armstrong, “Marco Zoppo’s ‘Parchment Book of Drawings’ in the British Museum: Reflections on the ‘all’antica’ Heads”, in her Studies of Renaissance Miniaturists in Venice, 2 vol., London, 2003, I, p. 37-75. 250 See E. Békés, The Physiognomy of a Renaissance Ruler: Portraits and Descriptions of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary (1458-1490), Saarbrücken, 2009, esp. p. 15-25, with bibliography. 251 See L. Vayer, “Il Vasari e l’arte del Rinascimento in Ungheria”, in Il Vasari storiografo e artista: atti del congresso internazionale nel IV centenario della morte, Arezzo, Firenze, 2-8 settembre 1974, Florence, 1976, p. 501-524, esp. p. 513-521.

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Italian enclave at the borders of Europe, and its contacts with Florence, in particular, are well documented. But Hungary was not exceptional in its reception of the Florentine all’antica portrait of Alexander, which soon began to circulate far and wide. Alexander with the Horns of Zeus Ammon

Another Hellenistic numismatic type needs to be mentioned here, since it had some influence on Renaissance art. This is the effigy of Alexander with the ram’s horns of his fabled father, the Egyptian god Ammon (or Zeus Ammon). The image was devised by Lysimachus, Alexander’s successor in Thrace, and also adopted by Seleucus I Nicator; and it, too, was known in the Quattrocento from coins and cameos. A numismatic specimen was in the Medici collection, where it was seen by Poliziano, who described it as an “imago cornigera” (Fig. 50)252. It is possible that this specimen was the one which Francesco di Simone Ferrucci copied in the drawing mentioned above. Unlike the portrait of the helmeted Alexander, which migrated freely from a numismatic effigy into a variety of artistic media, portraits with the ram’s horns are found almost exclusively in intaglios and medallions253, as well as in decorative reliefs based on plaquettes and ancient gems. Examples are mostly found in Lombardy, a region where this style of decoration was particularly favoured in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries254. An example is in the tomb of Ambrogio Longhignana, Ludovico Maria Visconti’s castellan, at Isola Bella in the Lake Maggiore. On the four pillars at the base, there are medallions with all’antica profile heads; one of these, on the first pilaster from the right, has the effigy of Alexander displaying the anastole (that is, with his hair brushed up from his forehead) and the horns of Ammon (Fig. 52)255. In conclusion, even though the image of Alexander with ram’s horns had only a limited popularity, it contributed to Renaissance iconography

252 Poliziano discussed at length whether the “imago cornigera” he saw in the numismatic collection of Lorenzo was issued by Seleucus or, as suggested by D. Gionta, Iconografia erodianea: Poliziano e le monete di Lorenzo, Messina, 2008, p. 34 and n. 1, by Lysimachus; in either case, it is clear that he was referring to a coin bearing the image of Alexander with the horns of Zeus Ammon. See V. Fera, “Il dibattito umanistico sui Miscellanea”, in Agnolo Poliziano poeta scrittore filologo: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Montepulciano, 3-6 novembre 1994, ed. V. Fera and M. Martelli, Florence, 1998, p. 333-364, at p. 346. Several ancient cameos with this effigy are in the Cabinet des médailles of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, including one attributed to Pyrgoteles himself: see M.-L. Vollenweider, Camées et intailles, tome I: Les portraits grecs du Cabinet des médailles. Catalogue raisonné, 2 vol., Paris, 1995, I, p. 45-50, nos 29-32. 253 There are several specimens in Florence; see R. Gennaioli, Le gemme dei Medici al Museo degli Argenti: cammei e intagli nelle collezioni di Palazzo Pitti, Florence, 2007 (sixteenth-century all’antica cameos of Alexander: p. 164, no. 30-31; an unidentified young boy with the horns of Zeus Ammon: p. 165, no. 32; an Athena wearing a helmet with decorative features from Zeus Ammon’s horns is illustrated at p. 167, no. 38). 254 On the use of plaquettes in Lombard architecture of the Renaissance, see M. Leino, Fashion, Devotion and Contemplation: The Status and Functions of Italian Renaissance Plaquettes, Oxford, 2013; see also Ead., “Italian Renaissance Plaquettes and Lombard Architectural Monuments”, Arte lombarda, 1-3 (2006), p. 111-126. 255 On the Longhignana monument, see E. L. Longsworth, “The so-called ‘Monumento to Camillo Borromeo’”, Arte lombarda, 100 (1992), p. 61-69. For an examination of the Alexander medallion in light of other Lombard examples, see Burnett and Schofield, “The Medallions of the Basamento”, p. 10. As pointed out by L. Damiani Cabrini, “L’incanto delle ‘pietre vive’: il monumento Longhignana e l’uso del marmo a Milano in età sforzesca”, in Scultura lombarda del Rinascimento: i monumenti Borromeo, ed. M. Natale, Turin, 1997, p. 259-276, at p. 275, n. 98, there is another image of Alexander on the second pilaster from left of the Longhignana tomb, but this is merely a cast of the Alexander medallion under discussion.

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in a significant way, but not specifically to that of Alexander, since it was often used as a generic feature in military portraits. A fourth numismatic type of Alexander wearing the elephant scalp (exuviae elephantis) on his head, in allusion to his conquest of India, will not be taken into consideration here. The effigy, devised by Ptolemy I Soter of Egypt around 310-305 bc, was known in the fifteenth century but had no effect on Renaissance Alexander iconography. Instead, the attribute of the elephant scalp came to be appropriated by the personification of the Roman province of Africa, and from there it came down to the Renaissance and beyond256. A Curtius Rufus Manuscript “Illustrated Like a Romance Text”257

Among the many illuminated manuscripts mentioned or discussed in this chapter, a codex in the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati of Siena, ms. I.VII.23, deserves particular attention, not least because, despite occasional references to it in the scholarly literature, it has not been studied in-depth. The manuscript contains Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni in the Italian (Lombard) translation completed by Pier Candido Decembrio in 1438. As we have seen in Chapter 3, Decembrio filled in gaps in Curtius’s text with passages from Plutarch and supplemented the work with his own Comparatione between Alexander and Julius Caesar. The Siena codex is one of the few manuscripts containing the whole of Decembrio’s work, which he referred to as “Istoria d’Alexandro Magno”. While the owner of ms. I.VII.23 and the circumstances of its commission have not been identified, even though there are several heraldic devices on the frontispiece, a Milan provenance is certain. The dating is problematic, but some time around 1450 seems most likely. The text has been corrected by Decembrio himself258, and the eleven illuminated scenes have been ascribed to a follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum (active in Milan between 1430 and c. 1453), who shows some influence from the regions north of the Alps259. The decoration of ms. I.VII.23 has been dismissed as the work of a not terribly gifted artist260; but the unique character of its iconographic programme is of considerable interest and is without parallel in any other Curtius, or Alexander related, manuscript

256 See F. Salcedo, Africa: iconografia de una provincia romana, Rome and Madrid, 1996; L. Bonoldi, “Exuviae Alexandri: slittamenti del significato allegorico della spoglia elefantina”, La Rivista di Engramma, 44 (2005) (on-line journal: http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=2252) [last accessed 24 November 2021], and J. Spicer, “The Personification of Africa with an Elephant-Head Crest in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603)”, in Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion, ed. W. S. Melion and B. Ramakers, Leiden, 2016, p. 677-715. 257 In its essentials, this section has already appeared in my “Curtius Rufus, Pier Candido Decembrio and the Impact of the Historiae on Fifteenth-Century Italian Art”, in Postérités européennes de Quinte-Curce, p. 509-523, at p. 517-523. The quoted phrase in the title of the paragraph is from C. Mitchell, A Fifteenth-Century Italian Plutarch, London, 1961, p. 10. 258 As reported by Pade, “Curzio Rufo e Plutarco”, p. 111. 259 See ibid, p. 110, n. 32. The Northern European influence was noted as early as 1912 by Toesca, La pittura e la miniatura, p. 534. 260 Toesca, ibid, p. 533-534, speaks of a “minuzioso e fanciullesco illustratore”, while Mitchell, A Fifteenth-Century Italian Plutarch, p. 16, says that “the little men in the Alexander book are no more than puppets”. The attribution to Giovanni Ambrogio de’ Predis, put forward on stylistic grounds by M. Salmi, Italian Miniatures, London, 1957, p. 73, is not convincing.

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of the time261. The decoration consists of eleven lively scenes, each covering a half page; eight of them are placed at the beginning of each of Curtius’s books (Books III to X), two pictures illustrate the most significant sections supplemented from Plutarch at the beginning and end of Curtius’s account, while the eleventh appears at the opening of Decembrio’s Comparatione262. It has been noted that the illustrations are closely related to the text, each illustrating a major episode from the book which it opens263. The exact content of the scenes has not, however, previously been analysed264. The identification of the subject matter of the illustrations is not always straightforward; and in many cases they do not rely on any existing visual tradition. Most are accompanied by a few lines of text, also in the vernacular, which are written in the margins and provide a brief description of the subject of the picture, as well as the reference to the chapter of the book where the episode is narrated265. The illustration on the frontispiece, at fol. 1 r (Fig. 53), shows the Greek and Persian armies facing each other, separated by a river. The Greeks on horseback are already half way across the water, with Alexander immediately identifiable among them on account of his crown. The Persian archers and cavalrymen, who wear Oriental dress and hats, are ready to engage in battle, though their king cannot be seen in the crowd. The presence of the river, in combination with the absence of the Persian king, indicates that this is the Battle of the Granicus, the first of the three fought by Greeks and Persians and the only one in which Darius did not take part. The episode does not rely on Curtius, whose text is lost for this part, but rather on Plutarch, whose description of the battle was inserted into the Historiae by Decembrio and then carefully followed by the manuscript illuminator. At the opening of Book III, fol. 11 v (Fig. 54), there is a picture of the Battle of Issus, in line with the compositional arrangement discussed at length earlier in this chapter: Alexander on horseback pursuing Darius, who is fleeing from the battlefield on his chariot. The siege of Tyre (Fig. 55), a city which in antiquity was considered to be impregnable, is represented with great accuracy at fol. 34 v, and a number of narrative details which Curtius describes at length in Book IV – including the Greek soldiers who, in an umpteenth attempt to build a causeway between the coast of the mainland and the island on which the city was located, began to throw whole trees, root and branch, into the water. The siege of Tyre, which took Curtius nearly half of Book IV to describe, was no doubt chosen to illustrate Alexander’s exceptional military prowess. Medieval illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth century, which were based on far less detailed accounts, had showed only the bare essentials of the story – just a walled city, crested with towers and surrounded by 261 Other richly decorated copies of Decembrio’s translation of Curtius are known, but none of them has a comparably vast figurative cycle; see Pade, “Curzio Rufo e Plutarco”. 262 I thank Renzo Pepi, formerly at the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, for kindly providing me with a digital copy of the entire manuscript when I first became interested in it. Copies of the ten pictures at the opening of each of Curtius’s books, but not the one at the beginning of the Comparatione, are held in the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute. My thanks are also due to Anna Melograni, who generously discussed the manuscript decoration with me. 263 Ross, Alexander Historiatus, p. 68. 264 Mitchell, A Fifteenth-Century Italian Plutarch, p. 10, 15-16 and 40, n. 34, gives a general description of the scenes, discussing the style but not the iconography. 265 E.g., the picture at fol. 11 v, at the opening of the third book, is labelled “Bataglia fra l’esercito del re Alexandro e del re Dario. Recorre al capitulo XX di questo libro”.

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turbulent waters. The episode was not very often represented in the fifteenth century and only acquired importance in the visual tradition from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. This means that the illustration in ms. I.VII.23 was one of the earliest representations of the siege of Tyre to be based on an historical source. The next picture, at fol. 75 r (Fig. 56), presents three distinct episodes in the same frame: Alexander’s entry into Babylon, on the left-hand side; a scene in an interior which I interpret as the seduction of Alexander by his mistress Thais, on the right; and the burning of Persepolis, in the background, a controversial event which was reportedly instigated by Thais herself. This is one of the most charming illuminations in the manuscript: the city gate of Babylon with the Hanging Gardens sprouting from the highest tower, the group of young men kneeling in proskynesis before the triumphant Alexander, Thais undressing and seducing Alexander with her beauty, and finally the destruction by fire of Persepolis, in which Alexander himself, sceptre in hand, took part alongside Thais and several other Macedonians. Alexander’s encounter with the queen of the Amazons Thalestris occupies only a small section of Book VI in Curtius’s Historiae; and yet, the visit paid to Alexander by the beautiful queen, who reached the Macedonian camp accompanied by three hundred Amazons and who expressed the wish to conceive a child with Alexander, was certainly too beguiling a story to be left out. At fol. 100 v (Fig. 57), the meeting is represented on the left-hand side, with the figure of Alexander partially rubbed out but still identifiable by his crown. On the right, a completely different episode is depicted, one which was very infrequently, if ever, represented in the visual tradition: the arrest of Philotas, commander of the cavalry, who is here being apprehended and was later unjustly put to death, for allegedly conspiring against Alexander. At the opening of Book VII, at fol. 127 r (Fig. 58), Philotas’s father, the general Parmenion, is also assassinated on Alexander’s orders. Most of the illustration, however, is taken up by the crossing of the river Tanais (present-day Don), which marked the boundary with the Steppes inhabited by the dreaded Scythians. According to Curtius, not only did Alexander manage to get his entire army across the river on rafts – which in the picture take the shape of small boats – but he also heavily defeated the Scythians, who are shown aiming their crossbows at Alexander and his men on the opposite river bank. The opening illustration of Book VIII, at fol. 156 v (Fig. 59), shows a lavish banquet, with exquisite food, goblets full of wine, elegantly dressed courtiers, musicians and even a falcon. It was, however, the occasion for one of the most terrible crimes committed by Alexander: the murder of his friend Cleitus, who had publicly questioned his military prowess and ridiculed his achievements, as well as his claim to divinity. Blinded by fury and completely inebriated, Alexander picked up a spear and ran it through him. The picture displays a specific version of the murder, which is recounted solely by Curtius, who claims that Alexander did not kill Cleitus in the middle of the banquet room, but rather by the door. Curtius says that Alexander pretended to forgive his friend’s offences, but secretly hid outside the door and, spear in hand, waited for Cleitus to leave the banquet and killed him when he least expected it. I do not know any other picture where the death of Cleitus is illustrated according to Curtius’s account, that is, not as a rage-driven crime and committed on the spur of the moment, but instead as a premeditated and cold-blooded murder.

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The illustration at fol. 191 r (Fig. 60) can surely be identified as the moment when Alexander, determined to march further into India, is pleaded with by his general Coenus to change his mind and go back for the sake of his soldiers, who longed to return home – another episode which, to the best of my knowledge, is unique in the tradition. Book X has two pictures: the first at fol. 217 r represents the distribution of talents and riches to the army (Fig. 61); the second at fol. 224 v (Fig. 62) depicts the last moments of Alexander’s life, a section which is almost entirely lost in Curtius and was supplied by Decembrio from Plutarch’s text. Plutarch says in his Life that when Alexander was ill with a high fever for several days, rumours started to spread that he had died. The Macedonian soldiers demanded to see him and were allowed into his room, where Alexander was lying on his deathbed. Following the text closely once more, the illustration shows a few people weeping outside the room, while the entire army files past Alexander, who had lost his voice but managed to welcome each man anyway. In the final picture of the manuscript, at the opening of the Comparatione, at fol. 236 v, Alexander and Julius Caesar are portrayed as two generic knights wearing fancy parade armour; they can be told apart only by the labels with their names (Fig. 63)266. At this point, a few considerations on ms. I.VII.23 can be offered. The distinctiveness of the manuscript was aptly summarized by Charles Mitchell: “It is written in the volgare, and is illustrated like a romance text”267 – which, in actual fact, it is. While no work by an ancient author, written in either Latin or in Greek, would be illustrated with such a vast narrative cycle, the vernacular translations gave such books a different status. The meticulously drawn, carefully detailed and delightful pictures in manuscripts like ms. I. VII.23 would have greatly appealed to the readership at which they were aimed. Alexander is depicted as a valorous commander in a fifteenth-century world still in the grip of late Gothic culture, with no attempt made to portray architecture, apparel or weaponry in the all’antica style; the cycle thus reflected the fashion of courts such as those of Milan, Mantua or Ferrara, which had not yet been influenced by the new humanist taste for classical antiquity. In ms. I.VII.23, there is a particular interest in the battle scenes and, more generally, episodes of military life. The illustration on the frontispiece seems to set the tone for the entire iconographic programme. Humanists may have lamented the loss of the first two books of Curtius’s Historiae, in which the early life of Alexander was recounted; yet the illuminator of the Siena manuscript (and arguably the patron who commissioned it) took little advantage of the information about this period which Decembrio supplied from Plutarch. He did not illustrate, for example, the birth of Alexander (which would have been the perfect pendant to the depiction of his death at the end of the manuscript), nor the taming of Bucephalus (to which attention is drawn in a marginal annotation on fol. 3 v, stating: “bella prova duno cavallo chiamato Bucephalo”). Instead of these potentially dramatic stories, the illuminator preferred to depict the Battle of the Granicus, even though another battle, Issus, was illustrated later on in the manuscript. 266 A similar example, at the beginning of the Comparatio in another manuscript of Decembrio’s “Istoria d’Alexandro Magno”, is in Catania, Biblioteca Regionale Universitaria, ms. Ventimiliana 84, fol. 1 r; see A. Daneu Lattanzi, I manoscritti ed incunaboli miniati della Sicilia, 2 vol., Rome, 1965 (I) and Palermo, 1984 (II), II, p. 32, no. 12, and pl. V. 267 See n. 257 above.

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Another striking feature of the decorative scheme is that there is no attempt to conceal or downplay the most disturbing or problematic episodes from Alexander’s life – the burning of Persepolis, the death of Philotas, the murders of Cleitus and Parmenion – which were not frequently represented in the visual tradition precisely because they cast him in a bad light. The reason for this, in my view, is the close connection between text and images, and the nature of Curtius’s account, as supplemented by Decembrio, which is very dramatic and does not attempt to conceal the unattractive aspects of Alexander’s character and actions. Yet there is more to it than that for even though Book VIII is full of the glorious achievements of Alexander such as the siege of Aornos, the first glimpse of India and the battle against Porus, the episode chosen for illustration is instead his inglorious murder of Cleitus. The two illustrations of Alexander succumbing to female seduction – by Thais, who lures him into the sacrilegious act of destroying one of the capitals of the Persian Empire; and by Thalestris, a female ruler equal to him in power and strength – hardly convey a more positive image of him. Ms. I.VII.23 is a remarkable and unique work, combining the revived text of an ancient author, in a modern vernacular translation, with a style of decoration which was on the verge of dying out. Moreover, the episodes chosen for illustration are unusual. Although the artist had a model for some of them (e.g., the Battle of Issus), for the most part, they rely solely on the text, often creating iconographies with little contact to the visual tradition which was starting to develop from ancient histories of Alexander.

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Fig. 31: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; formerly Collection of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres

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Fig. 32: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius (detail), c. 1450; London, British Museum

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Fig. 33: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; Fiesole, Collezione Paolo Fresco

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Fig. 34: Lo Scheggia, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1460; formerly Artaud de Montor

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Fig. 35: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga

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Fig. 36: Master of the Story of Griselda, Alexander, c. 1494; Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts

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Fig. 37: Master of the Story of Griselda, Alexander (detail), c. 1494; Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts

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Fig. 38 and 39: Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Davide Ghirlandaio and Sebastiano Mainardi), Episodes from the Life of Alexander the Great (details), c. 1493-1494; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, on permanent loan to Longleat House, Wiltshire

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Fig. 40: Ricciardo di Nanni, Alexander, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, c. 1460; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, ms. plut. 64.28, fol. 1 r (detail)

Fig. 41: Alexander, from Plutarch, Vitae virorum illustrium, c. 1446-1448; Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, ms. S. XV.1, fol. 1 r (detail)

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Fig. 42: Alexander-Hercules type, Attic tetradrachm, c. 323-320 bc

Fig. 43: Profile Heads of Julius Caesar, Francesco I Sforza and Alexander, 1450-1466; Milan, Palazzo Vimercati (detail from the portal)

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Fig. 44: Arrian, De rebus gestis Alexandri Magni, detail from the title-page, post 1495; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 415, fol. 1 r

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Fig. 45: Binding of the Planudean Anthology with medallion portrait of Alexander, Florence, Laurentius de Alopa, 1494; Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek

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Fig. 46: Athena, bronze plaquette, c. 1500; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Fig. 47: Golden stater of Alexander with Athena and Nike, c. 330-320 bc; Oxford, Ashmolean Museum

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Fig. 48: Cristoforo Majorana, Alexander, from Arrian, De expeditione Alexandri Magni, c. 1480-1484; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 5268, fol. 3 r

Fig. 49: Andrea del Verrocchio (workshop of?), Alexander the Great, c. 1480-1485; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art

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Fig. 50: Tetradrachm of Lysimachus with Alexander-Zeus Ammon, mint of Lampsakos, 305-281 bc; London, British Museum

Fig. 51: Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, Sheet from the ‘Verrocchio Sketchbook’ with Head of Alexander-Zeus Ammon, c. 1487; Chantilly, Musée Condé, inv. DE 21 (verso)

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Fig. 52: Alexander-Zeus Ammon, c. 1495; Isola Bella, Palazzo Borromeo, Cappella Longhignana Tomb

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Fig. 53: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Battle of the Granicus, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 1 r

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Fig. 54: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Battle of Issus, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 11 v

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Fig. 55: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Siege of Tyre, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 34 v

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Fig. 56: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Entry into Babylon and the Burning of Persepolis, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 75 r

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Fig. 57: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Encounter with Thalestris and the Arrest of Philotas, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 100 v

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Fig. 58: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Murder of Parmenion and the Crossing of the Tanai, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 127 r

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Fig. 59: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Murder of Cleitus, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 156 v

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Fig. 60: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Coenus Pleading with Alexander to Take the Army Back Home, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 191 r

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Fig. 61: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Distribution of Talents to the Army, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 217 r

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Fig. 62: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Death of Alexander, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 224 v

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Fig. 63: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Julius Caesar and Alexander, from the Comparatione complementing Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 236 v

Chapter 5

The Development and Consolidation of Renaissance Iconography in the Sixteenth Century

Renaissance imagery of Alexander, grounded in ancient historical sources, which had begun to emerge in the Quattrocento, was developed and consolidated in the sixteenth century, quickly spreading across artistic media. As we have seen in Chapters 2 and 4, there was some persistence of the legendary tradition in fifteenth-century Italy; but in the course of the Cinquecento, the imagery of Alexander, as re-shaped on the basis of the ancient historical texts, became firmly established. The varied and inconsistent depictions of Alexander still found in the Quattrocento (when he was portrayed as youthful or old, clean-shaven or bearded, dressed in contemporary or all’antica clothing) were finally put aside, and a single portrait type was established. Together with the underlying influence of the helmeted numismatic type, discussed in Chapter 4, the description of Alexander’s features by Plutarch (Alexander IV.1-4), based on works by Lysippus, Alexander’s official sculptor, was crucial1. The material evidence progressively re-emerging from antiquity (coins and gems, but also sculptures) seemed to be perfectly in keeping with this description, and the new finds were often attributed to Lysippus or Pyrgoteles, Alexander’s official gem-engraver2. In the attempt to restore Alexander’s ‘true’ appearance, his reported features – the long and leonine hair 3, the anastole (the lock of hair rising up from his forehead), the straight nose, the full lips, the melting look of his upturned eyes and the neck bent slightly to the left – played an essential role, firstly, in the creation of new portraits of him (for example, Giulio Romano’s painting, c. 1537-1538, Geneva, Musée d’art et d’histoire, and his fresco in Mantua, Palazzo Te, Room of the Emperors)4, and, secondly, in identifying, sometimes mistakenly, ancient heads as Alexander’s (most famously, the so-called ‘Dying Alexander’, in the Uffizi, which inspired several Renaissance artists before its identification as Alexander was disproved)5.



1 Other sources are listed in Stewart, Faces of Power, p. 341-350. On Alexander’s ancient portraits, see also E. Schwarzenberg, “The Portraiture of Alexander”, in Alexandre le Grand: image et réalité, ed. E. Badian, Geneva, 1976, p. 223-267, and A. Trofimova, Imitatio Alexandri. 2 No evidence remains of the work of Alexander’s official painter, Apelles. 3 The long and curly hair, likened to a lion’s mane, was also an important trait of Alexander in the legendary tradition and was based on the description in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (I.13). 4 On the Geneva panel and the two additional versions on canvas known of it, see S. Legrand, “L’Alexandre le Grand de Giulio Romano: trois versions d’une ‘cosa molto bella’”, Genava: revue d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie, 56 (2008), p. 27-47; see also F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, 2 vol., New Haven, 1958, I, p. 218, and G. Rebecchini, Private Collectors in Mantua, 1500-1630, Rome, 2002, p. 57 and 81-83. On Alexander’s Renaissance portraits in general, see A. Fisher, “Portraits of Alexander the Great during the Italian Renaissance”, Artibus et historiae, 75 (2017), p. 79-96. 5 See G. A. Mansuelli, Galleria degli Uffizi: le sculture, 2 vol., Rome, 1958-1961, I, p. 94-96, no. 62, and F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1981, p. 134-136, no. 2; see also E. Schwarzenberg, “From the Alessandro morente to the Alexandre Richelieu: The Portraiture of

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Starting in the early sixteenth century, a vast, new iconographic repertoire of episodes from Alexander’s life, taken from the ancient historians, took shape. As we have seen in Chapter 4, its first emergence dates to the mid-fifteenth century, when it appeared on cassone panels, but it was for the most part limited to a single episode, ‘The Meeting of Alexander with the Family of Darius’. In the sixteenth century, the wider circulation of historical texts via printed editions resulted in the formation of an iconographic corpus of far greater proportions than ever before, with a large number of episodes to choose from. In contrast to what happened in the Middle Ages, this corpus did not arise as a visual apparatus accompanying the texts from which it originated, but rather developed independently from the pages of history books, which, in line with sixteenth-century fashion, were rarely illustrated and almost never decorated with narrative scenes. As I shall argue, the availability of authors such as Arrian and Diodorus Siculus who were previously either unknown or little read exerted only a limited influence on the visual arts. It did, however, help to create a new wave of interest in the figure and the life of Alexander; moreover, access to several, sometimes contradictory, accounts of the same story contributed to the production of a rich and diverse visual repertoire, in some cases with significant iconographic variations on the same episode. An important novelty in the sixteenth-century visual tradition was the appearance of huge fresco cycles devoted to Alexander, firstly in Italy and then in the rest of Europe6. In the decoration of palaces and wealthy homes, the stories of Alexander became a favourite subject for wall paintings, recommended in art treatises like those of Filarete (c. 1465) and Lomazzo (1584)7. No longer confined to cassoni and the domestic rooms where these were kept, the deeds of Alexander were displayed on the walls and ceilings of both private and public spaces, and sometimes even on external façades: many of the ‘Rooms of Alexander’ decorated from the early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century were great palace halls meant to celebrate the owner and patron, as much as to impress his guests8. The Alexander







Alexander the Great in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32 (1969), p. 398-405. 6 Alexander cycles in tapestries or easel paintings are less frequently found and, at any rate, are too late to be taken into consideration here. See, e.g., the set of five tapestries in Palazzo Tursi at Genoa (c. 1675), for which see L. Tagliaferro, “Per venticinque arazzi ‘genovesi’”, Bollettino dei musei civici genovesi, 7-9 (1981), p. 69-127, at p. 76, 91 and fig. 9-10, and four canvases hanging over doors in the Palazzo Reale in Turin (Francesco De Mura, 1768), which are illustrated in A. Griseri, “Francesco De Mura fra le corti di Napoli, Madrid e Torino”, Paragone Arte, 155 (1962), p. 22-43 and pl. 50-51. A rather extraordinary set of fourteen tapestries with stories of Alexander was in the collection of Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo (d. 1578) and was bought upon his death by Cardinal Nephew Filippo Boncompagni; for this still untraced set, see A. Paris, “L’eredità di Cristoforo Madruzzo: il testamento e l’inventario dei beni”, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico di Trento/Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient, 35 (2009), p. 361-461. My thanks to Paolo Sachet who drew my attention to it. 7 See Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, ed. A. M. Finoli and L. Grassi, 2 vol., Milan, 1972, I, p. 263 (IX), who speaks of the deeds of Alexander and Julius Caesar as “cosa memorabile e degna d’essere guardata” and considers them appropriate for decorating a single room on opposite walls. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scultura ed architettura, 3 vol., Milan, 1844, II, p. 189 (VI.25), lists Alexander among the ancient commanders whose deeds are worthy of being displayed in royal palaces and princely homes; he recommends, in particular, the battles of “Alessandro contro i persj, e gl’indj”. 8 It is known that painted “Rooms of Alexander” existed in the Middle Ages but none of them has survived. Two well-documented but lost cycles in England were commissioned by King Henry III for Clarendon Palace and Nottingham Castle, on which see T. Borenius, “The Cycle of Images in the Palaces and Castles of Henry III”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 6 (1943), p. 40-50, at p. 44 and 48-49, and L. J. Whatley, “Romance, Crusade,

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cycles painted in Italy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries should be examined one by one: the peculiarities of each, as well as the different choice of the episodes and their variable combinations, make every cycle unique. It is beyond the scope of this book to attempt such an enormous task; but there are a few elements which can be pointed out in relation to sixteenth-century cycles that also, for the most part, apply to later ones. Some cycles were, of course, more important and more ingeniously conceived than others. One of the most complex and magnificent ‘Rooms of Alexander’ was commissioned by Pope Paul III for the Sala Paolina in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome (Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547): an unusually large number of texts on Alexander were consulted in order to devise the iconographic programme, which introduced some new stories (such as ‘Alexander Burning the Carriages of Persian Booty’ or the ‘Triumphal Entry into Babylon’)9 for the first time10. Other cycles included extremely rare episodes which are almost unique in the visual tradition: for instance, ‘Alexander in the Palace of Darius’ (Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, Città di Castello, Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera)11 or the ‘Conquest of the Town of Nysa’ and the ‘Exchange of Gifts with King Omphis, or Taxile’12 from the detached frieze in Palazzo Vizzani at Bologna (Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560)13. The stories of Alexander and his women, painted in the Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes (now the King’s Staircase) at Fontainebleau (Primaticcio, 1541-1544), had very little, if any, iconographic precedent – indeed, it has been suggested that this ground-breaking inventiveness was a deliberate attempt to bewilder the viewer14. and the Orient in King Henry III of England’s Royal Chambers”, Viator, 44 (2013), p. 175-198. Palatial main halls decorated with stories of Alexander are also a literary topos, most famously exemplified by the late thirteenth-century poem L’intelligenza (ed. M. Berisso, Parma, 2000), with stanze 216-238 devoted to Alexander. 9 An earlier example of this subject, but on a much more limited scale, is in the Siena ms. I.VII.23 of Curtius Rufus (see Chapter 4 above). 10 On the Sala Paolina, see Gli affreschi di Paolo III a Castel Sant’Angelo: progetto ed esecuzione 1543-1548 (exhibition catalogue, Rome, Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo, 1981-1982), ed. F. M. Aliberti Gaudioso and E. Gaudioso, 2 vol., Rome, 1981, and E. Parma Armani, Perin del Vaga: l’anello mancante. Studi sul Manierismo, Genoa, 1986, p. 209226. R. Harprath, Papst Paul III. als Alexander der Grosse: das Freskenprogramm der Sala Paolina in der Engelsburg, Berlin and New York, 1978, should be read in light of the review by C. Hope, The Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981), p. 104-105. 11 See Pinacoteca Comunale di Città di Castello: Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, ed. F. F. Mancini, 2 vol., Perugia, 1987-1988, I: Dipinti, p. 120 (R. Guerrini). 12 A later example of this rare theme is in a canvas from the Alexander cycle for Cardinal Montalto; see D. Benati, Sisto Badalocchi e i “giovani” di Annibale Carracci (exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Galleria Fondantico, 2008), Bologna, 2008, and B. Granata, Le passioni virtuose: collezionismo e committenze artistiche a Roma del cardinale Alessandro Peretti Montalto (1571-1623), Rome, 2012, p. 120-126. On the decoration of the Cardinal’s villa in general, see P. Tosini, Immagini ritrovate: decorazione a Villa Peretti Montalto tra Cinque e Seicento, Rome, 2015. 13 See M. Marongiu, “Le Storie di Alessandro Magno in Palazzo Vizzani a Bologna”, Fontes. Rivista di filologia, iconografia e storia della tradizione classica, 13-16 (2004-2005), p. 29-51. On the ceiling of this ‘Room of Alexander’ there was a now lost ‘Apotheosis of Alexander’, which is the earliest appearance of a theme explored in the later tradition: the best preserved example is in the Private Audience Hall in the Gran Duke’s Summer Apartments (now Tesoro dei Granduchi) in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (Agostino Mitelli and Angelo Michele Colonna, 1640) on which see N. Bastogi, “Le sale affrescate da Angelo Michele Colonna e Agostino Mitelli”, in Fasto di corte. La decorazione murale nelle residenze dei Medici e dei Lorena, ed. M. Gregori, 4 vol., Florence, 2005-2009, II: L’età di Ferdinando II de’ Medici (1628-1670), p. 60-82, at p. 71-77; see also M. Campbell, “Medici Patronage and the Baroque: A Reappraisal”, The Art Bulletin, 48 (1966), p. 133-146, at p. 141 and fig. 9. 14 See J. Koering, “La visite programmée: le rôle de l’orateur dans la réception des grands décors”, in Programme et invention dans l’art de la Renaissance, ed. M. Hochmann, J. Kliemann, J. Koering and P. Morel, Rome, 2008, p. 353-370. I thank Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini for bringing this essay to my attention.

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Painted programmes centred on Alexander clearly have to be understood in the wider context of the diffusion of historical cycles, often devoted to Roman history15. Alexander would, of course, be a perfect choice for any patron with the same name wishing to decorate his own residence (including the pope, as the Sala Paolina for Alessandro Farnese, Paul III, shows). Stories of Alexander, however, could also be depicted alongside those of other rulers and commanders, usually Romans, such as in the Salone (Room XI) of the Palazzo Vitelli at Città di Castello, with deeds of Alexander, Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus and Hannibal in the painted frieze16. More frequently, however, a single Alexander episode was paired with an event from the life of a Roman, usually Julius Caesar (as in the so-called Casa Tallarino in Mantua)17 or Scipio Africanus (Giulio Romano, Room of the Emperors, Palazzo Te, also Mantua)18. Given the variety and wealth of material available, an examination of a selected number of cycles would be of little use for understanding how the Renaissance imagery of Alexander developed in the Cinquecento. It seems more sensible, therefore, to proceed thematically. Rather than discussing the more than thirty episodes which appear in sixteenth-century art19, however, I shall focus on those which I consider to be most helpful for illustrating the way in which Alexander came to be envisaged in the sixteenth century, either because of their popularity or for the light they shed on the transformation of his portrayal from legend to history. Selected Episodes from the Life of Alexander The Meeting with the Women of Darius

The starting point for the historical tradition of Alexander in Italian art of the sixteenth century is the bedchamber of Agostino Chigi in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, where stories of Alexander were painted by Sodoma in 1518-151920. Roberto Guerrini considered this room to be “almost an archetype” of Renaissance Alexander iconography21, and 15 See E. Battisti, Cicli pittorici: storie profane, Milan, 1981, and J. Kliemann, Gesta dipinte: la grande decorazione nelle dimore italiane dal Quattrocento al Seicento, Milan, 1993. 16 See Pinacoteca Comunale di Città di Castello, I, p. 84-112, nos 11.1-11.4 (R. Guerrini). 17 See G. Ferlisi, “La mantegnesca facciata dipinta dell’antica piazza Purgo a Mantova”, in A casa di Andrea Mantegna: cultura artistica a Mantova nel Quattrocento (exhibition catalogue, Mantua, Casa del Mantegna, 2006), ed. R. Signorini, Milan, 2006, p. 70-83. An earlier example is the pair of spalliere for the Spannocchi family showing Alexander and Julius Caesar, now at Longleat House (see Chapter 4 above). 18 See A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova/The Palazzo Te in Mantua, 2 vol., Modena, 1998, II, p. 430, fig. 847 and p. 438, fig. 858. Many examples of the pairing of Alexander and Scipio are found in eighteenth-century painting (e.g., Sebastiano Ricci, Raleigh, North Carolina Museum; and Giambattista Tiepolo, Montecchio Maggiore, Villa Cordellina: see n. 28 below). 19 For a list of these, see Appendix 1. 20 On Sodoma’s frescoes at the Farnesina, see R. Bartalini, Le occasioni del Sodoma: dalla Milano di Leonardo alla Roma di Raffaello, Rome, 1996, p. 75-81, and Id., “Da Raffaello al Sodoma: sulla camera nuziale di Agostino Chigi alla Farnesina”, in Late Raphael: Proceedings of the International Symposium/Actas del congreso internacional (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2012), ed. M. Falomir, Madrid and Turnhout, 2013, p. 70-79. On the villa, see La Villa Farnesina a Roma/The Villa Farnesina in Rome, ed. C. L. Frommel, 2 vol., Modena, 2003. 21 R. Guerrini, “Dalla Soranza a Casa Pisani: la figura di Alessandro Magno in Veronese”, in Nuovi studi su Paolo Veronese, ed. M. Gemin, Venice, 1990, p. 371-379, at p. 371 (“quasi un archetipo”).

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rightly so, for the two scenes depicted by Sodoma on adjacent walls – the ‘Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’ and his ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ – are not only the earliest examples on a monumental scale of themes which would become hugely popular from the sixteenth century onwards, but also served as an important iconographic model for later versions of the scenes. Of the two other episodes painted in the Farnesina room, the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ on the west wall, a slightly later addition to the cycle, will be discussed below, while the painting between the windows on the south wall is problematic: it is usually referred to as the ‘Battle of Issus’ – presumably because of its proximity to the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ – but it lacks any distinctive attributes supporting this identification; since it can therefore be discussed only as a generic battle fought by Alexander, it contributes little to our understanding of the fresco cycle22. With respect to its iconography, Sodoma’s depiction of the ‘Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius’ (Fig. 64) does not differ much from the representations of the subject on cassone panels examined in Chapter 4. Before a makeshift tent in a military camp, an unusually large royal family – all of them women, with the exception of a little boy – witnesses the same event which was depicted on fifteenth-century cassone fronts: the queen mother kneeling before Alexander and Hephaestion, a eunuch under the tent pointing at the true Alexander and the king about to raise Sisygambis from the ground. Sodoma must have relied on the existing iconographic tradition of the ‘Meeting’, based on Curtius Rufus, which, as we have seen, emerged in Tuscany around 1450. Having been a leading artist in Siena before moving to Rome, Sodoma was, no doubt, familiar with this tradition, since his patron Agostino Chigi was a Sienese by birth who maintained strong connections with his hometown throughout his life23. From the 1520s, the ‘Meeting’ became an increasingly popular subject and was almost always included in the cycles of stories of Alexander which continued to decorate great palaces and wealthy homes of Italy (and Europe) until the nineteenth century24. There are more iconographic variations on the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ than of any other episode from the life of Alexander. This is because the story, as recounted in the ancient sources, has a very complex narrative; in addition, as is often the case in the Alexander tradition, while the four authors on whom we mostly rely (Curtius Rufus, 22 For the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’, ascribed to the French painter Guillaume de Marcillat, see N. Dacos, “Beccafumi e Roma”, in Domenico Beccafumi e il suo tempo (exhibition catalogue, Siena, Chiesa di Sant’Agostino, and elsewhere, 1990), Milan, 1990, p. 44-59, at p. 58. The battle scene has been ascribed to Bartolomeo di David by F. Sricchia Santoro, “Ricerche senesi. 3. Bartolomeo di David?”, Prospettiva, 29 (1982), p. 32-40, at p. 37. 23 Agostino began his remarkable carrier as an apprentice at the Spannocchi bank in Rome, which was owned by the brothers Giulio and Antonio, who commissioned the Alexander cassone panel now at Longleat, examined above in Chapter 4. 24 The latest example of which I am aware is in the Villa Torlonia in Rome, where Alessandro Torlonia commissioned a room dedicated to his namesake: in 1835-1837 Francesco Coghetti frescoed eight episodes on the vault of the room, among which there is the ‘Meeting of Alexander with the Family of Darius’, modelled on Charles Le Brun’s famous painting of 1660-1661 for Louis XIV. See B. Steindl, “L’iconografia alessandrina nella Roma dell’800”, in Alessandro Magno in età moderna, p. 315-348, esp. p. 321-324. The Torlonia cycle is also discussed by Angelo Maria Piemontese in his La Persia istoriata in Roma, at p. 244-245; Piemontese’s book contains much valuable information on sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Alexander cycles found in Rome (see ibid., p. 224-246), which the author had more briefly discussed in his “Le imprese di Alessandro Magno figurate in Roma/The Heroic Deeds of Alexander the Great as Portrayed in Rome”, in Immagine del mito. Iconografia di Alessandro Magno in Italia/Images of a Legend. Iconography of Alexander the Great in Italy, ed. P. Stirpe, Rome, 2006, p. 42-68.

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Plutarch, Arrian and Diodorus Siculus) agree on the essential elements of the story, they disagree on some of the details, in particular, praising different virtues shown by Alexander. The ‘Meeting’ was thought to exemplify various virtues, including magnanimity, clemency, generosity, chastity and friendship; consequently, pictures labelled ‘The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius’, depending on what part of the story is being illustrated, can vary quite a bit, and it is not always easy to identify which moment or combination of moments the artist has chosen to portray. In the Sodoma fresco, as in the cassone panels which inspired it, the emphasis is on the central action of the episode: the proskynesis of Sisygambis and the reaction of the magnanimous and clement Alexander, who is helping (or about to help) her up from the ground. This model persisted for almost two centuries, appearing, for example, in a large canvas by Antonio Bellucci in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford25 and in Giuseppe Bazzani’s painting in the Palazzo d’Arco at Mantua, which is part of a set of seven stories of Alexander made in about 174026. The spotlight sometimes, however, falls on the two friends, caught at the moment when Alexander says: “You were not mistaken, mother, for this man, too, is Alexander” (Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni III.12.17). This moment is usually visualised as Alexander and Hephaestion pointing at each other (or Hephaestion at himself), while Sisygambis is still prostrated on the ground. An example is a fresco of 1559-1560 by Taddeo and Federico Zuccari in the Castle of Bracciano (Fig. 65)27; and several similar works are found up to the eighteenth century such as Sebastiano Ricci’s painting in the North Carolina Museum of Raleigh, of 1708-1710, and Tiepolo’s magnificent fresco in the Villa Cordellina at Montecchio Maggiore, Vicenza, of 1743-174428. In the Bracciano painting, the viewer’s attention is also drawn to the young princess, Darius’s daughter Stateira, who is shown approaching from the right; she steps forward, with the modest gesture of a Venus Pudica, hand in hand with her little brother, who resembles a Cupid. No textual source singles her out from the group of Persian women, but Stateira was to become Alexander’s wife (allowing him to secure his position as Darius’s rightful heir) in Susa in 324 bc, at a mass ceremony between Macedonian officers and Persian women known as Susa Weddings (Arrian, Anabasis VII.4.4-8 and Plutarch, Alexander

25 Both the original provenance (from a Venetian or German palace) and date of the painting (from 1688 to 1716) are debated; it seems likely, however, that it was made around 1710. See The Ashmolean Museum: Complete Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings, ed. C. Casley, C. Harrison and J. Whiteley, Oxford, 2004, p. 12, and C. Whistler, Baroque and Later Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, London, 2016, p. 64-69, no. 7. 26 See R. Signorini, La dimora dei conti d’Arco in Mantova: stanze di un museo di famiglia, Mantua, 2000, p. 174-183. Highly emotional depictions of the subject are also found in the late eighteenth century, e.g., a small painting by an anonymous Venetian artist in the Pinacoteca Civica of Vicenza, where Sisygambis, having just been raised from the ground, is shown leaning on Alexander’s chest; see Pinacoteca civica di Vicenza: catalogo scientifico delle collezioni, ed. M. E. Avagnina, M. Binotto and G. C. F. Villa, 3 vol., Vicenza, 2003-2005, II: Dipinti del XVII e XVIII secolo, p. 474-475, no. 467 (D. Tosato). 27 On the Bracciano cycle, see my “Stories of Valour and Love for a Wedding: The Sala di Alessandro Magno and Sala di Psiche in the Castle of Bracciano”, in Building Family Identity: The Orsini Castle of Bracciano from Fiefdom to Duchy (1470-1698), ed. P. Alei and M. Grossman, New York and Oxford, 2019, p. 329-350, as well as C. Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari: fratelli pittori del Cinquecento, 2 vol., Milan and Rome, 1998-1999, I, p. 116-123. 28 For Ricci’s painting and a pendant to The Continence of Scipio, also in Raleigh, see L’opera completa di Sebastiano Ricci, ed. J. Daniels, Milan, 1976, p. 111-112, no. 257. On Tiepolo’s frescoes at the Villa Cordellina, see Gli affreschi nelle ville venete: il Settecento, ed. G. Pavanello, 2 vol., Venice, 2010-2011, I, p. 416-423, no. 112 (A. Mariuz).

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LXX.2)29. It seems likely that the prominence given to Stateira at Bracciano alludes to her future role as the wife of Alexander – a highly appropriate choice, as the fresco is part of the Alexander cycle painted on the vault of the bedchamber of Paolo Giordano I Orsini and Isabella de’ Medici, on the occasion of whose marriage the room was decorated. There are several representations of the ‘Meeting’ in which the young princess Stateira, rather than Sisygambis, holds the central place among the Persian women, such as in a canvas of 1575-1600 by Maarten de Vos and his workshop, clearly influenced by Italian examples30. In some sixteenth-century paintings of the ‘Meeting’, the relationship between the king and his friend Hephaestion is given particular emphasis, as in a fresco of around 1565 in Villa Godi, near Vicenza. This is a very unusual depiction of the episode, because the artist, Giambattista Zelotti, has stripped the story down to its bare essentials, with only the three main characters present: Sisygambis, kneeling on the ground; Hephaestion, with a spear in his hand; and Alexander, laying his hand on his friend’s shoulder and pointing at him31. One of the most beautiful and influential paintings of the ‘Meeting’, Paolo Veronese’s monumental canvas, made for the Pisani Moretta family of Venice and since 1857 housed in the National Gallery, London (Fig. 66)32, also illustrates the episode by combining these two distinct moments in the textual narrative: Sisygambis’s prostration and the misidentification, followed by the correct identification, of Alexander33. Veronese’s depiction of the ‘Meeting’ is unconventional, with its unusual sequence of gestures and

29 According to Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni IV.5.1, after the battle of Issus Darius sent a letter to Alexander, offering him his daughter Stateira in marriage, but Alexander boldly refused. The princess should not be confused with her mother, and Darius’s wife, who was also called Stateira. 30 See The Sanpaolo Art Collection, ed. A. Coliva, Milan, 2003, p. 90-91, as well as Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 87 and pl. 36. Other examples are illustrated in the Greek version of the catalogue Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 418-467. A fresco scene painted by Polidoro da Caravaggio on the façade of Palazzo Milesi in Rome, known from drawings (e.g., Zurich, private collection) and engravings (e.g., British Museum, inv. 1856, 1213.50), is usually labelled ‘The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius’ and shows a young lady standing in the central position. Although it is certainly an episode illustrating clemency, I am not convinced that the protagonist is Alexander. See ibid. (English version), p. 171, no. XI.1 (D. Ekserdjian), and P. Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio: l’opera completa, Naples, 2001, p. 497-498, no. 18. Two additional copies of the fresco are in Chicago: Italian Drawings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection, ed. S. Folds McCullagh and L. M. Giles, Chicago, 1997, p. 367, nos 592-593 (L. M. Giles), while a study of the figure usually identified as Alexander was published by L. Ravelli, Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Bergamo, 1978, p. 146, no. 104. 31 See G. Bodon, “Alessandro eroe ‘platonico’? Una proposta di lettura del ciclo cinquecentesco nel salone di Villa Godi a Lonedo di Lugo Vicentino”, in Alessandro Magno in età moderna, p. 95-116, at p. 108-109. On the villa in general, see Gli affreschi nelle ville venete: il Cinquecento, ed. G. Pavanello and V. Mancini, Venice, 2008, p. 272-286, no. 68 (L. Crosato Larcher). I haven’t been able to read the unpublished dissertation of M. L. Pixley, Patronage and the Construction of Nobility: The Villa Godi Fresco Cycle and the Villa’s Role in the Veneto and the Politics of a Sixteenth-Century Patrician Family, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1998, which has a chapter on the frescoes of the Room of Alexander (“The Salon and the Art of War: The Example of Alexander the Great within an Orderly Cosmos”, p. 247-328). 32 For the lengthy and troubled transactions which eventually led to its sale to the National Gallery, alongside the wonderful account given by Claudia Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 29-39, see Penny, National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, p. 371-374. Interesting remarks on the sale are also in F. Isman, “Celebriamo quel casato: del venduto non un fiato”, Art e Dossier, 325 (2015), p. 54-57. 33 See the excellent study of Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, along with Xavier Salomon’s review in The Burlington Magazine, 151 (2009), p. 845-847 (for the original location of the painting); Penny, National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, p. 354-387; C. H. M. Gould, The Family of Darius before Alexander by Paolo Veronese: A Résumé, Some New Deductions and Some New Facts, London, [1978] and X. F. Salomon, Veronese (exhibition catalogue, London, National Gallery, 2014), London, 2014, p. 117-121. See also L. Finocchi Ghersi, “Trittico veneziano attorno alla Famiglia di Dario: Veronese, Vittoria, de’ Grigi”, Ricche Minere, 9 (2018), p. 55-68.

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the apparent presence of members of the Pisani Moretta family disguised as figures from ancient history. Nevertheless, the double focus of the picture is clear: Sisygambis and the Persian princesses kneel before Alexander, as he points at Hephaestion, who is pointing at himself34. From the 1630s, when the Pisani Moretta transferred the painting from its original location in their villa at Montagnana (Padua) to their recently acquired palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, Veronese’s painting became a must-see attraction for visitors and artists alike, most famously among them Goethe and (after its relocation to London) Henry James, who eloquently described the scene as “the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of Alexander”35. Not only was it copied countless times, but it remained a crucial point of reference for painters depicting the ‘Meeting’ until the eighteenth century; this was true not only for Venetian artists such as Bellucci, Ricci and Tiepolo, but also for Charles Le Brun, whose hugely influential Tent of Darius of 1660-1661, part of an Alexander cycle for Louis XIV, drew on Veronese’s composition36. Another variation on the ‘Meeting’ also deserves to be mentioned, not least because it appears in one of the most remarkable Alexander cycles of the Renaissance, the Sala Paolina in the Castel Sant’Angelo37. At first glance, the scene depicted at the end of the east wall (Fig. 67) seems to have very little in common with paintings of the ‘Meeting’ discussed so far. But, according to the main ancient source for the episode, Curtius Rufus (Historiae Alexandri Magni III.12.26), after Alexander raised Sisygambis from the ground and spoke to her, he turned to the little son of Darius sheltering in his mother’s lap and took him into his arms; everyone was amazed to see the boy showing no fear at all of Alexander

34 For the identity of the man in red on the right-hand side of the painting as Alexander, see Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 90 and 95-96. Jennifer Fletcher, however, in her review of P. Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice, The Burlington Magazine, 138 (1996), p. 135, identified Alexander as the man in gold cloth standing next to him, who is usually, and I believe correctly, identified as Hephaestion. 35 H. James, “Venice” [1882], in Italian Hours, New York, 1909, p. 1-30, at p. 18. 36 See T. Kirchner, Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre de Charles Le Brun: Tableau-manifeste de l’art français du xviie siècle, Paris, 2013; I thank Jennifer Montagu for bringing this book to my attention and for lending me her own copy of it. On Le Brun’s visual sources, including Veronese, see C. Grell and C. Michel, L’École des princes, ou, Alexandre disgracié: essai sur la mythologie monarchique de la France absolutiste, Paris, 1988, p. 106-108. For Le Brun’s Alexander cycle and the series of tapestries based on it, see La Tenture de l’Histoire d’Alexandre le Grand (exhibition catalogue, Paris, Galerie des Gobelins, 2008-2009), Paris, 2008. A set of six paintings after Le Brun’s cycle was made as far afield as Mexico: the 1767 series by Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz is now in Mexico City, Fomento Cultural Banamex; see I. Katzew, “Valiant Styles: New Spanish Painting, 1700-85”, in Painting in Latin America 1550-1820, ed. L. E. Alcalá and J. Brown, New Haven and London, 2014, p. 148-203, at p. 187-188. Le Brun’s composition was also copied on objects such as fans (a French example of 1720-1740 is in Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) and pair-cases (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, LOAN: MET ANON.2:1 to 3-1992). A sheet added to a 1472 incunable of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae in Florence is decorated with a detail from Le Brun’s picture: see Incunaboli ed edizioni rare: la collezione di Angelo Maria D’Elci (exhibition catalogue, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 1989), ed. A. Dillon Bussi, A. M. Figliolia Manzini, M. D. Melani, I. G. Rao, L. Bigliazzi and A. R. Fantoni, Florence, 1989, pl. XXVIII (the entry, p. 213-214, no. 104, does not, however, identify the source as Le Brun). I would like to thank Martin Davies for this reference. 37 On the sources of the Alexander episodes in the Sala Paolina, see R. Guerrini, “Plutarco e la cultura figurativa nell’età di Paolo III: Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina”, RACAR/Revue d’art canadienne, 12.2 (1985), p. 179-187. Strictly speaking, the Sala Paolina should not be considered a ‘Room of Alexander’, for it is not entirely devoted to Alexander’s deeds but includes also episodes from the life of St Paul – the choice being a homage to the religious and secular namesakes of Paul III, whose birth name was Alessandro. Nevertheless, the two cycles unfold independently one from the other in both the compositional and narrative respect, and can therefore be discussed separately without prejudice of my argument.

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and cheerfully putting his arms around his neck38. This is the scene illustrated in the fresco of the Sala Paolina, with Sisygambis still on her knees and Hephaestion taken aback with surprise. This version of the ‘Meeting’ is, however, unique in the sixteenth century: with its emphasis on the benevolent, almost fatherly, behaviour shown by Alexander towards Darius’s child and the absence of any Persian girl who might tempt him with her beauty, this image was an appropriate iconographic choice for the papal apartments of Paul III39. It is noteworthy that it does not appear in the Alexander cycles directly inspired by the Sala Paolina frescoes and commissioned by members of the Farnese entourage for their palaces on the outskirts of Rome (for example, the Palazzo Crispo in Bolsena), where the more conventional encounter with Sisygambis is preferred instead40. When compared to the earliest representations of the theme on cassone panels, and even to Sodoma’s fresco in the Farnesina, sixteenth-century depictions of the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ show an unprecedented emphasis on the figure of Hephaestion. In the cassone panels, the focus of the episode is the encounter between Alexander and Sisygambis, and not her misidentification of Hephaestion as Alexander. While Alexander is usually accompanied by a group of gentlemen, Hephaestion, if present, is not identifiable for certain. By contrast, in the Farnesina fresco (Fig. 64), Hephaestion stands prominently next to Alexander, though he is only a witness to the encounter with Sisygambis, without taking part in it. As we have seen, however, a central role is assigned to Hephaestion in other representations of the ‘Meeting’ such as the one in the Castle of Bracciano (Fig. 65) and, above all, Zelotti’s fresco in Villa Godi, where the mistaken identification of the two friends is the real core of the scene. Valerius Maximus’s inclusion of the ‘Meeting’ in his Memorable Doings and Sayings as an exemplum of friendship, highlighting Alexander’s reference to Hephaestion as “another Alexander”, in line with the Aristotelian notion that a friend is another self (Nicomachean Ethics IX.4), may have contributed to the growing visual importance of Hephaestion in the episode: from an indistinct figure on the marriage chests to a supporting actor – and, occasionally, a lead player – in the sixteenth-century tradition41. This might explain why in so many depictions of the episode Alexander and Hephaestion look as similar as twins and are at times not easily told apart: for instance, in the Sala Paolina and in Zelotti’s fresco in Villa Godi, as well as in later examples like the Tiepolo in Villa Cordellina and

38 The episode is also reported by Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica XVII.38.2. 39 See Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 63-64. 40 For the Bolsena palace, owned by Cardinal Tiberio Crispo, castellano of Castel Sant’Angelo during the decoration of the Sala Paolina, see A. De Romanis, Il Palazzo di Tiberio Crispo a Bolsena, Rome, 1995, esp. p. 1-6 and 13-16. For other palaces in the Lazio influenced by the Farnese decorations, and often including an Alexander cycle, see P. Picardi, Perino del Vaga, Michele Lucchese e il Palazzo di Paolo III al Campidoglio: circolazione e uso dei modelli dell’antico nelle decorazioni farnesiane a Roma, Rome, 2012, p. 107-140; I owe this reference to Jan L. de Jong, whom I thank. 41 On the tradition of Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia, a work which was known since the Middle Ages, see D. M. Schullian, “Valerius Maximus”, in Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, V, ed. F. E. Cranz, p. 287-403. See also R. Guerrini, Studi su Valerio Massimo (con un capitolo sulla fortuna nell’iconografia umanistica: Perugino, Beccafumi, Pordenone), Pisa, 1981, M. T. Casella, Tra Boccaccio e Petrarca: i volgarizzamenti di Tito Livio e di Valerio Massimo, Padua, 1982, and M. Crab, Exemplary Reading: Printed Renaissance Commentaries on Valerius Maximus (1470-1600), Zurich, 2015.

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Francesco Trevisani’s 1735 painting for the La Granja Palace in Spain42. Although this is clearly inconsistent with the written accounts – Sisygambis’s mistake is due to the fact that Hephaestion, taller and more handsome than Alexander, does not look like him – it was an effective way of expressing in visual terms the close bond of friendship between Alexander and Hephaestion43. The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane

Agostino Chigi’s bedchamber in the Villa Farnesina is known today as ‘The Room of the Marriage of Alexander the Great and Roxane’ after the fresco by Sodoma on the north wall, the most famous and influential of the cycle. It shows Alexander approaching the Sogdian princess Roxane in her bedchamber and presenting her with the crown which seals and symbolises their marriage (Fig. 68)44. Sodoma’s painting is based on a composition by Raphael, which survives in a highly finished red chalk drawing in the Albertina (Fig. 69), a rapid pen and ink sketch in the Teyler Museum of Haarlem and a number of slightly variant sheets attributed to his workshop45. While making use of Raphael’s design, Sodoma introduced some changes into the composition: most significantly, in my view, he placed Alexander’s helmet in the foreground, as if it were one of his essential attributes even when unworn. Thanks to the engraving by Gian Giacomo Caraglio (Fig. 70)46, Raphael’s design rapidly became the most famous and authoritative model for the entire iconographic tradition of the subject47.

42 Francesco Trevisani’s canvas was commissioned as part of an Alexander cycle, devised by Filippo Juvarra for the La Granja Palace in Spain but never completed; see J. Alvarez Lopera, “Philip V of Spain and Juvarra at La Granja Palace: The Difficulty of Being Alexander”, in Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 37-46 and the entry at p. 182-183, no. XI.9 ( J. Alvarez Lopera). Interesting remarks on the textual and visual sources used by the various artists who executed the cycle can be found in their correspondence with Juvarra: see Filippo Juvarra a Madrid, ed. C. Greppi, Madrid, 1978, p. 121-122 and 139-141. 43 This interpretation is also suggested by Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 94-95. 44 The fresco is described by Vasari, Le vite, V, p. 384, as “la storia d’Alessandro quando va a dormire con Rosana”. Vasari also mentions the figure of Vulcan in his forge, painted by Sodoma by the fireplace of the room, but does not refer to the ‘Meeting’ and the two other scenes on the walls. See La Villa Farnesina a Roma, I, p. 121-125, and A. Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi: “Il Sodoma”, New York and London, 1976, p. 32-36 and 164-177. 45 See Raphael: Die Zeichnungen, ed. E. Knab, E. Mitsch and K. Oberhuber, Stuttgart, 1983, p. 610, nos 539-540. Among the works ascribed to Raphael’s pupils, the drawing by Tommaso Vincidor (Paris, Musée du Louvre, Départment des Arts graphiques, inv. 3885 recto) is worth mentioning. Following Oberhuber’s suggestion, it is usually assumed that Raphael’s study was made for the Villa Farnesina; it is certainly plausible that in the late 1510s, too busy to carry out the commission himself, he abandoned it and left his studio drawings to the painter who was asked to replace him: Sodoma. 46 For Caraglio’s engraving, see Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century (The Illustrated Bartsch, XXVIII), ed. S. Boorsch and J. Spike, New York, 1985, p. 201, no. 62; see also Raphael invenit: stampe da Raffaello nelle collezioni dell’Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, ed. G. Bernini Pezzini, S. Massari and S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Rome, 1985, p. 160-161, nos 1-4. Among the contemporary copies of Raphael/Caraglio is a drawing in the Royal Collections, inv. 12756, on which see A. E. Popham and J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, p. 316, no. 809. 47 For an overview of the tradition, see K. Oberhuber and A. Gnann, “The Depiction of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxana”, in Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 214-224, and following catalogue entries, p. 225-243. R. Förster, “Die Hochzeit des Alexander und der Roxane in der Renaissance”, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 15 (1894), p. 182-207, is still useful.

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Before Raphael, there was no visual precedent for the ‘Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’.48 The composition is an attempted reconstruction of Aëtion’s lost painting from antiquity, described by Lucian in one of his ekphraseis (descriptions of artworks), in the dialogue Herodotus or Aetion 4-6 – a text which was still rare at the beginning of the sixteenth century49. For Lucian, as well as for Raphael and Sodoma, the marriage of Alexander and Roxane represented the triumph of the power of love50: Roxane sits on the edge of her nuptial bed in the modest posture fitting for a bride, the unarmed Alexander is accompanied by Hephaestion and the god of marriage ceremonies Hymenaeus, while groups of amorini play with Alexander’s weapons, signalling both the romantic character of the scene and the temporary suspension of war-related activities. That Alexander instantly fell in love with the beautiful Roxane is recorded in the ancient historical sources (Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni VIII.4.23-5, and Plutarch, Alexander XLVII.4). In addition, Curtius (VIII.4.25) noted that Alexander, who had been able to resist the beauty of the Persian princesses captured at Issus, was powerless before the beauty of Roxane, a princess of inferior birth – the ‘Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’ and the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ are juxtaposed per figuras in the Villa Farnesina. An impressive number of artworks were based on Raphael’s composition, largely via Caraglio’s engraving. Among the paintings, it is worth mentioning: Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta’s mural of 1540-1545, formerly in the Casino Olgiati Bevilacqua in Rome, where the marriage scene is set in an open-air landscape51; Francesco Primaticcio’s fresco of 1541-1544 for the Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes at Fontainebleau52; and Taddeo Zuccari’s fresco of around 1560, part of the Alexander cycle painted in Palazzo Mattei

48 Some fifteenth-century northern manuscripts of the Romance include a representation of the episode, but they are not comparable to the composition designed by Raphael: not only do they show a generic marriage scene in modern court dress, modelled on the ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ type, but also, in accordance with the legendary tradition deriving from the Pseudo-Callisthenes (II.22), they present Roxane as the daughter, not of the Sogdian baron Oxyartes, but rather of Darius himself. A particularly beautiful example of these northern illustrations is in New York, Morgan Library & Museum, ms. M.782, fol. 210 v; see Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany, p. 144 and fig. 223. 49 See Lucian, Descrizioni di opere d’arte, ed. S. Maffei, Turin, 1994, p. 113-115. For the availability in Agostino Chigi’s entourage of Lucian’s dialogue, in the 1503 Greek edition printed by Aldus Manutius, see Bartalini, “Da Raffaello al Sodoma”, p. 75-76. For Lucian and the impact of his ekphraseis on Renaissance art, see Sonia Maffei’s introduction to her edition of Lucian, Descrizioni, p. xv-lxxxvi, esp. p. lv-lxvi, and L. Faedo, “Le immagini dal testo: commento all’apparato iconografico”, in ibid., p. 127-142, esp. p. 134-138; see also Ead., “L’impronta delle parole: due momenti della pittura di ricostruzione”, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, II: I generi e i temi ritrovati, p. 3-42, esp. p. 23-42, and J. M. Massing, Du texte à l’image: la calomnie d’Apelle et son iconographie, Strasbourg, 1990. 50 On the different meaning which Aëtion’s painting may have had, see S. Maffei, “Una ricostruzione impossibile: le nozze di Alessandro e Rossane di Aezione”, Ricerche di storia dell’arte, 30 (1986), p. 16-26, esp. p. 23-25. 51 The Casino Olgiati-Bevilacqua (the so-called Villa of Raphael) was destroyed in 1848; Siciolante’s murals, including the ‘Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’, were detached in 1836 and are now in the Galleria Borghese: see P. Della Pergola, Galleria Borghese: i dipinti, 2 vol., Rome, 1955-1959, II, p. 128-129, no. 180, and J. Hunter, Girolamo Siciolante pittore da Sermoneta (1521-1575), Rome, 1996, p. 136-139, no. 15. Siciolante’s painting gained considerable renown in the eighteenth century due to the inclusion of an etching after it in the Schola Italica Picturae, published in Rome in 1772; see Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 242-243, no. XVIII.13 (A. Gnann). A painting auctioned in 2007, attributed to Girolamo da Santacroce and formerly in the Manfrin collection in Venice, also places the marriage scene in a greenery landscape; see Sotheby’s, London, Old Masters Paintings, 6 December 2007, lot. 232, and L. Borean, La Galleria Manfrin a Venezia: l’ultima collezione d’arte della Serenissima, Udine, 2018, p. 123 and 135. 52 See M. B. Lossky, “Sources d’inspiration d’une fresque bellifontaine: l’‘Alexandre et Roxane’ de Primatice”, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français (1981), p. 21-25.

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Caetani, also in Rome53. In the Sala Paolina, a pared-down version of the scene appears in one of the celetti above the windows – it is the crown handed by Alexander to Roxane which enables the scene to be identified54. So popular was Raphael’s composition that it was adapted to illustrate stories unconnected to Alexander. It served, for instance, as a model for a tapestry in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicting the tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Hermes approaching Herse in her bridal chamber (Fig. 71)55. Similarly, Francesco Xanto Avelli made a number of ceramic plates based on Raphael’s design, one of which illustrated the marriage of Ninus and Semiramis (Plate XVa), and another, more surprisingly, Mucius Scaevola burning his hand in the presence of Porsenna (Plate XVb)56. Raphael’s attempt to reconstruct a lost painting from a written description clearly reflects the Renaissance attempt to rival and even surpass antiquity57. The erudite nature of this undertaking was, no doubt, partially responsible for the fascination which Raphael’s composition exerted on sixteenth-century artists58. Yet the iconographic formula he created continued to influence the tradition well into the nineteenth century. I know of only few exceptions, all of them from the mid-eighteenth century, which rely instead on the account of Curtius Rufus (Historiae Alexandri Magni VIII.4.27), with the couple following the Macedonian custom of sharing a loaf of bread during a banquet – possibly an attempt to revitalise the theme but also, I believe, an opportunity for painters to stage a magnificent banquet scene, not coincidentally modelled on those of Antony and Cleopatra59. We can say, therefore, that the ‘Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’ is one of the very few episodes from the life of Alexander for which the artistic tradition drew on an author such as Lucian who was not among the ancient historians of Alexander. More importantly, it is the only theme in the Renaissance iconography of Alexander which is

53 Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari, I, p. 129. 54 See R. Guerrini, “Storia antica e iconografia umanistica (D. Zaga, Episodi della vita di Alessandro Magno, Sala Paolina, Castel Sant’Angelo)”, Athenaeum, 63 (1985), p. 37-43. 55 See Los amores de Mercurio y Herse: una tapicería rica de Willem de Pannemaker (exhibition catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2010), Madrid, 2010, esp. p. 19-20. 56 For the Semiramis plate, made for the marriage of Federico II Gonzaga and Margherita Paleologa, see J. V. G. Mallet, Xanto: Pottery-Painter, Poet, Man of the Italian Renaissance, London, 2007, p. 128-129, no. 40. Other similar examples are discussed by A. Holcroft, “Francesco Xanto Avelli and Petrarch”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 51 (1988), p. 225-234, esp. p. 232-234. For the Mucius Scaevola plate, see J. V. G. Mallet, “A Maiolica Plate Signed ‘F.R.’”, Art Bulletin of Victoria, 17 (1976), p. 4-19, and T. Wilson, Italian Maiolica in the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2015, p. 94-97, where a similar example in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. C.12-1953) is also mentioned. 57 See J. Cranston, “Longing for the Lost: Ekphrasis, Rivalry and the Figuration of Notional Artworks in Italian Renaissance Painting”, Word and Image, 27 (2011), p. 212-219, with further bibliography; and R. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Aldershot, 2009. 58 See, e.g., Faedo, “L’impronta delle parole”, p. 31-32, for Taddeo Zuccari’s awareness of the connection between Raphael’s design and Aëtion’s painting. 59 Significant examples are: an oil on canvas by Claudio Francesco Beaumont, c. 1740, Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries (see Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in East Sussex [The Public Catalogue Foundation], London, 2005, p. 19); a painting by Giuseppe Bazzani, c. 1740, Mantua, Palazzo d’Arco (see Signorini, La dimora dei conti d’Arco, p. 182); and a fresco by Giambattista Crosato, c. 1753, in the ballroom of Ca’ Marcello near Padua, which is discussed in my “Storie di Alessandro Magno in villa: intorno agli affreschi di Giambattista Crosato a Ca’ Marcello, Levada di Piombino Dese”, Arte Documento, 27 (2011), p. 160-167, as well as in D. Ton, Giambattista Crosato: pittore del Rococò europeo, Venice, 2012, p. 117-125 and p. 359-365, no. 70.

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based on a visual, rather than a written, source. As well as displaying the power of love, to which even Alexander succumbed, the episode has connections, drawn by Curtius Rufus and often illustrated in painted cycles, to the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ and stresses Alexander’s respectful behaviour towards Roxane – a foreigner and a woman of lower social status whom he decided, unexpectedly and in defiance of convention, to marry. Despite the presence of other women in Alexander’s life (for instance, Darius’s daughter Stateira, whom he married at Susa), Roxane was his first wife and the mother of his only legitimate child and heir – Alexander IV, born a few months after his father’s death, and notoriously executed alongside Roxane herself by Alexander’s successor Cassander sometime between 311 and 309 bc60. Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe

Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe (or Pancaspe)61 are the protagonists of a story which makes its first appearance in Renaissance art around the mid-sixteenth century62. Like the ‘Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’, taken from Lucian, this story does not derive from one of the ancient historians of Alexander, but originates instead as an anecdote about art. The episode is recounted by Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia XXXV.86-87: Alexander commissioned his court painter Apelles to make a nude portrait of his favourite mistress Campaspe, but soon realised that Apelles, enchanted by the beauty of the model, had fallen in love with her; showing his magnanimity and self-restraint, Alexander sacrificed his own feelings for Campaspe and gave her to Apelles as a present63. The theme of  ‘Alexander Presenting Campaspe to Apelles’ was not very popular in the sixteenth century. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became a favourite subject for private commissions and in art academy competitions, giving rise to various interpretations and largely developing independently of the tradition of Alexander iconography64. The story recounted by Pliny allowed artists to celebrate not only their patrons (in the figure of the magnanimous Alexander) but also themselves (in the figure of Apelles, with whom any painter was, of course, happy to be equated), so that many

60 For the murder, see Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica XIX.105.2. Tomb III in the Royal Cemetery at Vergina, known as the Tomb of the Prince, is thought to be that of Alexander IV; for the chronology of the royal tombs and a status quaestionis of the research carried out after Manolis Andronikos’s excavation of the archaeological site in 1977, see E. N. Borza and O. Palagia, “The Chronology of the Macedonian Royal Tombs at Vergina”, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 122 (2007), p. 81-125, and the exhibition catalogue Heracles to Alexander the Great. 61 Several versions of the name are attested in the sources; I here adopt Campaspe because it is found most frequently. The matter was discussed at some length by Carlo Dati (Smarrito), Vite de pittori antichi, Florence, 1667, p. 130-132. 62 If this is true for the visual tradition, the episode is well known to fifteenth-century humanists, and is being reported, for instance, by Lorenzo Ghiberti in his Commentarii (I.21) of around 1447. 63 Aelian, Varia historia XII.34, also mentions Campaspe as the mistress of Alexander who had been taken prisoner at Larissa in Greece and was greatly loved by Apelles, but does not report the episode recounted by Pliny. Whether Campaspe reciprocated Apelles’s feelings is not known, but this seems not to have bothered Alexander, whose insensitive disregard for the matter Pliny deplored. 64 See S. Ferino Pagden, “Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe”, in Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 135-149; see also D. Cast, The Calumny of Apelles: A Study in the Humanist Tradition, New Haven and London, 1981, p. 187-191. Several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plays and melodramas centring on Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe contributed to the widespread popularity of the story in the visual arts.

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such works should be seen as allegories of painting. The beauty of Campaspe and the feelings she immediately provoked in Apelles sometimes turned the episode into a love story, with the modern painter (most famously, Giambattista Tiepolo) portraying himself as Apelles and giving the face of his wife or mistress to Campaspe; in other cases, a little Cupid aiming his arrow at Apelles’s heart is included in the scene (as in Giambattista Crosato’s fresco in Ca’ Marcello near Padua)65. But the encounter of Apelles, Alexander and Campaspe in the artist’s studio was also an unmissable opportunity for seventeenthand eighteenth-century painters to depict grand versions of their own studios66. Indeed in many cases, artists showed Apelles painting Campaspe in the presence of Alexander, with no reference to his magnanimous gesture67. The theme of Campaspe emerges in the 1540s, when two of the three sixteenth-century examples known to me were made. A crucial influence was Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano, published in 1528, in which the episode from Pliny was recounted68. The earliest representation of Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe is found in the Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes at Fontainebleau, where Primaticcio’s fresco of 1541-1544 (in the 1834-1835 rendition, which replaces the lost original), shows Alexander and his lover seated naked on a bed, while Apelles is painting a portrait of them (Fig. 72)69. Drawing on passages in Pliny where Apelles is said to have made several portraits of Alexander in his capacity as official court painter, as well as the one of Campaspe, Primaticcio showed Apelles painting a double portrait of Alexander and Campaspe, which is unrecorded in the sources70. This unique iconographic choice can be readily explained in light of the overall programme of the room, which belonged to the mistress of King Francis I and was decorated with episodes from Alexander’s life involving women (Roxane, Timoclea, Thalestris), often marked by a sensuality which is particularly apparent in the Campaspe episode71. 65 Tiepolo’s painting of about 1726, with his wife Cecilia Guardi posing as Campaspe, is in Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts (see Giambattista Tiepolo [exhibition catalogue, Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, 1996, and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997], ed. K. Christiansen, London and Milan, 1996, p. 84-86, no. 11 [K. Christiansen]). For Crosato’s fresco, see my “Storie di Alessandro Magno in villa”. 66 This had a particular resonance in the seventeenth-century Dutch genre known as ‘the collector’s cabinet’, where our story often provided the narrative pretext for showing the magnificent studio of a painter or the display of art collections. See T. Hoenselaars, “Renaissance Collections of Alexander the Great”, in Culture: collections, compilations. Actes du colloque de Paris 2001-2002, Paris, 2005, p. 245-259. 67 See, e.g., a painting by Sebastiano Ricci of c. 1705 in the Hermitage Museum (see A. Scarpa, Sebastiano Ricci, Milan, 2006, p. 296-297, no. 431, and p. 116, pl. XL; for another version in Parma, see ibid., p. 271-272, no. 363). Pliny, Naturalis Historia XXXV.85, also speaks of a visit paid by Alexander to Apelles’s studio, during which the painter rebuked him for his ignorant remarks on art; because the episode showed Alexander – and therefore modern art patrons – in a bad light, it was rarely represented in paintings. 68 See Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. V. Cian, Florence, 1947, p. 128 (I. 52). 69 See N. J. Vickers, “Courting the Female Subject”, in The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 1994-1995, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1995), Los Angeles, 1994, p. 95-107, esp. p. 95-99 and 105-106, n. 15. 70 By edict of Alexander himself, Apelles was the only painter allowed to portray him; the same privilege was granted to the sculptor Lysippus and the gem-engraver Pyrgoteles (Pliny, Naturalis Historia VII.125 and XXXVII.8). 71 On the Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes in general, see L. Aldovini, “La Chambre de la duchesse d’Étampes 1541-1544”, in Primatice maître de Fontainebleau (exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2004-2005), ed. D. Cordellier, Paris, 2004, p. 226-240; K. Wilson-Chevalier, “Alexander the Great at Fontainebleau”, in Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 25-33; Ead., “Figures des femmes d’Alexandre à Fontainebleau sous le règne de François Ier”, in Figures d’Alexandre à la Renaissance, p. 153-183.

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The first representation of Alexander offering Campaspe to Apelles dates to 1548, when Giorgio Vasari included it among the monochromes of the Sala del Camino (also known as Sala del Trionfo della Virtù) in his own house at Arezzo (Plate XVI)72. As part of a cycle illustrating episodes from the lives of ancient Greek painters, it is not surprising that Vasari’s composition has at its centre not Alexander but Apelles: the painter is shown presenting Alexander with the portrait of Campaspe he was commissioned to make, and receiving – “in even exchange for the portrait”, it has been recently suggested73 – the girl herself as a gift from the king. What became the standard iconography of ‘Alexander Offering Campaspe to Apelles’ did not usually, however, involve the presentation of the girl’s portrait to the king, but instead focused entirely on Alexander’s magnanimous gesture towards his court painter. The earliest example of this iconography is one of the oval paintings decorating the Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Fig. 73): the hand of Alexander giving Campaspe to Apelles is significantly at the very centre of the composition74. The Campaspe episode, like the other stories from Alexander’s life discussed in this chapter, entered the Renaissance iconographic repertoire as an example of his virtue. Like the ‘Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’, it was often paired with the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’, in this case because both stories displayed Alexander’s magnanimity. In the Studiolo of Francesco I, for instance, facing the oval painting of Campaspe on the opposite wall, there is a version of the ‘Meeting’75. Also worth mentioning is a copy from the mid-1650s of Veronese’s Meeting with the Family of Darius by Francesco Minorello, who was commissioned at the same time to make a pendant of his own invention, which is signed and dated 1656: the subject he chose was ‘Alexander Offering Campaspe to Apelles’76.

72 See S. Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History, New Haven and London, 2013, p. 243-251, esp. p. 249; at p. 322 there is a list of occurrences of the Campaspe episode in Renaissance treatises on art. For the Sala del Camino, see A. Paolucci and A. M. Maetzke, La casa del Vasari in Arezzo, Florence, 1988, p. 45-88. 73 Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture, p. 249, who adds that “the scene suggests that the likeness is so convincing that Alexander valued it as highly as the person”. Since Vasari’s fresco was conceived as a praise of Apelles (and therefore of Vasari himself), this interpretation is persuasive; it should be noted, however, that the idea of offering Campaspe in exchange for Apelles’s portrait is not found in Pliny nor in any source I know of, and is perhaps a visual invention of Vasari himself. 74 See V. Conticelli, “Guardaroba di cose rare et preziose”. Lo studiolo di Francesco I de’ Medici: arte, storia e significati, La Spezia and Lugano, 2007, p. 386-390, no. 14. A female portrait, that is the naked figure of Venus Anadyomene, is indeed displayed in this picture, but this is merely a reference to Pliny’s statement (Naturalis Historia XXXV.87) that Campaspe posed for that painting, a famous work by Apelles. 75 See Conticelli, “Guardaroba di cose rare”, p. 329-331, no. 4; according to Conticelli, the painting by Jacopo Coppi has been identified by Marilena Caciorgna as “Alessandro offre stoffe macedoni alle donne di Dario”, an episode recounted by Curtius Rufus which follows the ‘Meeting’. 76 After several vicissitudes, on which see Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 37-38, the two paintings by Minorello now hang together in the Sala del Tiepolo in Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Venice. Minorello’s Campaspe was first published by G. Pavanello, “Dipinti seicenteschi in Ca’ Pisani-Moretta: Luca Ferrari e Francesco Minorello”, Arte veneta, 30 (1976), p. 180-181; a colour reproduction is in I. Chiappini di Sorio, Palazzo Pisani Moretta: economia, arte, vita sociale di una famiglia veneziana nel diciottesimo secolo, Milan, 1983, pl. 13. For Minorello, see M. Biffis’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 74, Rome, 2010, p. 695-697. Minorello’s copy of the Veronese is reproduced, alas only partially, in A. Craievich, “Note per una collezione”, in I Pisani Moretta. Storia e collezionismo (exhibition catalogue, Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, 2015), ed. A. Craievich, Crocetta del Montello (Treviso), 2015, p. 86-119, at p. 92, fig. 5.

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c h a p t er   5 The Taming of Bucephalus

In the Renaissance iconography of Alexander, the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ is a case apart; for unlike the majority of episodes from his life illustrated from the fifteenth century onwards, it had enjoyed vast popularity throughout the Middle Ages, as we have seen in Chapter 1. The story of how the fifteen-year-old Alexander managed to tame and ride the savage horse presented to his father Philip is told in both medieval versions of the Romance and, among ancient historians, in chapter 6 of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander77. The ‘Taming’ is thus one of the very few episodes – and undoubtedly the most significant of these – found both in the legendary and the historical tradition. There is, however, a notable difference between the medieval and the Renaissance versions: in the Romance and its visual tradition, Bucephalus is portrayed as a monstrous, man-eating and almost infernal creature, whereas the ancient historians, and consequently the artists of the Renaissance, describe him as a wild and magnificent animal, unusual in terms of his size and courage, but nevertheless a horse. The first representations of this Renaissance Bucephalus are found around 1450 on the group of cassoni panels illustrating the ‘Battle of Issus’ examined in Chapter 4; despite the difficulty of identifying the figures in such scenes, as in the case of the panel in the British Museum (Plate XI), there is no monstrous horse here. The iconographic theme of the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’, based on Plutarch’s account, emerges in the 1520s and presents Alexander either attempting to tame the horse (holding him by the reins or about to mount him) or already riding him. A number of works, all made in Rome at about this time, illustrate the episode. On the west wall of Agostino Chigi’s bedchamber at the Villa Farnesina (Fig. 74), a fresco of around 1525 attributed to Guillaume de Marcillat, which I mentioned before, shows a rearing Bucephalus of formidable size and frightening appearance mounted by the teenage Alexander78. In the same years, stories of Alexander, including the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’, appeared on the façades of two Roman palaces; the cycles are both lost but are partially documented by sixteenth-century drawings79. In Palazzo Gaddi Cesi, painted by Polidoro da Caravaggio in 1524 with stories and figures from ancient Rome, a series of incidents from the life of Alexander appeared between the windows of the top floor. A drawing of the entire façade, preserved in the Albertina (inv. 15462), shows seven scenes in the attic80, including the ‘Birth of Alexander’ (and possibly his ‘Begetting’ immediately

77 Neither Arrian nor Diodorus Siculus narrate the episode, since their accounts begin much later, with Alexander’s accession to the throne. Although they do mention Bucephalus, it is merely to say that, on his death in India, Alexander founded a city in his honour (Alexandria Bucephala, on the Jhelum river, present-day Punjab, Pakistan). The episode of the ‘Taming’ was presumably included in one of the lost initial books of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae. 78 See Dacos, “Beccafumi e Roma”, p. 58. A precise date for the fresco is difficult to establish because the painter Guillaume de Marcillat sojourned frequently in Rome between 1517 and 1525: see Ead., Le logge di Raffaello: maestro e bottega di fronte all’antico, Rome, 1977, p. 111-112. Nevertheless, a date around 1525 and in any case before 1529, when de Marcillat died in Arezzo, seems to me most likely. 79 On the third palace, Palazzo Milesi, which is usually said to have included a depiction of the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’, see above, n. 30. 80 Two additional scenes at the opening of the series were already lost at the time the drawing was made. For Palazzo Milesi, see Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, p. 140, 170, n. 93, and 498-499, no. 19; the Albertina drawing is illustrated at p. 145. For a description of the seven Alexander episodes, see Harprath, Papst Paul III, p. 61-62.

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before), the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ and the ‘Cutting of the Gordian Knot’81. A second much-admired façade, painted by Maturino da Firenze and entirely devoted to Alexander, was executed around 1524-1527 on a palace once standing in via di Ripetta near Piazza del Popolo and now destroyed82. A drawing in the Fondation Custodia in Paris has been identified as a partial copy of the frescoes and shows the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ flanked by the ‘Birth of Alexander’, on the left, and the ‘Cutting of the Gordian Knot’, on the right (Fig. 75)83. A similar composition of the Bucephalus episode, after Polidoro but from an unidentified source, is found in the verso of a sheet given to Francesco Salviati in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Rennes (Fig. 76)84. In these examples, Bucephalus is clearly depicted as the fierce and majestic horse described by Plutarch, but with no trace of the marvellous features which characterised him in the legendary tradition. Nonetheless, the text of Plutarch was not followed to the letter in the visual tradition, for the Alexander who tames Bucephalus is seldom depicted as a young boy: an exception is the Farnesina, as well as a few paintings in the later tradition (for example, the one from the previously mentioned series by Giuseppe Bazzani in Mantua, c. 1740, and an even later example, Edgar Degas’s Alexander and Bucephalus of 1861-1862)85. Polidoro and most painters who came after him (at least until the version by Giambattista Tiepolo, from the late 1750s, Paris, Musée du Petit Palais)86, portray Alexander as a young man, not as a fifteen-year-old boy; among sixteenth-century examples are the Alexander cycles of Fontainebleau (Fig. 77)87, Palazzo Ricci Sacchetti in Rome,88 and Palazzo Mattei Caetani, also in Rome89.

81 Despite its great renown, such that it has become a proverbial phrase for an impossible problem solved by a bold action, the ‘Cutting of the Gordian Knot’ was less popular in Renaissance art than we might expect and, for this reason, will not be discussed here. After Polidoro’s façade, the incident appeared in various sixteenth-century cycles, most importantly in Veronese’s lost decoration of 1551 in the Villa Soranza at Treville near Castelfranco Veneto (Treviso), where it was paired with the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ and accompanied by the virtue of Justice; see D. Gisolfi Pechukas, “Veronese and His Collaborators at ‘La Soranza’”, Artibus et historiae, 15 (1987), p. 67-108, as well as Salomon, Veronese, p. 58 (with bibliography). Its real popularity, however, dates to the seventeenth century; see, e.g., the Greek version of the catalogue Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 300-321. 82 See Vasari, Le vite, IV, p. 464: “Vicino al Popolo, sotto S. Iacopo degli Incurabili, [Polidoro e Maturino] fecero una facciata con le storie d’Alessandro Magno ch’è tenuta bellissima”. 83 See Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, p. 143 and 496, no. 10; see also J. Byam Shaw, The Italian Drawings of the Frits Lugt Collection, 3 vol., Paris, 1983, II: Polidoro Album, p. 19-20 and pl. 21 (Byam Shaw does not, however, identify the source of the sketches). A more legible rendering of the ‘Gordian Knot’ episode from Polidoro, possibly from the same fresco cycle, is in the Art Institute of Chicago; see Italian Drawings before 1600, p. 348, no. 532 (S. Folds McCullagh). 84 See Disegno: les dessins italiens du Musée de Rennes (exhibition catalogue, Modena, Galleria Estense and Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1990), ed. P. Ramade, [Rennes, 1990], p. 213, no. 159. 85 For Bazzani’s ‘Taming of Bucephalus’, see Signorini, La dimora dei conti d’Arco, p. 175. On Degas’s lengthy preparation of the painting, now in Washington DC, see Degas: Klassik und Experiment (exhibition catalogue, Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, 2014-2015), ed. A. Heiling, Munich and Karlsruhe, 2014, p. 212-215, nos 86-91. 86 See Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 80-81, no. III.3 (G. Knox). 87 See Wilson-Chevalier, “Alexander the Great at Fontainebleau”, p. 27-28. 88 On the painted frieze by Ponsio Jacquio (c. 1555), see J. L. de Jong, “An Important Patron and an Unknown Artist: Giovanni Ricci, Ponsio Jacquio, and the Decoration of the Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti in Rome”, The Art Bulletin, 74 (1992), p. 135-156, at p. 139 and 141-143. 89 See Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari, I, p. 124-129; for an additional, but slightly different composition, see the drawing in an American private collection in ibid., I, p. 25.

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This visual readjustment can be understood, I believe, in light of the Renaissance interest in the representation of horses and particularly in equestrian statues90 – both of which had some bearing on the popularity of the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ theme. By representing Alexander as a young man, rather than a teenage boy, the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ could be likened to the generic type of the ‘Horse Tamer’. It seems no coincidence that from the sixteenth century, the two ‘Horse Tamers’ on the Quirinale Hill were said to represent Alexander and Bucephalus91, nor that several Renaissance works representing a young man leading a rearing horse (as in Bambaia’s marble relief of 1531-1532 from the Tomb of Gaston de Foix in the Victoria and Albert Museum) have been identified both as ‘Alexander Taming Bucephalus’ and as a ‘Youth Holding a Horse by the Reins’ 92. One last example is worth considering: namely, a fresco cycle commissioned around 1545 by the condottiere Alessandro Vitelli for his palace at Città di Castello, not far from Perugia. In homage to himself, he asked the painter Cola dell’Amatrice to depict stories of his namesake Alexander. The series of military episodes illustrated along the walls of the room presently known as Room IX (possibly, Alessandro Vitelli’s studiolo) are taken mainly from Curtius Rufus and Plutarch. The cycle begins, however, with the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’ (Fig. 78), who is depicted as a unicorn. In the following scenes Bucephalus also has a brand with an ox-head on his shoulder. It is very likely, as Roberto Guerrini has suggested, that Bucephalus was portrayed in this way in honour of Alessandro Vitelli’s friend, Alessandro Farnese, whose personal device was a unicorn. The ox-head brand on Bucephalus’s shoulder may also be a visual pun on Alessandro Vitelli’s surname, which means ‘calves’ 93. Whatever the explanation, it is striking that, in a cycle illustrating Alexander engaged in the military scenes based on Greek and Roman historical sources, Bucephalus is depicted as he had been in the illuminated pages of the medieval Romance, discussed in Chapter 1. The Birth (and Begetting) of Alexander

The ‘Birth of Alexander’, though not widely represented in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an event from his life94, is noteworthy in the present discussion because the narrative, summarised in Chapter 1, contains a supernatural element which goes against the overall Renaissance tendency to portray Alexander as a historical figure. This is all the more true in the incident that immediately precedes it – the ‘Begetting’. As we have seen before,

90 See, in general, W. Liedtke, The Royal Horse and Rider: Painting, Sculpture, and Horsemanship 1500-1800, New York, 1989, and A. Quondam, Cavallo e cavaliere: l’armatura come seconda pelle del gentiluomo moderno, Rome, 2003. 91 First suggested in 1558 by Onofrio Panvinio, this identification continued until the eighteenth century; although it is still a matter of debate, the statues probably represent the Dioscuri. See Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, p. 136-141, no. 3; and P. P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, 2nd edition, London and Turnhout, 2010, p. 172-175, no. 125. 92 J. Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, 3 vol., London, 1964, II, Text: Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, p. 545-549; G. Agosti, Bambaia e il classicismo lombardo, Turin, 1990, p. 135-169, esp. p. 158 and pl. 132. 93 See Pinacoteca Comunale di Città di Castello, I, p. 114-123, no. 13, esp. p. 116-117 (R. Guerrini). 94 This probably explains why it is not listed among the episodes from Alexander’s life either in A. Pigler, Barockthemen: Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edition, 3 vol., Budapest, 1974, II, p. 354-363, 366-369 and 386-388, or in the 1997 catalogue Alexander the Great in European Art.

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like the ‘Taming of Bucephalus’, this episode from Alexander’s childhood is found in the Romance (I.12) and, among ancient historians, only in Plutarch (Alexander II-III). The latter reports that not only had Olympias been visited several times by the god Zeus Ammon in the form of a serpent but that her husband Philip had once furtively witnessed one such encounter by peeking into Olympias’s chamber through a chink in the door. As the oracle of Apollo had foretold to him, Plutarch continues, Philip was to lose the eye with which he had looked through the door as a punishment for his impudence in spying on a god. While both the ‘Birth’ and the ‘Begetting of Alexander’, as discussed in Chapter 1, are well documented in the previous tradition, they appear only occasionally in the art of the Renaissance. What’s more, in the medieval repertoire examined before, Birth and Begetting were treated as two separate, and often visually juxtaposed, events, the former being depicted as a conventional childbirth scene and the latter emphasising the divine intervention in the conception of Alexander. This is not the case in the Renaissance, where some attention is given to the ‘Birth’, whereas the ‘Begetting’ is seldom represented as a self-contained episode95. Despite the availability of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander in the fifteenth century, as described in Chapter 3, his account of the ‘Birth of Alexander’ did not enter the iconographic repertoire until the 1520s96. Two drawings after Polidoro da Caravaggio (Fig. 79 and 75) show how the event was envisaged: as in conventional birth scenes, Olympias is sitting on her bed, while an attendant bathes the baby; the only element identifying it as the birth of Alexander is the serpent of Zeus-Ammon, coiled on the bed next to the queen, to the consternation of a second attendant and of Olympias herself97. A slightly different composition, with more attendants, is still visible in a badly damaged drawing in the British Museum, assigned to a follower of Giulio Romano98. These images must by all means be confirmed as illustrations of the ‘Birth of Alexander’. Yet, the inclusion of the serpent in them not only does contribute a key iconographic detail for the identification of the scene but it also clearly alludes to the marvellous begetting of the hero which, if it no longer involves the Nectanebo of the Romance, still retains the supernatural aura

95 In my view, it remains uncertain whether Polidoro’s frescoed façade of Palazzo Gaddi Cesi, now lost but documented by the aforementioned Albertina drawing (inv. 15462), included a depiction of the ‘Begetting’ next to the unmistakable image of Olympias giving birth. As far as the drawing allows us to tell, the preceding picture of a woman lying on a bed may equally be identified as Olympias being seduced by a (albeit hardly discernible) serpent or as Olympias being foretold in her sleep of the great destiny awaiting her son (as reported by Plutarch, Alexander II.3). 96 I do not know of any representation of the ‘Birth of Alexander’ based on Plutarch’s account in the Italian Quattrocento – even in manuscripts and books containing the Life of Alexander there is at most a portrait of Alexander at the beginning, with no narrative scenes at all. One notable, and rather amusing, example, however, is found north of the Alps, in a manuscript of Vasque de Lucène’s French translation of Curtius, illuminated in Bruges around 1468-1475 and now in the British Library (ms. Burney 169). The initial section (which Vasque, as mentioned before, interpolated from Plutarch) has at fol. 14 r a picture with the huge dragon embracing Olympias in her bed, while irritatedly turning his head towards the door, from which a crowned Philip looks into the room. It is worth noticing that a marginal note written next to the picture by a much later hand reads “The Fable of the Birth of Alexander the Great”. For an illustration and discussion (though not strictly relevant to my point here) of the picture, see Hériché Pradeau, “La conception d’un héros”, p. 170 and pl. XXVIIa. 97 On the Rennes drawing, see Disegno: les dessins italiens, p. 213, no. 158. For a third, more sketchy copy of Polidoro’s fresco in Chicago, see Italian Drawings before 1600, p. 367-368, no. 596 (L. M. Giles). 98 See P. Pouncey and J. A. Gere, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Raphael and His Circle, 2 vol., London, 1962, I, p. 170-171, no. 283; II, pl. 269.

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highlighted by Plutarch. The temple, which is visible in the left-hand corner of all three drawings, is also an additional reference to the account of the ‘Birth’ given by Plutarch. On the very day of Alexander’s birth, he reports, the great temple of the goddess Artemis at Ephesus was destroyed by fire and “it was apropos of this that Hegesias the Magnesian made an utterance frigid enough to have extinguished that great conflagration. He said, namely, it was no wonder that the temple of Artemis was burned down, since the goddess was busy bringing Alexander into the world” (Alexander III.5-6). Although the temple is not represented in flames, it clearly refers to the dramatic event which also marked Alexander’s birth99. A variation on the iconography attested by these sheets is found in a drawing in Chicago, inscribed with the name of Polidoro but now attributed to the Florentine artist Andrea Boscoli (Fig. 80)100. The subject here is not the ‘Birth of Alexander’, as there is no baby; rather, the focus is on Olympias, who is approached by a huge, dragon-headed serpent, which coils itself around her leg, alarming the queen and her two serving ladies, who run out of the room screaming101. In my view, the reason for this dramatic change, which cannot be labelled as ‘Begetting’ because of the distress in which Olympias seems to find herself, does not come from the iconography of Alexander but instead is connected to other contemporary representations of similar seduction scenes, modelled on the ‘Leda and the Swan’ type such as the ‘Begetting of Scipio Africanus’ (for example, in the painted frieze in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome)102. An extraordinary Renaissance fresco of the ‘Begetting of Alexander’ does exist and was painted by Giulio Romano in 1527-1528 on the east wall of the Chamber of Cupid and Psyche in the Palazzo Te at Mantua (Fig. 81). This is the most explicit sixteenth-century rendition of the encounter of Olympias and Zeus Ammon, who is shown both as a god in human form and as a serpent. Also, in a very accurate translation into painting of the text of Plutarch, on the right-hand side, Philip sneaks from behind the door and is blinded 99 A beautiful rendition of the birth of Alexander, which include the burning temple of Ephesus and the figure of Artemis herself looking down on baby Alexander from the cloudy sky, was made by Ludovico Carracci around 1605 for the palace of Alessandro Tanari in Bologna. This painting, famously described by Carlo Cesare Malvasia in his Felsina pittrice of 1678, is known today through a highly-finished preparatory study (Royal Collection, inv. RCIN 902175) and a small canvas in the Kramskoy Museum of Fine Arts in Voronezh, Russia, which was initially presented as Ludovico’s finished work (B. Bohn, Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing, Turnhout, 2004, p. 341, no. 193) and is now more convincingly believed to be a copy (A. Brogi, Ludovico Carracci. Addenda, Bologna, 2016, p. 44, 113-114 and n. 170-171). Ludovico’s first, and later discarded, idea for the Tanari painting, which has no temple in it but includes a full-standing figure of Artemis and her dog, is published in U. V. Fischer Pace, “Disegni italiani a Weimar”, in ‘Aux Quatre Vents’. A Festschrift for Bert W. Meijer, ed. A. W. A. Boschloo, E. Grasman and G. J. van der Sman, Florence, 2002, p. 93-97, at p. 95-96, and also discussed by Brogi, Ludovico Carracci, p. 45, n. 69. 100 See Italian Drawings before 1600, p. 43, no. 46 (S. Folds McCullagh). For Boscoli, alongside A. Forlani Tempesti, “Boscoli, Andrea”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 13, Rome, 1971, p. 213-215, see N. Bastogi, Andrea Boscoli, Florence, 2008 (where, however, our drawing is not discussed). 101 For representations of the snake visiting Olympias in her bed on fourth-century Roman contorniates, see Ross, “Olympias and the Serpent”, p. 17-21. 102 As mentioned above in Chapter 1, on the model of Alexander, both Scipio Africanus and Emperor Augustus were rumoured to have been fathered by a serpent. For the fresco in Palazzo dei Conservatori, see N. Dacos, “Il fregio delle Storie di Scipione a Palazzo dei Conservatori: Jean Cousin il Giovane a Roma”, in Scipione l’Africano: un eroe tra Rinascimento e Barocco. Atti del convegno di studi, Roma, Academia Belgica, 24-25 maggio 2012, ed. W. Geerts, M. Caciorgna and C. Bossu, Milan, 2014, p. 79-95, esp. p. 80 and 95.

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by Zeus’s eagle, which holds his thunderbolt. Giulio’s representation of the ‘Begetting of Alexander’ remained unique, despite the existence of a (censored) print made after it103. This unusual and highly eroticised iconography can be explained by the nature of the palace in which it is located. Palazzo Te was built by Federico II Gonzaga as a suburban villa where he could enjoy the company of his mistress, Isabella Boschetti. The decoration of the Chamber of Cupid and Psyche celebrates the irresistible power of love, which is exemplified by the mythical stories of, among others, Venus and Adonis, Polyphemus and Galatea, and Pasiphaë’s illicit desire for a bull104. In this context, the story of Olympias and Zeus Ammon was an appropriate choice. A crucial fact, albeit acknowledged in the scholarly literature, needs to be restated here: in 1520, Isabella Boschetti bore Federico his first natural son, who was given the name Alessandro105. Until 1533, when Federico’s marriage to Margherita Paleologa produced a legitimate male heir, Alessandro seemed destined to inherit the title and the land from his father. It was during these momentous years, when everything was still possible for Alessandro Gonzaga, that the ‘Begetting of Alexander’ was painted: it was clearly intended not only as a celebration of the passionate love between Federico (Zeus Ammon) and Isabella (Olympias), but also as an augury of the greatness, equal to that of his namesake Alexander, which their son would achieve. The rare depiction of the blinding of Philip of Macedon can be explained as a reference to the husband of Isabella Boschetti, who, like Philip, was a cuckolded spouse and deceived father, and who, in the end, suffered even greater punishment than Philip for his meddling106. The story of Alexander’s begetting and birth is the only episode from his life with a supernatural element – the serpent of Zeus Ammon fathering Alexander with Olympias – to emerge in Renaissance art. Since, however, the other ancient historians of Alexander did not present any alternative versions to Plutarch’s account of his birth, an artist wanting to depict this episode would be hard pressed to avoid the divine intervention of Zeus. True, unlike the Romance, Plutarch does not mention the involvement of the magician and trickster Nectanebo in Alexander’s conception (on which, see Chapter 1), an absence which enables us to make a clear distinction between the legendary and historical accounts. Nevertheless, it is significant that, in an iconographic repertoire which stressed the exceptional, yet entirely human, qualities of Alexander, the depictions of his birth, drawing on the ancient authority of Plutarch, show the glint of divinity which made him a man like no other.

103 For the 1538 engraving by Giovanni Battista Scultori (Vienna, Albertina, inv. It/I/29/4), see Giulio Romano (exhibition catalogue, Mantua, Palazzo Te and Palazzo Ducale, 1989), Milan, 1989, p. 286-287 (B. Talvacchia). 104 For a different line of thinking about the meaning of the room decoration, which, however, I do not find entirely convincing, see M. F. Maurer, “A Love that Burns: Eroticism, Torment and Identity at the Palazzo Te”, Renaissance Studies, 30.3 (2016), p. 370-388. Thanks are due to Barbara Furlotti, who drew my attention to this work. 105 A possible connection between Alessandro Gonzaga (1520-1580) and Giulio’s fresco is noted, but not discussed further, by E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics, Baltimore and London, 1977, p. 26, and S. Cavicchioli, Amore e Psiche, Milan, 2002, p. 143, n. 74. 106 Boschetti’s husband, Count Francesco Cauzzi Gonzaga of Calvisano, met a violent and mysterious death, for which Federico Gonzaga was rumoured to be responsible. I thank Lorenzo Bonoldi for discussing Giulio’s fresco with me and for generously sharing his knowledge of the Gonzaga family.

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To conclude, in Chapter 4 the instrumental role played by Curtius Rufus in the creation of the new Quattrocento Alexander imagery has been highlighted; in the sixteenth century, it was instead Plutarch who exerted the greatest influence on art107. Despite the manuscript circulation of his Life of Alexander in Guarino’s Latin translation since the early 1400s (discussed in Chapter 3), it was not until the 1470s, following Campano’s 1470 editio princeps of the Parallel Lives108, that the impact of Plutarch on the visual tradition started to be felt, and it was only in the early sixteenth century that it became decisive. Yet while many events from Alexander’s life which were illustrated in the sixteenth century are found in Plutarch, only few of them occur in Plutarch alone – most importantly, the ‘Birth of Alexander’, ‘Alexander Taming Bucephalus’ and ‘Alexander Covering Darius’s Body with His Cloak’ (Alexander XLIII.3)109. Where the influence of Plutarch is more evident is in the general conception of Alexander which became dominant in the sixteenth century: in keeping with the aim and content of his writings – mainly the Life of Alexander but also De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute in the Moralia – the emphasis was increasingly placed on Alexander’s moral virtues rather than his military prowess. This conception can perhaps best be seen in Castiglione’s Cortegiano, where Alexander, the virtuous and learned pupil of Aristotle, is mentioned some twenty times and represents the perfect courtier110. It was because of his moral virtue that Alexander was regarded as a suitable model for emulation by princes, rulers and aristocrats. In sixteenth-century art, this image, as I have tried to demonstrate, was based on a select number of episodes from his life which attained popularity in the new, historically grounded, iconography of Alexander: not only the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’, but also Alexander’s compassionate behaviour towards the dead Darius, as depicted by Giambattista Zelotti, in his fresco of c. 1560-1565, in the central hall of Villa Godi, Lonedo di Lugo (Vicenza)111. In the later pictorial tradition, a similar episode concerning the valorous Porus, wounded and defeated in the battle of the Hydaspes in India but nevertheless granted his kingdom back by Alexander, was also illustrated from Plutarch (Alexander LX.7-8)112. Even minor and infrequently depicted

107 See, above all, Biografia dipinta. 108 See Caciorgna, “Immagini di eroi ed eroine”, p. 229. 109 Darius’s death is variously reported in the sources, but only Plutarch mentions Alexander’s merciful act of using his own cloak to cover the corpse. In imitation of Alexander, Antony did the same with Brutus’s body at Philippi in 42 bc (Plutarch, Antony XXII.4). 110 See M. Villa, “Plutarco e Castiglione: il personaggio di Alessandro Magno”, in Uso, riuso e abuso dei testi classici, ed. M. Gioseffi, Milan, 2010, p. 209-232, and Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 46-47. 111 See Bodon, “Alessandro eroe ‘platonico’?”, p. 100. As the partial list in Pigler, Barockthemen, p. 357 shows, the episode was especially popular in eighteenth-century Venetian painting (e.g., Zanchi, Pellegrini, Crosato, Piazzetta), where it was often paired with the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’. 112 The earliest Italian example known to me is in an illuminated picture in the so-called Codice Sforza (ms. Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Varia 75, fol. 7 r), a manuscript containing a set of notes on the Rhetorica ad Herennium copied in 1467 by the then fifteen-year-old Ludovico Sforza under the supervision of his teacher Picenardi and decorated shortly afterwards; on the manuscript, see Pagine di scuola: il manoscritto sforzesco Varia 75 della Biblioteca reale di Torino, ed. G. Saccani, Padua, 2016, and Francesco Filelfo educatore e il ‘Codice Sforza’ della Biblioteca Reale di Torino, ed. L. Firpo, Turin, 1967; I discuss the picture of ms. Varia 75 and its iconographic tradition in the essay “Ancient Heroes to Teach the Young Ludovico il Moro. Alexander the Great and the Indian King Porus in the Codice Sforza”, in The Prince and the Condottiero in Italian Humanism and Renaissance: Literature, History, Political Theory, and Art, ed. M. Celati and M. Pavlova, Oxford (forthcoming). The next example I am aware of is a much later fresco in the

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incidents helped to construct the image of Alexander as an exemplary moral figure: giving his chair by the fire to a shivering soldier (like in the so-called Casa Tallarino, Mantua)113; refusing a helmet full of water during a march through the arid lands of the Gedrosian desert (Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, Rome, Palazzo Mattei Caetani)114; and setting fire to the Persian booty, his own included, which was weighing down his army on its way to India (Marco Pino, 1545-1547, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina, ceiling)115. The trust he showed in his doctor and old friend Philip, falsely accused of being a Persian spy and of trying to poison him, also contributed to this picture116. Another way of stressing Alexander’s noble nature was to illustrate his respect, if not reverence, for the mythical past which he had attempted to imitate: placing Homer’s Iliad in a golden casket which once belonged to Darius (Raphael’s workshop, 1520s, monochrome in the Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican)117 and the seventeenth-century theme of his sacrifice at the tomb of Achilles in Troy118. Episodes which displayed Alexander’s military prowess and strength – the battles he fought and the sieges he laid (most importantly, against Tyre) – were also, of course, depicted. But the majority of episodes illustrated from historical sources were exempla virtutum. An additional element stands out in this new portrait of Alexander: he was surrounded by women. The ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ is the most significant example, but it is not the only one. Roxane, Stateira, the queen of the Amazons Thalestris, Campaspe,

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Portego of the Casino Correr on the Venetian island of Murano, painted in 1696 by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini for Angelo Correr with stories of Alexander, on which see Gli affreschi nei palazzi e nelle ville venete dal ‘500 al ‘700, ed. F. Pedrocco, Schio, 2008, p. 172-179 (M. Favilla and R. Rugolo), with previous bibliography. Further examples are found in the eighteenth century (e.g., Francesco Fontebasso, c. 1760, Bourg-en-Bresse, Musée de Brou: see Settecento: le siècle de Tiepolo. Peintures italiennes du xviiie siècle exposées dans les collections publiques françaises [exhibition catalogue, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts and Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000-2001], ed. A. Brejon de Lavergnée and P. Durey, Paris, 2000, p. 109, no. 25 [S. Loire]) and include several other works by G. A. Pellegrini, for which see Antonio Pellegrini: il maestro veneto del Rococò alle corti d’Europa (exhibition catalogue, Padua, Palazzo della Ragione, 1998-1999), ed. A. Bettagno, Venice, 1998, p. 91-93, 120-123, no. 8, and 130-131, no. 12. Cf. the medieval tradition based on the Pseudo Callisthenes (III.4) mentioned earlier in Chapter 2, where Alexander is said to have fought Porus in single combat and killed him; see, e.g., Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany, fig. 300 and 342. See Ferlisi, “La mantegnesca facciata dipinta”. Another example in Mantua is found in the Apartment of the Secret Garden in Palazzo Te, illustrated in Belluzzi, Palazzo Te, II, p. 640, fig. 1158. The episode appears also on one of the celetti in the Sala Paolina in the Castel Sant’Angelo: see Guerrini, “Storia antica e iconografia umanistica”. See Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari, I, p. 128, fig. 50. See Harprath, Papst Paul III, pl. 11. The episode was most often illustrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but it appeared as early as 1490 in the Bentivoglio chapel in the church of San Giacomo Maggiore at Bologna, among the ancient exempla of the Triumph of Fame painted by Lorenzo Costa: see E. Negro and N. Roio, Lorenzo Costa 1460-1535, Modena, 2001, p. 91-93, no. 12c. On the theme in antiquity, see F. Sisti, “Alessandro e il medico Filippo: analisi e fortuna di un aneddoto”, Bollettino dei classici, 3 (1982), p. 139-151. See A. Emiliani and M. Scolaro, Raffaello: la Stanza della Segnatura, Milan, 2002, p. 199. For the print after it by Marcantonio Raimondi and the diffusion of Raphael’s invention in other artistic media, especially ceramics, see Alexander the Great in European Art, p. 188-189. The episode was also included in the programme of the Sala Paolina (see Gli affreschi di Paolo III, I, p. 177, fig. 118), as well as in the fresco cycles of the Sala di Apollo in the Palazzo Pitti (Pietro da Cortona, 1641: see Campbell, Pietro da Cortona, p. 114 and fig. 67) and in the Room of the Emperors in Palazzo Te (Giulio Romano, 1530-1531: see Belluzzi, Palazzo Te, II, p. 430, fig. 847). On this subject and its overlapping iconography with the similar visit paid by Augustus to Alexander’s tomb, see D. R. Marshall, “Giovanni Ghisolfi and Achilles, Alexander, and Augustus”, Storia dell’arte, 98 (2000), p. 47-75.

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Sisygambis, Timoclea119: even when present in the medieval legend120, none of these women had there the highly significant role they came to play during the Renaissance, when they became essential figures in Alexander’s life, towards whom he behaved with moral virtue and courtesy. The sixteenth-century image of Alexander, as it appeared in the artistic tradition, was entirely positive. The episodes which reflected badly on him and which are also recorded by ancient historians – the murders of his friend Cleitus; Callisthenes and Philotas put to death after unfair trials; the burning of Persepolis at the instigation of Thais121– only began to be illustrated in the seventeenth century, and even then quite rarely. The image of Alexander as a virtuous prince, to be emulated for his magnanimity and compassion even more than for his military deeds, was largely based on Plutarch. The influence of Valerius Maximus can be detected in a few episodes; but Arrian and Diodorus Siculus seem to have had a very limited impact on the iconography of Alexander. Arrian’s Alexander is essentially a military commander, a man of war who fights relentlessly to secure victory, with very little consideration of anything else, and therefore provided little material for a moral picture. As we have seen in Chapter 3, Diodorus Siculus’s account became available too late to have any real influence on a visual tradition which was by then already established. As for Curtius Rufus, whose Latin text certainly lost ground when compared to the more fashionable Greek histories, his entertaining and dramatic narrative continued to be an invaluable source of anecdotal material but his double-edged portrait of Alexander – as notable for his vices as for his virtues – was far less suitable for emulation than the exemplary figure presented by Plutarch. Finally, it is necessary to give some consideration to the reasons why the illustration of moral examples became so popular in the course of the sixteenth century. This issue, which reaches far beyond the iconography of Alexander122 and art history itself, is too large to be fully addressed here. Nevertheless, some observations about it can be made. The presentation of ancient history as a succession of moral exempla intended to teach and serve as model for the present has its roots in Cicero’s “historia magistra vitae” (De oratore II.36) and the humanist historiography based on it, especially the historical works of Flavio Biondo and Leonardo Bruni123. The illustration of selected moral episodes from the lives of ancient figures, including Alexander, can be seen as a visual equivalent to this 119 One of the first depictions of Timoclea of Thebes standing on trial before the magnanimous judge Alexander (Plutarch, Alexander XII) is Zuccari’s painting in Palazzo Mattei Caetani (see Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari, I, p. 129, fig. 54). The subject of a drawing in the British Museum assigned to Perin del Vaga (inv. 1860, 0616.118: see Pouncey and Gere, Italian Drawings, I, p. 93, no. 158 and II, pl. 124) is still debated, but it should certainly be identified as Timoclea before Alexander. Thanks to Guido Rebecchini for pointing out this drawing to me. 120 See, e.g., M. Gosman, “L’élément féminin dans le Roman d’Alexandre: Olympias et Candace”, in Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Liverpool 1980), ed. G. S. Burgess, Liverpool, 1981, p. 167-176. 121 On this episode, see A. McAuley, “The Great Misstep: Alexander the Great, Thais, and the Destruction of Persepolis”, in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander, p. 717-738. 122 The best-known example of this type of moral re-interpretation is Hercules, on which see E. Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst, Leipzig and Berlin, 1930. 123 From the vast bibliography on the topic, see R. Landfester, Historia magistra vitae: Untersuchungen zur humanistischen Geschichtstheorie des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts, Geneva, 1972; G. Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past, Cambridge MA and London, 2012, esp. p. 7-60; B. Stasi, Apologie umanistiche della “historia”, Bologna, 2004; T. Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature,

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didactic conception of history, which guided most humanist scholars. The importance of Plutarch in this process was crucial: as a sort of general reference on moral matters, his work also greatly influenced, as we have seen, the iconographic tradition124. As far as Alexander is concerned, it is this new moral evaluation which allowed him to survive the decline of the legendary tradition and to be reshaped into an exemplum virtutum, whose deeds made him relevant to the men of the Renaissance, showing them both what to pursue and what to avoid.

Ithaca and London, 1990; E. Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago and London, 1981, p. 3-33; A. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13 (1950), p. 285-315. 124 See Biografia dipinta, esp. the first chapter by Roberto Guerrini at p. 1-98. The role played by Valerius Maximus was less important, but still noteworthy; see R. Guerrini, “Dal testo all’immagine: la ‘pittura di storia’ nel Rinascimento”, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, II: I generi e i temi ritrovati, p. 43-93, esp. p. 45-73; with reference to the Alexander iconography, see Terribile, Del piacere della virtù, p. 46-60. On Valerius Maximus’s depiction of Alexander in general, see J. Bellemore, “Valerius Maximus and His Presentation of Alexander the Great”, in East and West in the World Empire of Alexander, p. 299-316, and D. Wardle, “Valerius Maximus on Alexander the Great”, Acta Classica, 48 (2005), p. 141-162.

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Fig. 64: Sodoma, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1518-1519; Rome, Villa Farnesina alla Lungara

Fig. 65: Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1559-1560; Bracciano, Orsini-Odescalchi Castle

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Fig. 66: Paolo Veronese, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1565-1567; London, National Gallery

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Fig. 67: Perin del Vaga, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1545-1547; Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina

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Fig. 68: Sodoma, The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, 1518-1519; Rome, Villa Farnesina alla Lungara

Fig. 69: Raphael, The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, c. 1516-1517; Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina

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Fig. 70: Gian Giacomo Caraglio, The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, after Raphael, 1520-1539; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fig. 71: Giovanni Battista Lodi da Cremona (design), Aglauros’s Vision of the Bridal Chamber of Herse, c. 1540 (woven c. 1570); New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Fig. 72: Alexandre-Denis-Abel de Pujol, Apelles Painting Alexander and Campaspe, after Primaticcio (1541-1544), 1834-1835; Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes

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Fig. 73: Francesco Morandini (il Poppi), Alexander Offering Campaspe to Apelles, 1570-1572; Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici

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Fig. 74: Guillaume de Marcillat (attr.), The Taming of Bucephalus, c. 1525; Rome, Villa Farnesina alla Lungara

Fig. 75: The Birth of Alexander, the Taming of Bucephalus, the Cutting of the Gordian Knot, after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1570-1590; Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, inv. 9576 (Polidoro Album, fol. 23 r)

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Fig. 76: Francesco Salviati (attr.), The Taming of Bucephalus, after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1548-1550; Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 794.1.2951 (verso)

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Fig. 77: Primaticcio, The Taming of Bucephalus, 1541-1544; Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes

Fig. 78: Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, The Taming of Bucephalus, c. 1545; Città di Castello, Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX

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Fig. 79: Francesco Salviati (attr.), The Birth of Alexander, after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1548-1550; Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 794.1.2951 (recto)

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Fig. 80: Andrea Boscoli (attr.), Olympias Visited by Zeus-Ammon in the Guise of a Serpent, 1595-1599; Chicago, Art Institute

Fig. 81: Giulio Romano, The Begetting of Alexander, 1527-1528; Mantua, Palazzo Te, Chamber of Cupid and Psyche

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Conclusion

The aim of this book was to shed light on a little-explored chapter in the tradition of the myth of Alexander: the iconographic transition from the medieval ‘Alexander of legend’ to the Renaissance ‘Alexander of history’, that took place in Italy over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By examining the visual production which developed around the figure of Alexander during this time, and by discussing it in dialogue with the textual and iconographic material which the Quattrocento inherited from the past, this book has demonstrated the significance of this transformation, not least because it marked a permanent turning point in the tradition, which gradually but completely eclipsed the previous imagery of Alexander. Once again, it would be worth recalling that all this applies to the visual tradition; as repeatedly stated before, the eclipse of the ‘Alexander of legend’ in the literary tradition follows another, slower timeline, which is not coextensive with the iconographic trajectory I have traced. The personality of Alexander the man is destined to remain elusive: his life is known to us from texts written centuries after his death1 and although his physical appearance is documented by a large number of ancient portraits, these are strongly idealised. It is not merely a matter of lost or fragmentary sources: during Alexander’s own lifetime, and largely on his own initiative, divine features and qualities were already attributed to him, and his extraordinary achievements were recounted in various different forms, ranging from bare factual records to fanciful re-elaborations. Eventually two distinct but intertwined threads emerged: the legendary and the historical tradition of Alexander – in the terminology which I have adopted in this research, ‘legend’ and ‘history’. As we have seen, the legendary tradition goes back to the late ancient Greek text conventionally known as the Pseudo-Callisthenes, compiled in Alexandria at the latest in the third century ad from a variety of materials, some of which dated back to the decades immediately after Alexander’s death. The historical tradition draws essentially on the four main ancient historians who wrote in Greek and Latin about Alexander – Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Arrian and Diodorus Siculus – together with the third-hand account of Justin. During the Middle Ages, with the Greek authors being practically unknown, knowledge of Alexander was perpetuated by both the Latin ancient historians and the tradition based on the Pseudo-Callisthenes and its derivatives – texts which were often transmitted together and interpolated one into the other. Starting from the tenth century, a vast body of literature took shape, where both historical data and more imaginative information contributed to the transformation of Alexander into a mythic figure and fearless explorer, the undefeated commander and the inquisitive pupil of Aristotle, the prototype of the

1 See Lane Fox, Alexander the Great, p. 27, who states that, due to the almost complete loss of first-hand sources, the life of Alexander can be “the subject for a search, not a story”.

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chivalric knight and the conqueror who is driven to the ends of the earth by his insatiable thirst for the unknown. The vast iconographic corpus illustrating the countless reworkings and versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes produced in every European language includes the wars fought by Alexander in Asia, and the military nature of his expedition to the East was and remained clear – in the manuscripts these accounts are usually entitled Historia de preliis (“The History of the Battles”). Even greater emphasis, however, was placed on Alexander’s marvellous adventures in far distant India – most importantly, the ‘Flight with Griffins’, the ‘Submarine Voyage’ and the ‘Visit to the Oracular Trees of the Sun and the Moon’ – which in some cases circulated outside the illustrated pages of manuscripts, attesting to the diffusion of the legendary stories of Alexander beyond the very restricted audience of those who had access to books. With the emergence of a new interest in the ancient past and a different critical approach towards its surviving texts, which were eagerly sought after and enthusiastically recovered, something in the relationship with, and the received view of, the towering figure of Alexander began to change. The hugely popular marvellous stories recounted in the innumerable versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, when confronted with the very different account of Alexander’s life given by ancient historians, were called into question. Even texts which had been known for centuries such as the Historiae Alexandri Magni of Curtius Rufus, towards the end of the fourteenth century were approached, most notably by Petrarch, in an entirely new way. In the writing of fifteenth-century Italian humanists, a preoccupation can be distinctly detected for the first time: namely, the need to sieve through the tradition and distinguish, in the wealth of information handed down through centuries, unreliable from trustworthy accounts, legendary tales from factual evidence – to use their words: fabula from historia. It is at this moment that the old Ciceronian categories are being revived, applied to the Nachleben of Alexander, and that the two threads that had coexisted for centuries in the tradition were untangled. The biased and judgemental nature of the humanist distinction between fabula and historia has already been noted at the beginning of this book: in the attempt to connect themselves directly to antiquity, fifteenth-century humanists had to condemn and ultimately erase everything they considered to be not authentically ancient. The tradition of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, with its wondrous stories of unheard-of adventures in the depth of Asia, was surely the perfect target – so incredible did that Alexander appear when compared to the hero of Plutarch, Arrian, or Curtius, authors that became now, and only now, the undisputable authorities on Alexander. Dismissed as the dispensable fruit of the medieval imagination, the whole tradition of the Pseudo-Callisthenes was rejected, cast into disrepute as, at best, tales that only ignorant people could believe, and slowly consigned to oblivion. In the hands of fifteenth-century humanists, the fabulous aura that had surrounded Alexander for centuries evaporated, and by relying on the portrait of him drawn by the newly available ancient historians, the Macedonian conqueror was recast as a moral exemplum and a valorous military commander – still an extraordinary and captivating man but also a more relatable, more possible, more reachable model for princes and aristocrats to look at and emulate. However, by doing so, by rejecting the whole medieval tradition that had flourished around the Romance, the humanists ended up rejecting a tradition that originated from an account that, as we have seen, was even older than the historical accounts they cherished as authentically ancient. And yet, the

conclusion

long-standing influence of this reassessment should also be acknowledged: as late as 1966, the great historian Santo Mazzarino lamented that he himself, as a boy, had been taught in school about the two, allegedly clear-cut categories, and made a plea for the necessity of getting rid of that old-fashioned, and ultimately wrong, assumption2. That the transition from a medieval ‘Alexander of legend’ to a Renaissance ‘Alexander of history’ took place in the visual tradition, as I have explained in this book, deserves some additional considerations. The humanist recovery of ancient historical sources alone couldn’t possibly cause the dramatic change in the Alexander iconographic imagery that has been the subject of my investigation. It is the radical change happening in the social and cultural fabric of fifteenth-century Italy that brings about the reinvention of Alexander that I have discussed. The new patrons and the wider, wealthier and more diverse public of the courts and cities of the Italian peninsula; their artistic needs, changing taste and expectations; the new kind of artefacts (and their function, purpose, and destination) they chose to decorate their homes with, display their power and celebrate their status: all these elements must be taken into account as they made a significant contribution to the creation of the new imagery of Alexander that took shape in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At the same time, the circulation of the ancient historical sources effectively providing a new repository of episodes from the life of the conqueror was, of course, instrumental in the creation of a new imagery of Alexander – the direct contact and often personal collaborations between artists and humanists that we know existed in Renaissance Italy proved to be, even in this respect, crucial. To give just one example concerning the important depiction of Alexander’s stories on cassone panels, which I have discussed in Chapter 4: as is well known, this kind of object was usually decorated with some moral exemplum taken from ancient history so as to teach a didactic lesson to the bride (and groom); and the story of Alexander, as recounted by, above all, Curtius and Plutarch conveniently provided just such a lesson – namely in the episode of the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’, which illustrated the magnanimity, as well as the chastity, of Alexander. If the humanist recovery of the ancient historical texts and, more importantly, the emergence of a new critical enquiry and of modern historiography as we still know it had a ground-breaking impact on this legendary conception of Alexander, the medieval visual imagery did not disappear at once, and some examples, as I have shown in Chapter 2, can still be found in the fifteenth century. According to a widespread assumption in the scholarly literature, based on George Cary’s The Medieval Alexander3, the medieval legend was never as rich and inventive in the Italian peninsula as it was in France and in northern

2 Mazzarino, Il pensiero storico classico, II.1, p. 24: “Noi, oggi, non possiamo più accettare integralmente la divisione netta, che tuttavia apprendemmo sui banchi della scuola, fra la tradizione ‘veridica’ (pragmatica) sulle imprese di Alessandro Magno e la tradizione ‘fantastica’ (retorica o dramatica) intorno a quelle imprese medesime. Possiamo dire che c’era un più e un meno d’invenzione; anzi, che ce n’era in taluni storici d’Alessandro moltissima, un minimo in altri; ma non ci riuscirà mai di segnare una barriera netta fra la storiografia pragmatica e quella retorica” (“Today we can no longer accept the clear-cut distinction, which we were taught in school, between the ‘historical’ [pragmatic] tradition of the deeds of Alexander the Great and the ‘legendary’ [rhetorical or poetic] tradition of those same deeds. We may say that there was a higher or lesser degree of invention; or rather, that there was much invention in some historians of Alexander and much less in others but we would never be able to draw a neat boundary between the pragmatic and the rhetorical historiography”. My translation). 3 Cary, The Medieval Alexander, esp. p. 262.

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Europe; so that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the legendary stories of Alexander lingered on in Italy as dry and repetitive imitations “from which all real life had departed”4. The recent research of Roberta Morosini on the literary tradition has disproved Cary’s view, demonstrating that elements of originality and inventiveness are also found in Alexander texts written in Italy such as those composed by Antonio Pucci and Domenico Scolari5. Her reassessment of the literary tradition is confirmed by my re-examination of fifteenth-century visual treatments of the medieval legend. Evidence of the persistence of the older imagery is scattered among artistic genres (from illuminated manuscripts to drawings, from tarot cards to fresco cycles) and includes artworks which have not been previously discussed in the scholarly literature on Alexander (for example, the Curtius Rufus codex, now ms. Vitr. 22.9 in Madrid). Despite the continuing appeal of the legend, however, hints of a change in the conception of Alexander can be detected. Alongside the Paris drawing of the ‘Submarine Voyage’ ascribed to Raphael, which reveals an interest in the technical challenges of the venture without parallel in previous representations of it, there are the cycles of the Nine Worthies, embodying the core values and ideals of the medieval courtly tradition par excellence, yet including an Alexander who, though mixed with mythical and historical figures alike and still the fabled conqueror of the legend (as explicitly stated in the titulus accompanying his figure in La Manta castle), has also regained his rightful historical place among the Heathens. These fifteenth-century artworks are located on the cusp of legend and history, for they present Alexander both as a hero belonging to a distant past (and yet anachronistically wearing contemporary dress) and as an ideal model for the present, as at the Castle della Manta and in the Doria tapestries. Moreover, the theme of the Nine Worthies, which flourished north of the Alps in the fourteenth century, is not documented in Italy until the fifteenth century, when the old chivalric canon was being replaced by the new humanist fashion for Uomini famosi, largely made up of figures from the history of Rome. And the first example of this renewal is found in the Palazzo Trinci of Foligno, where a visual continuum was created between the series of Nine Worthies in the corridor and the Roman rulers and emperors painted in the Sala degli Imperatori. The fifteenth century lies at the centre of my research, since it was then that the humanist recovery of the ancient historical sources on Alexander took place and that the creation of a new Alexander iconography began to appear in the visual arts in around 1450, running in parallel with the surviving legendary imagery until the end of the century. Establishing the chronology of the humanist recovery of the ancient historical accounts, which I have done in Chapter 3, was crucial, not least because it has often been dealt with in a confusing manner – if it is taken into consideration at all – in the scholarly literature on particular Renaissance artworks representing Alexander. By examining how these ancient sources were used by humanists in their writings, a better understanding could be gained of how and why the received view of Alexander changed so dramatically in the transition from legend to history. A telling example is the Historiae Alexandri Magni of Curtius Rufus, a text which had been circulating for centuries and yet was felt as a new acquisition of great

4 Ibid., p. 274. 5 See Morosini, “The Alexander Romance in Italy”, and Ead., “‘Perché Alexandro cercò molti istrani paesi’”.

conclusion

importance for Petrarch and the first generation of humanists. In this account, Alexander was presented as an ambiguous figure, commendable for his virtues but contemptible for his crimes; this depiction, I believe, was a key factor in shaping the humanist conception of Alexander, whose name is often mentioned in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literature in both positive and negative terms. In order to explore how the new historical conception of Alexander developed, a number of prominent humanist authors have been discussed in Chapter 3, focusing on the way in which they presented Alexander and the events in his life. What has emerged is that, in the first half of the fifteenth century, Curtius Rufus and Justin were generally regarded as the most trustworthy authorities on Alexander and were recommended to young boys in humanist educational treatises. Of particular note in this context are Pier Candido Decembrio, who in 1438 made the first vernacular translation of Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni, and his brother Angelo, whose De politia litteraria of around 1450 provides a remarkable insight into the literary and iconographic representation of Alexander at the time, one which illuminates the central issue of this book: the iconographic transition from the legendary to the historical tradition. In a famous passage, Angelo not only testifies to the continuing popularity in the Italian courts of his day of Northern European tapestries illustrating the marvellous stories of Alexander from the medieval Romance but he also attacks the legendary tradition on which those luxurious artworks depended by invoking the authority of Curtius Rufus. Pier Paolo Vergerio, however, recommended Arrian, whose Anabasis he translated into Latin, as the most reliable source on Alexander to have survived from antiquity. Whichever ancient historian was claimed to be the most authoritative, it is clear that the humanist reassessment of Alexander brought about a heightened awareness of the difference between reliable and unreliable sources – between legend and history or, to use the terms employed by humanists, between fabula and historia. Even before the fifteenth century, Petrarch and Boccaccio, despite their different approaches to Alexander, made use of Justin’s Epitoma and Curtius Rufus’s Historiae to support their interpretations; and they both rejected the legendary tradition of the Middle Ages, which in the case of Petrarch amounted to passing it over in eloquent silence. In Chapter 4, the impact that this reassessment had on the iconographic tradition has been evaluated, including works which have often been overlooked or inadequately dealt with in the scholarly literature. Reshaped in accordance with the newly available textual sources and the material evidence from antiquity which was continually being unearthed, eagerly collected and copied, the image of Alexander in the fifteenth century appeared in a number of artworks which were very different in nature and which, broadly speaking, belong into three categories. The first category comprises portrait heads cast from the numismatic effigies of Alexander (or believed to be of him), which were included in the decoration of manuscripts and reproduced in plaquettes, sculptures and reliefs. Employed in homage to the antiquarian taste of Quattrocento Italy, they contributed to the creation of an all’antica portrait of Alexander which, by the sixteenth century, turned into a recognisable, standardised portrait, thought to reflect the true likeness of Alexander. A second category concerns depictions of Alexander as part of the Uomini famosi cycles, the humanist canon inspired by Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, which presented a selection of famous and virtuous men and which eventually replaced the series of Nine Worthies.

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That only a limited number of these cycles included Alexander was due, as I explained, to the focus of these cycles on figures from the history of Rome. Nevertheless, the six cycles with Alexander which I was able to identify – both extant and lost, but documented – revealed the variety of meanings attributed to Alexander in these representations and the originality of at least some of them (most notably, the cycle in the Corte Ducale of Palazzo dell’Arengo in Milan, devised by Francesco Filelfo). Episodes from Alexander’s life which drew on historical sources rather than medieval legends are part of a third category. These are first detected in a group of cassone panels of around 1450, arguably produced in the Florentine workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni and Marco del Buono Giamberti. In addition to the one piece, today in the British Museum, which is usually discussed in the relevant literature on Alexander6, I have traced five other panels showing an almost identical arrangement, both in compositional and iconographic terms: the subject represented in all of these works is the ‘Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius’, which took place after the Battle of Issus, also illustrated in the panels. By comparing visual and written sources and by relying on the chronology of the recovery of ancient texts established in the previous chapter, it has been conclusively demonstrated that the literary source on which these panels depended, and the visual tradition that developed from them, was Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni. While in the fifteenth century the historical Alexander entered the domestic space of the Renaissance household in the form of cassone panels illustrating brand new episodes from his life, in the sixteenth century these stories spread to great halls and ceremonial spaces, appearing in frescoes on walls and ceilings on a much larger scale, which was unprecedented in the previous artistic tradition. In the course of the Cinquecento, this iconographic repertoire not only increased in size but was also consolidated, with ‘Rooms of Alexander’ displaying his deeds remaining fashionable for at least three centuries both in Italy and throughout Europe. From the over thirty historically grounded episodes which I have found in sixteenth-century Italian art (see Appendix 1), only five have been examined in detail; these were either very popular (‘The Meeting with the Family of Darius’, ‘The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane’ and ‘Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe’) or else helped clarify the relationship in this period between legend and history (‘The Taming of Bucephalus’ and ‘The Birth (and Begetting) of Alexander’). By the 1560s, when the time-line of this book ends, all the historical episodes contributing to the Renaissance iconography of Alexander had appeared. If one painting had to be chosen to mark the culmination of this research it would be Paolo Veronese’s Meeting with the Family of Darius, completed by 1567, now in the National Gallery in London, and one of the most beautiful and influential Alexander paintings of the Renaissance. Whereas the emergence of the Renaissance iconography of Alexander in the Quattrocento depended largely on the account of Curtius Rufus, from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century onwards it was Plutarch’s representation of Alexander which became dominant, overshadowing that of Curtius Rufus. The impact of Arrian on the visual tradition was quite limited, in any case before the end of the sixteenth century, while the recovery of the relevant parts of Diodorus Siculus’s history came too late to influence Cinquecento Italian art.



6 See, e.g., Penny, National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, p. 379.

conclusion

Since Johann Gustav Droysen undertook the first modern scholarly studies of Alexander in 18337, a vast and ever-growing bibliography has grown up around him. While the investigation of Alexander the man and the transmission of his myth in antiquity has always attracted scholarly attention, studies of the reception of the myth in the Persian and Eastern traditions have greatly increased over the last twenty years, while a global approach to the afterlife of Alexander has also recently gained some traction8. As for the Western tradition, with which this book is concerned, in contrast to the continuous appeal of the medieval legend, which is still the most extensively tilled field, the reception of the Alexander myth in the Renaissance, the early modern period and the modern era, as noted by Mario Casari in 2012, remains a “huge mosaic, yet to be explored”9. By discussing the two parallel and often overlapping iconographic traditions of the legendary and historical Alexander, an original light has been cast on a vast and varied figurative repertoire, which, despite being for the most part well known to art historians, has often been perceived as fragmentary – a succession of particular objects treated individually and in isolation from each other. In addition to these familiar works, some unknown or little-known pieces have been presented, most notably, the Alexander fresco in the Castle of Quart in the Val d’Aosta and the illustrated Curtius Rufus manuscript in Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23. By taking into consideration a large number of wide-ranging artworks and associating them with the written sources on which they relied, I have been able to place the turning point in the visual tradition in around 1450, when the historically based themes of Alexander, and in particular the ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’, first appear. As I have tried to show, this sea change in the tradition from legend to history took place first in Italy and from there spread to the rest of Europe. It was the result not merely, among many factors, of the recovery of the ancient historians of Alexander, but also of the critical approach of humanists towards these texts. We know, for instance, that the Greek historical texts about Alexander were well known at Byzantium and in the East alongside the Romance, and yet there seems to have been no sense of the opposition between legend and history. Writing to Cardinal Bessarion from Crete on 6 July 1453, as mentioned above in Chapter 3, Isidore of Kiev describes a scene which is also recorded by several Western witnesses: the enemy of Christianity and conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmed II, took delight in having the account of Alexander’s life read to him every day “in Arabic, in Greek and in Latin”10. Even though modern scholars have questioned Mehmed’s knowledge of Greek and Latin, attempts have been made to identify these lives. The Greek text was certainly the Anabasis of Arrian, which was in Mehmed’s library; the Arabic account was no doubt one of the Persian epic poems

7 J. G. Droysen, Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, Berlin, 1833 (2nd edition 1877). 8 See, e.g., S. F. Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance, Oxford, 2019. 9 M. Casari, [review of Alessandro Magno in età moderna, ed. F. Biasutti and A. Coppola, Padua, 2009], Rivista di filosofia, 104 (2012), p. 145-148, at p. 148: “un mosaico enorme, ancora tutto da esplorare”. 10 The Latin text of the letter, accompanied by an Italian translation, further commentary and bibliography, has been published by Agostino Pertusi; for a reference, see Chapter 3, n. 56 above.

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derived from the Pseudo-Callisthenes, most likely Ahmedi’s Iskandarname11; as for the Latin text, it is surely the account of Curtius Rufus. As I have emphasised throughout, the oblivion into which the medieval legend progressively fell, as far as the iconographic tradition is concerned, from the early fifteenth century on, was permanent and definitive – though in the mid-nineteenth century, scholars began to study the transmission of the myth of Alexander12. That in the visual arts of Italy the legend was well and truly dead by around 1580 is suggested by some anonymous verses accompanying a fresco portrait of Alexander in the Palazzo del Giardino at Sabbioneta: Hic maris et terre imperium sibi Marte subegit / raptum coelum si licuisset erat. [With the help of Mars, [Alexander] subordinated both the sea and the earth to his dominion, and he would have conquered the heavens, if only that were possible]13. In the legendary tradition that had enjoyed such a vast popularity for centuries, Alexander did, of course, ascend to the sky with griffins and conquer the heavens; but in the late Cinquecento, no one apparently recalled this magnificent adventure. By this time, the memory of Alexander the “airman”, as David Ross dubbed him14, had completely faded. It survived in the stories written and reprinted time and again for an audience now dismissively qualified as vulgus, but in the visual arts the legend had come to an end. Alexander would perform other deeds and his name would still be remembered without losing “the spell of youth and glory”15 it had possessed for so long. But heaven was no longer for him: from now on, “Alexander was to remain permanently grounded”16.

11 See F. Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, Princeton NJ, 1978, p. 499-500. An important reading of the figure of Mehmed II in relation to Alexander has been recently offered by M. Centanni, “Il ritratto di Maometto II”, in her Fantasmi dell’antico. La tradizione classica nel Rinascimento, Rimini, 2017, p. 253-315. 12 See Centanni, “Alexander the Great”, p. 30-31. 13 The English translation is mine. The Latin verses are transcribed in M. Ruina, “La Sala di Alessandro Magno e Giulio Cesare”, in Dei ed eroi nel Palazzo Giardino di Sabbioneta: miti e allegorie per un principe umanista, ed. L. Ventura, Rome, 2008, p. 85-97, at p. 94. 14 See Chapter 1, n. 71. 15 Lane Fox, Alexander the Great, p. 26. 16 Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image, p. 155.

A ppendix 1

Inventory of the episodes from the Life of Alexander, taken from ancient historical sources found in Renaissance Italian art (1450 to 1600)

This appendix lists the episodes from the life of Alexander which made their appearance in Italian art between 1450 and 1600 and became the supporting framework of the new historically based iconographic repertoire of Alexander that has been discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. For each episode ancient sources and Renaissance visual examples are provided. In the selection of artworks exemplifying each episode, this list does not pretend to completeness: to record every depiction of an Alexander story that may be found across different artistic media in what is a hugely vast and potentially limitless corpus of artefacts would be a Herculean feat that could hardly be accomplished and would not ultimately be within the scope of the present research. In the case of greatly popular themes such as Alexander’s ‘Meeting with the Family of Darius’ or his ‘Marriage to Roxane’ only the most significant artefacts known to me have been included. To give but one example: while Raphael’s drawing of the ‘Marriage’, upon which the whole visual tradition heavily relies, has been included, I have not recorded each of the numerous copies, engravings, prints and maiolica plates which reproduce more or less exactly Raphael’s design. I have also not included the Alexander episodes which, to the best of my knowledge, do occasionally appear in the 1450 to 1600 Italian visual tradition but are not seen afterwards. It is the case, for instance, of the illustration of one specific incident involving Alexander in the Royal Palace of Susa, which is recounted by Curtius Rufus (V.2.13-15) and Diodorus Siculus (XVII.66) and is found in Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera – as this image is part of a larger Alexander cycle, it is listed, however, in Appendix 2. I have listed the episodes from Alexander’s life in chronological order, from his birth to his death; wherever our sources disagree on the exact succession of events, I have followed the account of Curtius Rufus. I. Begetting and Birth of Alexander Sources

Plutarch II-III

264

a p p en di x 1 Artworks

I.1

I.2 I.3 I.4 I.5 I.6

Follower of Giulio Romano, 1514-1546, drawing, London, British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, inv. 1960, 1115.1 Giulio Romano, 1527-1528, fresco, Mantua, Palazzo Te, Chamber of Cupid and Psyche After Polidoro da Caravaggio, sixteenth century, drawing of the frescoed façade of Palazzo Gaddi Cesi, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, inv. 15462 Francesco Salviati (attr.) after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1548-1550, drawing, Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 794.1.2951 (recto) After Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze, c. 1570-1590, drawing of the façade fresco of a palazzo in via Ripetta in Rome, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, inv. 9576 (Polidoro Album, fol. 23 r) Andrea Boscoli (attr.), 1595-1599, drawing, Chicago, Art Institute

II. Taming of Bucephalus Sources

Plutarch VI Artworks

II.1

II.2 II.3 II.4 II.5 II.6 II.7 II.8 II.9

Guillaume de Marcillat (attr.), c. 1525, fresco, Rome, Villa Farnesina, Room of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxane After Polidoro da Caravaggio, sixteenth century, drawing of the frescoed façade of Palazzo Gaddi Cesi, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, inv. 15462 Francesco Primaticcio, 1541-1544, fresco, Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX Francesco Salviati (attr.) after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1548-1550, drawing, Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 794.1.2951 (verso) Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Salone degli Arazzi After Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze, c. 1570-1590, drawing of the façade fresco of a palazzo in via Ripetta in Rome, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, inv. 9576 (Polidoro Album, f. 23 r) Bernardo Castello, 1592, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Salone

III. Timoclea of Thebes Standing on Trial before Alexander Sources

Plutarch XII

I n ven tory of the ep is odes from the Life of A lexa nder Artworks

III.1 III.2

III.3

Perin del Vaga, 1516-1547, drawing, London, British Musem, inv. 1860, 0616.118 Francesco Primaticcio, 1541-1544, fresco, Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Salone degli Arazzi

IV. The Meeting with Diogenes Sources

Plutarch XIV.3-5 and Moralia 331; Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers VI.38; Valerius Maximus, Factorum et dictorum memorabilium IV.3 ext. 4; Arrian, VII. 2 Artworks

IV.1

IV.2 IV.3 IV.4 IV.5 IV.6 IV.7 IV.8 IV.9



Tarot card (The Sun) from the Este Tarocchi, after 1473, New Haven, Yale University Library, Cary Collection of Playing Cards Workshop of Deruta or Siena, early sixteenth century, maiolica plate, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. 1673-18551 Giulio da Urbino, 1534, maiolica plate, Baltimore, Walters Art Museum Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room XI (Stories of Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar and Alexander) Workshop of Castel Durante, c. 1550, maiolica plate, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. 8916-1863 Giovanni Battista Castello, c. 1555-1560, fresco, Genoa, Villa di Tobia Pallavicino delle Peschiere, ceiling of the Sala2 Giorgio Vasari and workshop, 1559, fresco, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Studiolo di Cosimo I (also known as Tesoretto or Scrittoio del Duca) Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Salone degli Arazzi Bernardo Castello, 1592, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Salone

1 The ‘Meeting of Alexander and Diogenes’ is a particularly favoured subject in Renaissance maiolica; I have listed here three plates which best represent the iconographic compositions most often adopted in the illustration of the episode. 2 Additional episodes survive in a poor state in the lunettes below the ceiling; I am not entirely convinced, however, by the attempts at their identification with stories of Alexander (‘The Cutting of the Gordian Knot’; ‘Alexander and Aristotle’) that have been put forward; see L. Stagno, “‘Imago Alexandri’ nella grande decorazione genovese (XVI-XVII secolo)”, in Biografia dipinta e ritratto dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo: Atti del Convegno, 26-27 ottobre 2007, ed. M. Caciorgna, L. D’Anselmo, M. Marongiu and M. Sanfilippo, Siena, 2008, p. 69-92, at p. 69-72; and La pittura in Liguria: il Cinquecento, ed. E. Parma, Genoa, 2000, p. 313-315.

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V. Alexander and His Physician Philip3 Sources

Curtius Rufus III.6.1-17; Plutarch XIX; Arrian II.4.7-11 Artworks

V.1

V.2

Lorenzo Costa, 1490, oil on canvas, Bologna, San Giacomo Maggiore, Cappella Bentivoglio (part of The Triumph of Fame) Follower of Vittore Carpaccio (attr.), tempera on panel, early sixteenth century (sold at Sotheby’s New York, 8 June 2007)

VI. The Battle of the Granicus Sources

Plutarch XVI; Arrian I.13-16; Diodorus Siculus XVII.19-21 Artworks

VI.1

VI.2 VI.3 VI.4

Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illuminated picture from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450, Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 1 r Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room XI (flanked by a possible depiction of the Crossing of the Hellespont) Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani Workshop of Andrea and Ottavio Semino, c. 1565, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Agostino Pallavicino in Strada Nuova, Sala di Alessandro (battle scene, possibly Granicus)

VII. The Cutting of the Gordian Knot Sources

Curtius Rufus III.1.11-18; Plutarch XVIII; Arrian II.3 Artworks

VII.1

VII.2 VII.3

After Polidoro da Caravaggio, sixteenth century, drawing of the frescoed façade of Palazzo Gaddi Cesi, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, inv. 15462 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander

3 Depictions of this episode, which often include an emaciated Alexander lying on his sickbed, are often mistaken in the literature for illustrations of the ‘Death of Alexander’. While there does exist a medieval tradition based on the Romance that shows Alexander’s last moments, the subject remains extremely rare in the historically-based repertoire and gained some currency as late as the nineteenth century – the most famous example being Carl Theodor von Piloty’s painting (c. 1885, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek).

I n ven tory of the ep is odes from the Life of A lexa nder

VII.4 VII.5 VII.6 VII.7 VII.8

Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Salone degli Arazzi Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani Workshop of Andrea and Ottavio Semino, c. 1565, Genoa, Palazzo di Agostino Pallavicino in Strada Nuova, Sala di Alessandro After Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze, c. 1570-1590, drawing of the façade fresco of a palazzo in via Ripetta in Rome, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, inv. 9576 (Polidoro Album, f. 23 r) Bernardo Castello, 1592, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Salone

VIII. Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe Sources

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia XXXV.86-87 Artworks

VIII.1

VIII.2 VIII.3

Alexandre-Denis-Abel de Pujol, after Francesco Primaticcio (1541-1544), fresco, 1834-1835, Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes Giorgio Vasari, 1548, fresco, Arezzo, Casa del Vasari, Sala del Camino Francesco Morandini (il Poppi), 1570-1572, oil on panel, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici

IX. The Battle of Issus4 Sources

Curtius Rufus III.11; Plutarch XX.2-4; Arrian II.10-11; Diodorus Siculus XVII.32.2-36.6. Artworks

IX.1

IX.2 IX.3 IX.4



Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illuminated picture from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450, Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 11 v Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, formerly Collection of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, London, British Museum Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, Fiesole, Collezione Paolo Fresco

4 Before the seventeenth century, no depiction of an Alexander battle that can certainly be identified as the third one against the Persians, that is the Battle of Gaugamela (or Arbela), can be found in Italian art – the earliest picture known to me being the huge canvas that Pietro da Cortona painted in 1644-1650 (Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Sala dei Trionfi).

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IX.5 IX.6 IX.7 IX.8 IX.9 IX.10 IX.11 IX.12 IX.13 IX.14

Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga Worskhop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, formerly Sewickley PA, George R. Hann Collection Lo Scheggia, c. 1460, cassone panel, formerly Artaud de Montor Collection Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Davide Ghirlandaio and Sebastiano Mainardi), c. 1493-1494, tempera on panel, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, on permanent loan to Longleat House, Wiltshire Sodoma and Bartolomeo di David, 1518-1519, fresco, Rome, Villa Farnesina, Room of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxane (battle scene, possibly Issus) Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander Giambattista Zelotti, c. 1560-1565, fresco, Lonedo di Lugo (Vicenza), Villa Godi Malinverni, Salone centrale (battle scene, possibly Issus) Workshop of Andrea and Ottavio Semino, c. 1565, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Agostino Pallavicino in Strada Nuova, Sala di Alessandro (battle scene, possibly Issus) Bernardo Castello, 1592, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Salone

X. The Meeting with the Family of Darius Sources

Curtius Rufus III.12.1-26; Plutarch XX.5-XXI.5; Arrian II.12.3-8; Diodorus Siculus XVII.37.3-38.7 Artworks

X.1

X.2 X.3 X.4 X.5 X.6 X.7 X.8

Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, formerly Collection of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, London, British Museum Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, Fiesole, Collezione Paolo Fresco Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga Worskhop of Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1450, cassone panel, formerly Sewickley PA, George R. Hann Collection Lo Scheggia, c. 1460, cassone panel, formerly Artaud de Montor Collection Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Davide Ghirlandaio and Sebastiano Mainardi), c. 1493-1494, tempera on panel, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, on permanent loan to Longleat House, Wiltshire Master of the Story of Griselda, c. 1494, tempera on panel, Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts (panel background)

I n ven tory of the ep is odes from the Life of A lexa nder

X.9 X.10 X.11 X.12 X.13 X.14 X.15 X.16 X.17 X.18 X.19 X.20 X.21 X.22

Sodoma, 1518-1519, fresco, Rome, Villa Farnesina, Room of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxane Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, 1559-1560, fresco, Bracciano, Orsini-Odescalchi Castle, Room of Alexander Luzio Romano (attr.), 1559-1562, fresco, Bolsena, Palazzo Crispo (today Palazzo Del Drago), Room of Alexander Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Sala Gialla (Darius’s Daughter Stateira Presenting Alexander with the Booty of Issus, which He Refuses) Giambattista Zelotti, c. 1560-1565, fresco, Lonedo di Lugo (Vicenza), Villa Godi Malinverni, Sala di Venere (Alexander, Hephaestion and Sisygambis) Workshop of Andrea and Ottavio Semino, c. 1565, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Agostino Pallavicino in Strada Nuova, Sala di Alessandro Paolo Veronese, 1565-1567, oil on canvas, London, National Gallery Francesco Morandini (il Poppi), 1570-1572, oil on panel, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici Workshop of Francesco Bassano, 1590s, oil on canvas, Padua, Musei Civici, inv. 1027 Bernardo Castello, 1592, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Antisala Venetian school, c. 1600, oil on canvas, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

XI. The Siege of Tyre Sources

Curtius Rufus  IV.2.1-4.19; Plutarch  XXIV.2-XXV.1; Arrian  II.18.1-24.6; Diodorus Siculus XVII.40.2-46.5 Artworks

XI.1

XI.2 XI.3 XI.4 XI.5

Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illuminated picture from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450, Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 34 v Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, 1559-1560, fresco, Bracciano, Orsini-Odescalchi Castle, Room of Alexander Luzio Romano (attr.), 1559-1562, fresco, Bolsena, Palazzo Crispo (today Palazzo Del Drago), Room of Alexander Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani

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XII. Sieges of Other Cities XII.1 XII.2 XII.3

Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX (possibly, siege of Halicarnassus) Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani (possibly, siege of Nysa) Paolo Veronese, oil on canvas, c. 1575, Venice, Palazzo Ducale, Sala del Collegio, ceiling monochrome (possibly, siege of the city of the Mallians)5

XIII. The Meeting with the Jewish High Priest Jaddus at Jerusalem6 Sources

Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II, 325-339 Artworks

XIII.1

XIII.2 XIII.3 XIII.4 XIII.5 XIII.6 XIII.7





Michelangelo, 1508-1512, fresco, Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel, medallion on the ceiling Francesco Salviati, engraving, 1530-1536, Los Angeles, County Museum of Art Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina (complemented by Alexander Praying in the Temple of Jerusalem) Alessandro Cesati, cast bronze medal for Pope Paul III Farnese (verso), 1546, London, British Museum Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Sala Gialla Bernardo Castello, 1592, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Salone

5 Ettore Merkel (“Gli ‘exempla virtutis’. Una riconsiderazione dopo il restauro del soffitto del Collegio”, in Nuovi studi su Paolo Veronese, ed. M. Gemin, Venice, 1990, p. 380-390, at p. 384) has tentatively seen in this picture a depiction of “Alessandro nell’atto di incitare i soldati alla conquista della città di Tebe nel 335”, while labelling the relevant image illustration as “Alessandro vince Archelao a Cheronea”. I believe that neither of these battles are in fact depicted here. The painting shows a soldier climbing a ladder which is leaning on some city walls, and is surrounded by his companions who raise their shields against arrows coming from above. These elements seem to me to indicate a famous episode of the Mallian campaign in the Punjab (326-325 bc), when Alexander forced the siege of a seemingly impregnable town by grabbing a ladder and climbing into the city himself. This deed, which resulted in Alexander being so seriously wounded that rumours of his death began to spread in the Macedonian camp, became a notable exemplum fortitudinis which occasionally appears in the iconographic tradition (e.g., in the Triumph of Fortitude, a Flemish tapestry part of The Triumph of the Seven Virtues series, c. 1535, San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums, which, among a number of exemplary figures from antiquity, shows Alexander standing on his ladder and attacking the Mallians fighting from the top of their city walls. On this tapestry, see A. G. Bennett, Five Centuries of Tapestry from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1976, p. 98-99, no. 20). 6 In the later tradition, this episode is also combined with the following one, ‘Alexander Being Shown the Book of Daniel in the Temple of Jerusalem’.

I n ven tory of the ep is odes from the Life of A lexa nder

XIV. Mount Athos Carved in the Form of Alexander, as Proposed by the Architect Dinocrates (sometimes depicted as Dinocrates presenting Alexander with the project) Sources

Plutarch, De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute 335c-e; Vitruvius II.1.1-4; Strabo XIV.1.23; Lucian, How to Write History 12 Artworks

XIV.1

XIV.2 XIV.3

Francesco di Giorgio Martini, drawing from his Trattato di architettura, c. 1495, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, ms. Magl. II.1.141, fol. 77 v Drawing from Pellegrino Prisciani, Orthopasca, c. 1501, Modena, Biblioteca Estense, ms. Lat. 466 = alfa.X.1.6, fol. 1 r (two juxtaposed images: Pellegrino Prisciani before Pope Julius II and Dinocrates before Alexander presenting his project) Workshop of Raphael, 1524-1532, drawing, Fossombrone, Biblioteca Civica Passionei, Fossombrone Sketchbook, fol. 38 v (Mount Athos carved according to Dinocrates’s project)

XV. Visit to the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa Sources

Curtius Rufus IV.7; Plutarch XXVI.11-XXVII.11; Arrian III.3.1-4.5; Diodorus Siculus XVII.49.2-51.4 Artworks

XV.1 Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani XVI. Foundation of the City of Alexandria in Egypt Sources

Curtius Rufus IV.8.1-6; Plutarch XXVII.4-10; Arrian III.1.5-2.2; Diodorus Siculus XVI.52 Artworks

XVI.1

XVI.2 XVI.3

Master of San Miniato (attr.), c. 1460, cassone panel, Venice, Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro (foundation of Alexandria Bucephala) Reginaldo Piramo, illuminated picture from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (in Greek, for Duke of Atri, Andrea Matteo III Acquaviva), 1490-1510, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ms. Phil. Gr. 4, fol. 27 r Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander

XVII. The Triumphal Entry into Babylon Sources

Curtius Rufus V.1.19

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a p p en di x 1 Artworks

XVII.1 Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illuminated picture from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450, Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 75 r XVII.2 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina XVII.3 Luzio Romano (attr.), 1559-1562, fresco, Bolsena, Palazzo Crispo (today Palazzo Del Drago), Room of Alexander (Triumph of Alexander, perhaps Entry into Babylon?) XVIII. Alexander Placing (or Ordering the Placing of ) Homer’s Iliad in a Golden Casket from Darius’s Treasure Sources

Plutarch XXVI.1-2 Artworks

XVIII.1 Workshop of Raphael, c. 1513-1520s, fresco monochrome, Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Stanza della Segnatura XVIII.2 Giulio Romano and workshop, 1530-1531, fresco, Mantua, Palazzo Te, Room of the Emperors XVIII.3 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina XVIII.4 Manno di Bastiano Sbarri (design of Perin del Vaga), 1547-1561, silver relief from the Cassetta Farnese, Naples, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte XVIII.5 Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander XVIII.6 Niccolò dell’Abate, 1568-1570, fresco, Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes XIX. The Burning of Persepolis at the Instigation of Thais Sources

Curtius Rufus V.7.2-9; Plutarch XXXVIII; Diodorus XVII.72.1-6 Artworks

XIX.1

XIX.2

Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illuminated picture from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450, Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 75 r Ludovico Carracci, c. 1592, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Francia (formerly Luchini Angelelli Zambeccari)

I n ven tory of the ep is odes from the Life of A lexa nder

XX. Alexander Covering Darius’s Body with His Cloak Sources

Plutarch XLIII.3 Artworks

XX.1

XX.2 XX.3 XX.4 XX.5 XX.6

Reginaldo Piramo, illuminated picture from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (in Greek, for Duke of Atri, Andrea Matteo III Acquaviva), 1490-1510, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ms. Phil. Gr. 4, fol. 27 r Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander (Alexander Having the Body of Darius Reburied) Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani Giambattista Zelotti, c. 1560-1565, fresco, Lonedo di Lugo (Vicenza), Villa Godi Malinverni, Salone centrale Venetian school, c. 1600, oil on canvas, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (Alexander Before Darius’s Body)

XXI. The Meeting with the Queen of the Amazons Thalestris Sources

Curtius Rufus VI.5.24-32; Plutarch XLVI; Diodorus Siculus XVII.77.1-3 Artworks

XXI.1

XXI.2

XXI.3

XXI.4 XXI.5

Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illuminated picture from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450, Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 100 v Francesco Primaticcio, c. 1540, drawing for a fresco in the Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes at Fontainebleau, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, Cabinet des dessins, Fonds des dessins et miniatures, inv. 8572 recto After Francesco Primaticcio, c. 1545, copy of a drawing for the Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes at Fontainebleau, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, Cabinet des dessins, Fonds des dessins et miniatures, inv. 8705 recto (Thalestris Climbing into Alexander’s Bed) Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, 1559-1560, fresco, Bracciano, Orsini-Odescalchi Castle, Room of Alexander Bernardo Castello, 1592, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Salone

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XXII. Alexander Giving His Chair by the Fire to a Shivering Soldier Sources

Curtius Rufus VIII.4.15-17; Valerius Maximus, Factorum et dictorum memorabilium V.1 ext. 1 Artworks

XXII.1 Andrea Mantegna (attr.), c. 1490s, fresco, Mantua, Casa Tallarino XXII.2 Giulio Romano and workshop, c. 1531, Mantua, Palazzo Te, Apartment of the Secret Garden, Camera di Attilio Regolo XXII.3 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina (celetto) XXIII. The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane Sources

Lucian, Herodotus or Aetion 4-6; Curtius Rufus VIII.4.23-29; Plutarch XLVII.7 Artworks

XXIII.1 Raphael, c. 1516-1517, sanguigna, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina XXIII.2 Sodoma, 1518-1519, fresco, Rome, Villa Farnesina, Room of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxane XXIII.3 Gian Giacomo Caraglio after Raphael, 1526-1539, engraving, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum XXIII.4 Francesco Xanto Avelli, maiolica plate, c. 1535, Bologna, Museo Civico XXIII.5 Girolamo da Santacroce (attr.), c. 1535, oil on canvas (sold at Sotheby’s London, 6 December 2007) XXIII.6 Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta, 1540-1545, mural transferred to canvas, Rome, Galleria Borghese (from the Casino Olgiati-Bevilacqua) XXIII.7 Francesco Primaticcio, 1541-1544, fresco, Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes XXIII.8 Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX (possibly, Story of Roxane?) XXIII.9 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina (celetto: Alexander Presenting Roxane with a Crown) XXIII.10 Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Salone degli Arazzi XXIV. Alexander Reconciling Hephaestion and Craterus Sources

Plutarch XLVII.11-12

I n ven tory of the ep is odes from the Life of A lexa nder Artworks

XXIV.1 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina XXIV.2 Ponsio Jacquio, c. 1555, fresco, Rome, Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Room of Alexander XXIV.3 Luzio Romano (attr.), 1559-1562, fresco, Bolsena, Palazzo Crispo (today Palazzo Del Drago), Room of Alexander XXV. The Crossing of the Hydaspes River Sources

Curtius Rufus VIII.13.5-27; Plutarch LX.1-7; Arrian V.13.1-4 Artworks

Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX XXV.2 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina (Alexander Ordering the Construction of Ships to Cross the Hydaspes) XXV.3 Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Sala Gialla XXV.1

XXVI. The Battle of the Hydaspes against Porus Sources

Curtius Rufus VIII.14.1-39; Plutarch LX.8-13; Arrian V.14.1-18.3; Diodorus Siculus XVII.87.1-89.1 Artworks

XXVI.1 Master of San Miniato (attr.), c. 1460, cassone panel, Venice, Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro XXVI.2 Illuminated picture from Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1467, Turin, Biblioteca Reale, ms. Varia 75 (Codice Sforza), fol. 7 r (a wounded Bucephalus, who died after the battle, is also depicted next to Alexander) XXVI.3 Reginaldo Piramo, illuminated picture from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (in Greek, for Duke of Atri, Andrea Matteo III Acquaviva), 1490-1510, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ms. Phil. Gr. 4, fol. 27 r (possibly) XXVI.4 Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, c. 1545, fresco, Città di Castello (Perugia), Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX XXVI.5 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina (Porus Attacked by Macedonian Soldiers) XXVI.6 Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Sala Gialla

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XXVII. Mercy Towards the Defeated Porus Sources

Plutarch LX.14-16; Curtius Rufus VIII.14.40-46; Arrian V.18.4-19.3; Diodorus Siculus XVII.89.2-3 Artworks

XXVII.1 Illuminated picture from Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1467, Turin, Biblioteca Reale, ms. Varia 75 (Codice Sforza), fol. 7 r XXVIII. Alexander Refusing a Helmet full of Water Sources

Plutarch XLII. 5-107; Arrian VI.26.1-3 Artworks

XXVIII.1 Taddeo Zuccari, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Rome, Palazzo Caetani (formerly Mattei), Sala Gialla XXVIII.2 Tommaso Laureti, c. 1560, fresco transferred to canvas, Bologna, Palazzo Vizzani XXIX. Alexander Building (or Sacrificing on) Twelve Altars in India Sources

Curtius Rufus IX.3.19; Plutarch LXII.8; Arrian V.29.1-2; Diodorus Siculus XVII.95.3 Artworks

XXIX.1 Perin del Vaga and workshop, 1545-1547, fresco, Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina XXIX.2 Paolo Veronese, oil on canvas, c. 1575, Venice, Palazzo Ducale, Sala del Collegio, ceiling monochrome8 XXX. The Courage Shown by a Macedonian Boy during a Sacrifice Performed by Alexander Sources

Valerius Maximus, Factorum et dictorum memorabilium III.3 ext. 1

7 Unlike the other historians, who place the incident towards the end of Alexander’s expedition, in the Gedrosian desert, Plutarch has the event happening much earlier in the story, during Alexander’s march in pursuit of Darius after the battle of Gaugamela. 8 I do not share Ettore Merkel’s identification of this scene as “Alessandro Magno che sacrifica nella Troade sopra i dodici altari prima di muovere alla conquista dell’Asia” (“Gli ‘exempla virtutis’”, p. 385); the very number of altars shown in the picture, as well as the Persian/Oriental attire of the figures, which the same Merkel has noted, seem to me to point to another sacrifice instead, which was performed by Alexander at the end, rather than at the beginning of his journey – namely, the sacrifice made on the twelve altars that he had built in India.

I n ven tory of the ep is odes from the Life of A lexa nder Artworks

Domenico Beccafumi, c. 1520-1524, fresco, Siena, Palazzo Bindi Sergardi (formerly Agostini, Casini Casuccini, known also as Palazzo Venturi) XXX.2 Flemish workshop upon design of Francesco Salviati, c. 1542, tapestry, Naples, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte XXX.1

XXXI. The Indian Philosopher Calanus Burning in the Fire before Alexander Sources

Plutarch LXIX6-8 Artworks

XXXI.1 Francesco Xanto Avelli, 1532, maiolica plate, London, British Museum, inv. 1913, 1220.120 XXXI.2 Bernardo Castello, 1592, fresco, Genoa, Palazzo di Angelo Giovanni e Giulio Spinola in Strada Nuova, primo piano nobile, Salone (possibly) XXXII. Susa Weddings Sources

Plutarch LXX.2; Arrian VII.4.4-8 Artworks

XXXII.1 Francesco Primaticcio, c. 1540, drawing for the Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes at Fontainebleau, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, Cabinet des dessins, Fonds des dessins et miniatures, inv. 8569 (Susa Weddings Banquet) XXXIII. The Death of Alexander (Macedonian Soldiers Paying their Respects to the Dying Alexander) Sources

Curtius Rufus X.1-6; Plutarch LXXVI 1-9; Arrian VII.26.1 Artworks

XXXIII.1 Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illuminated picture from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450, Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 224 v.

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Among other significant episodes developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are ‘Alexander’s Visit to Achilles’s Tomb’ (e.g., Francesco Fontebasso, c. 1750, Prague, Národní Muzeum), ‘Alexander Being Rescued from the River Cydnus’ (e.g., Pietro Testa, c. 1650, oil on canvas, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and ‘Alexander Sealing Hephaestion’s Lips’, which originated in sixteenth-century books of emblems. Stories which did make their appearance in the Quattro and Cinquecento but gained significant popularity only in later centuries include ‘Alexander’s Mercy towards the Indian King Porus’, ‘The Meeting with Thalestris Queen of the Amazons’, and ‘The Murder of Cleitus’9; a noteworthy Alexander cycle featuring these three episodes, alongside ‘Alexander Being Rescued from the River Cydnus’, was painted by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini in 1696 in the Portego of the Casino Correr, on the island of Murano. Other incidents in Alexander’s life, such as his ‘Visit to the Delphic Oracle’ or ‘The Gardener Abdalonymus Made King of Sidon’ also enjoyed some limited popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.



9 To my knowledge, the only example of Alexander killing Cleitus before 1600 can be found in ms. I.VII.23 of the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati di Siena, fol. 156 v, which I discussed in Chapter 4.

A ppendix 2

Inventory of the existing painted cycles of Alexander in Italy (1500 to 1600)

The aim of this appendix is to provide a list of the fresco cycles devoted to Alexander which were painted in Italy in the sixteenth century and still survive today. For the purpose of the present study, I have taken into consideration only those cycles that illustrate narrative episodes from the life of Alexander, taken from the ancient historical sources, with a biographic intent – that is, with the aim of telling his life through a selection of his chief deeds. Cycles in artistic media other than painting (for example, sets of tapestries or series of sculpted or stucco reliefs) do exist but date later than 1600 and are therefore not included here. Nor have I included cycles devoted to ancient history which show stories of Alexander alongside those of other Greek and Roman famous men – although the individual Alexander episodes featuring in them are listed in Appendix 1. Cycles which, at the present state of research, cannot be firmly identified as Alexander’s are also not discussed here1. The cycles are listed in chronological order; alongside the essential information concerning authorship, date, technique and location, I provide for each of these ‘Rooms of Alexander’ the list of episodes from Alexander’s life that are illustrated, as well as a select bibliography. 1. SODOMA AND BARTOLOMEO DI DAVID, 1518-1519, WITH LATER ADDITION BY GUILLAUME DE MARCILLAT (ATTR.), c. 1525, FRESCO, ROME, VILLA FARNESINA, ROOM OF THE MARRIAGE OF ALEXANDER AND ROXANE Episodes

Meeting with the Family of Darius; Marriage of Alexander and Roxane; Taming of Bucephalus; Battle Scene (Issus?)



1 This is the case, for example, of the fresco cycle in Palazzo Spada (formerly Capodiferro) in Rome, ascribed to Siciolante da Sermoneta and dated around 1550; the identity of its main character, that scholars have identified as either Alexander or Scipio Africanus, seems still dubious to me. On the cycle, see L. Mortari, “Gerolamo Siciolante a palazzo Spada Capodiferro”, Commentari, 26 (1975), p. 89-97; L. Neppi, Palazzo Spada, Rome, 1975, p. 54, 65, 85 and fig. 54-60; S. Urcioli, Palazzo Spada: il percorso ritrovato. Nuovi studi sulle decorazioni cinquecentesche, Rome, 2017, p. 79-87; the identification with Scipio was first suggested by R. Keaveney, “Siciolante at the Palazzo Spada: Scipio Africano or Alexander the Great”, in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Federico Zeri, ed. M. Natale, 2 vol., Milan, 1984, I, p. 401-405.

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R. Bartalini, Le occasioni del Sodoma: dalla Milano di Leonardo alla Roma di Raffaello, Rome, 1996, p. 75-81, and Id., “Da Raffaello al Sodoma: sulla camera nuziale di Agostino Chigi alla Farnesina”, in Late Raphael: Proceedings of the International Symposium/Actas del congreso internacional (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2012), ed. M. Falomir, Madrid and Turnhout, 2013, p. 70-79

2. PERIN DEL VAGA AND WORKSHOP, 1545-1547, FRESCO, ROME, CASTEL SANT’ANGELO, SALA PAOLINA Episodes

On the walls: Alexander Placing Homer’s Iliad in a Golden Casket; Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot; Meeting with the Family of Darius; Alexander Reconciling Two Soldiers (Hephaestion and Craterus); Alexander Consecrating the Altars of the Twelve Olympian Gods On the celetti above the windows: Alexander Giving His Chair by the Fire to a Shivering Soldier; Alexander Sacrificing to the Gods2; Marriage of Alexander and Roxane (Alexander Presenting Roxane with a Crown) On the vault: Meeting of Alexander and the Jewish High Priest Jaddus at Jerusalem; Alexander Praying in the Temple of Jerusalem; Alexander Burning the Carriages of Persian Booty on his Way to India; King Porus Attacked by Macedonian Soldiers; Alexander Ordering the Construction of Ships to Cross the Hydaspes; Triumphal Entry into Babylon Bibliography

Gli affreschi di Paolo III a Castel Sant’Angelo: progetto ed esecuzione 1543-1548 (exhibition catalogue, Rome, Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo, 1981-1982), ed. F.  M. Aliberti Gaudioso and E.  Gaudioso, 2  vol., Rome, 1981; R.  Guerrini, “Plutarco e la cultura figurativa nell’età di Paolo  III: Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina”, RACAR Revue d’art canadienne, 12.2 (1985), p. 179-187; Id., “Storia antica e iconografia umanistica (D. Zaga, Episodi della vita di Alessandro Magno, Sala Paolina, Castel Sant’Angelo)”, Athenaeum, 63 (1985), p. 37-43

3. COLA DELL’AMATRICE AND WORKSHOP, c. 1545, FRESCO, CITTÀ DI CASTELLO (PERUGIA), PALAZZO VITELLI ALLA CANNONIERA, ROOM IX Episodes

Taming of Bucephalus; Siege of a City (possibly Halicarnassus); Battle of Issus; Siege of Tyre; Alexander Covering Darius’s Body with His Cloak; Alexander in Darius’s Palace at Susa; Alexander with His Army Crossing the River Hydaspes; Alexander Defeating Porus; Story of Roxane (?) Bibliography

Pinacoteca Comunale di Città di Castello: Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, ed. F. F. Mancini, 2 vol., Perugia, 1987-1988, I. I dipinti, p. 114-123, no. 13 (R. Guerrini)



2 More on this celetto, which remains unidentified in the scholarly literature, is in an article I am currently working on.

inventory of the existing painted cycles of alexander in italy (1500 to 1600)

4. PONSIO JACQUIO, c. 1555, FRESCO, ROME, PALAZZO RICCI-SACCHETTI, ROOM OF ALEXANDER Episodes

Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot; Meeting with the Family of Darius; Alexander Ordering Homer’s Iliad to be Placed in a Golden Basket; Alexander Pouring a Libation to the Memory of the Trojan Heroes; Battle of Issus; Foundation of Alexandria; Alexander Having the Body of Darius Reburied; Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe; Taming of Bucephalus; Alexander Receiving an Ambassador from Nysa; Alexander Reconciling Two Soldiers (Hephaestion and Craterus); Alexander Kneeling Before the High Priest of Jerusalem Bibliography

J. L. de Jong, “An Important Patron and an Unknown Artist: Giovanni Ricci, Ponsio Jacquio, and the Decoration of the Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti in Rome”, The Art Bulletin, 74 (1992), p. 135-156, esp. p. 139 and 141-143

5. TADDEO AND FEDERICO ZUCCARI, 1559-1560, FRESCO, BRACCIANO, ORSINI-ODESCALCHI CASTLE, ROOM OF ALEXANDER Episodes

The Siege of Tyre; Meeting of Alexander and Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons; Triumph of Alexander and Thais in Carmania3; Meeting with the Family of Darius

Bibliography

C. Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari: fratelli pittori del Cinquecento, 2 vol., Milan and Rome, 1998-1999, I, p. 116-123; C. Daniotti, “Stories of Valour and Love for a Wedding: The Sala di Alessandro Magno and Sala di Psiche in the Castle of Bracciano”, in Building Family Identity: The Orsini Castle of Bracciano from Fiefdom to Duchy (1470-1698), ed. P. Alei and M. Grossman, New York and Oxford, 2019, p. 329-350

6. LUZIO ROMANO (ATTR.), 1559-1562, FRESCO, BOLSENA, PALAZZO CRISPO (TODAY PALAZZO DEL DRAGO), ROOM OF ALEXANDER Episodes

On the vault: Meeting with the Family of Darius; The Siege of Tyre; Alexander Reconciling Two Soldiers (Hephaestion and Craterus); The Fire of Tyre; Triumph of Alexander (too damaged to be identified with a more precise episode such as the Triumphal Entry into Babylon) Bibliography

A. De Romanis, Il Palazzo di Tiberio Crispo a Bolsena, Rome, 1995, esp. p. 1-6 and 13-16

3 According to the identification I suggested in my 2019 essay (see Bibliography below).

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7. TADDEO ZUCCARI, c. 1560, FRESCO TRANSFERRED TO CANVAS, ROME, PALAZZO CAETANI (FORMERLY MATTEI) Episodes

Sala Gialla: Alexander Meeting the High Priest Jaddus; Meeting with the Family of Darius (Darius’s Daughter Stateira Presenting Alexander with the Booty of Issus, Which He Refuses); Alexander and His Army Crossing the River Hydaspes; Alexander Defeating Porus; Alexander Refusing Water from a Soldier in the Gedrosian Desert Salone degli Arazzi: Marriage of Alexander and Roxane; Taming of Bucephalus; Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot; Timoclea Before Alexander; Alexander and Diogenes Bibliography

C. Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari: fratelli pittori del Cinquecento, 2 vol., Milan and Rome, 1998-1999, I, p. 124-129

8. TOMMASO LAURETI, c. 1560, FRESCO TRANSFERRED TO CANVAS, BOLOGNA, PALAZZO VIZZANI Episodes

Battle of the Granicus; Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot; Meeting with the Family of Darius; Siege of Tyre; Alexander Visiting the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa; Alexander Covering Darius’s Body with His Cloak; Alexander Refuses some Water Offered by a Soldier; Siege of Nysa4; Exchange of Gifts Between Alexander and Omphis King of Taxila. In addition to these, the cycle comprised some estimated five scenes, now lost; among them, there was possibly a depiction of Alexander’s Apotheosis. Bibliography

M.  Marongiu, “Le Storie di Alessandro Magno in Palazzo  Vizzani a Bologna”, Fontes. Rivista di filologia, iconografia e storia della tradizione classica, 13-16 (2004-2005), p. 29-51

9. GIAMBATTISTA ZELOTTI, c. 1560-1565, FRESCO, LONEDO DI LUGO (VICENZA), VILLA GODI MALINVERNI, SALONE CENTRALE Episodes

Battle Scene (possibly Issus?); Alexander Covering Darius’s Body with His Cloak

Bibliography

G. Bodon, “Alessandro eroe ‘platonico’? Una proposta di lettura del ciclo cinquecentesco nel salone di Villa Godi a Lonedo di Lugo Vicentino”, in Alessandro Magno in età moderna, ed. F. Biasutti



4 I follow here the identification suggested by Marcella Marongiu, as opposed to that of Anton W. A. Boschloo (Il fregio dipinto a Bologna da Nicolò dell’Abate ai Carracci, 1550-1580, Bologna, 1984), who thought of the Sack of Tyre.

inventory of the existing painted cycles of alexander in italy (1500 to 1600)

and A. Coppola, Padua, 2009, p. 95-116, at p. 108-109; Gli affreschi nelle ville venete: il Cinquecento, ed. G. Pavanello and V. Mancini, Venice, 2008, p. 272-286, no. 68 (L. Crosato Larcher)

10. WORKSHOP OF ANDREA AND OTTAVIO SEMINO, c. 1565, FRESCO, GENOA, PALAZZO DI AGOSTINO PALLAVICINO IN STRADA NUOVA, SALA DI ALESSANDRO Episodes

Meeting with the Family of Darius; Battle of the Granicus; Battle Scene (possibly Issus?); Alexander and the Basilisk5; Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot Bibliography

L. Stagno, “‘Imago Alexandri’ nella grande decorazione genovese (XVI-XVII secolo)”, in Biografia dipinta e ritratto dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo: Atti del Convegno, 26-27 ottobre 2007, ed. M. Caciorgna, L. D’Anselmo, M. Marongiu and M. Sanfilippo, Siena, 2008, p. 69-92, esp. p. 7278; La pittura in Liguria: il Cinquecento, ed. E. Parma, Genoa, 2000, p. 250-254, esp. p. 251

11. BERNARDO CASTELLO, 1592, FRESCO, GENOA, PALAZZO DI ANGELO GIOVANNI E GIULIO SPINOLA IN STRADA NUOVA, PRIMO PIANO NOBILE, SALONE Episodes

Meeting with Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons; Taming of Bucephalus; Battle of Issus; Alexander and Ada Queen of Caria; Alexander’s Sacrificing to the Gods (possibly, The Brahmin Calanus Willing to Step into the Fire); Alexander and Aristotle; Alexander Meeting a Group of Greek Prisoners Mutilated by the Persians at the Gates of Persepolis; Alexander and Diogenes; Meeting of Alexander and the High Priest Jaddus. On the north wall, a monochrome shows The Cutting of the Gordian Knot. Bibliography

L. Stagno, “‘Imago Alexandri’ nella grande decorazione genovese (XVI-XVII secolo)”, in Biografia dipinta e ritratto dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo: Atti del Convegno, 26-27 ottobre 2007, ed. M. Caciorgna, L. D’Anselmo, M. Marongiu and M. Sanfilippo, Siena, 2008, p. 69-92, esp. p. 7886, and La pittura in Liguria: il Cinquecento, ed. E. Parma, Genoa, 2000, p. 281-291, esp. p. 287288, and p. 140.



5 The story of how Alexander ingenuously defeated a basilisk known for its venomous stare is told in the Historia de Preliis J3 and other texts contributing to the legendary tradition; the inclusion of such a marvellous episode in a sixteenth-century fresco cycle relying on the historical accounts of Alexander’s life is most extraordinary and can perhaps be explained, as Laura Stagno has suggested (“‘Imago Alexandri’ nella grande decorazione genovese (XVI-XVII secolo”, in Biografia dipinta e ritratto dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo: Atti del Convegno, 26-27 ottobre 2007, ed. M. Caciorgna, L. D’Anselmo, M. Marongiu and M. Sanfilippo, Siena, 2008, p. 69-92, at p. 78), in light of the courage and resourcefulness shown by Alexander on this occasion, as much as when cutting the Gordian knot.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources Aelian [Claudius Aelianus], Varia historia/Historical miscellany, ed. and trans. N.  G. Wilson, Cambridge MA and London, 1997 Alberic of Pisançon, The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, vol. 3, Version of Alexandre de Paris, Variants and Notes to Branch I, ed. A. Foulet, Princeton, 1949, p. 37-60 Alexander of Paris, The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, vol. 2, Version of Alexandre de Paris, Text, ed.  E.  C. Armstrong, D.  L. Buffum, B.  Edwards et L.  F.  H. Lowe, Princeton, 1937; Alexandre de Bernay, Il Romanzo di Alessandro, ed. and trans. M. Infurna and M. Mancini, Milan, 2014 Alexandreida in rima: The Life and Deeds of Alexander the Great in an Anonymous Italian Renaissance Poem, ed. A. Wilson Tordi, Lewiston NY, 2004 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. H. Rackham, New York and London, 1934 Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri and Indica, ed. P. A. Brunt, 2 vol., Cambridge MA and London, 19761983 Arrian, L’Indiké di Arriano: introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento, ed. N. Biffi, Bari, 2000 Giovanni Aurispa, Carteggio, ed. R. Sabbadini, Rome, 1931 Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, ed. A. M. Finoli and L. Grassi, 2 vol., Milan, 1972 L’Aventuroso ciciliano attribuito a Bosone da Gubbio: un “centone” di volgarizzamenti due-trecenteschi, ed. C. Lorenzi, Pisa, 2010 Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione, ed. V. Branca, Milan, 1974 (in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, ed. V. Branca, 12 vol., Milan, 1964-1998, III, p. 1-272) Giovanni Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium, ed. P. G. Ricci and V. Zaccaria, Milan, 1983 (in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, ed. V. Branca, 12 vol., Milan, 1964-1998, IX) Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, ed. V.  Zaccaria, Milan, 1967 (in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, ed. V. Branca, 12 vol., Milan, 1964-1998, X) Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. G.  Padoan, Milan, 1965 (in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, ed. V. Branca, 12 vol., Milan, 1964-1998, VI); Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, trans. M. Papio, Toronto, 2009 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogiae deorum gentilium, ed. V.  Zaccaria, Milan, 1998 (in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, ed. V. Branca, 12 vol., Milan, 1964-1998, VII-VIII.2) Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, ed. S. Miglietti, Pisa, 2013 Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. H. Hart, 3 vol., Florence, 1984-1987 Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis, trans. P. W. G. Gordan, New York, 1974 Brunetto Latini, Tresor, ed. P. G. Beltrami, P. Squillacioti, P. Torri and S. Vatteroni, Turin, 2007

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Index of names

Page numbers in italics indicate references found in the Appendixes. Abdalonymus, 278 Acciaiuoli, Niccolò, 148 Achilles, 11, 148, 151, 154, 239, 278 Acquaviva, Andrea Matteo III, duke of Atri, 271, 273, 275 Ada, queen of Caria, 283 Adam, 32, 148n, 160 Adonis, 237 Aelian, 229n Aemilius Paulus, 138n Aeneas, 79, 151, 154 Aesop, 17n Aëtion, 227, 228n Aglye, 75 Ahmedi, 262 Albèri, Antonio, 100 Alberic of Pisançon, 23, 95n Alcibiades, 155n Alexander (Thracian commander), 166n Alexander Balas Epiphanes, 72n Alexander Molossus, king of Epirus, 107 Alexander of Paris, 19, 23, 39, 74 Alexander of Pherae, 106n Alexander III of Macedon (Alexander the Great) – chief episodes from his life and legend: with Apelles and Campaspe, 229-231, 260, 267, 281 battle of Gaugamela (or Arbela), 135, 138, 153, 267n, 276n battle of the Granicus, 98, 135, 138n, 168, 186, 188, 266, 282-283 battle of the Hydaspes against Porus, 35, 55-56, 189, 238, 275, 280, 282

battle of Issus, 135-142, 145, 186, 188-189, 221, 223n, 232, 260, 267-268, 279-283 begetting, 20-27, 105, 108, 232, 234-237, 260, 263-264 birth, 20-27, 39, 98, 108-109, 232-238, 260, 263-264 burning Persepolis, 187, 189, 240, 272 cutting the Gordian knot, 106, 233, 265n, 266-267, 280-283 death, 35n, 71-73, 94, 157, 188, 266n, 277 with exuviae elephantis (on coins), 185 flight with griffins, 13, 18, 27n, 30-35, 39, 53, 56-58, 60-61, 71-72, 81, 105, 108-110, 153, 256, 262 founding Alexandria, 271, 281 with helmet (on coins), 177-184, 217 as Hercules (on coins), 175-177 with horns of Zeus-Ammon (on coins), 184-185 marriage with Roxane, 221, 226-229, 231, 260, 263, 274, 279-280, 282 meeting with the family of Darius, 135145, 172, 218, 220-227, 229, 231, 233n, 238239, 257, 260-261, 263, 268-269, 279-283 meeting with the High Priest Jaddus, 270, 280-283 meeting with the Queen of the Amazons (Thalestris), 138n, 170, 187, 273, 278, 281, 283 mercy towards Darius (covering Darius’s body with his cloak), 74, 238, 273, 280, 282 mercy towards Porus, 238, 276, 278 murdering Cleitus, 16n, 167n, 187, 189, 278

330

i n dex of n ames

placing Homer’s Iliad in a Golden Casket, 239, 272, 280-281 siege of Tyre, 165, 186-187, 239, 269, 280282 submarine voyage (descent into the sea), 18, 27n, 33-35, 39, 53, 56-57, 60-62, 71, 81, 105, 108, 110, 153-154, 182, 256, 258 Susa weddings, 222, 229, 277 taming of Bucephalus, 20, 26n, 27-29, 39, 56, 110, 188, 221, 232-235, 238, 260, 264, 279-283 triumphal entry into Babylon, 187, 219, 271-272, 280-281 visit to the Oracular Trees of the Sun and the Moon, 26, 35-39, 53, 256 Alexander IV, 229 Alexander Romance (Pseudo-Callisthenes), 10, 12, 15, 17-18, 20-25, 27-28, 30-31, 33-35, 37, 39, 53, 55-58, 59n, 60, 62, 74, 81-82, 89, 96, 102, 105-107, 110-112, 133, 137-138, 154, 163, 170n, 182, 217n, 227n, 232, 234-235, 237, 239n, 255-256, 259, 261-262, 266n Alexandreida in rima, 53 Alfonso, duke of Calabria see Aragon, Alfonso Alfonso I, king of Naples see Aragon, Alfonso of (the Magnanimous) Alighieri, Dante see Dante Alighieri Altichiero da Zevio, 164 Amazons, 35, 56n, 63, 169-170, 187, 239, 273, 278, 281, 283 Amelei, 75 Ammon (Amun Ra) see Zeus Ammon Andrea del Castagno, 148, 171n Andrea of Hungary, 151 Angeli, Jacopo, 91 Anjou family, 152 Anjou, Robert, king of Naples, 151 Anne, St, 23 Anthiocus I Soter, 29n Antiochus IV, 72n Antipater, 35n, 71 Antony (Mark Antony), 228, 238n Apelles, 217n, 229-231, 260, 267, 281 Apollo, 141, 142n, 235

Apollonio di Giovanni, 134-137, 139-141, 152, 260, 267-268 Apuleius, 111n Aragon family, 58 Aragon, Alfonso of (the Magnanimous), king of Naples (as Alfonso I), 58, 93-94, 99, 113, 151, 161, 177 Aragon, Alfonso of, duke of Calabria, 173n, 177 Aragon, Beatrice of, 155n Aragon, Ferdinand I (Ferrante) of, king of Naples, 57, 177n Archpriest Leo of Naples see Leo of Naples, Archpriest Ariosto, Ludovico, 19n Aristobulus, 91, 92n Aristotle, 10, 17, 148n, 159, 162-163, 173, 180n, 238, 255, 265n, 271, 273, 275, 283 Arrian, 7-8, 10, 12n, 16, 89, 91-94, 96, 101n, 109-113, 139-140, 142, 168, 169n, 173, 177, 181, 218, 222, 232n, 240, 255-256, 259-261, 265-269, 271, 275-277 Artaxerxes III, 22 Artemis, 236 Artemisia, 171n Arthur, 63, 65, 77-78, 80-81 Athena, 178-182, 184n Attavante degli Attavanti, 178n Augustine, St, 163 Augustus, Emperor, 22, 31n, 156, 158, 176n, 177, 236n, 239n Aulus Gellius, 95n Aurispa, Giovanni, 92, 140 Avanzi, Jacopo, 164 Averlino, Antonio see Filarete Avventuroso ciciliano see Bosone da Gubbio Bacon, Roger, 62n Baldinucci, Filippo, 61n Bambaia (Agostino Busti), 234 Bartolomeo della Gatta, 174n Bartolomeo di David, 221n, 268, 279 Bassano, Francesco, 269 Battiferri, Matteo, 178 Bazzani, Giuseppe, 222, 228n, 233 Beaumont, Claudio Francesco, 228n

index of na mes

Beccafumi, Domenico, 277 Bede the Venerable, 163 Bellucci, Antonio, 222, 224 Belus, 158n Bembo, Bonifacio, 166 Berruguete, Pedro, 148n Bessarion, Cardinal, 100n, 261 Bessus, 165 Biondo, Flavio, 240 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 14, 64, 66n, 106-108, 111, 139n, 149, 154, 156, 160, 259 Boccati, Giovanni, 147 Bodin, Jean, 58n Boethius, 148n Boiardo, Feltrino, 111n Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 19n Boncompagni, Filippo, Cardinal (Nephew), 218n Boschetti, Isabella, 237 Boscoli, Andrea, 236, 264 Bosone da Gubbio, 64n Bracciolini, Poggio, 94n, 95, 98, 169n Brucianesi Master, 136n Brunetto Latini, 18, 29n, 61 Bruni, Leonardo, 99, 240 Brutus (founder of the Roman Republic), 156 Brutus ( Julius Caesar’s assassin), 238n Bucciolini, Pier Angelo, 80 Bucephalus, 20, 26n, 27-29, 38-39, 55-56, 110, 174n, 188, 221, 232-235, 238, 260, 264, 275, 279-283 Burgkmair, Hans, 67 Calanus, 277, 283 Callisthenes, 16n, 17, 100, 107, 159-160, 240 Campagnola, Domenico, 164 Campano, Giovanni Antonio, 90, 100, 139n, 145, 172, 238 Campaspe, 229-231, 239, 260, 267, 281 Candace, 35, 138n, 162-163 Carafa, Oliviero, Cardinal, 181 Caraglio, Gian Giacomo, 226-227, 274 Carlini, Giulio, 146n Carpaccio, Vittore, 266 Carracci, Ludovico, 236n, 272

da Carrara family (Carraresi), 164n da Carrara, Francesco I il Vecchio, lord of Padua, 164-165 Casaubon, Isaac, 17 Cassander, 229 Cassiodorus, 111 Castello, Bernardo, 264-265, 267-270, 273, 277, 283 Castello, Giovanni Battista, 265 Castiglione, Baldassare, 230, 238 Cato the Younger, 149n Cauzzi Gonzaga, Francesco, count of Calvisano, 237n Cecco Lapi, 155n Centaurs, 144n Cesati, Alessandro, 270 Charlemagne, 63, 64n, 65-66, 77, 156, 158 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, 54, 99n Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 54 Charles VI, king of France, 68n Charon, 110 Chigi, Agostino, 220-221, 226, 227n, 232 Cicero, 148n, 149n, 156, 240 Claudia Quinta, 171n Claudian, 149, 156 Cleitus, 16n, 100, 160, 167n, 187, 189, 240, 278 Clemenza Provana di Pancalieri, 68-69 Cleopatra, 154n, 228 Coenus, 188 Coghetti, Francesco, 221n Cola dell’Amatrice, 219, 234, 264-266, 268270, 273-275, 280 Colonna family, 161 Colonna, Angelo Michele, 219n Comestor, Peter, 16 Constantine, Emperor, 156, 158 Contugi, Matteo, 174n Coppi, Jacopo, 231n Corner, Girolamo, 164 Correr, Angelo, 239n da Cortona, Pietro (Pietro Berrettini), 144n, 239n, 267n Corvinus, Matthias, king of Hungary, 94n, 99n, 155n, 177-178, 181-183

3 31

332

i n dex of n ames

Cospi, Angelo, 94, 140 Costa, Lorenzo, 239n, 266 Craterus, 274-275, 280-281 Crispo, Tiberio, Cardinal, 225n Crosato, Giambattista, 228n, 230, 238n Cupid, 172, 222, 230 Curlo, Giacomo, 93, 140n Curtius Rufus, Quintus, 7-8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 57-58, 60, 81, 89, 92, 95-107, 109-112, 134135, 139-144, 154, 159, 162-163, 168, 169n, 172-174, 176, 181, 185-189, 219n, 221-222, 223n, 224, 227-229, 231n, 232n, 234, 235n, 238, 240, 255-263, 266-269, 271-277 Cusa, Nicholas of, Cardinal, 95 Cyriac of Ancona, 179 Cyrus the Great, 138n, 158, 166, 167n, 170, 171n Dandolo, Andrea, 31 Daniel, 72n, 74n, 158, 270n Dante Alighieri, 106, 111, 148n, 149, 154, 156 Daphne, 141n Dares Phrygius, 105n Darius I, 31n Darius III, 16n, 31n, 37, 55, 56n, 72-74, 78, 95, 97n, 100-101, 103, 107, 108n, 109, 135-145, 162-163, 165, 168, 172, 179, 181-182, 186, 218-222, 223n, 224-225, 227, 229, 231, 232n, 233n, 238-239, 257, 260-261, 263, 268-269, 272-273, 276n, 279-283 Datini, Francesco, 150 David, 63, 65, 77, 148n De Carolis, Adolfo, 146n decasyllabic Roman d’Alexandre, 23, 24n, 28n, 36, 39, 74 Decembrio, Angelo, 8-9, 14, 54, 99, 109-111 Decembrio, Pier Candido, 58, 90n, 94, 9799, 109, 111, 134, 140, 185-186, 188-189, 259, 266-267, 269, 272-273, 277 Degas, Edgar, 233 Deipyle, 65 Della Robbia (workshop), 182 Demosthenes, 162-163 De Mura, Francesco, 218n Deschamps, Eustache, 63, 146n Diadochi, 72, 94, 100, 107, 168 Dictys Cretensis, 105n

Dietleib, 75 Dietrich von Bern (Theodoric the Great), 75-76 Dinocrates, 271 Diodorus Siculus, 10, 12n, 16, 18, 89, 93-94, 96, 139-140, 142, 168-170, 173n, 218, 222, 225n, 232n, 240, 255, 260, 263, 266-269, 271-273, 275-276 Diogenes, 265, 282-283 Diogenes Laertius, 265 Diomedes, king of Thrace, 28 Dionysus, 11 Dioscuri, 234n Domenico di Bandino, 156n Donne famose (iconographic theme), 147, 151, 153n, 166, 169n, 171-173 Doria, Andrea, 54 Doria Pamphilj, Filippo Andrea V, 54n Duchess of Étampes (Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly), 219, 227, 230 Edward IV, king of England, 56 Elizabeth, St, 23 Erasmus, 97n Erizzo, Sebastiano, 175n Ermoldus Nigellus, 146n d’ Este, Borso, duke of Ferrara, 71-72, 110n d’ Este, Ercole I, duke of Ferrara, 58, 99, 111n d’ Este, Leonello, duke of Ferrara, 109, 110n, 111n, 176 Etiope, 66n Eumenes of Cardia, 107 Eunostos of Tanagra, 171n Eve, 32, 148n Facio, Bartolomeo, 93, 140n, 177 Famous Men (iconographic theme) see Uomini famosi Famous Women (iconographic theme) see Donne famose Farnese family, 225 Farnese, Alessandro see Paul III, Pope Ferdinand I (Ferrante), king of Naples see Aragon, Ferdinand I (Ferrante) Fernández de Heredia, Juan, 90n Ferrante (Ferdinand I), king of Naples see Aragon, Ferdinand I (Ferrante)

index of na mes

Ferrucci, Francesco di Simone, 183-184 Filarete (Antonio Averlino), 161n, 218 Filelfo, Francesco, 166-171, 173n, 260 Firdausi, 37-38 Flavius Josephus see Josephus, Flavius Fontebasso, Francesco, 239n, 278 Francesco da Fiano, 79, 80n, 81 Francesco I da Carrara see da Carrara, Francesco I il Vecchio Francesco I Sforza see Sforza, Francesco I Francesco di Antonio del Chierico, 176n Francis I, king of France, 230 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, 7, 92 Frezzi, Federico, 80n, 81 Fulvio, Andrea, 175n, 180n Furius Camillus, 156n Fury, 182 Galatea, 237 Garel, 76 Gaston de Foix, 234 Gawain, 75 Gaza, Theodore, 93 Gentile da Fabriano, 78, 80 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 111 George of Trebizond, 94n Gervase of Tilbury, 18 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 151, 229n Ghirlandaio, Davide, 268 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 143-144, 156n, 268 Giacomino da Ivrea, 77 Giamberti, Marco (Marco del Buono), 134, 136, 260 Giotto, 151-152, 154-155, 166n Giovanna I, queen of Naples, 151 Giovanni Ambrogio de’ Predis, 185n Giovanni di Ser Giovanni see Scheggia, Lo Giovanni Fiorentino (Malizia Barattone), 151-155 Girolamo da Santacroce, 227n, 274 Giulio da Urbino, 265 Giulio Romano (Giulio Pippi), 180, 217, 220, 235-237, 239n, 264, 272, 274 Giusto de’ Menabuoi, 161n Godfrey of Bouillon, 63, 65, 68, 77, 81 Godfrey of Viterbo, 38

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 224 Goldoni, Carlo, 146n Gonzaga family, 64 Gonzaga, Alessandro, 237 Gonzaga, Federico II, 228n, 237 Gonzaga, Francesco, Cardinal, 56, 176 Gregory I (the Great), Pope, 110, 148n Grenier, Guillaume, 56n Grenier, Melchior, 56n Grenier, Pascal, 54, 56 Guardi, Cecilia, 230n Guariento, 164n Guarino of Verona (Guarino Guarini), 90, 98n, 145, 172n, 238 Guglielmo da Pastrengo, 103 Guido da Pisa (twelfth-century priest), 20n Guido da Pisa (Dante’s commentator), 106n Guillaume de Marcillat, 221n, 232, 264, 279 Hadrian, Emperor, 91 Hannibal, 103, 149, 156-157, 167n, 220, 265 Harpies, 25n Hartlieb, Johann, 74 Hector, 62-63, 65-66, 68-69, 71, 75, 77, 79-81, 151, 154 Hegesias of Magnesia, 236 Henry III, king of England, 218n Hephaestion, 139, 140n, 221-227, 269, 274275, 278, 280-281 Hercules, 11, 28, 81, 148, 151, 154, 175-176, 177n, 240n Hermes, 228 Herse, 228 Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, 34, 38n Histoire ancienne jusqu’à Pompée, 71n Historia de Preliis ( J1, J2, J3 versions), 18-20, 23-24, 29, 34, 37, 53, 167n, 256, 283n Holofernes, 171n Homer, 169n, 180n, 239, 272, 280-281 Horatius Cocles, 147 Hymenaeus, 227 L’intelligenza, 219n Iollas, 35n Iseult, 75 Isidore of Kiev, 100n, 261

333

334

i n dex of n ames

Isidore of Seville, 18, 111, 163 Iulus, 80 Jacobilli, Ludovico, 80n, 81 Jaddus, 162-163, 270, 280-283 James, Henry, 224 James, Thomas, 178 Jaquerio, Giacomo, 65n Jason, 110 Jean de Berry, 63n Jean de Hesdin, 149 Jean de Vignay, 17 Jerome, St, 72n, 74n, 148n, 158 John III, duke of Naples, 18 John, St, the Baptist, 23 Jonah, 33n Joseph of Egypt, 171n Josephus, Flavius, 163, 270 Joshua, 63, 65, 70, 77, 148n Judas Maccabeus, 63, 65, 77 Judith, 148n, 171n Julius II, Pope, 271 Julius Caesar, 31n, 62-63, 65-66, 71, 75-77, 79-80, 90, 97, 99n, 136n, 138n, 139n, 144, 147n, 148, 150-151, 153-154, 156n, 160n, 167, 170, 176, 185, 188, 218n, 220, 265 Julius Valerius, 17, 30n, 96, 112 Juno, 180n Justin, 7, 10, 12, 16, 21n, 89, 96, 99-101, 103105, 107, 109, 112, 163n, 168-170, 255, 259 Justus of Ghent, 148n Juvarra, Filippo, 226n Ladislaus the Posthumous, duke of Austria and king of Hungary and Bohemia, 7, 92, 99, 112 Lamprecht, Pfaffe, 74 Landino, Cristoforo, 106n Languschi, Jacopo, 100n Lapiths, 144n Lascaris, Janus, 178-181 Laureti, Tommaso, 219, 266-267, 269-271, 273, 276, 282 Lauro, Pietro, 93 Le Brun, Charles, 180, 221n, 224 Leda, 236 Leo of Naples, Archpriest, 18-19, 24, 30n

Leonardo da Besozzo, 161 Leonardo da Vinci, 62 Leonnatus, 139, 144-145 Letter of Alexander to Aristotle about India (Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem), 18, 35, 38n Leyden, Lucas, van, 67 Libro de Alexandre, 28n, 39, 96 Libro del Nascimento, 53 Lippi, Filippo, 155n Livy, 7, 22, 99n, 103, 105, 150 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 218 Lombardo della Seta, 149, 164n, 165 Longhignana, Ambrogio, 184 Longuyon, Jacques de, 63, 65, 73 Lorenzo di Bicci, 147 Louis XIV, king of France, 221n, 224 Lovato Lovati, 24n Lucan, 168, 172 Lucian, 227-229, 271, 274 Lucretia, 148n Ludovico of Saluzzo, 65n, 69n Luzio Romano, 269, 272, 275, 281 Lysimachus, 183-184 Lysippus, 217, 230n Maccabees, Book of, 71-72, 74n, 104, 168 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 99n Madruzzo, Cristoforo, Cardinal, 218n Mainardi, Sebastiano, 144n, 268 Majorana, Cristoforo, 177n Malacarne, Vincenzo, 70n Malatesta family, 147 Malatesta, Elisabetta Varano, 99 Malatesta, Galeazzo, lord of Pesaro, 99 Malatesta Novello, Domenico, 175 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, 236n Manfred I del Vasto, 68 Manfredi III Chiaromonte, 25, 27 Manno di Bastiano Sbarri, 272 Mansionario, Giovanni (Giovanni de’ Matociis), 175n Mantegna, Andrea, 274 Manutius, Aldus, 227n Marco del Buono see Giamberti, Marco Marguerite of Roussy, 65n, 69-70

index of na mes

Marinus II, duke of Naples, 18 Mars, 262 Martin V, Pope, 74n Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, 62, 271 Masaccio, 136 Masolino da Panicale, 160 Master of La Manta, 65 Master of San Miniato, 271, 275 Master of the Cité des Dames, 70 Master of the Story of Griselda, 143, 171, 268 Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, 185, 266267, 269, 272-273, 277 Maturino da Firenze, 233, 264, 267 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, 94 Medici, Francesco I de’, 231 Medici, Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’, 174 Medici, Isabella de’, 223 Medici, Lorenzo de’ (the Magnificent), 99, 136, 179, 181-183, 184n Medici, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’, 174 Medici, Lucrezia de’, 99 Medici, Piero de’ (the Gouty), 174n Medici, Piero de’ (the Unfortunate), 179 Medusa, 177 Megisto, 169n Mehmed II, 99, 100n, 183, 261 Mellini, Giovanna, 144 Menalippe, 66n Michelangelo Buonarroti, 270 Michelino da Besozzo, 161n Minorello, Francesco, 231 Mitelli, Agostino, 219n Montalto, Alessandro, Cardinal see Peretti Montalto, Alessandro, Cardinal Montefeltro, Battista di, 99 Montefeltro, Federico da, duke of Urbino, 99n, 147-148, 174, 177n Morandini, Francesco (il Poppi), 267, 269 Morlete Ruiz, Juan Patricio, 224n Mucius Scaevola, 147, 228 Myrina, 166, 169-171 Nebuchadnezzar, 31n, 158 Nectanebo (legendary father of Alexander), 17, 22-26, 28n, 29, 59-60, 89, 105, 108, 235, 237

Nectanebo II, pharaoh of Egypt, 22 Nereid, 182 Nerli, Filippo de’, 99n Neroccio de’ Landi, 147 Neuf Preux see Nine Worthies Neuf Preuses see Nine Lady Worthies Niccoli, Niccolò, 95, 176n Niccolò dell’Abate, 272 Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, 150 Nicholas, king of Armenia (Nicholas of Caesarea), 55, 72-73 Nicholas V, Pope (Tommaso Parentucelli), 92n, 94, 169n Nicola di maestro Antonio of Ancona, 59 Nicolaus Antonii de Ricciis, 174n Nine Lady Worthies, 63, 68, 70, 72, 77, 170 Nine Worthies, 14, 53, 62-65, 67-68, 70-73, 75-81, 148, 150, 162, 164, 181, 258-259 Ninus, 157-158, 166, 170, 228 Il Novellino, 27n Odassi, Ludovico, 93 Old French Prose Alexander, 19, 25n, 34 Olympias, 9, 16n, 21-25, 29, 35, 59-60, 105, 107-108, 235-237 Omphis, 219, 282 Oostsanen, Cornelisz van, 67n Orcagna, Andrea, 137n Orosius, 12, 16, 18, 101, 163n, 167-170 Orsini, Aldobrando, 79 Orsini, Costanza, 79 Orsini, Giordano, Cardinal, 67, 79, 160, 162-163 Orsini, Paolo Giordano I, 223 Ovid, 134n, 172, 228 Oxyartes, 227n Paleologa, Margherita, 228n, 237 Pannonius, Janus, 94n Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli), 58, 93, 113 Panthea, 169n Panvinio, Onofrio, 234n Paris, 151, 154 Parmenion, 160, 187, 189 Pasiphaë, 237 Paul III, Pope (Alessandro Farnese), 219220, 224n, 225, 234, 270

335

336

i n dex of n ames

Paul, St, 224n Pellegrini, Giovanni Antonio, 238n, 239n, 278 Penthesilea, 65, 68-69, 70n, 154 Percival, 75 Peretti Montalto, Alessandro, Cardinal, 219n Perotti, Niccolò, 91, 93n Perugino, Pietro, 61n Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 14, 64, 80, 97, 102-108, 111-112, 134n, 146, 149-150, 152n, 155-156, 158-160, 164n, 165, 169, 256, 259 Phaeton, 141n Philip (Alexander’s physician), 239, 266 Philip the Arab, Emperor, 60 Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, 54 Philip II of Macedon, 9, 11, 16n, 17, 21-23, 25, 27-29, 59-60, 94, 100, 105, 108, 110, 157, 162-163, 232, 235-237 Philotas, 100, 160, 165, 187, 189, 240 Phineus, 25n Piazzetta, Giambattista, 238n Piccolomini family, 143, 144n, 150, 171 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio (Pope Pius II), 7-9, 92, 93n, 99, 112-113, 172n Piccolomini, Silvio di Bartolomeo, 171n Piccolomini Todeschini, Francesco, Cardinal (Pope Pius III), 172 Picenardi, Giovanni Francesco, 238n Pier Andrea da Verrazzano, 155n Piero di Giovanni, 155n Piloty, Carl Theodor, von, 266n Pino, Marco, 239 Piramo, Reginaldo, 271, 273, 275 Pisanello, 176 Pisani Moretta family, 223-224 Pius II, Pope see Piccolomini, Enea Silvio Pius III, Pope see Piccolomini Todeschini, Francesco, Cardinal Pizan, Christine de, 66n, 146n Placidi, Alessandra, 144 Placidi, Battista, 171n Plato, 148n Pliny the Elder, 89, 110, 229-230, 267

Plutarch, 10, 16, 21, 28, 89-91, 96-98, 100, 109, 112, 139, 142-145, 163n, 165, 166n, 168, 169n, 170n, 172-176, 185-186, 188, 217, 222, 227, 232238, 240-241, 255-257, 260, 263-269, 271-277 Pluto, 110 Polidoro da Caravaggio, 223n, 232-233, 235236, 264, 266-267 Poliziano, Angelo, 183-184 Polyphemus, 237 Polo, Marco, 37-38, 146n Pompeius Trogus, 89, 100-101, 168 Pompey, 139n, 156n Ponsio Jacquio, 233n, 264, 266, 268-273, 275, 281 Porsenna, 228 Porus, 35, 55-56, 63, 72-74, 137n, 162-163, 189, 238, 239n, 275-276, 278, 280, 282 Priam, 31n, 154 Primaticcio, Francesco, 219, 227, 230, 264265, 267, 273-274, 277 Prisciani, Pellegrino, 271 Pseudo-Callisthenes see Alexander Romance Pseudo-Oppian, 29n Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemy), 178, 182 Ptolemy I Soter, 11, 91, 92n, 185 Pucci, Antonio, 258 Pujol, Alexandre-Denis-Abel, de, 267 Pyrgoteles, 184n, 217, 230n Pyrrhus, 103, 149, 156-157, 168n Queen of Sheba, 137, 163 Quintilian, 89 Rabanus Maurus, 18, 74n Raffaele Berti da Pistoia, 176n Raimondi, Marcantonio, 239n Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 60, 61n, 226228, 239, 258, 263, 271-272, 274 Rapicano, Cola, 57-58 Rapicano, Nardo, 177n Ravenna Cosmographer, 74n Rembrandt, 180 Remus, 78 Ricci, Sebastiano, 220n, 222, 224, 230n Rolando da Piazzola, 24n Romulus, 78-81, 165

index of na mes

Rosselli, Francesco, 173n, 174n Roxane, 35, 154n, 221, 226-231, 239, 260, 263, 274, 279-280, 282 Rucellai, Giovanni, 161n Rudolf von Ems, 34 Sacchetti, Franco, 64 Sagundino, Niccolò, 93 Sallust, 7, 99n, 100 Salutati, Coluccio, 90n, 101n, 156, 157n, 158-160, 167 Salviati, Francesco, 156n, 233, 264, 270, 277 Salviati, Jacopo, 99 Samson, 39, 148, 151, 155n Sanudo, Marin, 59 Sauer, Stanislaus, 177 Scaliger, Joseph, 17 Scheggia, Lo (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni), 136, 137n, 141n, 268 Scipio Africanus, 22, 79-81, 108n, 139n, 148, 167n, 171n, 220, 222n, 236, 265, 279n Scipio Nasica, 79n Scolari, Domenico, 61, 258 Scultori, Giovanni Battista, 237n Seelos, Ignaz, 75 Seleucus I Nicator, 29n, 184 Semiramis, 66-67, 69, 158n, 163n, 166, 228 Semino, Andrea, 266-269, 283 Semino, Ottavio, 266-269, 283 Seneca, 103n, 159, 168 Severus Alexander, Emperor, 162n Sforza family, 166n Sforza, Francesco I, duke of Milan, 56, 166, 176 Sforza, Ludovico (il Moro), duke of Milan, 238n Siciolante da Sermoneta, Girolamo, 227, 274, 279n Siegfried, 75-76 Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, 92-93, 112 Simonetta, Cicco, 94 Sisygambis, 135, 139, 140n, 221-226, 240, 269 Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), 180, 220-222, 225-227, 268-269, 274, 279 Solinus, Gaius Iulius, 18, 29, 96 Solomon, 137, 151, 152, 154

Spannocchi family, 143, 145, 171n, 220n Spannocchi, Ambrogio, 144 Spannocchi, Antonio, 144, 221n Spannocchi, Giulio, 144, 221n Spano, Pippo, 148 Stateira (Darius’s daughter), 222-223, 229, 239, 269, 282 Stateira (Darius’s wife), 223n Strabo, 89, 169n, 170n, 271 Suetonius, 22, 66 Sulpitia, 171n Taccola, Mariano, 62 Tacitus, 99n, 167 Tamagni, Vincenzo, 148n Tamerlane, 160 Tanari, Alessandro, 236n Taxile see Omphis Testa, Pietro, 278 Thais, 187, 189, 240, 272, 281 Thalestris, 170, 187, 189, 230, 239, 273, 278, 281, 283 Theuca, 69-70 Thibaut of Bar, 63 Thomas III of Saluzzo, 65, 67-71 Thomyris, 166, 167n, 171n Tiberius Gracchus, 171n Tiberti, Dario, 90 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 220n, 222, 224-225, 230, 233 Timoclea, 166n, 169n, 230, 240, 264-265, 282 Titus, Emperor, 31n Torlonia, Alessandro, 221n Trajan, Emperor, 31n, 110, 165 Traversari, Ambrogio, 92n, 176n Trevisani, Francesco, 226 Trinci, Ugolino III, 78-81 Tristan, 75-76 Triton, 177, 182 Trogus Pompeius see Pompeius Trogus Tros, 79 Uberto di San Martino di Castelnuovo, 77 Uberti, Farinata degli, 148 Uccello, Paolo, 147 Uomini famosi (iconographic theme), 14, 67, 80-82, 133, 143, 146-174, 258-259

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Vaga, Perin del, 54, 219, 240n, 265-266, 269270, 272, 274-276, 280 Valerano of Saluzzo, il Burdo, 65, 68-70 Valerio di Saluzzo della Manta, 68 Valerius Maximus, 66n, 89, 171, 225, 240, 241n, 265, 274, 276 Valgulio, Carlo, 93n Valturio, Roberto, 62 Vasari, Giorgio, 133n, 134n, 144, 151, 161n, 181-182, 226n, 231, 265, 267 Vasque de Lucène, 8, 99n, 235n Ventimiglia, Eufemia, 27 Venus, 180n, 222, 231n, 237 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 7-9, 14, 92-93, 111-113, 140n, 259 Veronese, Paolo, 223-224, 231, 233n, 260, 269-270, 276 Verrocchio, Andrea del, 181-183 Vespasian, Emperor, 31n Vespasiano de’ Bisticci, 178n Villani, Filippo, 156 Vimercati, Gaspare, 176 Vincent of Beauvais, 16-18, 101, 160n, 163 Vincidor, Tommaso, 226n Vintler, Franz, 74 Vintler, Niklaus, 74, 75n, 76 Virgil, 96, 148n, 167, 172 Visconti family, 166n Visconti, Azzo, 166n

Visconti, Bianca Maria, duchess of Milan, 166 Visconti, Filippo Maria, duke of Milan, 59n, 97-98 Visconti, Ludovico Maria, 184 Vitelli, Alessandro, 234 Vitruvius, 271 Vivarini, Antonio, 147 Vos, Maarten de, 223 Vulcan, 226n Walter of Châtillon, 16, 92n, 96-98, 105, 107, 111-112, 138, 154, 169n Wigalois, 76 Wilhelm von Orleans, 75 Wilhelm von Österreich, 75 Xanto Avelli, Francesco, 228, 274, 277 Yverny, Jacques, 65n Ywain, 75 Zanchi, Antonio, 238n Zanobi da Strada, 149, 156 Zelotti, Giambattista, 223, 225, 238, 268-269, 273, 282 Zeus, 175 Zeus Ammon, 21-22, 24, 59-60, 105, 108, 157, 159, 182-184, 235-237, 271 Zoppo, Marco, 183 Zuccari, Federico, 222, 269, 273, 281 Zuccari, Taddeo, 222, 227, 228n, 239, 240n, 264-265, 267, 269-270, 273-276, 281-282

List of illustrations

Colour plates Plate I: The Birth of Alexander, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna. Per gentile concessione dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo 115 Plate II: The Flight with Griffins and the Submarine Voyage, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1250-1275; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Rep. II.143, fol. 101 r-v. Courtesy Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek 116-117 Plate III: The Visit to the Tree of the Sun, c. 1260s-1270s; Quart (Aosta), Castle, Donjon, Main hall (detail). Archivi dell’Assessorato beni culturali, turismo, sport e commercio della Regione autonoma Valle d’Aosta – fondo Catalogo beni culturali. Photo: Interactive Sound SRL di Riccardo Mazza. Su concessione della Regione Autonoma Valle d’Aosta 118 Plate IV: Episodes from the Childhood and Youth of Alexander, c. 1460; Genoa, Villa del Principe, Sala della Caduta dei Giganti. Villa del Principe-Palazzo di Andrea Doria © ADP s.r.l. 119 Plate V: Alexander’s Adventures in the East, c. 1460; Genoa, Villa del Principe, Sala della Caduta dei Giganti. Villa del Principe-Palazzo di Andrea Doria © ADP s.r.l. 120 Plate VI: Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, c. 1468; Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, ms. Vitr. 22.9, fol. 1 r. © Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid 121 Plate VII: The Flight with Griffins and The Earth Contemplated from the Heavens, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, c. 1468; Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, ms. Vitr. 22.9, fol. 1 r (detail). © Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid 122 Plate VIII: Raphael (attr.), The Submarine Voyage, c. 1494; Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Michèle Bellot 123 Plate IX: Master of La Manta, Hector and Alexander, from The Cycle of the Neuf Preux and Preuses (detail), c. 1420-1425; Manta (Saluzzo, Cuneo), Castle della Manta, Sala Baronale. Photo Dario Fusaro, 2020 © FAI – Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano 124 Plate X: The Taming of Bucephalus, details from Episodes from the Childhood and Youth of Alexander, c. 1460; Genoa, Villa del Principe, Sala della Caduta dei Giganti. Villa del Principe-Palazzo di Andrea Doria © ADP s.r.l. 125 Plate XI: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; London, British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum 126 Plate XII: Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Davide Ghirlandaio and Sebastiano Mainardi), Episodes from the Life of Alexander the Great, c. 1493-1494; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, on permanent loan to Longleat House, Wiltshire. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 127

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Plate XIII: Leonardo da Besozzo, The Crespi Chronicle, page showing Alexander with Aristotle, Demosthenes and Philip of Macedon, 1442-1449; Milan, Crespi Collection, fol. 10 v. Courtesy of Sotheby’s 128 Plate XIV: Leonardo da Besozzo, The Crespi Chronicle, page showing Darius with Jaddus, Porus and Candace, 1442-1449; Milan, Crespi Collection, fol. 11 r. Courtesy of Sotheby’s 129 Plate XVa: Francesco Xanto Avelli, The Marriage of Ninus and Semiramis, 1533; London, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 130 Plate XVb: Francesco Xanto Avelli, Mucius Scaevola Before Porsenna, 1534; Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1940 130 Plate  XVI: Giorgio  Vasari, Alexander Offering Campaspe to Apelles, 1548; Arezzo, Casa del Vasari, Sala del Camino. Su concessione del Ministero della cultura, Direzione regionale Musei della Toscana-Museo statale di Casa Vasari di Arezzo 131 Black and white images Chapter 1

Fig. 1: The Birth of Alexander, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1370-1380; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 7190, fol. 1 v. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 40 Fig. 2: The Begetting of Alexander, from Historia de Preliis ( J1 version), c. 1310-1320; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 8501, fol. 5 r. © BnF 40 Fig. 3: The Begetting of Alexander, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna. Per gentile concessione dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo 41 Fig. 4: Nectanebo Flying into the Banquet Hall, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna. Per gentile concessione dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo 42 Fig. 5: The Taming of Bucephalus, from Venice Alexander Romance, c. 1280; Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, ms. Correr 1493, fol. 2 r. © Biblioteca Correr – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia 43 Fig. 6: The Taming of Bucephalus, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1370-1380; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 7190, fol. 2 v. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 44 Fig. 7: The Taming of Bucephalus, 1377-1380; Palermo, Palazzo Chiaromonte (Steri), Sala Magna. Per gentile concessione dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo 44 Fig. 8: The Flight with Griffins, 12th century; Venice, St Mark’s Basilica, north façade. Per gentile concessione della Procuratoria di San Marco 45 Fig. 9 and 10: The Flight with Griffins, 11th century; Venice, St Mark’s Basilica, Pala d’Oro. Per gentile concessione della Procuratoria di San Marco 46 Fig. 11: The Flight with Griffins, 1163-1165; Otranto, Cattedrale di Santa Maria Annunziata. Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images 47

list of illustrations

Fig. 12: The Flight with Griffins and the Submarine Voyage, from Historia de Preliis ( J1 version), c. 1310-1320; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 8501, fol. 48 v and 49 r. © BnF 47 Fig. 13: The Submarine Voyage and the Flight with Griffins, from Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, c. 1380-1410; Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ms. 2576, fol. 101 r. © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna 48 Fig. 14: The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1250-1275; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Rep. II.143, fol. 89 r. Courtesy Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek 48 Fig. 15 and 16: The Meeting with the High Priest and The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, from Venice Alexander Romance, c. 1280; Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, ms. Correr 1493, fol. 64 v and 65 r. © Biblioteca Correr – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia 49 Fig. 17: The Visit to the Dry Tree, from Historia de Preliis ( J2 version), c. 1250-1275; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Rep. II.143, fol. 88 v. Courtesy Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek  49 Fig. 18: Alexander and the Oracular Tree, from Firdausi, Shahnameh, c. 1430; Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Ouseley Add. 176, fol. 311 v. Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 50 Fig. 19: The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, from Godfrey of Viterbo, Pantheon, 13th century; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. lat. 5003, fol. 96 r. © BnF 51 Chapter 2

Fig. 20: Alexander as King of Swords, from the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, c. 1470-1491; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. © Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano 83 Fig. 21 and 22: Olympias as Queen of Swords and Ammon as Knight of Swords, from the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, c. 1470-1491; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. © Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano 84 Fig. 23 and 24: Nectanebo as Knight of Cups and Philip as King of Coins, from the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, c. 1470-1491; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. © Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano 84 Fig. 25: Raphael (attr.), The Submarine Voyage (detail), c. 1494; Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Michèle Bellot 85 Fig. 26: Master of La Manta, The Cycle of the Neuf Preux and Preuses, c. 1420-1425; Manta (Saluzzo, Cuneo), Castle della Manta, Sala Baronale. Photo Dario Fusaro, 2020 © FAI – Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano 85 Fig. 27: Hector (lost), Alexander and Julius Caesar, c. 1393-1405; Bolzano, Castel Roncolo, Casa d’Estate. Tutti i diritti © by Fondazione Castelli di Bolzano 86 Fig. 28: Giacomino da Ivrea, Six Worthies, from Castelnuovo, c. 1430-1440; Cuorgnè (Turin), Museo Archeologico del Canavese. Courtesy CESMA – Museo Archeologico del Canavese, Cuorgnè 87

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Fig. 29: Workshop of Gentile da Fabriano, Alexander, from The Cycle of Worthies, c. 1411-1412; Foligno, Palazzo Trinci, Corridor. Courtesy Museo della Città di Palazzo Trinci, Comune di Foligno 88 Fig. 30: The corridor connecting Palazzo Trinci to Palazzo delle Canoniche (seen from Palazzo Trinci); Foligno, Palazzo Trinci. Courtesy Museo della Città di Palazzo Trinci, Comune di Foligno 88 Chapter 4

Fig. 31: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; formerly Collection of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. Photo: The Warburg Institute, Photographic Collection 190 Fig. 32: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius (detail), c. 1450; London, British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum 191 Fig. 33: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; Fiesole, Collezione Paolo Fresco. Courtesy Moretti Fine Art 192 Fig. 34: Lo Scheggia, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1460; formerly Artaud de Montor. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images 193 Fig. 35: Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, The Battle of Issus and the Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, c. 1450; Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. Direção-Geral do Património Cultural /Arquivo e Documentação Fotográfica, Photo: José Paulo Ruas 194 Fig. 36: Master of the Story of Griselda, Alexander, c. 1494; Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. © The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham / Bridgeman Images 195 Fig. 37: Master of the Story of Griselda, Alexander (detail), c. 1494; Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. © The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham / Bridgeman Images 196 Fig. 38 and 39: Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Davide Ghirlandaio and Sebastiano Mainardi), Episodes from the Life of Alexander the Great (details), c. 1493-1494; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, on permanent loan to Longleat House, Wiltshire. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 197 Fig. 40: Ricciardo di Nanni, Alexander, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, c. 1460; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, ms. plut. 64.28, fol. 1 r (detail). Su concessione del MiC. È vietata ogni ulteriore riproduzione con qualsiasi mezzo 198 Fig. 41: Alexander, from Plutarch, Vitae virorum illustrium, c. 1446-1448; Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, ms. S. XV.1, fol. 1 r (detail). © Biblioteca Malatestiana, Cesena 198 Fig. 42: Alexander-Hercules type, Attic tetradrachm, c. 323-320 bc. © bpk 199 Fig. 43: Profile Heads of Julius Caesar, Francesco I Sforza and Alexander, 1450-1466; Milan, Palazzo Vimercati (detail from the portal). Wikimedia Commons, Photo Giovanni Dall’Orto 199

list of illustrations

Fig. 44: Arrian, De rebus gestis Alexandri Magni, detail from the title-page, post 1495; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Urb. lat. 415, fol. 1 r. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 200 Fig. 45: Binding of the Planudean Anthology with medallion portrait of Alexander, Florence, Laurentius de Alopa, 1494; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek. Courtesy Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz 201 Fig. 46: Athena, bronze plaquette, c. 1500; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington  202 Fig. 47: Golden stater of Alexander with Athena and Nike, c. 330-320 bc; Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. © Ashmolean Museum 202 Fig. 48: Cristoforo Majorana, Alexander, from Arrian, De expeditione Alexandri Magni, c. 1480-1484; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 5268, fol. 3 r. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 203 Fig. 49: Andrea del Verrocchio (workshop of?), Alexander the Great, c. 1480-1485; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington  203 Fig. 50: Tetradrachm of Lysimachus with Alexander-Zeus Ammon, mint of Lampsakos, 305-281 bc; London, British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum  204 Fig. 51: Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, Sheet from the ‘Verrocchio Sketchbook’ with Head of Alexander-Zeus Ammon, c. 1487; Chantilly, Musée Condé, inv. DE 21 (verso). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (domaine de Chantilly) / Michel Urtado  204 Fig. 52: Alexander-Zeus Ammon, c. 1495; Isola Bella, Palazzo Borromeo, Cappella Longhignana Tomb. Photo Archivio Fotografico Borromeo Isola Bella 205 Fig. 53: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Battle of the Granicus, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I. VII.23, fol. 1 r. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena  206 Fig. 54: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Battle of Issus, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 11 v. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 207 Fig. 55: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Siege of Tyre, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 34 v. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 208 Fig. 56: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Entry into Babylon and the Burning of Persepolis, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 75 r. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 209 Fig. 57: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Encounter with Thalestris and the Arrest of Philotas, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale

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degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 100 v. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 210 Fig. 58: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Murder of Parmenion and the Crossing of the Tanai, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 127 r. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 211 Fig. 59: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Murder of Cleitus, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 156 v. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 212 Fig. 60: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Coenus Pleading with Alexander to Take the Army Back Home, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 191 r. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 213 Fig. 61: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Distribution of Talents to the Army, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 217 r. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 214 Fig. 62: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, The Death of Alexander, from Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 224 v. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 215 Fig. 63: Follower of the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Julius Caesar and Alexander, from the Comparatione complementing Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni (Italian translation of Pier Candido Decembrio), c. 1450; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, ms. I.VII.23, fol. 236 v. © Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena 216 Chapter 5

Fig. 64: Sodoma, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1518-1519; Rome, Villa Farnesina alla Lungara. Ghigo Roli / Bridgeman Images 242 Fig. 65: Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1559-1560; Bracciano, Orsini-Odescalchi Castle. Photo by Roberto Sigismondi 242 Fig. 66: Paolo Veronese, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1565-1567; London, National Gallery. Bridgeman Images 243 Fig. 67: Perin del Vaga, The Meeting of Alexander and the Family of Darius, 1545-1547; Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, Sala Paolina. Per gentile concessione della Direzione Musei Statali della città di Roma – Museo Nazionale di Castel S. Angelo 244

list of illustrations

Fig. 68: Sodoma, The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, 1518-1519; Rome, Villa Farnesina alla Lungara. Ghigo Roli / Bridgeman Images 245 Fig. 69: Raphael, The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, c. 1516-1517; Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina. Photo: © Albertina, Vienna 245 Fig. 70: Gian Giacomo Caraglio, The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, after Raphael, 1520-1539; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase. Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917 246 Fig. 71: Giovanni Battista Lodi da Cremona (design), Aglauros’s Vision of the Bridal Chamber of Herse, c. 1540 (woven c. 1570); New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of George Blumenthal, 1941 246 Fig. 72: Alexandre-Denis-Abel de Pujol, Apelles Painting Alexander and Campaspe, after Primaticcio (1541-1544), 1834-1835; Fontainebleau, Palace, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Fontainebleau) / Jean-Pierre Lagiewski 247 Fig. 73: Francesco Morandini (il Poppi), Alexander Offering Campaspe to Apelles, 1570-1572; Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici. Photo © Raffaello Bencini / Bridgeman Images 248 Fig. 74: Guillaume de Marcillat (attr.), The Taming of Bucephalus, c. 1525; Rome, Villa Farnesina alla Lungara. Ghigo Roli / Bridgeman Images 249 Fig. 75: The Birth of Alexander, the Taming of Bucephalus, the Cutting of the Gordian Knot, after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1570-1590; Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, inv. 9576 (Polidoro Album, fol. 23 r). © Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris 249 Fig. 76: Francesco Salviati (attr.), The Taming of Bucephalus, after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1548-1550; Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 794.1.2951 (verso). Photo © MBA, Rennes, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-Manuel Salingue 250 Fig. 77: Primaticcio, The Taming of Bucephalus, 1541-1544; Fontainebleau, Chamber of the Duchess of Étampes. Bridgeman Images 251 Fig. 78: Cola dell’Amatrice and workshop, The Taming of Bucephalus, c. 1545; Città di Castello, Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, Room IX. Comune di Città di Castello, Pinacoteca Comunale 251 Fig. 79: Francesco Salviati (attr.), The Birth of Alexander, after Polidoro da Caravaggio, c. 1548-1550; Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 794.1.2951 (recto). Photo © MBA, Rennes, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-Manuel Salingue 252 Fig. 80: Andrea Boscoli (attr.), Olympias Visited by Zeus-Ammon in the Guise of a Serpent, 1595-1599; Chicago, Art Institute. The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection 253 Fig. 81: Giulio Romano, The Begetting of Alexander, 1527-1528; Mantua, Palazzo Te, Chamber of Cupid and Psyche. © Comune di Mantova, Musei Civici 253

3 45

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

5

Introduction

7

Chapter 1. The Legendary Tradition of Alexander in Medieval Art and Literature The Medieval Tradition in Italy: An Overview Episodes from the Legend The Begetting and Birth of Alexander The Taming of Bucephalus The Flight with Griffins The Submarine Voyage The Visit to the Trees of the Sun and the Moon

15 15 21 21 27 30 33 35

Chapter 2. The Persistence of the Legendary Traditionin FifteenthCentury Italian Art Marvellous Adventures in the East in the Doria Tapestries The Flight with Griffins in a Curtius Rufus Manuscript Alexander as King of Swords in the Sola-Busca Tarocchi A Fifteenth-Century Drawing Depicting the Submarine Voyage Alexander among the Nine Worthies The Sala Baronale in the Castle della Manta The Triads of Castel Roncolo The Castelnuovo Cycle The “Cavalcavia” with the Worthies of Palazzo Trinci

53 54 57 59 60 62 65 74 76 78

Chapter 3. The Humanist Recovery of Ancient Historical Sources and Its Impact on the Reception of Alexander The Recovery of the Ancient Greek Sources Plutarch’s Life of Alexander Arrian’s Anabasis Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca Historica The Revived Interest in the Ancient Latin Sources Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni Justin’s Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum Humanist Use of Ancient Sources Petrarch Giovanni Boccaccio

89 90 90 91 93 95 95 100 102 102 106

348

ta b l e of con ten ts

Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria Pier Paolo Vergerio

109 111

Chapter 4. The Emergence of a New Renaissance Iconography in the Fifteenth Century Alexander on Cassone Panels The Battle of Issus and the Meeting with the Family of Darius Two Sienese Panels Based on Plutarch Alexander and the Cycles of Uomini famosi An Introduction to the Uomini famosi Cycles in Italian Art Representations of Alexander in Uomini famosi Cycles Medieval Cycles The Castel Nuovo Cycle, Naples Transitional Cycles The Cycle in the Aula Minor, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence The Cycle in the Orsini Palace of Monte Giordano, Rome Humanist Cycles The Sala dei Giganti, Padua The Cycle in the Corte Ducale, Palazzo dell’Arengo, Milan The ‘Piccolomini Cycle’ of the Famous Men and Women Images of Alexander in Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts Images of Alexander Based on Ancient Numismatic Prototypes Alexander Wearing the Lion-Skin of Hercules The Helmeted Alexander Alexander with the Horns of Zeus Ammon A Curtius Rufus Manuscript “Illustrated Like a Romance Text”

133 134 135 142 146 146 150 151 151 155 155 160 164 164 166 171 173 174 175 177 184 185

Chapter 5. The Development and Consolidation of Renaissance Iconography in the Sixteenth Century Selected Episodes from the Life of Alexander The Meeting with the Women of Darius The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe The Taming of Bucephalus The Birth (and Begetting) of Alexander

217 220 220 226 229 232 234

Conclusion

255

Appendices

263

Bibliography

285

Index of names

329

List of illustrations

339