The early Renaissance and vernacular culture 9780674049529, 9780674062733

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page vii)
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Introduction (page 1)
1. Courtly Lyric I (SIMONE MARTINI, FRENCH COURTLY LYRIC, AND THE VERNACULAR, page 9)
2. Courtly Lyric II (SANDRO BOTTICELLI AND POLIZIANO: HUMANIST LEARNING AND THE VERNACULAR, page 67)
3. Civic Ritual I (CARDINAL ORSINI'S PAINTINGS AND BACCIO BALDINI'S ENGRAVINGS OF THE SIBYLS: HUMANIST LEARNING AND VERNACULAR DRAMA, page 117)
4. Civic Ritual II (RECONSTRUCTING THE VERNACULAR OCTAVES WITH THE PROPHECIES OF THE TWELVE SIBYLS, page 207)
Appendix (CARDINAL ORSINI'S TWELVE SIBYLS AND THEIR PROPHECIES IN VERNACULAR OCTAVES RECONSTRUCTED, page 269)
Notes (page 317)
Index (page 365)

Citation preview

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance SPONSORED BY VILLA I TATTI HARVARD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR ITALIAN RENAISSANCE STUDIES FLORENCE, ITALY

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The a ‘Renaissance and ernacular (ulture CHARLES DEMPSEY

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON, ENGLAND ZOIT2Z

Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dempsey, Charles. The early Renaissance and vernacular culture / Charles Dempsey. p. cm.—{ The Bernard Berenson lectures on the Italian Renaissance) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04952-9 (alk. paper) 1. Arts, Italian. 2. Arts, Renaissance—lItaly. 3. Arts and society—lItaly. I. Title. NX552.A1D 45 2012

709.45—d¢23 2011023475

Contents

List of Illustrations — vii

Acknowledoments xi

Introduction 1 1, Courtly Lyric I SIMONE MARTINI, FRENCH COURTLY LYRIC,

AND THE VERNACULAR 9

%, Courtly Lyric ll SANDRO BOTTICELLI AND POLIZIANO: HUMANIST

LEARNING AND THE VERNACULAR 67

> Civic Ritual 1 CARDINAL ORSINIS PAINTINGS AND BACCIO BALDINIS ENGRAVINGS OF THE SIBYLS: HUMANIST LEARNING AND VERNACULAR DRAMA _ 117

4. Civic Ritual II RECONSTRUCTING THE VERNACULAR OCTAVES WITH

THE PROPHECIES OF THE TWELVE SIBYLS 207

Appendix CARDINAL ORSINIS TWELVE SIBYLS AND THEIR PROPHECIES IN VERNACULAR OCTAVES

RECONSTRUCTED 269

Notes 317 Index 365

Illustrations 1. Benozzo Gozzoli, Horsetamer, metalpoint, gray-black wash, heightened with white, on blue prepared paper, 359 X 246 mm, British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British Museum) — 15 2. Giotto di Bondone, The Virgin’s Wedding Procession, fresco, north wall,

Arena Chapel, Padua. (By kind permission of the Comune di Padova—Assessorato alla Cultura) 29 3. Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, tempera on wood, 203 X 314 cm, Uffizi,

Florence. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 33 4. Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci (obverse), oil on panel, 42.7 X 37 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Ailsa Mellon Bruce

Fund, image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington) 37 5. Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci (reverse), oil on panel, 42.7 X 37 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Ailsa Mellon Bruce

Fund, image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington) 39 6. Simone Martini, Maesta (detail), fresco, 763 X 970 cm, Palazzo Pub-

blico, Siena. (Scala/ Art Resource, NY) 45 7. Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maesta (detail), tempera and gold on panel, Museo dell’Opera Metropolitana, Siena. (Alinari/ Art Resource,

NY) 47 8. Unknown artist, Virgin and Child, tvory statuette, Prance, height 32 cm, Louvre, Paris. (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource,

NY) 51 Vil

Illustrations 9. Simone Martint, Saint Louis of Toulouse Crowning His Brother Robert of

d’Anjou, tempera and gold on panel, main panel 200 X 138 cm and predella 56 X 138 cm, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.

(Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 59 10. Sandro Botticelli, Madonna del Padiglione, tempera on panel, diameter

65 cm, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. (Biblioteca Ambrosiana,

Milan) 75 u. Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, tempera on canvas, 184.5 X 285.5 cm,

Uffizi, Florence. (Scala/ Art Resource, NY) 79 12. Venus de’ Medici (Roman statue), marble, height 153 cm without base,

Uffizi, Florence. (Alinari/ Art Resource, NY) 81 13. Sandro Botticelli, Idealized Portrait of a Lady (so-called Simonetta), oil

and tempera on panel, 82 X 54 cm, Stadel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. (© U. Edelmann—Stidel Museum—ARTOTHEK) _ 93 14. Sandro Botticelli, Mars and Venus, tempera and oil on panel, 69.2 X 173.4 cm, National Gallery, London. (© National Gallery, London/

Art Resource, NY) 99 15. Andrea del Verrocchio, Head of a Young Woman, charcoal heightened

with white and brown ink, 325 X 272 mm, British Museum, London

(© The Trustees of the British Museum) 103 16. Leonardo da Vinci, Head of a Woman (study for Leda and the Swan),

pen and ink, 9.2 X 11.2 cm, Windsor, RL 12515. (The Royal Collec-

tion © 2o10, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth IT) 105 17. Sandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, tempera on panel, 111 X 134

cm, Uffizi, Florence. (Nimatallah/ Art Resource, NY) 111 18. Sandro Botticelli, Giuliano de’ Medici, tempera on panel, 75.5 X 52.5

cm, framed 105.7 X 81.3 X 11.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Samuel H. Kress Collection, image courtesy National Gal-

lery of Art, Washington) 115 19. Benozzo Gozzoli, Erythraean Sibyl (detail of frame of Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion), fresco, Chapterhouse, San Marco (Museo di San

Marco), Florence. (Scala/ Art Resource, NY) 127 VUL

Illustrations 20. Cosimo Rosselli (school), Adoration of the Magi, tempera on panel, 101

X 217 cm, Uffizi, Florence. (Scala/ Ministero per 1 Beni e le Attivita

culturali/Art Resource, NY) 149 21. Last Supper (detail from Processional Cross), Florentine, silver, partly gilt, niello, copper, with traces of gilding over wood, Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York. (Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY) — 163 22. Piero del Pollaiuolo, Prudence, oil on panel, 167 X 88 cm, Uffizi,

Florence. (Finsiel/Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 169 23. Master ES, The Evangelist John, engraving, 148 (borderline) X 99 mm,

British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British

Museum) 175 24. Master ES, The Evangelist Mark, engraving, 146 (borderline) X 99

mm, British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British

Museum) 177 25. Master ES, The Evangelist Matthew, engraving, 148 (borderline) X 96

mm, British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British

Museum) 179 26. Master ES, Saint Thomas, engraving, 134 (cut) X 95 mm, British

Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British Museum) 181 27. Baccio Baldini (attributed), The Prophet Amos, engraving, 147 X 106

mm, British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British

Museum) 183 28. Master ES, Saint Paul, engraving, 132 (cut) X 100 mm, British

Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British Museum) 185 29. Master ES, Lady with a Helmet and Shield, engraving, 99 (cut) X 65

mm, British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British

Museum) 187 30. Baccio Baldini (attributed), The Prophet Daniel, engraving, 149 X 108

mm, British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British

Museum) 191

1X

Illustrations 31. Martin Schongauer, Christ Before Pilate, engraving, 166 (borderline) X

12 mm, British Museum, London. (© The Trustees of the British

Museum) 193 32. Hans Memling, Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, Wife of Tomaso Portinari,

44.1 X 34 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Image ©

Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY) 197 33. Unknown artist, Portrait of Margaret of York, oil on panel, 20.5 X 12.4

cm, Louvre, Paris. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) 199

The Twelve Sibyls, Florentine Fine Manner All are attributed to Baccio Baldini and housed tn the British Museum,

London. (© The Trustees of the British Museum) A.t. The Persian Sibyl, engraving, 180 X 108 mm. 270 A.2. The Libyan Sibyl, engraving, 178 X 108 mm. 274 A3. The Delphian Sibyl, engraving, 179 X 108 mm. 278 A.4. The Cimmerian Sibyl, engraving, 179 X 106 mm. 282 Avs. The Erythrean Sibyl, engraving, 179 X 108 mm. 286 A.6. The Samian Sibyl, engraving, 180 X 108 mm. 290

A.7. The Cumaean Sibyl, engraving, 179 X 108 mm. 294 A.8. The Hellespontine Sibyl, engraving, 179 X 108 mm. 298

A.o. The Phrygian Sibyl, engraving, 180 X 108 mm. 302 A.to. The Tiburtine Sibyl, engraving, 179 X 108 mm. 306 A.u. The Sibyl Europa, engraving, 179 X 106 mm. 310 A.12. The Sibyl Agrippa, engraving, 178 X 108 mm. 314

x

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Joe Connors for his kind invitation to deliver the Berenson Lectures and for the warm hospitality extended to me by him, Frangoise Connors, and the ever helpful staff at I'Tatti, many of them old friends. I recall with special pleasure the lectures themselves, which were delivered to an impressively large and enthusiastic audience that was also filled with many friends and colleagues in the study of Renaissance Florence. Very special thanks are due to Naoko Takahatake

and Jessica Richardson for their invaluable and extraordinarily efficient assistance in acquiring illustrations and permissions. I am also grateful to Ian Stevenson, Assistant Editor in the Humanities at Harvard University Press, for his patience and good humor in seeing the book through to final publication. As always, my deepest appreciation is reserved for Elizabeth Cropper, whose patience, sharp prodding, and infallibly sound judgment have given me indispensable support throughout. I dedicate this book to the memory of my dear son, Adam Sell Dempsey, who died while it was being written, and to his widow, Kayoko Dempsey. One further, special acknowledgment needs to be made. | x1

Acknowledgments

am especially in the debt of Nerida Newbigin, whom I ran into by chance in the via dei Servi one fine June day in Florence in 2010, and who at a moment's notice generously agreed

to read chapters 3 and 4 and my appendix. She did so with extraordinary speed and close attention, and I have benefited greatly from her acute observations, which have saved me from many a slip. Needless to say, I am entirely responsible for such errors as remain. I must add that on one crucial point we differ. Professor Newbigin is convinced for sound reasons that the traditional attribution of the sibyls’ octaves to Feo Belcari is in error, principally because they are not mentioned in the list of Belcari's works compiled by his son while Belcari still lived. I have accordingly altered my text to keep the question of attribution as open as possible. However, in my heart of hearts I believe that Belcari, famous for his mastery of ottava rima (so beautifully analyzed by Limentan1), was the author, and that the octaves were not separately listed by his son simply because they were considered a

part of his Annunciation play. But this is a problem that merits closer study by others more expert than I. Washington, D.C, December 2010

XU

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

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Introduction

This ts the third book I have devoted to the broad theme of the Importance of vernacular culture to the understanding of Renaissance art. Uhe first, titled The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s

Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Mag-

nificent, was framed as a particular study of Botticelli’s Prima-

vera, which without doubt was conceived on the basis of a profound knowledge of classical culture that was unquestionably mediated by the great humanist scholar and poet Angelo Poliziano. In it, I suggested (and I am still convinced) that the classical materia motivating Botticellt’s imagery has essentially been established, and that therefore the classical structure of the Primavera’s invention—that ts, 1ts basic ico-

nography—has for all intents and purposes been resolved. The various interconnected ancient texts informing this 1n,

Introduction

vention (for Botticellt was not illustrating a single mythological episode but instead expressing a new poetic idea—a new poesia on the model of the ancients—transposed into painting) were assembled with elegant philological precision.

The invention of the Primavera 1s cast in the form of a carmen rusticum invoking the primitive gods of the ancient spring

as they had been worshiped before the Caesars, in the very earliest days of the Roman Republic. However, the appearance of the gods painted by Botticelli bears no relation to their representation in ancient art. To invoke Panofsky's famous “law of disjunction, | their form is not matched to their content. They are instead imagined, as Warburg had early recognized, in faithful renderings of the contemporary quasitheatrical costumes and accoutrements designed for the enactments of Florentine festivals, masquerades, and civic cele-

brations. In other words, like the nymphs and gods of Boccaccio’s Ninfale Fiesolano, the ancient deities appear resur-

rected in the familiar domestic setting of the Florentine countryside. They are imagined in contemporary guise, and they speak in the vernacular tongue. [he same is true of Poliziano's Stanze cominciate per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici, virtu-

ally contemporary with the painting of the Primavera. And, like the Primavera, the Stanze is dazzling in its combination of

profound classical allusions, its virtually infinite echoes of ancient poetic antecedents in combination with Petrarchan reminiscences, the whole presented in the most refined Tuscan vernacular. The problem of interpretation—not least for the Primavera—now shifts from simple iconography to 2

Introduction

one of understanding the conventions and rules governing the writing and reception of vernacular poetry as descended from Petrarch and the writers of the dolce stil novo, in particular as these conventions were adapted in the poetry of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his contemporaries, the most distinguished of whom was Poliziano. This poetry, so rich in specific references to contemporary places, persons, events, and ideals, follows rules different from the conventions governing the reading of classical poetry and requires the application of different interpretive strategies. My second book, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, took as its subject the figure of the infant putto, so familiar from secondcentury Roman sculpture in particular. Long all but dormant,

the putto was revived in the Quattrocento, above all by Donatello, who indeed may be said to have reinvented the figure and given it new expressive meaning. In Donatello’ time, putti were familiarly named, even in Latin documents, not as Latin amores or genii, but as vernacular spiritelli, or sprites. The

meaning of this word is not truly synonymous with any Latin equivalent and 1s especially clarified by its appearance in vernacular poetry, most notably in Dante’s Vita nuova and Convivio, from which it passed to the fifteenth century and

the poetry of Lorenzo the Magnificent (especially his Comento sopra alcuni de’ suoi sonetti) and his circle. Again the prob-

lem of understanding the uses and reception of even such apparently minor figures becomes one of grasping their meaning to contemporary Tuscan-speaking audiences, even among those with considerable skills in the ancient languages. 3

Introduction

What did these audiences see in their mind's eye when reading the ancient stories? Or, in Aby Warburg's famous formulation, What was it about antiquity that “interested” artists (and their viewers) in the Quattrocento? Accordingly, I asserted in my introduction to that book that, while I agreed with Panofsky’s defense of the concept of the Renaissance as

comprising a distinct historical period, I questioned what seemed to me to be an overemphasis on the phenomenon of classical revival as uniquely defining the distinctiveness of that period. Again I asserted the importance of vernacular culture as expressed in linguistic and visual forms to the extraordinary achievements of the Renaissance in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

In this book, I return to the same theme, hoping to amplify upon it by examining a lumited number of examples. In

the first chapter, following a brief outline of the history of the concept of the Renaissance itself, | begin with an examination of Simone Martinis extraordinary Maesta in Siena, a painting that has neither classical content nor form but that evinces perhaps the very first adaptation in Italian painting of those French courtly poetic conventions that were simultaneously transforming the vernacular idioms of the new Italian poetry. In particular, I rehearse the now familiar norms for representing female beauty in the poetics of the vernacu-

lar, French in origin and Italian in application, and suggest that these provide the key to understanding the emergence of an idea of terrestrial, and even erotic, cortesia. It is an idea that

responds to norms and ideals that are decidedly not classical, 4

Introduction

and to this theme | return in the second chapter. This begins with an analysis of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, painted a century

and a half after Simone’ Maesta. Here we are presented not with the Madonna as queen of a court, but with an image of the ancient goddess of love and beauty whose aspect is profoundly motivated by humanist Latin and Greek learning at its most refined. Again thanks to Poliziano’s exquisitely learned intervention, Botticelli’s Venus 1s conceived in rivalry with Apelles’s famous Venus Anadyomene as described by Pliny

and several Greek epigrams in the Planudean Anthology, imitated by Poliziano in a Greek epigram of his own. However, notwithstanding the profound humanist learning that informed Botticelli's conception, it is noteworthy and highly significant that the figure of Venus, notwithstanding the model for her in an ancient statue (of the so-called Medici Venus type), responds to the distinctly unclassical norms for describing female beauty in vernacular love lyric (as do her sinuously graceful Gothic contours ), norms that also deter-

mine the courtly appearance of the Madonna in Simone’s Maesta. They are sisters under the skin, and both are to be understood and interpreted in terms of the rules governing contemporary Tuscan poetic expression. The chapter then concludes with a parallel examination of Luigi Pulci’s comic frottola titled “Le Galee per Quaracchi” and Botticelli’s socalled Portrait of Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci in Frankfurt, re-

cently upgraded, in my opinion rightly so, from a studio production to the hand of the master himself. The poem lists in extravagantly burlesque detail the adornments and cosmetics 5

Introduction

required by the ladies—two galleys full!—for a weekend visit to Bernardo Rucellat’s villa just outside Florence, while the painting depicts in no less extravagant detail a breathtakingly

beautiful young Florentine woman tricked out with adornments such as those described by Pulci. Here we are confronted with a true critical aporia: Is she a portrait of an actual contemporary beauty such as Simonetta? Is she a forerunner of Michelangelo's unquestionably ideal (and unquestionably classical) teste divine? Does she personify some ancient goddess, such as Athena (an armor stomach plate is barely visible beneath her breasts )? Or 1s she all these things,

an actual woman playing a role in one of Florence's civic (and vernacular) representations, as had Simonetta herself when she was painted as a kind of Athena personifying Chaste Glory by none other than Botticelli on the banner carried by Giuliano de’ Medici into the joust he won in 1475!

The second half of the book, chapters 3 and 4, take up the question of civic celebrations directly, in particular the Feast of San Giovanni, and the new enactments, or sacre rappresen~ tazioni devised for them. These chapters are especially concerned with the figures of the sibyls devised for these enactments because in their production we encounter, some thirty years earlier than in Botticelll’s mythologies, the intersection of the new humanist learning with artistic, in this case theat-

rical, production. At some time around 1430 the humanist scholars at Cardinal Giordano Orsin1’s court in Rome had devised a new iconography for the ancient sibyls, increasing 6

Introduction

their number from ten to twelve and endowing each with new

attributes and new prophecies. The twelve sibyls were also painted, together with twelve prophets for a room in the Orsini Palace. The paintings are lost, but descriptions of them were circulated widely, arriving in Ferrara by the early 1440s and Florence shortly thereafter. In the next decade in Florence the Latin prophecies of the Orsini sibyls were given paraphrastic translation in oftava rima, some of which were recited as the prologue to the Annunciation play written by Feo Belcari, a master of oftava rima who, together with his sometime collaborator Piero di Mariano Muzi, has a claim to be one of the inventors of the new rappresentazioni, the earli-

est of which dates to the late 1440s. The sibyls’ verses also appear in corrupt form as captions to Baccio Baldinrs engravings of the twelve sibyls, dating to the early 1470s, in which the sibyls are represented in quasi-theatrical costume and with the attributes invented for the Orsini sibyls. Chapter 3 1s devoted to the reconstruction of the ancient sibyls and their prophecies undertaken by Cardinal Orsini’s humanist scholars. Chapter 4 takes as its subject the vernacular octaves with the sibylline prophecies attributed by long tradition to Feo Belcart. Finally, the book ends with an appendix reconstructing the twelve vernacular octaves themselves.

7]

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ONE

Courtly Lyric I SIMONE MARTINI, FRENCH COURTLY LYRIC, AND THE VERNACULAR

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HANKS in large part to the proliferation of art history studies posited on the models of social and economic historical research into what has come to be called the Early Modern Period, the very concept of Renaissance art has fallen into an oddly unresolved limbo. In particular, an idea of Renaissance art defined in its essence as the recovery and revival of classical form and usage seriously requires rethinking. To be sure, Vasari had referred to a rebirth (rinascita) of

art commencing with Giotto, but it is clear that by this he did not intend to characterize a rebirth of the art of antiquity. He meant, on the contrary, that art itself had been reborn after long being interred (sotterramento), dating from the time of Emperor Constantine and Pope Sylvester. Its revival

was ascribable to a return, accomplished by Giotto, to renlI

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

dering the effects of nature, the world as it is seen and experienced. The idea that Renaissance art was founded in a classical revival is a product of German Romanticism, descending

in particular from Friedrich Schlegel, who in 1797 became the first to employ the word “classical” to denominate the idealizing artistic style of antiquity and its Nachleben.' The no-

tion of Renaissance culture as itself a rebirth of classical, or even pagan, antiquity was then given definitive statement by Jacob Burckhardt, in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien of 1860.

Notwithstanding numerous revisionist attempts, it has enjoyed fairly general assent up to the present day, and was powerfully reasserted by Erwin Panofsky in 1965 in his classic Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (I here employ the

word “classic” in its original sense of “canonical’”). In this profoundly learned book—persuastve and enlightening in dozens of subsidiary demonstrations, but mistaken, I believe, in its major premise—Panofsky offered his famous “law of disjunction,’ whereby he argued that the art of the Renaissance reached maturity only when classical form (pathos) was reunited with classical content (ethos). He was unable to discern an engagement with a pure idea of classicism thus conceived until its adumbration in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, painted around 1485, and its full emergence with Raphael's klassischer Idealstil about twenty years later. Small wonder, then,

that Panofsky was accordingly compelled to redate the emergence of the Renaissance to nearly two centuries after Giotto

and Duccio in art, and Dante and Petrarch in letters, with 12

COURTLY LYRIC I

whom, ever since Boccaccio, Villani, Ghiberti, and Vasari himself, the new epoch had been said to find its beginnings. This virtual identification of the Renaissance with an idea of classicism only first realized by Raphael ultimately derives from eighteenth-century criticism and, especially, Winckel-

manns celebration of an aesthetic and moral perfection attained in ancient Greek art, which for him had been partially reborn, though only briefly, in Italian art of the early sixteenth century. For Vasari, on the other hand, this moment marked the emergence of a third and final phase (which he variously called the terza maniera or maniera moderna) of a long

revival of art that had developed over the previous two centuries and reached its apogee with Raphael's slightly older con-

temporary Michelangelo, whose realization of a perfected

nature in the representation of the human form had (in Vasaris view) surpassed the achievement even of the ancients. The first phase in the rebirth of art, marked by Giotto’s ren-

dering of natural appearances in reaction against the endlessly repeated decadent formulas of the maniera greca (or Byzantine manner), had been followed by a second, initiated by Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio, in which the painting of natural appearances and effects was refined by theo-

retical rationalization. As a result, the materials of optics (including perspective ), anatomy, and proportion were subjected to structural and mathematical analysis and additionally mastered. To borrow Panofsky’s elegant phrasing, artists

of the first phase painted nature as it appeared before them 13

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

(natura naturata), whereas artists of the second phase also sought to work according to the principles by which nature creates (natura naturans).

For Vasari, artists working in both periods did consciously emulate the ancients in their desire to render nature, and the undoubted achievement of antiquity provided a yardstick for

measuring their own success, but not necessarily a style to be emulated as such. The truth of this is indeed apparent from Pisanello’s copies after Roman sarcophagi, in which, stylistically speaking, the ancient origins of the figures are undetectable in their uncomfortably self-conscious nakedness, far more Gothic than they are Roman. It also appears

from Benozzo Gozzolis drawing of one of the Quirinal Horsetamers (Fig. 1), who resembles an unclothed shop assistant rather more than an ancient hero; or from Pollatuolo’s various versions of Hercules in violent combat; or yet again from Bertoldo’s famous bronze battle relief in the Bargello, in which figures literally copied from a Roman sarcophagus are rendered in a manner recognizably Ghibertian. In these examples, there is evident a desire to take antiquity as a guide to rendering the effects of observable nature, but little interest in antique style as such, much less a Winckelmannian concept of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (eine edle Einfalt

und eine stille Grosse, in Winckelmann’s famous phrase). The

same may be said of Brunelleschis demonstration of the mathematical principles governing perspective, a means he devised for bringing the observable world into sharp threedimensional focus. 14

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;a Ss Lh ee as Fe be | 'yoin'’s Wedding P ion, fi h

Fig. 2. Giotto dit Bondone, The Virgin’s Wedding Procession, fresco, nort wall, Arena Chapel, Padua.

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COURTLY LYRIC I was endlessly repeated in the poetry of the succeeding centuries, as well as in painting, as evidenced by Botticelli’s unforgettable image of Flora in the Primavera (Fig. 3)."' Beauty for

Botticelli, no less than for Latini and the poets of the stil novo, has blonde hair like spun gold, a face like tvory tinged with roses, a brow that is broad and serene, black eyebrows perfectly arched like little bows, and teeth like pearls, which are revealed when she smiles and seem to open a paradise to the eyes of the beholder. (I will here point out two anomalies in the descriptive convention, faithfully followed by Botti-

celli, namely blonde hair in combination with black eyebrows, and serious eyes above a smiling mouth. The latter paradox produces the alluring ambiguity of Flora’s smile.) The metaphorical techniques of such poetic descriptions, whether applied to persons, places, or seasons, were, as Geof-

frey and Matthew had claimed, the wellspring of poetic invention in the vernacular. They were repeated and varied in an unbroken tradition that continued in the following centuries, as Cropper showed with examples ranging from Botticelli’s Primavera to Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck through to Poussin’s Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well. All appeal to

vernacular conventions for representing beauty that, even in

the instance of Poussin, are decidedly not classic, despite Gombrich’s special pleading for the permanence of the classical solution. Thanks to Cropper’s demonstration, and much further work in both art and literature by Giovanni Pozzi and others, everyone 1s now familiar with how formal poetic de-

scription of the beloved'’s beauty in the vernacular courtly 31

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

tradition (descriptio pulchritudinis), arising from the lyric mate-

rialism of poetry in the dolce stil novo, reopened the very ques-

tion of beauty itself in Renaissance art, the donna’s beauty becoming a synecdoche for the beauty of works of art conceived and expressed in vernacular idioms.” A new avenue for understanding the problem of beauty in

Renaissance painting and sculpture, as well as poetry, had thus been opened, calling into question the dominant Neoplatonic understanding of the aesthetic and moral content of Renaissance art that had gained preeminence by the middle years of the last century. Eugenio Garin had already warned against the untversal application to Renaissance art of so monolithic an aesthetic, really an extreme transformation into Ficinian terms of a Burckhardtian idea of classi-

cism that claimed to have historical justification (though rather slender) but was in fact profoundly anti-Warburgian. Garin vigorously protested against the “external nature and naivete’ of so exclusively Platonic an understanding of the culture and art of the period, but to little effect. In a sharp rebuke to Panofsky and Charles De Tolnay's Neoplatonic in-

terpretations of a “classical Michelangelo,’ he pointed out that “Ficino was not Pico, nor was he Poliziano, and Petrarch and Petrarchism were not the Neoplatonism of the Ficinians; Landino and his commentary on Dante had means of their own, and the return to the inspiration of the dolce stil novo had

its own characteristics. [he themes and ‘content’ of Michel-

angelo can only be reduced to intrinsically Platonic matter by means of arguments largely drawn out of metaphors.”” 32

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Art, Washing ;

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COURTLY LYRIC I in his notebooks), all that we see, everything that 1s presented for the lover-spectator's pleasure, has metaphorical valence. Not only is the actual Ginevra represented; so also 1s Ginevra as a representation of an idea of love imagined by her courtly lover, Bernardo Bembo. She 1s in fact the highest expression of his imagination and his male desire. And indeed, as Jennifer

Fletcher showed in an exemplary article, the device on the back of her portrait is nothing more than a paraphrastic variant, both in the visual and verbal senses, of Bembo’s own

personal device, the motto VIRT'VS ET HONOR framed by laurel and palm branches.’° Recent infrared photographs have revealed that this motto originally appeared on the reverse of Leonardos painting, thereby identifying it as belonging to Bembo."® The device was then changed to refer to Ginevra by adding a sprig of juniper (ginepro = Ginevra) and altering the motto to its present form, VIRTUTEM FORMA DECORAT, poetically identifying her soul with Bembo's idea of her.” Her beauty adorns an idea of virtue that 1s wholly of his imagining and his desire, finding its perfection in her remembered presence among the cool springs and shady groves that together evoke for him a consoling refrigerium from every worldly passion and strife. Seen in such a light, the task of art history criticism 1s to discover on a case-by-case basis, following the rules (guided

by metaphorical clusterings of the sort indicated by Leonardo) that govern the creation and reception of vernacular courtly poetry. [he task is to discover for each unique painting what the imaginative idea of love is that we find expressed 4l

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

in the portrayal of the beloved, whether she appears in the form of an actual lady, as in the case of Ginevra de’Benci, or as some fictional counterpart, as in the instance of Brunetto Latini’s Iseult. Such an idea may be sacred or profane, expressed in the guise of the Madonna or of Venus. It may be a true idea of love, or even a false and deceiving one. It may be noble or straightforwardly erotic, and it may appear in the beatitude that is Beatrice, the idea of poetry enshrined in Laura, the myth of Florence embodied in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Lucrezia Donati, or in the carnal enchantments of an

Alcina or Armida. It may appear as the idea of Christian Charity painted by Botticelli in his Madonna of the Magnificat;

as the love of Virtue painted by Leonardo in the Portrait of Ginevra de’Benci; as that natural (and wholly terrestrial) love and desire producing the annual miracle of the renovatio mundi

celebrated in Botticelli's Primavera; or yet again as the self-

deceiving and utterly corrupt love of carnal pleasure put forward by Botticelli in his Mars and Venus, or by Bronzino in his London Allegory." Latin is the language of the Church, the untversity, and the chancery. The vernacular is the language of living experience

in the world. In courtly poetry, the vernacular is the medium for expressing an idea of love in the world, an idea to which

the poet, for good or ill, has dedicated his heart. So far as painting 1s concerned, it was a truism long before Thode to observe that the discovery in Italy of the actuality of lived experience in the natural world arose together with the first flowering of vernacular expression, a phenomenon to which 42

COURTLY LYRIC I Ulrike Hg has recently devoted a fine essay.” Giotto is untformly praised by the early writers Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cennino Cennini, Filippo Villani, Ghiberti, and Politian, as a painter of the realities of existence, as the creator of a “modern manner based in the observation of nature, a judgment repeated, needless to say, by Vasari. However, such naturalism

is far more complex than simply rendering the surface appearances of people and things. It is also a parallel means for expressing an idea of love in the world (as Dante said, it would be discourteous for a lover to address his lady in Latin), an idea of love that is founded in experience, in the ways people actually speak, see, and feel. As such, the rules of

engagement with this new art, like those governing the creation and reception of vernacular poetry, require careful investigation and definition. It is Jean Campbell's great merit, in several remarkable studies of Simone Martini’s Maestd, completed in 1315 and significantly “renovated” in 1321, to have been the first to have fully grasped the historical import and interpretive centrality

of the intersection of courtly vernacular lyric panegyric and vernacular style in Irecento painting, putting this to revelatory critical use.” Not least of the many innovations in Simone’ extraordinary fresco is that, as recent restoration has shown, the Madonna was altered in the artist’s 1321 rework-

ing, so that she astonishingly uncovers her hair (Fig. 6). Moreover, it is blonde. Her appearance in 1315 can be imagined by comparing her to the Madonna in the Maesta painted two years later, in 1317, by Simone’s relative Lippo Memmi in 43

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

the Palazzo Communale of San Gimignano. The positioning of her body so exactly replicates that of Stmone’s Madonna that it might have been drawn from the same cartoon, and he modestly veiled head no doubt also replicates Stmone’s original depiction. By contrast to Simones “renovation” of her in 1321, Duccio, in his Maestd, installed in the cathedral of Siena

In 1311, Just ten years before, shows the Virgin in the traditional way, as a Byzantine Hodegetria with hair completely covered (Fig. 7). So far as I know, the crowned Madonna with uncovered blonde hair is unprecedented in Italian painting. Yet Simone’s uncovering the Madonna's blonde hair has

gone virtually unnoticed in the literature. (As has the fact that her facial features—almond eyes, nose like a reed, black eyebrows arced like tiny bows—also accord with the normative conventions of effictio | or descriptio pulchritudinis| as inher-

ited from the Frenchmen Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendéme for describing the beloved’s beauty in vernacular lyric. ) The notable exceptions are Enzo Carli, in a truly remarkable essay, and Beat Brenk, for whom the uncovering of blonde hair was clearly a shock. In Brenk’s words, “The grandiose creative impulse of Duccio’s Maestd, installed on the

high altar of the Duomo in yn, is at once manifest in Simones fresco of 1315 in the Sala del Consiglio, a setting that did not require an altar, and he absolutely dared | italics mine] to

paint the Madonna as blonde, dressed d la mode, surrounded by stemmi identifying her as a protectress of the Angevins, the

governing Guelph party, and the Sienese people.” Brenk’s shock does not end there: “While the text written on the 44

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COURTLY LYRIC I

Italy. There was, after all, Lorenzo Monaco’s blonde Madonna in the Annunciation from the San Procolo polyptych (which of course follows Simones own Annunciation of 1333

for the Duomo in Siena) and the Hermitage Madonna of Humility convincingly attributed to Fra Angelico by Miklos Boskovitz and dated to around 1419. An especially impressive

eatly example appears in Vitale da Bologna’s Madonna dei Denti, painted for the Oratory of Sant’Apollonia at Mezzaratta in 1345, in whose costume and portrayal both traditional and courtly elements are artfully combined. The Madonna wears a head cover and mantle emblazoned with heraldic rampant gilded griphons. Her blonde hair is clearly visible beneath a transparent wimple in a style worn by ladies of the court in the days before wimples went out of fashion and came to be worn only by nuns. And beneath her serene forehead, black arched eyebrows, serious eyes, and reedlike nose, her lips are parted in a smile, revealing tiny pearl-like teeth—hence her sobriquet, the Madonna dei Denti—that the endlessly repeated conventions of descriptio pulchritudinis invariably liken to the opening of paradise to the beholder. For the Greek Symeon such images gave evidence that the Latins “desire an existence that is perceptible to the senses, for in

vain they take trouble to observe visible phenomena and those created things that are subject to change; they serve the

created world instead of the Creator ... putting their confidence only in the knowledge of what is trifling, and they stupidly do not consider that there is something above what is perceptible to the senses and the human mind . . . whereas 61

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[for us Greeks] the holy icons have been piously established in honor of their divine prototypes.” About a decade later, Gregory of Melissenus, a member of the Greek delegation to the Council of Ferrara in 1438, similarly complained to the patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph H, “When I enter a Latin church I do not revere any of the saints that are there because I do not recognize them. At most, I may recognize Christ, but I do not revere him either since I do not know in what terms he is inscribed. So I make the sign of the cross and I revere this sign I have made myself, not anything I have seen there.’*’ Presumably, neither Symeon

nor Gregory would have had much difficulty in recognizing in Duccio’s Madonna Rucellai the divine prototype of the Ma-

donna as sanctioned by centuries-old Byzantine traditions. By the same token they would not have acknowledged her as she appears in Simone’s Maestd, blonde hair scandalously uncovered, luxuriously dressed in imported Tatar silks, appearing as a species of Angevin queen seated beneath her royal pavilion decorated with secular coats of arms, accompanied by the members of her court. The cause of their discomfiture with such representations Symeon most acutely identified as the artist's concern to portray the visible phenomena of the

created world, or what I would call their vernacular address, appealing in the instance of Simone’s Maesta to the common experiences of each living inhabitant of the Sienese

commune. Simones Madonna could not possibly be, for Symeon, the queen of an eternal Heaven. She is instead lo62

COURTLY LYRIC I

cated in the contingencies of worldly existence, a secular sovereign presiding over a court of this earth. As we have seen, Enzo Carli recognized the wellspring of

Simones new vision of the Madonna in vernacular courtly lyric. Silently quoting from Giacomino da Verona’s De Lerusa-

lem celesti, Carli correctly saw in Simone’s Madonna “quella

nobil pulcella che in ciel porta corona,’ thus embodying an idea of cortesia celebrated by poets of the stil novo and adapted

in religious verse by Giacomino and Jacopone da Todi in his first lauda, in which the Virgin is invoked with the words “O

regina cortese. However, for whatever reason, he recoiled from the implications of this perception and took refuge in courtly conventions. [he effect is like releasing the air from a balloon, depriving Jacopone’s lauda of its very poetic afflatus,

which depends entirely on maintaining the tension between its celestial subject and her secular manifestation. Nor is it manifestly the meaning intended by Giacomino, who writes of the Queen of Heaven praised by angels and saints 1n floral metaphors remarkably prescient of Simone’s Maesta: ““Tant é alta e granda quella gentil pulcella / che li angeli e li sancti de let parla e favella, / empercio ch’ el’ é piu preciosa e bella / che

no é la fror del pra, né la rosa novella.” He concludes his apostrophe to the Virgins beauty with the words “Dondo una enumerable celeste compagna / tutore la salua con ogni cortesia. * Only Jean Campbell has dared to follow the interpretive imperatives for understanding the foundation to Simone's 63

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imagery in vernacular lyric panegyric to their inescapable conclusion. She recognized in his fresco the depiction of a royal adventus: the Madonna is seated with her court in a royal pavilion that can be linked in form and heraldry to actual ceremonial baldachins commissioned by Siena on the occasions of official Angevin royal visits between 1310 and 1327. She further appears as a kind of Queen of the May receiving floral offerings, and Campbell accordingly drew attention to the significant ties between this imagery and that, not only of religious laude but also of such civic rituals as the celebration of Calendimaggio.** As she notes, Simone’s

Madonna is cast explicitly in the role of the lyric beloved (amanza) in the same sense that Dante portrayed Beatrice in the Vita nuova and that Guido Guinizelli openly likened his love for his lady to his love of God in the canzone Al cor gentil: “Tenne d’angel sembianza / che fosse del tuo regno; / non

me fu fallo s’ eo li posa amanza. *’ And, in the Bolognese poet's imagination, this donna angelicata appears in the eternally springtime colors of paradise itself: Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare Ed assembrarli la rosa e lo giglio: Pitt che stella diana splende e pare, e cid ch’é lasstt bello e lei somiglio.**

The imagery is strikingly reminiscent of Simone’s image of

the Madonna in the Maestd, where indeed imagery of the spring is invoked in the incomplete triplet of vernacular verse that appears on its frame, dating the fresco to 1315, and, like O4

COURTLY LYRIC I Guinizelli, referring to the season when Diana (here called Delia) had brought forth all her lovely flowers and the month of May turns to June: Mille trecento quindici vol] gea| fe] Delia avia ogni bel fior spinto fe] Juno gia gridava imi rivolll o}”

The same is true of the words spoken by the Madonna herself, inscribed on her throne, and addressed to the angels who offer her roses and lilies: Li angelichi fiorecti, rose e gight,

Onde s’adorna lo celeste prato,

Non mi dilettan pit che I buon consigli .. .

In 1336, twenty-one years after completing, signing, and dating the Maesta in 1315, and fifteen years after altering it in 1321, Simone arrived at the papal court in Avignon, where he lived until his death in 1344. It was there that for the first time he met Petrarch, whose personal copy of Virgil Simone graced with his famous frontispiece. By Petrarch’s own testimony, written later on the first guard-leaf of this same copy of Virgil, the lady Laura had first appeared to his eyes in the church of Santa Clara on the sixth day of April in 1327, six years after Simone had last put his brush to the Maesta. He records that she died on the same day in 1348. “I am persuaded,’ Petrarch wrote, “that her soul returned, as Seneca

says of Scipio Africanus, to the heaven [from] whence it came.’ Petrarch also indicted two poems (Rime sparse, O5

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LXXVII and LXVII) in praise of a portrait of Laura limned by Simone Martini. In the first one, he wrote: Ma certo itl mio Simone fu in paradiso, Onde questa gentil donna si parte; Ivi la vide e ritrasse in carte, Per far fede qua giu del suo bel viso.*”

In both sonnets, Petrarch seems clearly to be referring to a drawing in metalpoint on paper Gn the second sonnet he writes that Simone “olt pose 1n man lo stile”), but no matter. For the larger point is that, even before painting Laura, Si-

mone had beheld the heavenly prototype of her perfect beauty and cortesia in paradise, and had already painted her in the Maesta.

66

TWO

Courtly Lyric II SANDRO BOT TICELLI AND POLIZIANO: HUMANIST LEARNING AND THE VERNACULAR

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T wILL, | hope, be apparent that the scholars to whom | have referred have responded to valid perceptions in making their arguments: Ulrike Io's emphasis (with a pedigree going

back to Thode and Boccaccio) on the new naturalism of Trecento art and its celebration of the natural world; Beat Brenk’s insistence (also with a distinguished pedigree) on the

centrality of the new narrative techniques in the painting of the period; Jean Campbell's stress on the parallel interpretive strategies employed in painting and the courtly poetry of the stil novo; and Hans Belting’s deservedly influential distinction

between the era of the cult image (Bild) and the newly emerging age er -art (Kunst). Moreover, in two shorter studies that have not yet enjoyed the same influence as his book, Belting underscored the centrality to the discussion of what he called 69

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volksprachliche Gebildeten, that is, vernacular painting.’ He noted

in particular the sudden and unexpected appearance of frescoes (and paintings), such as those painted on Cola da Rienzos house in Rome, that combined the new naturalism with extended inscriptions in the vernacular, either in prose or (as in Simone’s Maesta) in verse.

I have myself devoted two books, one on Botticelli's Primavera, the other on the Renaissance spiritello, to case studies

of the interaction of painted imagery and vernacular forms of expression. I argued that no matter how classical the subjects of paintings such as Botticelli's Primavera and London Mars and Venus may be, their imagery—the costumes and actions of the gods represented—is rooted in the Florentine present.” [hey are imagined in accordance with the conventions of vernacular lyric, and they can be understood only in terms of the rules and critical decorum regulating the writing of such verse. I have also essayed an answer to Warburg's old question, still crucial, of what it was about antiquity that “interested artists of the Quattrocento, who presented the figures of ancient fable “not as plaster casts, but in person, as figures full of life and color,’ just as they were enacted in the civic rituals and feasts of the city. For in my view the Renaissance never was—as both Thode and Warburg also realized—a “revival” or even an uninflected renovation of the “classical” (as we have seen, a term that then had no meaning), but rather the assimilation over time, or even the transposition of ancient and medieval modes into a new expres-

sion based in the life of the present. In this respect, the 70

COURTLY LYRIC II concept of different modes of vernacular style, expression, and content can provide what might be called a unified field theory, also capable, so far as Simone Martini is concerned, of assimilating and clarifying all the various interpretive approaches outlined above. Scholarly discussions of the imagery of Simone'’s Maesta have tended to treat this as an iconographical problem narrowly defined, and in particular have focused on the political context of a fresco that was, after all, created for the council chamber of the governing body of the city and territories of Siena.’ The political context of the Maestd—in which the

Virgin addresses the members of the council through the angels and patron saints who intercede with her, and through her with the infant Christ, on the commonwealth’s behalf—

is of course fundamental to Simone’ imagery. It is indeed central to the vernacular conception of the fresco and a clear

indication that the Madonna is there presented in a terrestrial manifestation, as the prototype fora royal and chivalric idea of, and as even the personification of, cortesia. She appears 1n the guise of a French queen of the house of Anjou, and as having responded to prayers invoking her presence as patron and protector of Siena and its dominions (“La mia terra’), into which, formally enthroned beneath a royal pavilion, she makes her ceremonial adventus. Political content, to be sure; however, political content is not one-dimensional in its representational possibilities, and in art it appears, like any

other subject, in many different guises and genres. For extreme contrast, consider the satirical cartoons of James Gil71

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ray set against the profoundly learned classical panegyric painted by Peter Paul Rubens in encomiastic praise of Marie

de Médicis; or, more to the point, Ambrogio Lorenzetti'’s scholastic gathering of virtues and vices painted in the room adjacent to the Sala del Consiglio as a Speculum principis addressed to the ministers of the Sovereign City-State of Siena, as personified in his Allegory of Good Government. Jean Camp-

bell has pointed the way toward resolving the tension between

political ends and poetic means by noting the distinction Dante made between vernacular poetry and what he called municipal verse, in his estimation inevitably fated to become the instrument of contingent political interests and factions (for which reason his teacher Brunetto Latini appears among the sodomites in Hell).* Simone'’s Maestd is indeed political; but it is, like Dante’s Commedia, political in the most profound sense. In the case of Simone, the political context of the Maesta is subject to a fully integrated and holistic poetic idea of cortesia.

In the first chapter, | examined the revolutionary import and consequences of Simone Martinis portrayal of the Madonna in the Maestd, which presents the Virgin enthroned beneath a pavilion emblazoned with the arms of France, the Angevins of Naples, and the Guelph party of Siena. Her padiglione signifies that she is being honored by the celebration

of a royal adventus as she arrives to take possession of the city,

which had only recently (in 1260) been placed under her pro-

tection together with its territories, all of which she lays claim to by calling it /a mia terra. Moreover, in sharp contrast 72

COURTLY LYRIC II to the Madonna in Duccio’s Maesta, and also to her original appearance in Simones own fresco before he reworked it in 1321, she is presented as the prototype for a courtly idea of cortesia, with her sumptuous dress, blonde hair, and carefully limned features expressing normative conventions regulating descriptions of the beloved’s beauty in vernacular lyric poetry. Though this was their first appearance in Italy, these

conventions originated not only in Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova but also in French Gothic art of the School of Paris. So important is this importation of a French courtly aesthetic that I have resisted abandoning the term “International Style” to denominate that major trend in the arts of which Simone himself is a leading representative. On the contrary, a crucial moment in the story of the dawning Renaissance may be defined, as it has been for poetry, by the importation of vernacular French conventions and courtly values and by their adaptation into new forms of expression in the vernaculars of Italy, both in language and the visual arts.

From the moment Simone completed his revision of the Maesta in 1321, the older usages of the maniera greca faded with

astonishing speed, and blonde Madonnas in contemporary costumes, or modifications thereof, proliferated in Italian art. Passing over hundreds of earlier examples (it seems invidious to single out Vitale da Bologna, Giovanni da Milano, Starnina, Lorenzo Monaco, and Masolino, from so many), I will indicate one from a century and a half later, Botticelli’s exquisite Madonna del Padiglione, now in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum in 2B

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

Milan (Fig. 10). The Virgin is presented simultaneously as the

Madonna lactans and as a kind of Madonna of Humility, kneeling upon the ground. Although she is not enthroned, her royal status is indicated by the baldachin that two angels prepare for her. Her golden hair is revealed through a sheer veil of contemporary manufacture (made from tela di rensa, or cloth from Reims, as the finest and most transparent of these veils are named in inventories). She wears a yellow striped

scarf and, beneath the blue cloak that identifies her as the Madonna (for by this date only older women and nuns wore such robes), there appears a contemporary red gonna with ties at the sleeves, allowing her underlying camicia to appear in pleasing puffs (called fenestrelle, or “little windows,” in inventories) at the forearms, a fashion that came into being in the 14708. And this brings us to the subject of the present chapter, which is Botticelli's treatment of courtly beauty as manifest in paintings of both pagan themes, as in the Birth of Venus, and religious ones, as in the Madonna della Melagrana, in which

the ancient goddess of love and the Madonna are imagined virtually as twin sisters. As discussed in the last chapter, in Renaissance and Renascences Erwin Panofsky formulated for pre-Renaissance art his

famous “law of disjunction, according to which classical subject matter was invariably kept separate from classical style. He advanced the bold argument that the true Renaissance occurred only when classical forms of expression (embodying pathos, in Aristotelian terms) were for the first time united with classical content (or ethos), In his view, this hap74.

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COURTLY LYRIC II

ziano sent some of his Greek epigrams to Antonio Urceo Codro in Bologna, urging him to “read first what I have written in imitation of not a few ancient writers on the Venus of Apelles, which our Pliny calls Anadyomene and worthily desctibes.”* In this epigram, he describes Venus “with her right hand wringing out the drops of the sea with which her head

is drenched . . . and with her left hand covering her sex.” However, not one of the epigrams in the Planudean Anthology describes the goddess covering her sex (that is, none characterize her as a Venus pudica), but instead make clear that

Apelles showed her wringing the seawater from her hair with both hands."® This is a detail confirmed by countless derivations from Apelles’ prototype in Roman and Byzantine art, and accordingly Titian’s Venus Anadyomene in the Ellesmere Collection shows the goddess squeezing water from her hair with both hands. Poliziano’s epigram and his earlier description of Venus in the Stanze C“premendo colla destra il crino, coll’altra il dolce pomo ricoprisse”’) are unique in imagining

the goddess’ hands engaged in different actions. This circumstance confirms that he and he alone mistakenly imagined Apelles’ Venus as the prototype for the Medici Venus pudica, no doubt mediated by Ovid's famous evocation of Apelles’ painting in a verse from the Ars amatoria: nuda Venus madidas exprimit imbre comas | “the nude Venus presses the locks

of her hair drenched in the sea” |."’ This unique detail further

confirms that Botticelli must have consulted Poliziano for the goddess’s pose in the Birth of Venus, although it created for

the artist a conundrum that he elegantly resolved by investing 53

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

her gesture with a double meaning. He painted Venus covering her breasts with one hand and her dolce pomo with the other, thus signifying her modesty (pudicitia) through a direct visual allusion to the Roman Venus pudica. And with the same gesture she presses her hair against her body, and thus asserts

her identity (and artistic rivalry) with Apelles’ foam-born Venus rising from the sea.

The interdependence of Poliziano’s reconstruction of Apelles’ Venus Anadyomene on the basis of the statue of Venus

pudica and Botticelli’s depiction of the goddess in his Birth of Venus constitutes a hapax legomenon and can be explained only by assuming a collaboration between the humanist and the painter in tmagining Venus's appearance. Furthermore, a

growing body of evidence points very specifically to Botticelli’s intimacy with Poliziano, particularly in the creation of Botticellrs so-called mythologies. To begin with a minor example, Poliziano in his Detti piacevoli, the collection of vernacular motti and facezie he assembled between the summer of 1479 and mid-1482, records no fewer than three of Botticelli’s

arouzie, one of them a clever quadruple pun: “The other day

Sandro Botticelli uttered to me a pleasing play on words: ‘Questo vetro chi ‘I votra? Vo’ tre, e io watrd’” (“Who will empty this glass? You'll want three, and I'll help them.” In more accessible Italian, “Chi vuotera questo bicchiere | =vetro |? Voi tre, e 10 vi aiuterd”).’” This, at the very least, documents Poltziano’s easy familiarity with Botticelli, whose ready wit and love of jokes Vasari also mentions, and whose fondS4

COURTLY LYRIC II ness for drink is affectionately satirized in Lorenzo de’ Medicts poem I Beoni.

More to the point, I have already shown in my book on Botticellr's Primavera that the philological elegance and consistency of the various classical texts assembled for the inven-

tion of that painting (which does not simply illustrate a single text but is rather a new poetic invention created on the basis of multiple classical sources that bear a true philological relation to one another) could have been accomplished only by a humanist scholar and poet of Poliziano’s caliber. The texts all pertain to Venus and her companions as deities of the springtime, including Mercury, whom previous scholars had been unable to identify with the season.'’* Moreover, in the instance of Botticelli’s Mars and Venus there occurs an-

other hapax uniquely linking the painter to the humanist, namely, the paniscus trumpeting into Mars’s ear through a conch shell. The meaning of this image should be understood with reference to Poliziano’s celebrated Miscellanea, the

collection of short essays written to propose solutions to various philological knots, which was published in 1489, or some four to five years after the Mars and Venus was painted."

There we learn that the origin of the term “panic terrors” (panikoi phoboi) derives from an incident in the battle of the

Olympian gods against the Titans, when Pan, seeing some conch shells by the seashore, armed himself and his woodland companions (1e., the satyrs, fauns, panisci, and the like) with them. When they blew upon them, the enormous reverO5

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

berating blast struck unreasoning terror into the Titans, causing them to flee the scene of battle. Ever since, writes Poli-

ziano, such irrational terrors were called “panics, after the name of Pan himself; and he adds that such panics, frightening but essentially harmless phantasms, are aroused by obsessive imaginings and nightmares. This forces a radical alteration in the way Botticelli’s Mars and Venus 1s conventionally

understood. Far from being shown the contented postcoital slumber of Mars, we have instead an image of the god of war tormented in sleep by the nightmare of Venus and her attendant sexual phantasms, personified by the ithyphallic panisci. It is an image that rather better conforms to Machiavelli's account of the state of affairs in Florence in the years before the trauma of the Pazzi conspiracy. As he wrote in his Istorie fiorentine, the youth of the city, after an extended period of peace, had become softened and indifferent to any dangers from within or without, consuming themselves in idleness and various lascivie, caring only for wearing fine clothes and pleasing the ladies, and thus were vulnerable to the onslaughts of treachery and fortune. In Botticellt’s painting, we similarly see a Mars rendered paradoxically unmartial by Venus, much as Poliziano imagined him in the Stanze, which, I have suggested elsewhere, presents a similarly jaundiced view of the effeminate luxuriousness of Florentine youth when imperiled by maleficent Fortune. It would thus seem that no more compelling an illustration of Panofsky's thesis could be desired. Venus Anadyomene

is represented, assisted by humanist learning at the highest 56

COURTLY LYRIC II

level, 1n her essential classical character as the foam-born

goddess of love and the animating spirit of the renovatio mundi that takes place in the spring, the season over which she presides. As Venus Anadyomene she is depicted in her true classical form, ultimately derived from a Greek expressive archetype originating with Apelles, known only from literary sources, and mistakenly but ingeniously thought to be transmitted by the Roman statue of Venus pudica. Classical form and content are hence fully reunited in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which is, moreover, the first monumental representation of the nude goddess since antiquity itself. But is this the

whole story? What did such a revival of the forms and contents of antiquity mean to Botticelli and his contemporaries? How did they envisage the antique in their imaginations? Panofsky partly begs this question by taking for granted the proposition that in Botticelli (and Poliziano) there is discernible the first step firmly taken toward a renewal in European art and culture of the permanent values of classicism, values that, as we have seen, were unquestioningly those only later asserted by Winckelmann. Moreover, 1n common with many mid-twentieth-century scholars, he found historical justification for this view in the Neoplatonism that was developed in Florence by Ficino and others under Medici patronage. This seemed to support the idea that Renaissance artists had sought to understand and assimilate already perfected classical forms that were appropriate to the expression of permanent truths, freed from the contingencies of mutating styles and fallible tastes. 87

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

Such a purely abstract conception of Florentine classicism and its meaning for Botticell1s contemporaries was radically different from that of Aby Warburg, Panofsky’s great predecessor and a pioneering scholar of Botticelli's art. In his still fundamental doctoral dissertation, published in 1893, which took as its subject Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus, he instead found evidence of contemporary Florentine vernacular culture in these two paintings despite their classical subjects. As he stated in a prefatory note, he placed Botticelli’s celebrated favole in the context of “analogous ideas that ap-

pear in contemporary art theory and poetic literature, and thus exemplified what it was about antiquity that ‘interested’

the artists of the Quattrocento.” For him the early Renaissance was rooted in popular culture, in the living vernacular, and not in a vain attempt to revive a long dead ancient world.

Warburg's view, in sharp contrast to those of Panofsky and Chastel, was that: The antique as a source of poised and measured beauty— the hallmark of its influence, as we have known it since Winckelmann—still counted for comparatively little. The figures of ancient myth appeared before Italian society ... in person, as figures full of life and color, in the festival pageants through which pagan joie de vivre had kept its foothold in popular culture.

Warburg's philological skills were impressive, indeed all but impregnable, and his analysis of Botticellt’s images in relation to poetry by Poliziano and his contemporaries, as well 86

COURTLY LYRIC II

as to their adaptations of a panoply of Greek and Latin models that Poliziano in particular assimilated, ts among the best ever attempted. But his true goal was not simply to establish iconographic stemmiata. It was rather “to trace, step by step, how artists and their advisors recognized the antique

as a model that demanded an intensification of outward movement, and how they turned to antique sources whenever

accessory forms—those of garments and hair—were to be represented in motion.’ This is Warburg's famous formulation of the concept of bewegtes Beiwerk, or accessories in agitated movement, and it is indeed the very opposite of Winck-

elmanns even more famous description of the foremost general characteristic of classical Greek art as “a noble simplicity and a quiet grandeur.’ Warburg's interests lay in the expressive powers of ancient art and literature, the profoundly emotive and irrational forces struggling beneath the artfully smooth surface of the old myths and stories, and how artists of the fifteenth century adapted their emotive conventions (or “pathos formulae”) to their own circumstances in ways that were far from majestically serene or dependent upon an appeal to a classical norm. Accordingly Warburg, when writing of the Birth of Venus, focused attention on the transitory movements of Venus's hair blown by the zephyrs with enough force so that she leans perilously to her left, slightly (and most unclassically) offbalance, as well as on the foam-capped waves and the hair

and garments, flying in the breeze, of the Hour of Spring (Flora), who strides forward on the shore holding up a bil39

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

lowing cloak to mantle the goddess. He found the ancient models for such agitated movement not in the Medici Venus nor in the canonical monumental sculptures of antiquity, but in gems, sarcophagus reliefs, and neo-Attic relief sculptures, which served as guides for rendering the graceful movements

of living dancers in the festival pageants of the Florentine present. To these observations it might be added that Venus's proportions are extraordinarily elongated. She is almost nine heads tall, in contrast to the Medici Venus’s six. The sinuous grace of her posture has been characterized proleptically as mannerist, and indeed it is quite likely that Botticelli was seeking to emulate a supreme quality that Pliny had clatrmed was unique to Apelles’ style, namely its grace (charis). This same quality was also attributed later to Parmigianino and most famously to Raphael and Guido Reni. However, it is much more likely, and certainly more historically plausible, that Botticelli’s idea of grace was founded not in antiquity but in the courtly style of Simone Martini’s Trecento and particularly in the characteristic S-curve of French Gothic art. In the same way, despite the supreme philological sophistication informing the story told by the painting, which is based, thanks to Poliziano’s unparalleled humanist learning, on a profound knowledge of classical literature, Venus's beauty and that of her companions is nonetheless expressed and can only be understood in obeisance to the conventions of contemporary vernacular love lyric."®

The contemporaneity of Botticelli's vision of Venus 1s also borne out by the costume of Flora, who steps forward gO

COURTLY LYRIC II on the shore to the right. Her gown is assuredly not ancient, but is instead a close rendering of a Florentine festival costume that Botticelli had actually seen, the higher forms of which, as Warburg observed, were “true translations of life

into art. It is an ephemeral, quasi-theatrical creation with floral decoration that is not woven but painted with cornflowers (ftordiligi, shown both in bud and in blossom), and it is strikingly similar to a festival costume represented in Jacopo del Sellaio’s Triumph of Chastity in the Museo Bandini in

Fiesole, in which it is worn by one of the attendants of Chastity, who rides in an edifizio, or festival float.” She is one of a group of dancers and, like Botticelli’s Flora in the Birth of Venus, is also dressed in a white camicia da giorno painted with

blue cornflowers. Most important of all, and most obvious, Botticelli’s Venus herself with her spectacular blonde hair, arched black eyebrows, and breasts like apples is not imagined in her antique guise but with all the attributes and colors describing the beloved’s beauty according to the normative conventions of the troubadour’s descriptio pulchritudinis. In

this, above all, she 1s the spiritual sister of Laura, and even the Madonna as painted by Simone Martini. It 1s appropriate at this point to turn to another painting, the fascinating picture in Frankfurt generically titled A Young Woman in Mythological Guise, which until recently was attrib-

uted to the school of Botticelli but which a growing consensus now ascribes to the master himself (Fig. 13).'* The lady has long been tentatively identified, controversially so, as Simonetta Cattaneo, the wife of Marco Vespucci, who died at QI

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

the age of twenty-three and was mourned in verse by all the principal poets of Florence, including Lorenzo il Magnitfico, who wrote no fewer than four sonnets lamenting her death. Simonetta also had a second, allegorical existence in Florentine romantic chivalry, having been the dama to whom Lorenzos brother Giuliano had dedicated his valor in the celebrated joust he won in 1475, immortalized by Poliziano in the Stanze cominciate per la giostra di Giuliano de’Medici. The extraor-

dinary beauty depicted in the Frankfurt picture conforms not to any classical model, but to the well-established norma-

tive conventions for representing the poet's (as well as the preux chevalier's) lady: golden tresses, high and serene forehead, arched eyebrows, alabaster skin tinged with rosy vermil-

ion at the cheeks and lips. So stunning is the beauty of Botticelli's mage that it has sometimes been doubted that this is a portrait at all, but rather a purely imaginary ideal, such as may be seen in his Madonna del Magnificat, to which the paint-

ing may be compared stylistically. But of what consists her ideal quality, based as it 1s in vernacular rather than classical conventions? And does it differ materially from the idealism of Botticelli’s Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici in the National Gallery in Washington (Fig. 18), which assuredly does represent an actual person but one seen after death, as re-created in memory? Io answer this, I will first turn to a text written by the poet Luigi Pulci. This is a poem of the type known as a “frottola,’ a form of traditional popularizing verse sung in the ordinary language of the streets that combines various highly stressed 92

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THREE

Civic Ritual I CARDINAL ORSINI’S PAINTINGS AND BACCIO BALDINI’S ENGRAVINGS OF THE SIBYLS:

HUMANIST LEARNING AND VERNACULAR DRAMA

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HE sacra rappresentazione as a new dramatic genre appeared

quite suddenly in Florence in the mid-1440s, only a few decades after the simpler liturgical spectacles devoted to the

Annunciation, Ascension, and Pentecost were first established, respectively, in the conventual churches of San Felice in Piazza, Santa Maria del Carmine, and Santo Spirito. These spectacles had little dramatic content as such. They consisted

principally of tableaux accompanied by recitations of the biblical texts either in Latin or vernacular translation. The staunchly Medicean poet Feo Belcari, whose Abraham and Isaac

was first performed in 1449, may fairly be claimed to be a co-

inventor of the new genre, together with such collaborators as Piero di Mariano Muzi, guardian of the Compagnia dei fanciulli dedicated to the Purification of the Virgin housed at 119

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

San Marco. Pope Eugenius IV had established four of these so-called Children's Companies in 1442 in a bull that also set up a commission under the future archbishop of Florence,

Antonino Pierozzi, for the creation of statutes regulating their governance. It was in the Compagnie dei fanciulli that the

earliest development and performance of the new sacre rappresentazioni occurred, Our attention will be focused on two of these plays, Muzi’s rappresentazione of the Purification of the Virgin and Belcarts of the Annunciation, an early version of which was perhaps first performed from a parade apparatus (edificio) during the reformed San Giovanni celebrations of

1454 as part of an extended cycle of plays beginning with the Creation and ending with the Last Judgment. Of particular concern are the prologues to both plays, which comprise speeches by a fair number of Old Testament prophets and pagan sibyls predicting the Incarnation. [he speeches overlap considerably, and they derive from a common source that was almost certainly also drawn upon for the San Giovanni cele-

brations of 1454. [he source was an utterly unprecedented vernacular versification in ottava rima of the traditional Latin liturgical spectacle called the Ordo Prophetarum, or Procession

of the Prophets, in which the prophecies of twenty-four Old Testament prophets were augmented by those of twelve pagan sibyls. In composing the sibyls’ octaves, our anonymous author relied upon humanist Latin epigrams that had been devised for a new, absolutely unprecedented, cycle of twelve sibyls invented around twenty years earlier and painted, together with twelve prophets, for Cardinal Giordano Orsini in 120

CIVIC RITUAL I Rome. He gave Orsini’ epigrams paraphrastic translation in ottava rima, some of which were later used for the prologues to

Belcaris Annunciation play, which takes as its theme the In-

carnation of Christ, and Muzis Purification play. The octaves are also appended, unfortunately in corrupted form, at the bottom of each of Baccio Baldini’s engravings of the twelve sibyls, dating about 1471-75. It 1s possible, however,

on the basis of this and early descriptions of the Orsini series (also surviving in corrupted form) to reconstruct the twelve sibylline octaves in their entirety, a demonstration of which appears in the appendix of this book. We first hear of Cardinal Orsini’s paintings in 1454, in a letter written by Poggio Bracciolini to the humanist Roberto Valturio, who had asked for information about the sibyls to be given the sculptor Agostino di Duccio for the decoration of the Chapel of the Sibyls (recte the Cappella della Madonna del Acqua) in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini I now lack the leisure to gather the information about the Sibyls you ask for, but although I am unable to supply the material I can assist you with some advice. Cardinal Orsini of good memory, who died in the time of pope Eugenius, had all the Sibyls [Sibyllas omnes] painted with the greatest care in a hall of his palace called the camera paramenti, together with inscriptions telling what times they lived in, and

what they had prophesied of Christ. You might write to Rome and arrange for a learned man to write down and send you the forma picturae |the descriptive characteristics and at-

tributes] of each of the Sibyls, their names, and their ept121

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

grams. Nowhere else will you find what you are looking for more exquisitely done, and at the same time you will spare

yourself a lot of tedious work. It is no small effort even nowadays to assemble this material, which was then gathered

together with the greatest possible diligence by extremely learned men.'

Cardinal Giordano Orsinis celebrated paintings of the twelve sibyls, together with twelve Old Testament prophets, perished when the Orsini Palace was almost completely destroyed by supporters of the Colonna between 1482 and 1485. Also lost was an equally famous series of paintings in the sala theatri, almost certainly painted between 1430 and 1434 by a team of artists, among them Leonardo da Besozzo, Masolino, and perhaps (though very doubtfully) Paolo Uccello.* This immense series, beginning with Adam and Eve, was arranged as a virorum illustrium chronica patterned on Eusebius’s division

of human history into six ages. The scheme of the sala theatri, including its inscriptions, 1s known from a number of copies and variations, among them by Barthelémy van Eyck and in Besozzo's own Cronaca figurata in Milan, known today as the

Cresp1 Chronicle. It also found a direct inheritance in the drawings for the so-called Florentine Picture Chronicle, many of

which are attributable to Baccio Baldini. His engraved series of the prophets and sibyls was certainly derived from a written description of the paintings of the prophets and sibyls in Cardinal Orsint’s camera paramenti. Although several prophets and two sibyls were also portrayed in the sala theatri, a full set of twelve sibyls appeared only in the camera paramenti, in which the cardinal maintained his prized ecclesiastical vest122

CIVIC RITUAL I ments and other liturgical paraphernalia, an assemblage described at great length in his will.’ The paintings of twelve sibyls in the camera paramenti are

of tremendous importance for the history of Renaissance art, as they were the first to establish a secure iconography for

the sibyls, and to establish it, as Poggio Bracciolini himself said, on solidly humanist lines. The names of the ten—not twelve—classical sibyls had been listed by Varro in his lost Antiquitates rerum divinarum and transmitted to the Middle Ages by Lactantius in the Divinae institutiones (I, vi, 6-17). There the sibyls are listed 1n the following order: the Persian, the Libyan, the Delphic, the Cimmerian, the Erythraean, the Samian, the Cumaean, the Hellespontine, the Phrygian, and the Tiburtine. Lactantius also records the prophecies of the ten stbyls, which he purports are completely in accordance with the authority of the Old Testament prophets. They predict events pertaining to the whole of Christ's life—from

his conception and birth to his miracles, passion, death, and resurrection—and conclude with his final coming at the Last Judgment.° The prophecies are scattered throughout the seven books of the Divinae Institutiones and were later summarized in Latin translation by St. Augustine (De civitate Dei,

XVIII, xxi) to show that the oracles, if arranged in a continuous series, could be read as a single extended prophecy. This single prophecy Augustine attributed to the Erythraean sibyl. Lactantius’s list of the ten ancient sibyls named by Varro was nevertheless often repeated, almost invariably following the same order, most notably by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae (VIU, 8). 123

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

Nevertheless, as Emile Male was the first to show, in the

Middle Ages only the terrible Erythraean stbyl, prophetess of the Dies irae, found representation in French art, where she alone was shown together with varying numbers of prophets, hence summarizing in a single figure all the pagan sibyls.° This was done despite the fact that Vincent of Beauvais, among others, had listed all ten of Varro’s stbyls, and it no doubt was done because of the authority of St. Augustine, who in the De civitate Dei not only conflated all the sibylline oracles into a single prophecy but also isolated the Erythraean sibyl as the author of a long Greek acrostic poem in which the first letters of each line spelled out the words, “Je-

sus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior.”’ The poem was widely known in the Middle Ages as the Cantus Sibyllae, or, from its opening words, the Ludicii signum, and it is as proph-

etess of the Last Judgment that the Erythraean sibyl is depicted in the upper left-hand corner of Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. The Iudicii signum especially owed its great popularity and broad diffusion to a substantial

homiletic piece, then erroneously attributed to Augustine, titled Contra Judaeos, Paganos, et Arianos Sermo de Symbolo, chap-

ters xi—xvitt of which are addressed to the Jews, demonstrat-

ing their error through the mouths of their own prophets.* Since the twelfth century, these chapters have frequently served as a lectio for Matins at Christmas or some other day of the Christmas season.’ In them the preacher, in response to the persistent disbelief of the Jews, calls forth witnesses from their own law as set out in the Old Jestament, summoning Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Moses, David, and Habak124

CIVIC RITUAL I kuk, who each recite their prophecies. They are followed by the New Testament figures of Simeon, Zacharias, Elizabeth, and John, and then, after a taunt that the testimony already

given should be more than ample, by the Gentiles Virgil, Nebuchadnezzar, and the Erythraean sibyl, who completes the litany by reciting the whole of the Ludicii signum. This done, the lectio concludes with a scornful rebuke to the Jews:

“I now believe, O perfidious Jews, having thus been opposed

and confuted by so many testimonies, you ought not seek

further.’ The pseudo-Augustinian homily enjoyed widespread celebrity not only as a crucial element of the lectio for Christmas Matins but also as the direct source, as Julien Durand was the first to show, for the choice of prophets carrying scrolls inscribed with their testimonies sculptured on the church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande at Poitiers and on the facades of the cathedrals of Ferrara and Cremona." Moreover,

although the complete text was originally read by a priest from the pulpit, the dramatic potential of the Contra Judaeos, in which individual prophets are in turn bidden to announce

their visions, is obvious, and indeed the lectio was quickly adapted into the earliest forms of proto-theatrical liturgical representation. [he homily came to play a crucial role in the early history of liturgical drama, when the biblical prophecies

would be intoned as responses by deacons and other members of the minor clergy to the reading of the text by the officiating priest, who would summon each of them forward in turn, and each would recite the biblical prophecy. Such an exchange is already implicit in the text of the Contra Judaeos 125

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

itself, in which the prophets are first called forth and then give their replies, thus: “Dic, Isaiah, testtmonium Christo, Ecce, quit, virgo in utero concipiet et pariet filium ...2 Dic et tu,

Jeremiah, testimonium Christo. Hic est, inquit, Deus noster, et non aestimabitur alius absque eo.” This was the point of depar-

ture for the development in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of a liturgical spectacle known as the Ordo Prophetarum, or Procession of the Prophets, in which over time the

number of prophets was gradually increased. Even so, the performance invariably concluded with but a single sibyl, the Erythraean, reciting the Ludicii signum.”

Likewise in Italy, before the new inventions for Cardinal Orsinis series we find only the Erythraean sibyl represented among the biblical prophets in Giovanni Pisano’s sculptures

for the facade of the Duomo in Siena, dating to the thirteenth century. She is identified by an inscription, Educabit| ur| de| us| et bl om]o, deriving from a pseudo-Joachite prophecy of the thirteenth century called the Vaticinium Sibillae Eritheae

which claims that the Erythraean sibyl had predicted that the Lamb of God would appear on earth in the time of the Taurus pacificus—identified in the manuscript glosses as Octavian (.e., Augustus).’° As late as 1442, a dozen years before Poggios letter to Valturio, we find only the Erythraean sibyl rep-

resented, together with nine prophets, in the frame painted by Benozzo Gozzoli around Fra Angelico’s fresco of the Crucifixion in the chapter room of San Marco (Fig. 19). Her name is written above her, and in one hand she holds a scroll upon which her prophecy is inscribed. In this instance it is 126

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CIVIC RITUAL I Baldint's true artistic peers, however, are to be found among

those charming and popularizing artists, by no means to be scorned, who were satellites in orbit around such grander figures as Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Rosselli, with whom they often collaborated as assistants on major commissions but who appear only as indistinct blurs at the outer edge of Vasari’s radar screen. Some, like Baldini, received only the briefest of mentions in the Vite, others none at all, and none was given even a short biography. As a result, many remain anonymous, although patient archival research done hand in hand with close stylistic analysis has restored names to a surprising number of worthy artists. "he PseudoPierfrancesco Fiorentino, perhaps better called the Lippi-Pesellino Imitator, and the painters Berenson named the Master

of the Johnson Nativity (Domenico di Zanobi?) and the Master of the Castello Nativity (Piero di Lorenzo?) remain anonymous, even though plausible identities have tentatively been proposed for the latter two. The Master of the Adimari cassone, on the other hand, has been 1dentified as Giovanni di ser Giovanni, called lo Scheggia, none other than Masaccio's

brother, and the Master of Santo Spirito has recently been

shown to be one or both of the brothers Donnino and Agnolo del Mazziere, who were formed in the shop of Cosimo

Rosselli and together maintained a shop of their own.*’ Baldini’s inventive fancy, as we find it expressed in his engravings and in his drawings for the Florentine Picture Chronicle, is especially aligned with that of Apollonio di Giovanni,

the cassone painter first identified and reconstructed as an 171

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

artistic personality by E. H. Gombrich, and who also, shortly before his death in 1464, illuminated the celebrated Riccardiana Virgil (MS 492).** In the Virgil we find pictorialized, in

the words of Giovanna Lazzi, “the Rome of Aeneas transferred to the banks of the Arno,’ the familiar heroes of ancient story reenacting their historic roles in Florence itself.”

The Trojan heroes imagined by Apollonio, like Baldint’s prophets, wear beards and fancifully varied hats “alla grecanica, their exotic costumes and hair stylings imitating those

worn by the Byzantine Greeks who accompanied the emperor John Paleologus to the Council of Florence in 14309. Their women are depicted with patiently arranged veils, huge mazzocchi, and twin-peaked hennins (those headpieces called corne and selle by the Florentines) in the Burgundian style. All appear in richly elaborate costumes, quasi-theatrical disguise-

ments that take as their point of departure the court finery and liveries of the fifteenth century. Figures at one and the same time familiar and exotic, they play their ancient roles in a purely Florentine cityscape that includes such readily identifiable buildings as the Baptistry and the recently completed Palazzo Medici.

Baldini may also be compared to another painter of cassont and domestic furnishings, brilliantly identified by Luciano Bellosi as Lo Scheggia (1410-86). Scheggia was especially favored by the Medici, as the inventory of the Medici Palace made at the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death attests, and it was he who painted Lorenzo's own desco da parto

now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Especially compa172

CIVIC RITUAL I rable to Baldini’s Prophets and Sibyls are two cassone fronts in

the Cambo collection in the Museu de Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, one by Scheggia depicting the seven enthroned cardinal and theological virtues, the other by his son Antonfrancesco with the seven liberal arts.”' They were painted late

in Scheggia’s career, and, like Baldini’s engravings of the prophets and sibyls, ultimately reflect the inventions by Piero Pollaiuolo and Botticelli for the cardinal and theological vir-

tues in the Iribunal of the Mercanzia. The same is true of the domestic paintings by Biagio d’Antonio, who in partnership with Jacopo Sellaio shared a shop with Lo Scheggia and his son in the early 1470s.” It is also true of the Botticellesque panel in the Corsini Palace in Florence, which shows five al-

legorical figures seated, as are many of Baldinis sibyls, on thrones of cloud, an old-fashioned device used by the engraver that was also adopted by a far greater artist, Ghirlandato, for his frecoes of four sibyls in the vault of the Sassetti Chapel, painted between 1479 and 1485.”°

Given the profound rooting of Baldini’s Prophets and Sibyls in the religious festivals and artistic traditions of Florence, in

short given their very “Florentineness, it is at first startling (and charming) to discover how closely Baldini studied, and how faithfully he adapted, the engravings of the Master ES, the supreme master of the second generation of engravers in Germany, whose latest prints are dated 1467, in which year or the year following he presumably died. The connection was originally noticed by Mariette, but for our knowledge of the extent of Baldinis dependence on ES we are especially in173

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

debted to the sharp eye of Max Lehrs.”* Three of Baldini's sibyls are derived with astonishing literalness from ES’s series of the Four Seated Evangelists.’ Por the Libyan sibyl (no. 2),

Baldini painstakingly copied the drapery pattern and folds from ES's engraving of the Evangelist Jobn (Lehrs 91; Fig. 23);

for the Delphic sibyl (no. 3), ES’s Evangelist Mark (Lehrs 809; Fig. 24); and for the Tiburtine sibyl (no. 10), ES'’s Evangelist

Matthew (Lehrs 88; Fig, 25). Stmilarly, the costume and drap-

ery folds of the Hellespontine sibyl (n. 8) copy ES’s St. Thomas (Lehrs 117; Fig. 26) from a second series, the Twelve Seated Apostles. Vhis latter series also provided models for a

number of Baldinis prophets. The prophet Amos (Hind C.L.15; Fig, 27) is dertved from ES’s St. Paul (Lehrs 113; Fig.

28), the prophet Obadiah (Hind C.I.16) from ES's St. Peter (Lehrs 112), the prophet Isaiah (Hind C.l.24) from ES’s St. James the Greater (Lehrs 115), and the prophet Malachi (Hind C.].22) from ES's Judas Thaddeus (Lehrs 123). Some of Baldint's

adaptations from ES are quite inventive. For example, while the figure of Baldini's prophet Ezekiel (Hind C.I.12) copies ES's St. John (Lehrs 116), the head is instead taken from ES’s St.

Peter (Lehrs 112). In like manner, for the right hand and sleeve

of the prophet Habakkuk (Hind C.I.19) Baldini returned to ES's Judas Thaddeus (Lehrs 123). He was especially captivated by

the motif of fluttering drapery swirling decoratively behind the back of the woman shown in ES’s Lady with a Helm and Buckler (Lehrs 220; Fig. 29), which he added as an embellish-

ment to the costumes of the Libyan stbyl (no. 2), the European sibyl (no. 11), and the prophet Haggai (Hind C.I.20). 174

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CIVIC RITUAL I sibyl (no. 8); and in the Phrygian sibyl’s Ottoman helmet (no. 9). Costuming is also apparent in other details of the sibyls’ dress. It is sufficient to mention the Phrygian sibyl's unbound hair and bared arm (no. 9), the Libyan sibyl's richly damasked robe (no. 2), the Cumaean sibyl’s gilded dress with feathery dagged edges at the elbows of her sleeves (no. 7),

and the extraordinary scalelike gilded sleeves worn by the sibyl Europa (no. 11), so reminiscent of Flora’s costume in the Primavera.*®

Of particular interest 1s the peaked hat worn by the Persian sibyl (no. 1), which is much truer to Burgundian fashion than that worn by the Samian sibyl (no. 6). So too is the neckpiece she wears, properly termed a collar rather than a necklace, which close inspection reveals to be a close-fitting choker adorned with alternating gems and enameled flowers, with pendant beads at the bottom.” Although Baldini does not render the collar in close detail, it is startlingly similar to the one worn by Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, wife of Tomaso

Portinari, the representative of the Medici to the court of Charles the Bold and manager of the Medici Bank in Bruges,

as she was portrayed by Hans Memling at the time of her wedding in 1470 (Fig. 32). In the portrait, Maria Maddalena appears, unsurprisingly, in Burgundian dress, wearing a single-peaked hennin anchored by a black velvet head-mantel

and rising to a conical peak wrapped with a sheer veil that spreads downward to her shoulders. Her highly distinctive neck collar, the same as the one she again proudly wore when portrayed by Hugo van der Goes in the Portinari Altarpiece, 195

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

is comprised of a string of jet beads (or black pearls) from which 1s suspended a stiffened cord of loosely knotted gold loops appliquéd with enameled five-lobed flowers set with pearls, sapphires, and rubies, at the bottom of which hang small silver and gold pendants. Baldini's Persian sibyl remarkably matches all these details of costume (including a slender cord from which is presumably suspended a jewel or crucifix beneath her bodice), even though her collar 1s not described in the same stunning detail as Maria Maddalena Baroncellis in Memling’s portrait. Nor are the two collars by any means identical. Nevertheless, the design of both is as distinctively identifiable as would be one

by Cartier. The prototype for such twisted gold collars was almost certainly created by Gerard Loyet, goldsmith and varlet de chambre for Charles the Bold, at the time of the duke’s own marriage in 1468 to Margaret of York, sister of Edward

IV of England.'' Margaret's twisted gold collar was also suspended from beads, and it was adorned with enameled red and white roses, just as we see it rendered in loving detail in an anonymous portrait of her in the Louvre, painted about a decade after her marriage (Fig. 33). Tomaso Portinaris name is frequently mentioned in the account books of Charles the Bold’s argentier, who was Loyet’s paymaster, and it is more than plausible that he commissioned Maria's collar directly from Loyet, or even that it was a wedding gift from the duke himself.’°° Either possibility would explain the special value Portinari assigned the collar by having it reproduced in two portraits of his wife, each by an outstanding Flemish painter. 196

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

197

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CIVIC RITUAL I And it explains Baldints adorning of the Persian sibyl with a non-Florentine collar of great value and royal connotations. Even so, in other respects the Persian sibyl’s dress 1s recog-

nizably Florentine. This appears especially in her sleeves, which are open with ties below the elbow (called fenestrelle) so

that her underlying chemise billows out in airy puffs, as well as 1n the string of pearls, commonplace in portraits of Flor-

entine women of the period, arranged at her forehead instead of the velvet loop so characteristic of Burgundian hennins.'* The elaborately damasked hem of her gown, on the other hand, ts entirely fanciful, as is the richly ornamented band that covers her shoulders and breast, worked in a fish-

scale pattern with suspended pearls that substitutes for the Burgundian flat ermine collar shown in Memling’s portrait of Maria Maddalena and in many other Flemish paintings of the period. Once again elements of the exotic, the foreign, and the familiar are artfully combined in the imagining of a costume appropriate to an ancient prophetess. The contemporary Burgundian and Florentine elements that appear intermixed with the purely fanciful in these costumes are all consistent with a dating of Baldinis prints to the 1470s, when the fashions to which the images allude first became popular. They also suggest that fresh in Baldini's mind when he made the engravings were the lavish and pompously deco-

rated costumes devised for the sibyls and prophets in the performance of the Annunciation play in San Felice at the time of Galeazzo Marta Sforza’s state visit to Florence in 1471. Although his images are not to be understood as liter201

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

ally reproducing the actual appearance of each of those costumes, they nevertheless undoubtedly do give a reliable sense of their general character and effect. The special interest of the phenomena of the sacre rappresentazioni, the costumes designed for them, and their staging in the churches and civic festivals of Florence, derives from the fact that we are here witness to the origins of the professionalization, so to speak, of the vernacular forms of public ritual that is normally associated with Lorenzo de’ Medicis later intervention in these rituals (trivialized by some historians as merely offering the public pane et circenses | bread and circuses |). [his process of professionalization can be seen in his own writing of canti carnascialeschi, his invention of the mascherata, and his commissioning of the finest poets, com-

posers, musicians, singers, and artist for the presentation, costuming, and performance of the popular festivals of the city. For the mascherate, new poems for singing were composed

by the best poets (Lorenzo himself and Poliziano among them), music to accompany them was written by professional

composers (including Heinrich Isaac) and sung by trained singers, banners and edifizi were designed and adorned by such distinguished artists as Botticelli, Verrocchio, and Pollatuolo, and new, sumptuous costumes were designed and created. However, Belcari and Muzi’s new sacre rappresentazioni,

and in particular the translation under the aegis of Cosimo and Archbishop Antonino of the humanist Latin used for the creation of Cardinal Orsini’s paintings of the sibyls into the vernacular cadences of a poetically polished ottava rima, 1s 202

CIVIC RITUAL I the direct precedent for Lorenzo's concept, as stated in the preface to the Raccolta Aragonese, of perfecting Florentine lan-

guage and culture by raising them, as the Greeks and Romans had done in their competitions, athletic games, theaters, and military triumphs, to an unheard-of expressive excellence that would equal and even surpass the ancients. Aby Warburg was

right to emphasize the importance of festival pageants, in which the figures of religion and ancient myth appeared before the Florentines “not as plaster casts, but in person, as figures full of life and color.”

Warburg's examples of the influence of festival celebrations included that of costumes such as those seen in Baldinis engravings, Botticelli's Primavera (in which Flora appears in a painted quasi-theatrical dress and Mercury carries a bejeweled parade falchion), Mars and Venus (with the god's armor shown as a contemporary sallet and jousting lance), and Pallas and the Centaur (with Pallas’s dress adorned with Medicean emblems). His special example, of course, was the figure of the nymph dressed all’antica, who continued as a favor-

ite masquerade figure well into the next century, in support of which Warburg cited a note on costuming for the GrandDucal intermezzi written by the actor Leone de’ Sommi, specifying that “Nymphs should wear camicie di donna, variously embroidered but with sleeves; and my custom 1s to have them starched, so that when they are tied with cords or straps of colored or gold silk | fenestrelle] they puff out a little ... and it would not be unseemly for some to bind up their tresses with silk ribbons covered with those extremely fine veils fall203

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

ing down over the shoulders that add so much loveliness to civic dress.’ ° Note well that De’ Sommi here does not, like Warburg, describe these costumes as all’antica but instead as civilian dress (civil vestire), which he describes according to the

fashions worn in the festivals of the good old days as painted a century earlier by Botticelli and Sellaio, dress that was, in De’ Sommi’s words, puro e semplice, and as such appropriate for

the simple nymphs of the fields and forests. In Botticelli himself, however, we are witness to the transformation into

the highest art of a distinctly contemporary Florentine culture that had been measured and tested against the supreme achievements of antiquity in art and literature and thereby perfected as an expression of present-day experience. [his was not undertaken as a rebirth, or renaissance, of the lost classical past, but instead as a renovatio of the living present measured against the achievement of that past. In this effort the celebrations attending the various civic festivals, as already conceived by Lorenzo's grandfather Cosimo de’ Medici, played a cardinal role.

>

As I stated out the outset, the term “Renaissance” as we un-

derstand it derives from nineteenth-century usage, but I am not concerned to abandon it as a period description of the years roughly extending from 1300 to 1550. It is indeed a con-

cept to which I am profoundly committed. I would perhaps prefer the nearest fifteenth-century equivalent, however, which is renovatio, especially as applied to the renovatio litteris, or re204

CIVIC RITUAL I making of literature, and also to the renovatio mundi, in meta-

phorical terms a renewal of culture that derives from the miraculous rejuvenation of the world each spring, much as we find it celebrated in Botticelli's Primavera. Panofsky considered and rejected this term (which had been advocated by Burchard), which, as he observed, was the designation employed among the scholars of Charlemagne'’s court, who of-

ten referred to a Carolingian renovatio. As he wrote, when Charlemagne “set out to reform political and ecclesiastical administration, communications and the calendar, art and literature, and—as a basis for all this—script and language ... his guiding idea was the renovatio imperii romani’ (something perhaps uncomfortably close to Burchard’s Fascist apologetics). And, he added, “all these efforts served, to use the contemporary phrase, to bring about an aurea Roma iterum

renovata. '°° Since, by the terms of Panofsky’s larger argument, this renovatio, important as it was, was incomplete—a proto-Renaissance or renascence—he preferred to abandon the term until the true Renaissance, when classical form and

content came to be permanently reunited. In a particular sense, however, I think he was mistaken, which was in think-

ing that the foundation of the new culture of the true Renaissance was uniquely based in the revival of antiquity, “a golden Rome renewed again” as conceived by Charlemagne.

The renovatio dreamed of by Lorenzo and Cosimo before him, both great patrons of humanist studies, and the renovatio defined by Lorenzo in the preface to the Raccolta Aragonese was

a remaking of the present, its language, arts, and culture, by 205

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assimilating the two great cultures of Italy, both Latin and Italian, and testing the results against the standards and achievements of the ancients. “It was not by chance,’ wrote Eugenio Garin in 1979, ‘that Poliziano passed from Greek to Latin and then to the vernacular in refining his style, and his vernacular at its most refined takes up the popularizing tendencies of the Florentine vernacular . . . and in doing this the totality [of his style| is accessible to everyone, aristocratic in the extreme and utterly popular, supremely ideal and completely real: umanissima.”'’ In such a way the achievements of the present might surpass the ancients, and the dream of the

humanist Incarnationist theologians of a culture more perfect than that of the age of Augustus, of a world thus made worthy of the Second Coming, might find its realization.

206

FOUR

Civic Ritual IT RECONSTRUCTING THE VERNACULAR OCTAVES

WITH THE PROPHECIES OF THE TWELVE SIBYLS

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t. Baccio Baldini’s Engravings of the Sibyls and

Cardinal Orsini’s formae Sibyllarum

Baccio Baldini’s fine-manner engravings of the twenty-four prophets and Francesco Rosselli’s broad-manner copies after

them each include the name of an Old Testament prophet together with an octave rendering his prophecy. With few exceptions, however, they do not contain Latin epigrams. [he engravings of the twelve sibyls, on the other hand, all display a Latin epigramma (to use Poggio Bracciolinis terminology) for each individual sibyl, as well as her nomen and either a translation or close paraphrase of her prophecy as set out in the vernacular rhythms of oftava rima. These epigrammata directly derive from a manuscript description of Cardinal Or-

sinis sibyls (including Europa and Agrippa), as do their 209

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nomina and their individual formae—that is, their descriptive characteristics and attributes—which Baldini followed in giying the sibyls visual form.'

No original text or texts of the Orsini sibyls can be identified. Copies exist in Liege, Tongerloo, Olmiitz, Brussels,

Munich, Stuttgart, and Florence (Biblioteca MediceoLaurenziana, Ashburnam 1190).’ Each differs in detail and completeness from the others. Emile Male was unaware of the existence of these manuscripts when he wrote his classic, and still indispensable, studies of the sibyls.° He therefore associated Baldini’s engravings with a slightly later compendium titled Sibyllarum de Christo vaticina, which was included

in a miscellany of essays first published in two editions of 1481 by the Dominican friar Filippo Barbier1. Male demonstrated that 1t was from this publication that the new canon for the sibyls was rapidly disseminated in Italy and throughout the whole of Europe, and since he knew of no earlier description of these sibyls, nor even of the existence of the Orsini sibyls, he erroneously surmised that Barbiert'’s treatise must have already been circulating in manuscript when Bal-

dint made his engravings in the 1470s.* However, Barbieri text and Baldini’s engravings both depend directly upon manuscript descriptions of Cardinal Orsini’s paintings, which were discovered by Lothar Freund in 1936 and then published and analyzed by Maurice Hélin. Hélin showed that they fall into two distinct recensions.° The first group centers on the Liége-Tongerloo manuscripts (hereafter L-T), and may be called the northern European recension. The second, or Ital210

CIVIC RITUAL II 1an recension, centers upon the Laurentian manuscript (hereafter M) and Barbieri’s Sibyllarum vaticina, both of which de-

rive from some earlier, more complete description of the Orsini sibyls that is now lost. The northern European and Italian recensions overlap considerably, but there are important differences. Both are certainly based on a fuller account of the Orsini sibyls than any yet known. That such an extended account did exist appears especially from a close examination and comparison of the prophecies spoken by the sibyls in Belcari’s Annunciation play, in Baldini’s engravings, and in the two manuscript recensions, which include Barbieri’s Sibyllarum vaticina. With regard to Barbieri,

he is less interested in the formae of the sibyls (sometimes omitting some of their descriptive attributes, most notably their ages) than he is in recording their Latin epigrammata, or

prophecies. hese he usefully renders at greater length than do either the surviving manuscripts or Baldini’s engravings, and for this reason I have listed in the appendix the epigrams as recorded by Barbieri and those appearing in the manuscripts and the engravings. It is clear from the manuscripts, however, that Cardinal Orsini set great store in the forma picturae devised for each sibyl and that he intended the descrip-

tions of his paintings to serve not only as a record of the learning that informed their invention, but also as a guide for his artists. Thus, in the manuscripts the first sibyl (the Per-

sian) 1s described seated on a throne, “and the subsequent ones too, diversimodo tamen, which are to be done as the painter wishes” (quod fieri debet secundum voluntatem pictoris). Indeed, 211

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one response to the cardinal’s wish that the descriptions serve

as a model for other artists 1s already stated in the northern European recension (L-T), which states that, along with the epigrams of the Orsini sibyls, there are also included prophecies accompanying six statues of sibyls, now lost, in the cathedral of Cologne (rethro chorum ecclesie Coloniensis).° For the

most part, however, these must have been derived from the Roman series, since, with two exceptions (the Erythraean and Samian sibyls, for whom epigrams are additionally recorded deriving from St. Augustine and the pseudo-Joachite Taurus pacificus oracle), only one prophecy is given for each stbyl, which in each case corresponds to its counterpart in the Italian recension. [his gives rise to the speculation that the reason so many copies survive in the libraries of northern Europe may well be that Cardinal Orsini had ordered copies to be taken as gifts when he traveled as a legate for Martin V to France, Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary.’ Be that as it may, Baccio Baldint’s engravings, in instances of differences between the northern European and Italian recensions, almost invariably reflect information contained in the latter. Close scrutiny of his engravings in comparison to both recensions, however, especially with regard to the stbyls’ actual prophe-

cies, helps to reconstruct the more complete description drawn upon by Baldini and, before him, the author of their vernacular octaves.

That Orsini chose for the camera paramenti twelve paintings

each of sibyls and prophets conforms to long-established 212

CIVIC RITUAL II tradition that associated the pagan oracles with the Old Testament prophets. The first ten stbyls appeared in the order given in Varross list as transmitted by Lactantius. Uhe first ten

sibyls in Baldini’s engravings, which are numbered consecutively, are in the same order.® In common with the Orsini series, however, Baldin: listed not ten but twelve sibyls, adding Europa and Agrippa. The latter also makes an appearance in Belcar1s Annunciation play. These circumstances alone estab-

lish the dependence of both on what Salvatore Settis has rightly denominated the “new canon” created with the Orsini paintings. With this as preface, we may now turn to the forma Sibyllarum.

Comparing Baldini’s engravings with the descriptions of Orsinis paintings, we find that the forma given in the manu-

scripts for the Delphic sibyl (no. 3) is that of woman age twenty, who, as in Baldini’s engraving, holds a horn in her right hand. The Italian recension (M) describes her simply as in manu cornu tenens, while the northern-European (L-T) adds that in dextera manu tenet cornu bucinatorium aureum, which

would account for the metal fittings on the sibyl’s curved horn in the engraving. She wears a silk robe (specified as black in M: vestita veste nigra), which Baldint shows in the richly ornamented baldric that encloses her robe across the shoulders.

The forma for the Erythraean sibyl (no. 5) 1s that of a woman age fifty who, as Baldini depicts her, is dressed as a nun (L-T: habitu monialis vestitur, subalbis vestis; M: nigro velle in 213

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capite). Che manuscripts also describe her, followed by Bal-

dini, with an unsheathed sword in her hand, and her feet placed on the star-spangled circle of the sky. The Samian sibyl (no. 6), described only as vestito veluto rubeo in L-T, is described in M as a woman of twenty-four, with a naked sword lying beneath her feet and a fine veil covering her head. The same attributes appear in Baldini’s engraving. Moreover, she has a beautiful chest (habens formosum

pectus), to which she draws attention by placing her hand upon it (manum ad pectus tenens), which Baldini ingeniously, and most effectively, indicated by showing the Samian sibyl firmly clasping a large fold of her gown at the point where it descends from her throat down between her breasts. The Tiburtine sibyl (no. 10) is twenty years old. She wears the skin of a wild goat thrown around her shoulders (depingitur habens pellem caprioli siluestris ad spatulas), its head and feet

knotted together above her breast (cum capite animalis sint reflexi desuper ad pectus et posteriores infixt ad corrigiam), descriptive

attributes again followed faithfully by Baldini.

The manuscripts describe the Hellespontine sibyl (no. 8) as fifty years old and terrible in aspect. Her head is completely bound like a Moorish woman's (L-T: caput habens ligatum per totum ut morista), and her throat is swathed, as Baldini

depicts her, all the way down to her shoulders (M: ligato velo antiquo capite sub ula circumvolto usque ad scapulos ).

The Phrygian sibyl (no. 9) is unsightly and melancholic (L-T: turpis et nigra; M: antiqua facie saturnine), and her hair is unkempt, twisted and falling down her back like a gypsy’s 214

CIVIC RITUAL II (L-T: capillos habens tortos et expansos supra dorsum more coyptiaco ).

This again agrees with Baldint’s engraving, as do the facts that she points with her finger and that her arms are wantonly bare (M: nudis brachiis).

Baldini’s engravings of these six sibyls all closely match the

descriptions of them in the Orsini series. The others also adequately match their descriptions. The Libyan sibyl (no. 2)

is described in M as twenty-four years old, with a garland woven from leaves and flowers on her head (ornate serto viridi et

florum in capite), in which respect Baldini agrees with the description. [he sibyl Europa (no. 11) is described in the manuscripts as fifteen years old and the most beautiful of all, with a glowing face. As in the engraving, she is clad in gold, has an extremely diaphanous veil tied to her head, around which her golden hair is knotted (M: velo subtilissimo capite ligata, induta veste aurata). A like correspondence obtains for the Cumaean sibyl (no. 7), whom the manuscripts describe as also dressed

in gold, eighteen years old, her hair pulled back behind her head, carrying a tall open book in one hand and holding her left hand over her knee (M: sinistra habens super genu).

Had we not taken note of these correspondences between Baldini’s sibyls and their counterparts in the Orsini cycle, the descriptions of the remaining three, the Cimmerian and Persian sibyls and the sibyl Agrippa, might have seemed too generic to be of use. However, even though it is not possible to say whether the eighteen-year-old Cimmerian sibyl wears a celestina veste in Baldint's engraving (no. 4), her hair is let down

over her shoulders (capillis per scapulas sparsis). And while we 215

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cannot be sure that the thirty-year-old Persian sibyl wears an aurea veste (no. 1), she does appear cum velo albo in capite. And if

we cannot say that the thirty-year-old sibyl Agrippa wears a rose-colored cloak over a rosy undergarment (no. 12), she does seem matura et gravis, is certainly dressed more severely than her sisters, romano more, and does, as in Baldint's engraying, raise her left hand and point to her epigram (M: et sinis-

a.

tram manum tenens ostendendo deorsum breve scriptum).

2. Baldini’s Latin Epigrams for the Sibyls and

Cardinal Orsini’s Epigrammata

Turning now to the Latin epigrams inscribed in Baldints engravings and comparing them with the ones prepared for the Orsini stbyls, we find further confirmation of the strict relationship existing for the two sets. Baldini’s epigrams are for the most part nothing more than shortened paraphrases of the Orsin1 epigrammata rather than complete transcriptions

of them. In his engraving of the Delphic sibyl (no. 3), for example, her prophecy of the forthcoming incorrupt virgin birth (Nascetur propheta e virgine absque humana corruptione) is

simply a variant of the one ascribed to her in the Orsini series (Nascetur propheta absque matris coitu ex virgine eius), from

which it obviously derives. The epigrams for ten other sibyls also paraphrase and generally, for reasons of space, shorten

their Orsin1 models, but in ways that also make manifest their dependence on them. 216

CIVIC RITUAL II Thus, we have for the Persian sibyl (no. 1) an epigram be-

ginning with a vision of the coming of “the Son of God astride the beast, the Lord of the Universe, the Savior of nations borne by a virgin:” Ecce filius Dei belluam equitans Dominus universi cuius gentium salutis in Virgine erit, effectively paraphras-

ing Orsinis Ecce bestia conculaberis et gignetur Dominus in orbis terrarum, et gremium Virginis erit salus gentium. The Libyan sibyl’s

epigram (no. 2), Ecce venientem diem et latentia aperientem tenebit

eremio gentium regina, predicting the day to come when the

Lord shall be held in the womb of the Queen of Nations and things hidden in darkness be filled with light, equally paraphrases the Orsini epigram, Ecce veniet dies et illuminabit Dominus condensa tenebrarum ... tenebit illum in Lremio Virgo domina gentium. To the Cimmerian sibyl’s (no. 4) prophecy of

a young girl, beautiful of face, who shall nourish a boy with heaven-sent milk, In pueritia sua cum facie pulcherrima puerum nutriet suo lacte, id est lacte celitus misso, may be compared the

words from her Orsini epigram: puella pulchra facie... nutrit puerum, dans ei ad comedendum vis, id est lac de coelo missum. The

Samian sibyl’s prognostication of the coming of a rich man born of a pauper and adored by the beasts of the field (no. 6), Ecce veniet dives et e paupere nascetur et bellue eum adorabunt,

similarly paraphrases the Orsini epigram for the same sibyl: Ecce veniet dives et nascetur de paupercula, et bestiae terrarum adorabunt eum.

Baldini’s epigram for the Cumaean sibyl (no. 7), Lam redit et virgo redeunt saturnia regna, simply repeats the immortal Virgil-

ian verse quoted more extensively in Cardinal Orsin1’s paint217

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ing of her, beginning two lines before, Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas, and ending four lines after, Casta fave Lucina: tuus iam regnat Apollo (Eclogues, IV, 4-10). His epigram for

the Hellespontine sibyl (no. 8), referring to God looking down upon the humble from his high dwelling place and predicting a Jewish virgin soon to give birth, Ex eccelso habitaculo respexit Deus humiles et in terris novissimis diebus ex hebrea

virgine nascetur, derives from Cardinal Orsini’s De excelsis coelorum habitaculo prospexit Deus humiles suos; et nascetur in diebus no-

vissimis de virgine hebrea in cunabulis terrae. The epigram Baldini

assigned the Tiburtine sibyl (no. 10), foretelling Christ's birth

in Bethlehem and its becoming known in Nazareth during the reign of the peaceful bull (Nascetur in Bettelem in Nazaret annunitabitur regnante quieto tauro) derives from Cardinal Orsinis Nascetur Christus in Betheleem et annunciabitur in Nazareth,

regente tauro pacifico. This prophecy is especially interesting, because it shows that the viri doctissimi responsible for devising the attributes and epigrams for the Orsin1 series of sibyls certainly knew the thirteenth-century pseudo-Joachite oracle ascribed to the Erythraean sibyl, from which Giovanni Pisano

quoted for his sculpture of her on the facade of the Duomo in Siena. As we have seen, that prophecy invoked a taurus pacificus in whose reign the Lamb of God would appear, and a gloss to this passage had identified the peaceful bull as the emperor Octavian. It was undoubtedly because of this that Orsinis humanist scholars decided the prophecy must have been made not by the Erythraean but the Tiburtine sibyl, 216

CIVIC RITUAL II who, of course, had famously revealed the forthcoming birth of Christ to the emperor Augustus. Finally, the epigram Baldini assigns the sibyl Europa (no. 11) telling of the coming from the high hills and mountains

of a man born of a virgin, who would reign in poverty and dominate in silence ( Veniet colles et montes et in paupertate regnans

cum silentio dominabitus |sic| et e i virginis vase exiliet), paraphrases Cardinal Orsini’s Veniet ille et transibit montes et colles . . . reonabit in paupertate et dominabitur in silentio et eoredietur de utero

virginis. And while at first glance the Phrygian sibyl’s Veniet desuper fiius Dei et firmabitur in coelo consilium et virgo annuncia~

bitur (no. 9: “he son of God shall come from on high and make everlasting his counsel in heaven, and he shall be announced to a Virgin”) looks different from her Orsini epigram, f lagellabit Dominus potentes terrae, et Olympo excelso veniet, et firmabit consilium in coelo, et annunciabitur virgo in vallis deserto-

rum (“The Lord shall scourge the powerful of the earth, and

shall come from lofty Olympus and make everlasting his counsel in heaven, and shall be announced to a Virgin in the desert valleys” ), closer examination shows it to be really a paraphrase, omitting the initial and concluding phrases. Simtlarly, although the sibyl Agrippa’s Hoc verbum invisibile tangiet

permittet et tanquam radices germinabit (no. 12) seems to differ from her Orsini epigram, which begins Invisibile verbum palpabitur et germinabit ut radix, again it only paraphrases her proph-

ecy of the invisible Word made flesh.

Eleven of Baldinis epigrams can accordingly be seen to 219

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derive directly from the Orsini epigrammata. The single exception is the one he assigns to the Erythraean sibyl (no. 5). Not

only does it not predict the Incarnation of Christ, but also, alone among all the epigrams for the twelve sibyls represented, it repeats an oracle of the Resurrection transmitted by both Lactantius and Augustine, Morte morietur tribus diebus somno suscepto. Moreover, the northern European (L-T) and Italian (M) recensions of the descriptions of the Orsini sibyls both record epigrams different from this and from each other. To the problem of the Erythraean sibyl we shall return.

CD 3. The Vernacular Octaves for the Sibyls and

Cardinal Orsini’s Epigrammata: Part [

We must now turn to the crucial intermediary between the description of Cardinal Orsini’s paintings of the sibyls and Baccio Baldinis engravings, and that is of course the author of the vernacular sibylline octaves. As we have seen, Baldinrs set of twelve sibyls was conceived as part of a suite of thirty-

six engravings, which would include twenty-four prophets. Of these thirty-six octaves, twenty-three repeat speeches recited by the prophets and sibyls in the sacra rappresentazione of

the Annunciation attributed to Feo Belcari when it was first published in 1495, which was then given its definitive modern edition by Alessandro D’Ancona in 1872. And this, in turn, raises the quaestio vexata of the transmission of Belcart’s text. 220

CIVIC RITUAL II

We know only two Annunciation plays from Quattrocento manuscripts and printed sources, and both are attributed to Feo Belcari. They differ significantly, but they also notably agree in many of the octaves assigned to the prophets

and sibyls. Of the latter, there are nine named in one play and eight in the other. The most well known text of the Annunciation play, the version published by D’Ancona and often anthologized (I have followed Luigi Banfi's edition and will hence hereafter refer to it as A-B) has been characterized by Nerida Newbigin as “execrable.”” She has stricken it from

the canon of Belcaris works and produced a new edition of the second play (hereafter N) that she considers to be the “authentic” version of Belcari’s rappresentazione of the Annun-

ciation.” Although the concept of authenticity is especially slippery when applied to texts of sacre rappresentazioni, which

could be altered from performance to performance according to the wishes of the festaiuoli responsible for staging a play in any given year, it 1s certainly true that very serious textual problems exist in A-B. An especially notorious anomaly is the interpolation of three “fictitious” sibyls—Sofonia, Michea,

and Osea—that correspond, of course, to the prophets Zephaniah (Sophonias), Micah, and Hosea. Moreover, A-B, as Newbigin rightly observed, is scarcely a play at all. Most of the text is given over to a seemingly interminable recita-

tion of octaves uttered by twenty-one prophets and nine sibyls. The performance then ends abruptly with single octaves spoken by the Virgin and God the Father, a lauda sung by a choir of angels, a speech by Gabriel, and the recitation in 221

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Latin of a biblical text narrating the Annunciation. By contrast, in N the number of octaves spoken by the prophets and sibyls 1s greatly reduced. Only three prophets appear, followed by eight sibyls, What is more, the eight sibyls are assigned only five stanzas between them. Just two of the sibyls, Agrippa and the Libyan sibyl, recite an entire octave. The remaining three are each divided between two stbyls, one of whom speaks the opening sestet, and the second the concluding couplet. The sibyls’ prophecies are followed by a true rappresentazione developed around a dispute between the virtues (Mercy and Peace, opposed by Truth and Justice) over whether, after five thousand years, the sin of Adam should be forgiven.

Nevertheless, A-B undoubtedly records an actual performance predating its publication in 1495 (in which it is attributed to Belcari), even though the festaiuoli on that occasion had been, as we shall see, extremely free, indeed careless, in adapting the verses for the prophets and sibyls. Moreover, it is undoubtedly this play to which Vincenzo Borghini refers in a letter to Cosimo I in 1565—66, discussing plans for the festivities celebrating the marriage of Cosimo's son Francesco. Borghini writes of reviving for the occasion the festa of San Felice in Piazza, that is, the rappresentazione of the Annuncia-

tion, and goes on to suggest that it might be adapted to more sophisticated modern tastes by modifying the lengthy procession of the prophets and sibyls, “which used to exhaust

the spectators, took a oreat deal of Orace away from the beauty of the rest, and could perhaps be altered in some way 222

CIVIC RITUAL II so as to improve and ennoble it with a few new inventions” (“quei Profeti e Sibille che solevano straccare molto gli spectator1 et toglievon gran gratia alla bellezza del resto, che forse potrebbono moderare in qualche cosa, et migliorare et rigentilirle con qualche inventione’ )."!

Newbigin’s reservations about the shortcomings of A-B (which had indeed also been expressed by D’Ancona) follow upon the same objection, and it is certainly true that N, in which the speeches of the prophets and sibyls are greatly reduced while the rappresentazione of the dispute among the virtues 1s given extended treatment, has much greater dramatic and artistic interest. Nevertheless, her outright rejection of it as “inauthentic” is perhaps hasty in light of the fact that the verses spoken by the prophets and sibyls might also be considered separately and understood as deriving from an independently written vernacular Ordo Prophetarum that could either be performed as such, more or less in the traditional Way, OL excerpted for use as the prologue to some new rappresentazione. In fact, as we shall see, someone did write a separate sequence of octaves for a complete set of twelve sibyls on the basis of the Latin epigrams composed for Cardinal Orsint’s paintings, a manuscript copy of which he certainly had before him as he worked. The octaves of the sibyls have been assumed to be by Belcari since certain of

them were later incorporated into the two Annunciation plays attributed to him (both in the “authentic” and “execrable” versions), which include the earliest known record of the prophecies of selected sibyls from Cardinal Orsini’s new 223

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canon in Florentine poetry, spectacle, or art. Who the author

of these octaves might be—whether Feo Belcari, Piero di Mariano Muzi, or even Matteo Palmieri as one of the festaiuoli in 1454——still awaits further research. Although Belcari 1s

an obvious candidate, Newbigin rightly points out that no sibylline octaves are included in the list of his works compiled by his son while he was still alive. However, it is quite likely that these octaves were written as part of a representa-

tion of the Annunciation on the traditional model (and hence listed as an Annunciation, not as a separate Ordo Prophetarum by Belcari’s son), according to which a lengthy calling forth of the prophets was concluded by the Angelic Salutation and a brief acknowledgment by the Virgin. Such were the spectacles seen by the Russian bishop Abraham of

Suzdal in 1439 and Agostino di Portico between 1451 and 1453, the latter of whom describes “David propheta a cavallo

con molti propheti” followed by the angel kneeling before the Virgin “e disse [nota bene, in Latin] Ave Maria’ e tutto come seguita il Vangelio; e la donna rispondeva e faceva tutti que’ gesti ‘et quomodo fiet etc.’"” Be that as it may, in 1454 our author's immediate task was to make paraphrastic verse trans-

lations of all twelve sibylline epigrams. A second set of twenty-four octaves, based in the Old Testament, was prepared for the prophets. The resulting thirty-six stanzas for the prophets and sibyls comprised a complete vernacular Ordo Prophetarum conceived as a preface to a brief representa-

tion of the Annunciation, much as we find it in A-B. As Newbigin wisely observes, “The texts of |the early represen224

CIVIC RITUAL II tations] are fluid, rough drafts which every festaiuolo could introduce modifications adapted to the actors or the political moment, as one intuits from the diversity of the redactions found in the plays of the Annunciation, the Giudizio, and the San Giovanni nel deserto.”'* No surviving rappresentazione includes verses for all twelve sibyls and all twenty-four proph-

ets, but they do incorporate more or less lengthy excerpts from the master list of octaves that had been created beforehand. It therefore follows that both series of octaves had been composed independently, preceding the writing of those plays that excerpt prophecies taken from them. My purpose now is to reconstruct as many as possible of the full series of thirty-six stanzas that had originally been compiled as master lists to be drawn upon by the authors of the sacre rappresentazioni and the festaiuoli staging them in any particular year.

Newbigin has herself written most acutely about the hybrid structure of the early sacre rappresentazioni, and especially

to the point is yet a third play. This is the earlier mentioned rappresentazione della Purificazione, enacted every February 2 by

the Purication Company of San Marco. The earliest documentation of a Purification play in Florence strongly suggests a performance of it 1n 1450, making it one of the very earliest true rappresentazioni.'* It was written by Belcart's early collabo-

rator, Piero di Mariano Muzi, whom we have already encountered as the custodian of the Purification Company when it participated in the celebration of the Feast of San Giovanni four years later, in 1454. Like A-B, Piero di Mariano’s rappresentazione is introduced by an extremely long Ordo 225

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Prophetarum, including verses in ottava rima for three sibyls and no fewer than twenty Old Testament prophets. The former are the Phrygian and Libyan sibyls, and Cardinal Orsini's sibyl Agrippa. The three sibylline octaves are, as we shall see, for all intents and purposes identical to the verses composed for these same three sibyls as transmitted by the two Annunciation plays, A-B and N. The same is true, with exceptions duly to be noted below, of the twenty octaves recited by the prophets. Newbigin has explained the appearance of identical octaves for the particular sibyls and prophets included in each of the three plays by suggesting that Piero di Mariano perhaps wrote the verses spoken by the prophets, and Belcari those for the sibyls (an argument she now repudiates ). Since the very earliest manuscript of the Purification play does not include the sibyls, she has concluded that their octaves were

added shortly thereafter and were lifted from N, the “authentic” version of Belcari’s Annunciation play. She suggests

further that the speeches of the prophets in the “execrable” A-B were in turn taken from Muzis Purification play." The solution is ingenious, but, to repeat, my contention 1s that all the verses were first composed independently as a vernacular Ordo Prophetarum of full octaves for at least twenty-

four Old Testament prophets supplemented by additional stanzas for the twelve sibyls as originally devised by Cardinal

Orsinis humanist scholars to augment the traditional lone figure of the Erythraean sibyl reciting the Ludicii signum. The

entire sequence of thirty-six octaves could conceivably be 226

CIVIC RITUAL II performed as a complete Ordo Prophetarum concluding with a

tableau of the Nativity or Annunciation accompanied by a Latin recitation of the relevant biblical text (as is very nearly the case in A-B); or again, as in the instances of N and, to a much lesser degree, the Purification play, it might be excerpted for use as the prologue to one of the new rappresentazioni. Belcart may have composed the sibylline octaves. He

possibly also wrote the prophets’ stanzas, or many of them, though it is impossible to be certain in light of the manuscript attributions of the Purification play to Muzi and the two Annunciation plays to Belcart. Indeed, it is entirely plausible that both these old friends and collaborators contributed verses, which, in any case, were certainly written earlier than the plays themselves. We shall begin with the prophecies of the sibyls. To establish which of the verses is original and which is to be reliably assigned to one sibyl or another, our point of departure will

be to examine the octaves spoken by those sibyls that take part in the plays we have noticed so far, namely, the two versions of the Annunciation play and the Purification play. Because the stanzas spoken by the sibyls in these plays are, as

we shall see, in each case paraphrastic translations of the Latin epigrams devised for the same sibyls as earlier painted for Cardinal Orsin1, comparison of these verses to the Orsini epigrams is indispensable to demonstrating that the octaves transmitted by these three sacre rappresentazioni derive from a prior master list of verses for all twelve sibyls that had been 227

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independently prepared. When the sibylline stanzas included in the plays have been exhausted, we shall continue by examining those octaves uniquely transmitted by Baldinis engrav-

ings, but not included in the plays. Comparison of their content to that of the Orsini epigrams will further make possible the reconstruction of all twelve sibylline octaves.

As Newbigin observed of the Purification play, it gives “splendid testtmony to the hybrid origins of the Florentine rappresentazioni. '° On the one hand, Piero di Mariano’s narrative derives from the eleventh chapter of the thirteenthcentury Meditationes vitae Christi by Pseudo-Bonaventura (him-

self heavily dependent on St. Bernard), which Male long ago showed was a primary source of inspiration for the early sacre rappresentazioni as well as for paintings of sacred narratives.

And, on the other hand, the procession of twenty prophets and three sibyls introducing the rappresentazione of the Purifcation is a traditional Ordo Prophetarum, a continuation of the

old liturgical spectacle that, as we have seen, had gradually evolved during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from out of the reading of Pseudo-Augustine’s Contra Judaeos.” The same hybrid structure also characterizes Belcari’s “authentic” Annunciation play (N). It too begins with an Ordo Prophetarum, in this case shortened to eight prophets and sibyls, succeeded by a rappresentazione of the dispute of the virtues that is also taken from and in part virtually translates, the first two chapters of Pseudo-Bonaventura’s Meditationes."*

The hybrid structure of both plays and the fact that virtually 226

CIVIC RITUAL II identical prophetic octaves appear in the Annunciation play to which Newbigin objects (A-B) suggest that the verse of the Ordo Prophetarum had already been composed independently of the three plays they introduce. This was excerpted for the introductory sections of both the “authentic” N and

the earlier Purification play. It follows that A-B, deriving from a late fifteenth-century text that attributes it to Belcart, must preserve, in however corrupt and dramatically unsatisfactory a form, thirty of the octaves earlier composed for that Ordo Prophetarum. So far as the sibyls are concerned, the

fact that the octaves composed with their prophecies paraphrase, and often virtually translate, the epigrams invented for the twelve sibyls painted for Cardinal Orsini helps establish the hypothesis that they were written separately before being excerpted for the rappresentazioni of the Annunciation and the Purification. We shall therefore begin by examining the sibylline octaves specifically transmitted by these plays, comparing them to each other and to the Orsini epigrammata.

When the three “fictitious” sibyls in A-B are removed from consideration, six sibylline octaves remain. Five essen-

tially duplicate the five octaves for the sibyls in N, though there are inconsistencies between the two texts in attributing a particular stanza to one sibyl or another. Cardinal Orsint's new sibyl Agrippa (no. 12) is the first to speak in N. She begins her prophecy with the words, “Sara palpato lo invisibil Verbo, /e poi germinera come radice,’ the first lines of an 229

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octave also recorded in A-B, but instead ascribed to the Tiburtine sibyl. However, the verse translates the epigram, Invisibile Verbum palpabitur et germinabitur ut radix, that accom-

panied the sibyl Agrippa in the Orsini series. We can thus be certain that Belcaris octave, even though accurately transmitted by both versions, 1s nevertheless erroneously assigned to the Tiburtine sibyl in A-B. Further confirmation is provided by the Purification play, in which the same stanza is correctly given to the sibyl Agrippa. Her octave reads: 12. SIBILLA AGRIPPA

Sara palpato lo invisibil Verbo, e€ poi germinera come radice: secco sara si come il foglio acerbo e non apparira bello e felice: grembo materno ne fara riserbo, di poi piangera Dio come infelice, e nascera di madre come Dio,

poi tra gli altri usera come uom rio.

The Libyan sibyl (no. 2) follows Agrippa in N. Her octave, beginning, “Ecco che presto ne verra quel die / che lucera le tenebre serrate,’ translates the Libyan stbyl's epigram in the Orsini series, Ecce veniet dies et illuminabit condensa tene-

brarum. We can thus be certain that the attribution of the same octave to the Samian sibyl in A-B 1s again mistaken. Moreover, the same stanza is correctly ascribed to the Libyan sibyl in the Purification play: 230

CIVIC RITUAL II 2. SIBILLA LIBICA

Ecco che presto ne verra quel die che lucera le tenebre serrate, e scioglieransi nodi e profezie della gran sinagoga, e rilasciate saran le labbra delle gente pie: vedrassi il Re de’ viventi, e palpate saran sue membra in grembo a Vergin vera, e l ventre suo fia di tutti stadera.

Because these two octaves are identically transcribed and correctly assigned to their speakers in both N and the Purifcation play, we may conclude that the sibylline verses 1n both

depend more directly than those of A-B on some anterior paraphrastic translations of the Orsini epigrams. Although the same octaves are transmitted by A-B, both are ascribed to the wrong speaker and hence must derive from an intermedi-

ary source, no doubt a hastily adapted earlier version of the Ordo excerpted for the prologue to the rappresentazione of the

Annunciation, into which such confusions had already been introduced. This inference is confirmed by the remaining three sibyl-

line octaves in N, which have themselves, however, been lightly but significantly altered. While Agrippa and the Libyan sibyl speak the whole of their octaves, which in both instances are accurately recorded and attributed, the remaining three octaves are each divided between two sibyls, the initial

sestet being pronounced by one sibyl and the concluding 231

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couplet recited by another. Accordingly, the Phyrgian sibyl is

the next to speak in N, but she utters only the first six lines of her prophecy. [he octave is completed by a couplet attributed to the Samian sibyl, and the full stanza, as edited by Newbigin, reads thus. SIBILLA FRIGIA:

Battera Dio i potenti di terra. Di sommo ciel verra l’Eccelso a noi, e fermera 11 concilio senza guerra. La Vergin fia annunziata po. Nelle deserte valli si disserra:

quest ‘é quell ch’to ne dico a tutti vou. SIBILLA SAMIA Di poverella il ricco essendo nato, dalle bestie di terra fia adorato.

The initial sestet, beginning, “Battera Dio 1 potent di terra. / Di sommo ciel verra leccelso a noi,’ accurately paraphrases

the epigram devised for Cardinal Orsinis Phrygian sibyl, Flagellabit Dominus potentes terrae et Olympo excelso veniet (no. 9).

At the same time the concluding couplet given the Samian sibyl, “Di poverella il ricco essendo nato, / dalle bestie di terra fia adorato, closely paraphrases the epigram that accompanied the Samian sibyl in the Orsini cycle: Ecce veniet dives et nascetur de paupercula et bestie terrarum adorabunt eum (no.

6). In other words, the couplet is an interpolation from another octave, one Belcari actually did write for the Samian sibyl, substituting for the couplet with which he had in fact 232

CIVIC RITUAL II completed the Phrygian sibyl’s octave. Since none of the plays records a complete octave for the Samian stbyl, this circumstance alone establishes beyond doubt that Belcari had composed verses for all twelve stbyls, basing each octave on one of Cardinal Orsini's twelve Latin epigrammata. The survival of the couplet also establishes that the festai-

uoli who had originally been responsible for producing the Annunciation play recorded in N had to hand a master list of all twelve sibylline stanzas, which they skillfully (and very accurately) adapted for the single octaves shared by two sibyls. It lends support, in other words, to the hypothesis that these octaves were written as an independent set composed independently of the invention for any particular sacra rappresentazione. he reason for combining the prophecies of the Phrygian and Samian sibyls within a single octave in N undoubtedly was that the festaiuoli, staging the play in some given year, wished to maintain an impressive number of sibyls for theatrical effect but, at the same time, wanted to abbreviate their individual prophecies in the interests of increasing the time available for the sacred drama itself. The hybrid octave thus fashioned for this version ended up in genuinely corrupt form in A-B, in which the whole of the octave is doubly misassigned, being given in its entirety to the Cumaean sibyl. This means that the full octave recorded in A-B postdates the hybrid one in N, from which it directly derives and is a corruption. It further means that the concluding couplet of the Phrygian sibyl's speech in the Purification play (which depends, as we have seen, more directly on 233

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Belcarts original verses than do the stanzas in A-B), which transmits the whole of the Phrygian sibyl’s octave without the interpolation of the Samian sibyl’s couplet, preserves

the correct reading of the last two lines of her octave: “Pero divoto intenda ciascheduno, / umile e puro e di colpe digiuno” (no. 9). The Phrygian sibyl’s octave accordingly originally read as follows: 9. SIBILLA FRIGIA Battera Dio 1 potenti di terra, dal sommo ciel verra lo eccelso a noi, e fermera il concilio senza guerra: la Vergin fia annunziata pot: nelle deserte valli si disserra:

questo é quell ch’io ne dico a tutti voi: pero divoto intenda ciascheduno, umile e puro e di colpe digiuno.

Unfortunately, these three stanzas complete the number of sibylline utterances included in the Purification play. It is clear that the octaves preserved in this play and in N (including both sestets and couplets, all of which are transcribed correctly and correctly assigned to the appropriate sibyl) are more reliable than the octaves transmitted by A-B. These latter, as we shall also see, do for the most part accurately repro-

duce Belcari’s verses but consistently confuse their proper speakers, assigning each to the wrong sibyl. They also combine sestets composed for one sibyl with couplets written for another, the result being that the full octaves recorded by A-B 234

CIVIC RITUAL II are transmitted in corrupt form. From here on, however, we no longer have the Purification play as a tertium comparationis for evaluating the transmission of Belcaris sibylline verses.

The Erythraean sibyl (no. 5) is the fourth to prophesy in N, uttering the first six lines of an octave completed by a couplet attributed to the Delphic sibyl (no. 3). The sestet, beginning “Risguardoe Dio dello eccelso abitacolo / gli umili

suoi, accurately translates the epigram attributed to the Erythraean sibyl in the northern European recension (L-T) of the description of the Orsini series, De excelsis coelorum habitaculo prospexit Deus humiles suos, and therefore is certainly

accurate. But here an additional problem arises. In the Italian recension (M), which includes Barbieri’s Sibyllarum vaticina, the epigram is ascribed to the Hellespontine sibyl (no. 8). To

this anomaly we shall return. The couplet concluding the octave, however, “Nascer debbe il profeta senza coito / di madre; d’una Vergine ¢€ il suo introito,” is spoken by the Del-

phic sibyl, and it perfectly translates the epigram composed for Cardinal Orsini’s Delphic sibyl, Nascetur propheta absque matris coitu ex virgine eius (no. 3). Without doubt this is the

concluding couplet of the octave actually written for the Delphic sibyl. As had also occurred in the Phrygian sibyl's octave, in which we saw a genuine sestet from her prophecy completed by an equally genuine couplet taken from the Samian sibyl’s stanza, the interpolation is again preserved as a

corruption in A-B, which assigns the entire octave to the Erythraean sibyl. In the absence of a comparison from the Purification play, it would seem possible only to give the ini235

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tial sestet of the speech, save for the fact that Baccio Baldini's engraving of the Erythraean sibyl not only transmits the sestet accurately but also records a different couplet, which un-

doubtedly preserves the original verse (no. 5). The octave reads: 5. SIBILLA ERITREA Risguardée Iddio dell’ eccelso abitacolo gli umili suoi, e nascera ne’ giorni ultimi, dico, con questo miracolo d’una Vergine ebrea, con tutti adorni costumi, il suo figliuol: senz altro ostacolo nelle terrene culle si sogg1ornt; nascera gran profeta, alto e accorto, di Vergin madre, et questo el vero scorto,’’

The five sibylline octaves recorded in N conclude with a sestet spoken by the Persian sibyl followed by a sestet ascribed to the Hellespontine sibyl. The couplet, which begins “Ecco la bestia sara conculcata, /e fia concetto il gran Signor giocondo. /il grembo della Vergine beata/ salute fia delle gente del mondo,” accurately renders the epigram devised for the Orsini painting of the Persian sibyl: Ecce bestia conculaberis et signetur Dominus in orbe terrarum, et gremium virginis salus gen-

tium (no. 1). The concluding couplet, however, “Vaticinare una parola basta; / Cristo Gest: nascera della casta,” is for the

third time an interpolation, translating the Hellespontine sibyl’s Orsini epigram, Lhesus Christios nascetur de casta (no. 8). 236

CIVIC RITUAL II Once again, A-B preserves the interpolation as a corruption, attributing not just the sestet but also the entire octave to the Persian sibyl. Baldinis engraving of the Persian sibyl repeats the corruption. In the absence of a comparison from the Purification play, we would seem to be at checkmate in attempting to restore the final couplet of the Persian stbyl's prophecy were it not

for the fact that A-B transmits a sixth and final sibylline octave for which there 1s no parallel in N. A-B attributes the entire stanza to the Hellespontine sibyl, and it reads as follows:

El magno Dio con la Potenza pia per fiato mandera suo figluol santo, qual fia Gest, e lut concetto fia per salute del mondo tutto quanto. Costui ogni potenzia avra in balia, e pover nascera e senz’ amanto, e mostrera in quell tempo segni assai: stmil la terra il ctel non ebbe mat.

As we shall momentarily see, this octave, like those for the other sibyls in A-B, is assigned to the wrong speaker. More-

over, it again appears to be a corrupt hybrid, combining a sestet that was certainly composed for the Samian sibyl (no. 6) with a couplet that appropriately concludes the octave for the Persian sibyl. The point of departure for the Persian sibyl’s vision 1S clearly the Apocalypse of St. John, in which is 237

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described the prodigious heavenly signs attending the coming

of a Virgin great with child, and the trampling of the beast underfoot (“la bestia conculcata’”). The couplet concluding the octave just quoted thus fittingly completes the Persian sibyl’s prophecy, which accordingly reads: 1. SIBILLA PERSICA

Ecco per cut la bestia conculcata sara, e fla concetto el Sir giocondo: tl srembo della Vergine beata salute fia della gente del mondo: saranno 1 piedi suol, di questa nata, fortezza da sostenere ogni pondo. E mostrera in quell tempo segni assat: simil la terra e 1 ctel non ebbe mai.

We have seen that five of the six actual sibylline stanzas preserved in A-B (discarding the three “fictitious” sibyls) essentially duplicate the five octaves divided between the eight sibyls who take part in the “authentic” Annunciation play, N. However, in three instances the octaves are given to the wrong

sibyl in A-B, whereas N makes no such errors in attribution, not even when completing sestets spoken by one sibyl with couplets uttered by another. This we have been able to verify by comparison of the verses with their sources in the Orsini epigrams. Moreover, A-B clearly descends from N, since several of its octaves preserve as corruptions the interpolations that had been made when dividing a complete stanza between two sibyls. An octave attributed to the Hellespontine, pre236

CIVIC RITUAL II served only in A-B, finds no parallel in N, but it too can be shown to be the result of combining separate prophecies.

Neither the sestet nor the couplet can be justified by the Orsini epigram for the Hellespontine stbyl (no. 8), and the stanza thus appears to be another instance of two genuine sibylline octaves that have been divided and misassigned. If we turn to the opening sestet of the octave mistakenly attributed to the Hellespontine sibyl in A-B, we find that its reference in the fifth and sixth verses to a child of great authority who is born so poor as to have no mantle to cover him (“cos-

tut ogni potenza avra in balia, Je povera nascera e senz amanto”) may be explained by the epigram for the Samian sibyl, Ecce veniet dives et nascetur de paupercula et bestiae terrarum

adorabunt eum (no. 6). Moreover, if we substitute for the couplet given to the Hellespontine stbyl in A-B, which we have

just given to the Persian sibyl (““e mostrera in quell tempo segomt assai_) the verses we have already seen were correctly assigned to the Samian sibyl in N (‘di poverella il ricco essendo nato,/ dalle bestie di terra fia adorato”), the octave gains greatly in force and logic. The emended stanza would thus be attributable to the Samian sibyl, and accordingly read: 6. SIBILLA SAMIA

El magno Dio con la Potenza pia per flato mandera suo figlio santo, qual fre Gest, e lui concetto fia per salute del mondo tutto quanto. Costui ogni potenze avra in balia, 239

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e pover nascera e senz amanto, di poverella il ricco essendo nato, dale bestie di terra fia adorato.

Our discussion thus far has been sufficient to demonstrate

that the author of the sibylline octaves was working directly from a transcription of the epigrammata for Cardinal Orsin1's full set of twelve sibyls. The Orsini epigrams have, moreover, been an indispensable guide to verifying which of Belcart's

octaves was intended for each sibyl. Although up to this point we have attempted to reconstruct only Six octaves, our discussion of them and their constituent sestets and couplets has also been sufficient to demonstrate that they were written as paraphrastic verse translations in ottava rima of all twelve epigrams. [he twelve stanzas were independently composed as a supplement to the twenty-four octaves for the Old Testa-

ment prophets and were not yet conceived as forming the prologue to some new rappresentazione. They were instead written as an Ordo Prophetarum in vernacular verse, augmented,

on the model of the Orsini paintings, by the addition of eleven sibyls as accompaniments to the Erythraean sibyl, who,

on the authority of Pseudo-Augustine, had traditionally appeared alone as the last in the procession of the prophets. Though his Ordo could itself be performed as an extended liturgical spectacle, in accordance with centuries-old usage, with a large number of prophets and sibyls taking part (as happened in both the A-B Annunciation play and the Purification play), it could also be shortened and more effectively 240

CIVIC RITUAL II adapted to the relatively sophisticated forms of the new sacre rappresentazioni (as happened with Belcari's Annunciation play

N). The thirty-six octaves composed for the sibyls and prophets constituted a set of vernacular exempla that might be excerpted ad libitum for the speeches of selected prophets and sibyls as the need arose, whether for Belcari’s own play with the dispute of the virtues, for an alternative version of it, or for some other play altogether. The very confusion in the attribution of octaves to the sibyl for whom they were intended existing between the two versions of the Annunciation play is indeed an indication that a preexisting series of octaves, originally composed as paraphrases of the Orsini epigrams, was selected from and adapted, often hastily, by the festaiuoli from one performance to another, with the tangled results we have here seen beginning to unravel.

4. A Digression on the Prophets

Just as the evidence thus far adduced suggests that someone, perhaps as early as 1454, composed an exemplary series of vernacular octaves paraphrasing all twelve of the Latin epi-

grams devised for the Orsini sibyls, so too does it indicate that Baccio Baldini’s engravings of the twelve sibyls are an exemplary series, one incorporating not only the epigrammata but also the formae originally invented for the cardinal’s paint-

ings of the sibyls. Cardinal Orsini twelve sibyls had been accompanied by paintings of twelve prophets, and Baldini’s engravings of the twenty-four prophets are also part of a 241

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larger interrelated series, one that exactly doubles the number of prophets accompanying the Orsini sibyls. On the basis of the many vernacular octaves Baldini appended to his engray-

ings that duplicate the stanzas uttered by the twenty-one prophets who take part in the Ancona-Banfi (A-B) edition of Belcari's Annunciation play, the handful of three who partic-

ipate in the Newbigin version (N), and the nineteen who appear in Muzis Purification play, we may reasonably suppose that, like the octaves for the sibyls, there also existed an exemplary list of octaves for all twenty-four of the Old Tes-

tament prophets that had likewise been written independently of any particular sacra rappresentazione, from which the

festaiuoli might make selections and adaptations as the need arose when staging the plays. Taken together, the twenty-four Jewish prophets and twelve pagan sibyls, as well as such New Testament witnesses to Christ’s Incarnation as Anna, Simeon,

and John the Baptist (for whom octaves were also written), constitute a complete vernacular Ordo Prophetarum.

The long tradition of the Ordo Prophetarum began, as we have seen, some time in the twelfth century with the reading of several chapters from the Pseudo-Augustine’s Contra Ju-

daeos in the Christmas Matins. Its development has been traced in exemplary manner by Maurice Sepin and Karl Young, who have shown how, with the passage of time, the number of prophets was gradually increased from the thirteen mentioned by Pseudo-Augustine to include many others, culminating in the twenty-eight, including all the major and minor prophets from the Vulgate, who took part in a 242

CIVIC RITUAL II spectacle performed in the fourteenth century in the cathedral of Rouen. Originally, a priest from the pulpit read the text of Pseudo-Augustine, but with the passage of time the words of the prophets were recited in responses by the members of the minor clergy, deacons and subdeacons, and prototheatrical elements were introduced. An especially amusing example is the introduction of the episode of Balaam, included as a prophet in a thirteenth-century Ordo Prophetarum staged in the cathedral of Laon, in which Balaam, confronted by an angel with a sword, tries in vain to spur the ass he is riding. He swears at the obstinate bestia, reproaching it for ma-

lingering, to which the ass (in fact a puer hidden sub asina) responds that he fears the angel in his path. It 1s also significant, as Young points out, that the Laon play is the first in which actual impersonation of the prophets, described in the manuscripts as wearing a species of costume adapted from the vestments of the lesser clergy, can be shown to have taken place.

This 1s unmistakably clear from indications given in the manuscripts of the appearances of the prophets, which provide specifications directly anticipating the parallel prescriptions for the costumes later devised for the Orsint sibyls and described as part of their formae. Thus, to give but two examples, in the Laon play, Moses is described cum dalmatica, barbatus, tabulas legis ferens, and David regio habitu. The proces-

sion concluded in the traditional way with the reciting of the Iudicii signum by the Erythraean sibyl in veste feminea, decapillata, edera coronata, insanienti simillima.”°° In the Rouen play, the 243

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number of Prophets was increased to its fullest extent, and their formae are also described. Jeremiah, for example, was sacerdotali habitu ornatus et barbatus tenens rotulum, and Moses tenens tabulas legis apertas, indutus alba et cappa, et cornuta facie,

barbatus, tenens virgam in manu. Again, the Erythraean sibyl, coronata et muliebri habitu ornata, concluded the performance with the recitation of the Ludicii signum.”'

The preponderance of liturgical dress indicated in the manuscripts—dalmatics, stoles, albs, and the like—undoubt-

edly derives from the fact that the members of the minor clergy originally played the parts of the prophets, a point stressed by Young, and, more recently, by Maurice McNamee

in his study of the iconographic function of liturgical vestments worn by angels and other sacred figures in Netherlandish art.” Of special interest, however, is the indication given in the manuscripts of attributes (or formae) for the prophets: Jeremiah’s beard and scroll, for example; Daniel as a youth holding an awn of wheat; the horned Moses with the tablets of the Law. McNamee has observed that Italian artists were

less inclined than their Netherlandish counterparts to costume holy figures in liturgical dress, and this is certainly true of the prophets depicted in Baldini’s engravings. Even so, the

earliest known description of a spectacle of the Annunciation in Florence, staged at least a decade before Belcari wrote his Annunciation play, does take notice of the adaptation of

liturgical vestments into costumes. It was written by a Russtan, Abraham, bishop of Suzdal, who was in Florence to attend the Ecumenical Council in 1439. Bishop Abraham de244

CIVIC RITUAL II scribes a God the Father, crowned and wearing magnificent robes, holding the Gospels, and gathered round him a multitude of little boys dressed as angels in white robes. An exceptionally beautiful boy, also crowned and dressed in sumptuous maidens clothes, impersonated the Virgin. Sharing the platform were four men in costume with long beards and the hair of their heads flowing down around their arms. Their heads were adorned with little garlands, and small golden haloes were fitted to each of their heads. The cloaks gathered round their shoulders were not elegantly made nor handsomely designed, but were rather like undershirts, white and flowing, and tied at the waist. Each of them wore on his right shoulder a small

red deacon’s stole, not for ornament. The composition of their clothes was quite in the likeness of Prophets. ... Each held in his hands a different text, that is, the ancient prophecies of Christ’s descent from Heaven and his Incarnation.”

Baldini’s engraving of Moses does depict the prophet wearing a cope fastened with a morse, but at the same time his costume, in common with those worn by his companions, manifests the same hybrid invention also observable in the sibyls, mixing together the familiar with the exotic. Although fanciful, it clearly reflects costumes that Baldini and the peo-

ple of Florence had seen firsthand in performances of the sacre rappresentazioni. Thus, among the expenditures made in

preparation for the performance of the Purification play in 1450, we find that there are listed outlays of money for costumes, including colored taffeta tunics, ornate headpieces for 245

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Simeon and three other performers, and a Jonah’s whale made of papier-maché decorated with gold stars.“ Baldini’s depic-

tion of Jonah shows him wearing a form of Turkish headpiece and holding just such an elaborately fashioned fish as his attribute. Moses also displays his familiar attributes, rays of light shining from his head (not, in this case, horns), and the tables of the law. In like manner, David and Isaiah wear fanciful hats and display a psaltery and a saw, respectively, and Noah, costumed with a fanciful conical hat, carries a model of the ark. Although the Purification play includes octaves for only three sibyls, all accurately transcribed and attributed, its value is greatly enhanced by the fact that it additionally records octaves for twenty prophets. These may be compared to the twenty-four octaves appended to Baldini’s engravings of the prophets, as well as to the twenty-one stanzas recited by Prophets in A-B—in fact twenty-four stanzas if we include among them the three stanzas muisattributed to the “fictitious’ stbyls Sofronia, Michea, and Osea, who are of course prophets. By contrast, N_ records speeches for only three prophets: David, Daniel, and Isaiah. Although there are some variations between our four sources in matching octaves to prophets, which is entirely to be expected, we also encounter fewer confusions than we do in the instance of the sibyls. Since the sibyls are our principal concern, I will only summarize my findings regarding the prophets’ octaves without entering into a detailed analysis of each stanza. Comparison of the prophets’ octaves as preserved in Bal246

CIVIC RITUAL II dinis engravings, in A-B, and the Purification play produces the following results, most of which are additionally verifiable by comparing them with their biblical sources. All three texts record, with only minor variations, the same (and correct) octaves for nine prophets: Jacob, Moses, Samuel, Joel, Jonah, Habakkuk, Haggai, Malachi, and Joshua. Jeremiah’s octave is also common to all three, although misassigned to Solomon by Baldini. A-B and N transmit David's stanza, as does Baldini, who mistakenly gives it to Aaron, Similarly, the octave ascribed to Obadiah by Baldini and in A-B is also re-

corded in the Purification play, where it is misascribed to Daniel. The octave actually written for Daniel, beginning “Vedendo to la notte in visione” (cf. Dantel 7:13: Aspiciebam ergo in visione noctis), appears in Baldinis engraving of Daniel and in the stanza assigned to Daniel in both A-B and N. This

adds up to fourteen octaves for which there are three independent witnesses, and for which the correct match of prophet to prophecy cannot be doubted. In addition, six octaves—those assigned to the prophets Noah, Elyah, Elisha, Amos, Nahum, and Zechariah—are common to two sources, Baldini’s engravings and A-B. This yields a total of twenty octaves for the prophets that we can confidently accept as written for those prophets. To this sum we may add another stanza, undoubtedly correctly assigned

to Ezekiel in both the Purification play and in A-B, which begins, “Quattro ruote su in ciel con animalt’ (cf. Ezekiel 1:15: apparuit rota una super terram iuxta animalia), discarding at

the same time the verse that accompanies Ezekiel in Baldint's 247

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engraving, We may also add to the list the octaves attributed

in the Purification play to the prophets Zephaniah and Micah, who are not included among Baldini’s prophets. Hardly surprisingly, their verses (which Newbigin showed are derived, respectively, from Sophonias 3:16—17, and Micheas 5:2)

are identical to those ascribed to the fictitious sibyls Sofonia and Michea in A-B. Baldini’s engraving of Baruch provides the unique text for that prophet, but its content, referring to the joyful sign of the star in the east, can be verified by comparing its source in Baruch 3:34—36 (Stellae autem dederunt lumen

_., et laetatae sunt), and there is no compelling reason to question its correctness. Similarly, although both the Purification play and A-B attribute stanzas to Hosea, who 1s not included

in Baldini's engravings, the octaves differ. Even so, the octave

transmitted by the Purification play (“imperocché in Egitto manderée /il Figliuol mio, e poi gli chiamerée”) finds its source in Hosea 11:1 (et ex Aegypto vocavi filium meum), and hence can be accepted as the original verse written for Hosea.

No octaves survive for either Aaron or Solomon, who (like Baruch) make appearances only in Baldinis engravings, in which their accompanying verses, as we have seen, were actually written for David and Jeremiah, respectively. In sum, twenty-three or twenty-four octaves survive that can confidently be ascribed to the prophet for which each was written. Not all of them appear in any single source, whether in Baldini’s engravings, in either the two versions of the Annunciation play (A-B and N), or in Piero di Mariano Muzis Purification play. This at once suggests that a com248

CIVIC RITUAL II plete series of verses in oftava rima for the prophets, number-

ing no fewer than twenty-four octaves but possibly running to even more, preexisted not only the engravings but also any of the plays in which the prophets make their appearance, including the Purification play, which is earliest recorded as being performed in 1450. Naturally, as had also occurred with the sibyls, confusions occurred as this master list was variously drawn upon by the festaiuoli responsible for staging the sacre rappresentaziont from year to year, sometimes emphasiz-

ing the extended and solemn recitation of the prophecies, as in the Purification play or in A-B, or sometimes reducing the

number of prophecies in order to allow more time for the religious drama, as in N. Such confusions could result from inadvertence, for example in the instance of confusing David's prophecy with Aaron's, or from egregious carelessness, doubtless brought on by haste, as in the case of the transmutation of Prophets into sibyls, as happened with Zephaniah, Micah, and Hosea in A-B. One consequence of these confu-

sions is the existence of a number of “orphaned” stanzas. When Baldini assigned David's prophecy to Aaron, for example, and Jeremiah’s to Solomon, it became necessary for him to substitute other verses for David and Jeremiah. It 1s not always possible to decide whether these were composed ad hoc or derived from the preexisting compilation of prophetic octaves. Each of the texts preserving the verses contains anomalies, some more extensive than others. Nonetheless, the verses recorded in Muzi’s Purification play contain only a few mistakes in attribution to the appropriate Prophet, 249

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which are easily detected, and none for the three sibyls included. The Newbigin version of Belcari's Annunciation play (N) is especially reliable, accurately transmitting and matching to the correct speaker the octaves for the three Prophets who take part (David, Daniel, and Isaiah), and also correctly recording and assigning the complete octaves or verse fragments (sestets and couplets) for eight sibyls.

5. The Vernacular Octaves for the Sibyls and

Cardinal Orsini’s Epigrammata: Part II

So far as the remaining sibylline stanzas are concerned, we have now exhausted the evidence given by the surviving sacre rappresentazioni and are left only with the verses transmitted by Baldini’s engravings. These must be handled with special care, not only because they introduce errors, but also because they derive from a later redaction of the master list of sibylline octaves that was also used by A-B, This we have already noticed for the Persian sibyl’s stanza beginning “Ecco la bestia sara conculcata,” which repeats the corruption introduced into A-B that attributes to the Persian sibyl the whole of an octave that, as N attests, in fact combines a sestet actually written for the Persian sibyl with a concluding couplet composed for the Hellespontine sibyl. Baldini’s engravings are the unique source for an additional five sibylline verses. These supply prophecies for the Delphic (no. 3), Cimmerian (no. 4), Cumaean (no. 7), and Tiburtine sibyls (no. 10), as well as Cardinal Orsini new sibyl Europa (no. 11), Although com250

CIVIC RITUAL II parisons for these stanzas are lacking in surviving sacre rappresentazioni, there remains one invaluable resource. In verify-

ing the accuracy of Baldini’s transcriptions of the verses accompanying each sibyl, comparison of their content with the epigrams invented for the same sibyls in the Orsini series is an indispensable guide. And in fact, although the engravings do present textual problems, the stanzas for these five sibyls all correspond quite satisfactorily with the Orsini epigrams.

We may start with the Cumaean sibyl’s stanza, which, as we have seen, was confused in A-B by ascribing to her a corrupt hybrid that combined a sestet written for the Phrygian sibyl with a couplet composed for the Samian. In Baldini's engraving, however, the octave begins, “L’ulttmo mio parlar fie si verace / pero che giunti son gli ultim: canti / del veni-

mento dello re di pacie, and this was without question inspired by Virgil’s immortal Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas, for which the complete passage was quoted in Cardinal

Orsini’s epigram for the Cumaean sibyl.* There is hence no doubt that the verse transmitted by Baldini’s engraving of the Cumaean sibyl is the one written by Belcari for her (no. 7): ;, SIBILLA CUMANA L’ulttmo mie parlar fie si verace,

pero che giunti son gli ultimi canti del venimento dello Re di pace, di chi ci salvera noi tutti quanti; e prender carne umana si gli piace, e mostrerassi umil a tutti quanti. 251

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Per madre prende lumil verginella, la qual sara sopra ogni donna bella.

The epigram for Cardinal Orsini’s Tiburtine sibyl, which begins, Nascetur Christus in Bethleem et annunciabitur in Nazareth,

and ends, O felix mater cujus ubera illum lactabunt, is also mani-

festly the foundation for the octave transmitted in Baldin1's engraving of the Tiburtine stbyl (no. 10), the unique source for Belcari’s octave giving her prophecy: 10. SIBILLA TIBURTINA

I] giusto Dio al tal mestier m‘ha dato, ch’ 1’ sabbi col mie dir manifestato d’'una Vergine che fie nunziata

e Nazaretta per lei abitata. In Bettalem sara manifestato la carne dove Dio fie umanato. E ben sara la sua madre felice, che di tal figlio si sara per nutrice.

Again, the Orsini epigram for the stbyl Europa, Veniet ille et transibit montes et colles, et latices sylvarum Olympi: regnabit in

paupertate et dominabitur in silentio et egredietur de utero virginis,

perfectly accounts for the octave recorded in Baldin1’s engrav-

ing of Europa, the only source preserving Belcaris octave (no. 11):

u. SIBILLA EUROPA Verra quel Verbo eterno, immaculato, e del Vergine vaso uscira fora per cut i colli e montt fia passato, 252

CIVIC RITUAL II cosi la sommita d’Olimpo ancora. Sotto gran poverta nel mondo nato, stonoreggiando con silenzio ogni ora. Cosi credo e confesso, e conosch '1o: vero Figliuol di Dio, e uomo e Dio.

The octaves for the next two sibyls, the Delphic and the Cimmerian, present special (but rewarding) problems, in the former instance because the verses recorded by Baldini are badly bungled. The epigram for Cardinal Orsinis Delphic sibyl, Nascetur propheta absque matris coitu ex virgine eius (which

we have already noticed with respect to the couplet attributed

to the Delphic sibyl in N), certainly inspired the verses of the initial sestet of her prophecy, which is uniquely recorded in Baldinis engraving of her: “dove ‘]1 profeta grande a incharnare /... nel ventre verginal d’uman ancilla / sanza congiunto d’uom mortal” (no. 3). But here the problem becomes a little more complex. Cardinal Orsinis painting of the Delphic sibyl was one of

only two (the other being the Cimmerian) for whom the manuscripts name a particular source in addition to those recorded by Lactantius. The authors cited by Lactantius, sedulously copied out in the manuscripts describing the Orsin1 sibyls—Nicanor on Alexander the Great as a source for the Persian sibyl, for example, Euripides’ prologue to Lamia for the Libyan, Naevius'’s Punic Wars for the Cimmerian, and Chrysippus on divination for the Delphic stbyl—are all virtually useless, having been lost or surviving only in fragments.

None were in fact utilized or even known to the cardinal’s 253

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scholars, who did, however, cite a second source for the Del-

phic sibyl: “Ovidius Naso, in arte poetica promptissimus. Moreover, Ovid had also been cited by Christine de Pizan (in Le livre de la cité des dames, completed in 1405) as having written

about the Delphic sibyl:—"La troisiéme [Sibylle] naquit au temple d'Apollon a Delphes . . . et Ovide lui consacra plusiers vers dans l'un des ses ouvrages. *°

The citation is in fact to a thirteenth-century poem then attributed to Ovid, the De vetula. The poem was extremely widely circulated, and modern scholarship has hypothesized (though controversially) that its true author was Richard de Fournival. It was often cited, and contributed greatly to the diffusion of a controversial form of astrological speculation introduced into the west in the previous century through the works of the ninth-century Arab astrologer Albumasar (Abu Ma'’shar) concerning the great planetary conjunctions. Albumasat’s Introductorium maius is the ultimate source for “Ovid’s”

adaptation of the so-called horoscope of the world’s oreat religions, according to which each of the principal religions had been prefigured in the stars by the conjunction of Jupiter with one of the other planets—Judaism from the conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn, for example, Islam from Jupiter with Venus, and Christianity from the conjunction of Jupiter with Mercury.”’ Despite opposition by the Church, especially on the dangerous point of whether astrology could have pre-

dicted the Incarnation, the theory was widely accepted by adherents including Roger Bacon, who quotes Albumasar ad litteram in his Opus maius,* Albertus Magnus in his Speculum 254

CIVIC RITUAL II astronomiae, and Thomas Bradwardine in his De causa Dei, both of whom also quote Albumasar extensively.” Each of them particularly refers to the Arab astrologer’s horoscope of the world’s religions, and also to the further theory promulgated by Albumasar and the Pseudo-Ovid in De vetula that, just as the conjunction of Jupiter with Mercury announced the advent of Christianity, so the virgin birth of Christ had been prefigured in the first decan of Virgo. Bradwardine indeed transcribed the relevant verses of the De vetula in their entirety.’ It is these very verses ascribed to Ovid that are the

source for the epigram attributed to the Delphic sibyl by Cardinal Orsint’s learned scholars: nascetur propheta absque coitu ex virgine eius (L-T’):

There was one such | major conjunction] not long ago, in the happy times of Augustus Caesar, in the twenty-fourth year from the beginning of his reign, which signified that after six

years there must be born a Prophet without coitus by his mother, a virgin | nasci debere prophetam / Absque matris coitu de

virgine|, of whom there ts a heavenly configuration in which the strength of Mercury ts greatly multiplied, and this harmonious conjunction will be the beginning of a future sect;

for nowhere among the heavenly signs does Mercury so dominate as in the sign of the Virgin; this is his house.”

We thus have double confirmation that the initial sestet of the vernacular octave accompanying Baldini's Delphic sibyl is in fact the one originally written for her, This is, first, because

the content of the sestet matches that of the epigram in255

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vented for the Delphic sibyl in the Orsini series; and, second, because it also matches the source given for that sibyl in the manuscripts, namely Ovid. The concluding couplet, however, must be amended by substituting for the verse engraved by

Baldini (“ecco tal cosa fie sopra natura / fatta per quel che puo che Idio dara,’ which we have already seen to be an inter-

polation) the couplet correctly ascribed to the Delphic sibyl in N. This is, as we saw, “Nascer debbe il profeta senza coito / di madre: d’una Vergine él suo introito, which perfectly translates the Orsini epigram, which in turn derives from the Pseudo-Ovid’s De vetula.

Before reconstructing the complete octave as accordingly emended, however, we must first consider briefly a second corruption introduced into Baldinis engraving, which is the unique source for the sestet, even as N uniquely preserves the couplet. The rhyme scheme for verses in ottava rima takes the pat-

tern AbAbAD, ending with a concluding couplet, Cc. Our author followed this pattern, and if he was indeed Feo Belcari he is, as Alberto Limentani has shown, a fundamental

contributor to the adaptation and refinement of the traditional forms of oftava rima as inherited, especially, from Boccaccio, taking them in directions that were especially adapted

to the requirements of effective oral delivery in theatrical performance.” The pattern shows, as we clearly see from N, how easily those producing the play in any given year might combine sestets taken from one sibyl’s octave (AbAbAb) with couplets taken from another's (Cc), while maintaining 256

CIVIC RITUAL II coherency of expression and the structural integrity of the octave as a whole. Occasionally, for the sake of variety, it 1s permissible to introduce into a series of octaves one composed entirely of rhymed couplets. This was indeed done in the octave for the Tiburtine sibyl (no. 10). A glance at the octave Baldini reproduced for the Delphic sibyl, however, shows that something has gone terribly wrong, I quote it as it appears in the engraving, including two all-important marginal additions, only lightly edited for the sake of clarity: Non é da esser lenta ma tranquilla averta l’opera e chonsiderare b dove ‘| profeta grande a incharnare A l’avenimento che alta villa Nel ventre verginal d’uman’ ancilla sanza congiunto d’uom mortal sa fare eccho tal chosa fie sopra natura

fatta per chuel che puo che Idio dara

When, sometime in the 1480s, Francesco Rosselli engraved his broad-manner copies of Baldini's prophets and sibyls, he consistently introduced orthographical clarifications to Belcaris verses as they had been recorded in the earlier series, but otherwise reproduced them exactly as they had originally appeared. However, in the single instance of the Delphic sibyl's octave, her verses were so manifestly incorrect in form and so obscure in meaning that 1t was deemed necessary to rearrange the octave and to rewrite lines 2, 3, and 8 altogether. The oc-

taves reproduced in Baldinis prints are indeed marred by a 257

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number of engravers errors. A conspicuous example is the word “tranquilla” in the very first line of the Delphic sibyl's verse (no. 3), in which the letter “n” was elided (“traquilla’’) and then awkwardly squeezed into place after a trial proof was pulled and the omission noticed. Much more seriously, it was also noticed that the third and fourth lines of the octave had been inadvertently transposed, thus destroying the rhyme scheme. For this reason Baldini engraved the letters “b” and “A’ in the margin next to these respective lines, to indicate

that they should be transposed and that formal order and sense could be restored to the octave by reading it in the form I have given it in the restoration. I have also substituted for the final couplet recorded by Baldini, which we have seen to be an interpolation, the authentic couplet as preserved in N. Baldint'’s reference in the transposed third and fourth lines

to the “alta villa,’ or heavenly house in which the Prophet would contrive to become flesh in a virginal womb, is an obscurity explained by the source of the Orsini epigram in the De vetula. The time of the Incarnation is there claimed to coincide with Mercury's rise to dominance in the heavenly house of Virgo, eius domus. Belcari’s “alta villa” 1s again evidence that he was working from a more complete manuscript

description of the Orsini sibyls and their epigrams than has so far come down to us. His octave for the Delphic sibyl can be reconstructed thus: 3. SIBILLA DELFICA

Non é da esser lenta, ma tranquilla averta l’opera, e considerare 256

CIVIC RITUAL II l’avenimento, che alta villa dove 'l profeta grande ha incarnare nel ventre verginal d’uman ancilla. Senza congiunzio d'uom mortal sa fare. Nascer debbe il profeta senza coito di madre: d’una Vergine é '] suo introito.

The Cimmerian sibyl (no. 4) is the only other for whom the manuscript descriptions of the Orsini sibyls specify, in

addition to an author named by Lactantius (in this case Naevius), a second source, and this is none other than “Albumasar astrologus.’ The epigram Baldini ascribes to the Cimmerian sibyl (whom he calls the Sibilla Chimica) in his engraving reads, In pueritia sua cum facie pulcherrima puerum nutriet

suo lacte, id est lacte celitus misso. It can be translated, “In her

gitlhood she, most beautiful of face, nourishes a boy with her own milk, that is, with milk sent from heaven.’ This is an ab-

breviated paraphrase of the epigram composed for Cardinal Orsint’s painting of the Cimmerian stbyl, omitting the allimportant introductory phrase. The Orsini epigram reads, in the fullest form of the prophecy to survive, In prima facie virginis ascendit puella pulchra facie, prolixa capillis, sedens super sedem stratam, nutrit puerum, dans ei ad comedendum vis, id est lac de coelo

missum. It translates, ‘In the first decan of Virgo there arises a girl, beautiful of face, with loosened hair, seated on a coyered bench, who nourishes a boy, giving him strength, that ts, milk sent from heaven.’ The epigram is founded in the same astrological horoscope prefiguring the Incarnation that had

been derived from Albumasar and transmitted by PseudoOvid in the De vetula. The first five lines of the octave re259

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corded in Baldini’s engraving clearly paraphrase the Orsini epigram, which in this case is based directly in Albumasar, although (as with the abbreviated Latin form of the epigram appearing in his engraving) Baldini omits the crucial reference to the first decan of Virgo. The last three lines of the octave, referring to the Adoration of the Magi, do not reflect any part of the Orsini epigram that has come down in the manuscripts. However, as we shall now see, these lines are certainly derived from a more complete manuscript description of the Orsini epigram for the Cimmerian sibyl than any that has survived. There can be no doubt that the octave appended to Baldints engraving is the one written for the Cimmerian sibyl, which can confidently be given as follows: 4. SIBILLA CHIMICA Una Vergine Santa in puérizia, colla sua faccia gloriosa e bella, nutrira tl Re dell’eterna milizia:

e ber del latte suo gli dara quella, per la cut si vedra Valta letizia

sopra, vittoria ’é la santa stella, e sara vicitata da coloro che oli offerano incenso, mira, e oro.

The citation of Albumasar is to the Introductorium maius, which was, as we have seen, a decisive work for transmitting Arabic astrological thought to the West. The Introductorium had first been translated in the twelfth century by Johannes Hispalensis and by Hermann of Carinthia and was also sum260

CIVIC RITUAL II marized by Hermann in his De essentiis; from these, Albumasar'’s thought was diffused throughout the whole of Europe. A particular claim in the Introductorium, to which we have referred in our discussion of Pseudo-Ovid’s De vetula, is especially relevant here. This is Albumasar’s assertion that astrological knowledge had anticipated the virgin birth of Christ. The astrologer's prophecy, as transmitted especially by Hermann of Carinthia, was ubiquitously repeated by William the Astrologer of Rheims, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Jean de Meaune (Roman de la Rose, vv. 19177-19190),

Albertus Magnus (who quotes the passage in its entirety), Bernard Silvestris (Megacosmus III, 53-54), and others. The epigram for Cardinal Orsini Cimmerian sibyl and Belcart's stanza deriving from it (also including the final three lines referring to the star observed by the Mag1) ultimately derive from Albumasar’s Introductorium (VI, 2), which I quote here

via Hermann of Carinthia’s translation and commentary in the first book of his De essentiis: Although the Holy Fathers describe at very great length the story of Jesus Christ, aside from other things whereby they most vehemently confute the stubbornness of the infidels, they passed over One important point, which perhaps was unknown to them until now—for, as the poet tells us, not all of us are capable of all things. Albumasar inserted this point from the Persian astronomers Hermes and Astalius in his treatise on Astrology, and we have translated | Albumasar's | passage in this same book in these words: “They say that in the first decan of Virgo a young girl rises—in their language 261

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seclios darzama, adre nedefa, as the Arabs interpret it, which among us means ‘pure virgin—-seated on her finely decorated throne, holding two ears of corn in her hand, nourish-

ing a boy and feeding him with her ius | broth] in a region named “Hebrea,; and the boy is called Jesus.’ In my opinion the Wise Men also recognized the boy, being informed by reading this and then having seen his star. Thus especially the

blindness of the Jews is shown here, since even in natural

speculation and the order of the ages the truth of Jesus Christ was in fact first known by a foreign nation. For the astrologer sees the whole situation more clearly. How wonderful it is that he could announce a wonder that he saw would happen in the future against the laws of nature! For who would believe the words of a man, or would not argue against his assertion if he were to make known openly that a virgin would give birth to a child? What he says, however, is reasonable. For ius is the juice from the flesh. lus therefore is

the milk on which the child feeds. But no woman has ever been able to feed a child with this unless she has given birth beforehand.”

Despite the citation of Albumasar in the manuscript descriptions of the Orsini sibyls, it 1S likely that the Cimmerian sibyl’s epigram was derived via the intermediary of Albertus Magnus's paraphrase of Hermanns translation in the Speculum astronomiae. This becomes clearer when we note that the

northern European recension (L-T) reports that the girl rising in the first decan of Virgo is honesta et munda, “honorable

and pure,” a phrase omitted from Barbiert’s rendering of the Cimmerian sibyl's epigram in the fullest redaction to have 262

CIVIC RITUAL II survived (no. 4). In different ways, both L-T and Barbieri ab-

breviate the Orsini epigram, which in its complete form is not transmitted by any of the existing manuscripts. However, it undoubtedly read as follows in the account of the Orsini sibyls consulted by the author of the octave: In prima facie virginis ascendit puella honesta et munda, pulchra facie, prolixa capillis,

sedens super sedem stratam, nutrit puerum, dans ei ad comedendum

ius, id est lac de coelo missum. For this Albertus Magnus is the

source, in a passage quoting at length from Albumasar's Introductorium. The italics are mine: For, in | Albumasarss] Treatise Six, Chapter One, in the section on the rising of those images that ascend with the sign of Virgo, this is found: “And in the first decan there arises a girl | et ascendit in prima facie illius puella) whom he calls Celchius

Darostal; and she is a virgin, beautiful and honorable and pure | pulchra atque honesta et munda|, with unbound hait | pro-

lixa capilli], holding two ears of wheat in her hand; and she sits on a covered bench | sedet super sedem stratam| and nurses a

boy |et nutrit puerum|, nourishing him with broth in | dans ei ad comedendum ius] in a place called Abrie. And a certain

people call this child Jesus, which 1s translated as Eice in Arabic.”

6. The Erythraean and Hellespontine Sibyls

We have established vernacular octaves for eleven of the twelve stbyls, and may Now at length turn to the problem of the persistent confusion between the Erythraean and Helles263

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pontine sibyls. It is a confusion as old as antiquity, and it arises from the rival claims of Marpessus in the Troad and Erythrae in Ionia to be the home of the one and only true sibyl and her oracle. So far as the Orsini sibyls are concerned, the problem, as Maurice Hélin was acutely aware, derives from the circumstance that the manuscript tradition transmitting epigrams for both the Erythraean and Hellespontine sibyls is almost hopelessly confused.*° The northern

European recension of the description of the sibyls in the Cardinal's camera parimenti (L-T) assigns to the Erythraean sibyl the epigram beginning De excelso coelorum habitaculo, which is without doubt the source for Belcari’s stanza, “Risguardée Dio dello eccelso abitacolo” (no. 5). But it also takes note of a second epigram, the familiar Ludicii signum from the acrostic verse that St. Augustine attributed to the Erythraean

sibyl (Civitas Dei, XVI, xxiii), which almost certainly records the inscription accompanying the sculpture of the Erythraean sibyl adorning one of the choir stalls of Cologne cathedral. The only other non-Orsinian prophecy cited in the northern European recension 1s one alternatively ascribed to the Samian sibyl, In ultima vero etate veniet agnus celestis: humili-

abitur Deus (no. 6). This derives from the Pseudo-Joachite Vaticinum Sibyllae Erythraeae, and no doubt records the inscrip-

tion accompanying the Samian sibyl in the choir at Cologne.”

In other words, the epigram 1s taken from the same taurus pacificus prophecy ascribed to the Erythraean sibyl that Giovanni Pisano quoted when he sculptured her for the facade of the Duomo in Siena. So far as the Italian recension (M) is 264

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concerned, Barbieri also attributes this epigram from the taurus pacificus oracle to the Erythraean sibyl, while Baldin1, and oddly in the light of the very different octave appended

at the bottom of the engraving, attributes to her yet a third epigram entirely unrelated to that octave. Uhis is the familiar prophecy recorded by Lactantius (Divinae institutiones, VII, xviil) and Augustine (Civitas Dei, XVI, xxut), beginning Morte morietur, which we have already noticed in connection with Benozzo Gozzolt’s fresco of the Erythraean sibyl in the frame of Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion in the Chapter Room of San Marco.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the epigram beginning De excelso coelorum habitaculo prospexit Deus is the one

actually invented for Cardinal Orsini’s series of sibyls, not only because the epigrams devised for those paintings were all new inventions referring only to the Incarnation (and expressly did not repeat the traditional prophecies recorded by Lactantius and Augustine), but also because the octave “Risguardée Iddio dell eccelso habitacolo” is a paraphrase of it. Moreover, this stanza, which Baldin1 accurately transcribed in

his engraving of the Erythraean sibyl, is also ascribed to her in both the D’Ancona-Banfi (A-B) and Newbigin (N) versions of Belcaris Annunciation play. Given the exceptional accuracy with which N in particular quotes and assigns the sibyls’ prophecies, correctly attributing to each her proper oracle (whether in complete octaves, excerpted sestets, or final couplets), the preponderance of evidence strongly favors assigning the unquestionably authentic stanza “Risguardée 265

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

Iddio” to the Erythraean rather than the Hellespontine sibyl.

However, it is worth investigating briefly the story of the confusion of the two sibyls.

Despite Baldini's accurate quotation of the octave “Risguardée Iddio” in his engraving of the Erythraean sibyl (no. 5), he misattributes the epigram from which it certainly derives (Ex excelso habitaculo respexit Deo humiles in his version)

to the Hellespontine sibyl (no. 8). The Italian recension of the description of the Orsini sibyls (M), including Barbiert, also gives the epigram De excelsis coelorum habitaculo respexit

Deus humiles to the Hellespontine sibyl. The northern Euro-

pean recension (L-I’), on the other hand, correctly assigns the epigram to the Erythraean sibyl. So far as M is concerned, the change of attribution seems to have been motivated by the desire, in the case of the Erythraean sibyl, to affirm the still very familiar medieval traditions recording the prophecy of this, the best known of all the sibyls, by quoting either the Augustinian Morte morietur (Baldint) or equally familiar Pseudo-Joachite taurus pacificus oracle (Barbieri). This desire necessitated the transfer of the Orsini epigram devised for the Erythraean sibyl, De excelsis habitaculo, to another stbyl,

the Hellespontine. The octave for the Erythraean sibyl was written before the switch was made, and indeed in Baldini’s engraving the particular attribute of the star-spangled heayenly circle upon which the Erythraean sibyl sits (in accordance with her forma in the Orsini series) seems explicable only as having been motivated by the high dwelling place to which the epigram refers. So too does the sibyl’s monastic 266

CIVIC RITUAL II dress, which evokes the humiles toward whom the Lord's gaze is turned. For these reasons, I have ascribed the octave begin-

ning “Risguardée Iddio” to the Erythraean sibyl (no. 5). The problem, however, is compounded when we turn to the Hellespontine stby] (no. 8), the twelfth and last stbyl to be considered. Indeed, having rejected the testimony of the Italian recension (M), including Barbieri, and accordingly returned the Orsinian epigram De excelsis habitaculo to the Erythraean sibyl, when we come to consider the Hellespontine sibyl we are left only with the evidence of the northern

European recension (L-T). This attributes to the Hellespontine sibyl an awkwardly sutured bipartite epigram: Lhesus Christios nascetur de casta. Felix ille Deus ligno qui pendet ab alto.

The first part is not ancient, and does refer, though in only the briefest terms, to the Incarnation. The second part, unconnected to the first, refers to the Crucifixion and derives from an earlier medieval tradition. It is inscribed, for exam-

ple, on the sculpture of the Hellespontine stbyl carved by Jorg Syrlin for the choir stalls in the Cathedral of Ulm, dating to around 1470, which 1s part of a series of sibyls otherwise heavily dependent on Lactantius.** This suggests that the epigram is another interpolation deriving from the inscriptions originally devised for the choir sculptures in Cologne, which, as we have seen, were incorporated into the northern European recension describing the Orsini paintings. Male traced its source to Sozomen's Historia ecclesiastica (IL, I, 10), and De Clerg to the Versus Sibyllae of the eighth or

ninth centuries.” 267

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture

However, although the single unadorned phrase in the first part of the epigram, Lhesus Christios nascetur de casta, leaves us

with little in the way of descriptive detail to go on when evaluating the octave recorded in Baldini’s engraving of the Hellespontine sibyl (for which there 1s no other witness ), we have already seen that the epigram does perfectly account for the Hellespontine sibyl’s couplet as recorded in N. And this couplet, if substituted for the concluding verse of the Hellespontine sibyl’s octave as recorded by Baldini perfectly com-

pletes the opening sestet of that same octave. Assuming this to be the octave composed for the Hellespontine stby] (and we have exhausted all other alternatives), the complete stanza would accordingly read: 8. SIBILLA ELISPONTICA Nella mia scuola stando, vidi fare tanto ‘n una fantina grand’onore qual in verginita si vuol salvare, e per divina grazia e suo valore, discende tn lei e viene incarnare figliuol che fia di tanto splendore. Vaticinare una parola basta: Cristo Gesti nascera della casta.

268

APPENDIX

Cardinal Orsini’s Twelve Sibyls and Their Prophecies in Vernacular Octaves Reconstructed

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DVNA VERGINE EbREA CONTVTT] ADORNI : FIGLVOL ALTRO 2TACOLO | \

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Pig, A.s. The Erythrean Sibyl, British Museum, London.

FIVE

Nomen: Sibilla Eritrea (The Erythraean Sibyl) Epigramma: (Barbieri) In ultima autem aetate humiliabitur Deus et bumanabitur proles divina: jungetur humanitati divinitas. Jacebit in feno agnus, et officio puellari educabitur Deus et homo. Signa praece-

dunt apud Apellas. Mulier vetustissima puerum prestium concipiet. Boetes orbis mirabitur, et ducatum praestabit ad ortum. (Baldini En-

graving) Morte morietur tribus diebus somno suscepto et mo| x] ab inferis egressu ad luce veniet primus.

Forma: (L-T) Quinta Sibilla annorum quinquaginta, tenet gladium recuruum in dextera pendentem et cruentatum, et habitu montalis uestitur, subalbis uestibus pedes habens supra celum rotundum azureum stellatum, et tenet rotullum in quo scribitur: Sibilla nobilisstma Ericthea nomine Erophila, in Babilonia orta, de Cristo sic ayt: De excelso celorum habitaculo

prospexit humiles suos . . . Item de eadem sibilla hos versus scribit Augustinus 1n sermone qui incipit: Vos, inquam, o Tudei: Ludicii signum tellus sudore madescet. (M) Sibilla Erithea

annorum ... In Babilonia nata, ornatu habitu monachalt veste induta, nigro vello in capite, manu gestans gladium nudum, non multum antiqua, mediocriter facie turbata, habens sub pedibus circulum aureum ornatum stellis ad similitudinem celi. Dicit sic: In ultima etate . . . (Barbieri) No descriptive details.

287

Appendix

Octave from Baccio Baldini’s Engraving of the Sibilla Eritrea

Risguardo Iddio dello excelso abitacolo gli umili suoi e nascera ne gorni uj 1]ttmi dicho chon questo miracolo d'una Vergine ebrea con tutti adorni chostumi el suo figluol sanz’ altr’ ostacolo nelle terrene chulle si soggorni nascera gram profephta alto e acorto di Vergin madre et questo el vero scorto The Octave for the Sibilla Eritrea Reconstructed

Risguardée Iddio dell’ eccelso abitacolo gli umili suoi, e nascera ne’ giornt ultimi, dico, con questo miracolo d’una Vergine ebrea, con tutti adorni costumi, il suo figliuol: senz’ altro ostacolo nelle terrene culle si soggiorni; nascera gran profeta, alto e accorto, di Vergin madre, et questo el vero scorto.

Comment: The sestet is transmitted by Belcari’s Annunciation

play (N), in which it is followed by a couplet correctly attributed to the Delphic sibyl (no. 3). The sestet is also accurately transmitted and assigned in the Annunciation play (A-B), in which, however, the Delphic sibyl’s couplet is erroneously given as the conclusion to the Erythraean sibyl’s octave. Baldint correctly records both sestet and couplet, his engraving being the unique source for the latter. 288

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l.Fr CHE TTV TaTOL2ZECOLNO2TRO PORRANPACIE Laka tata men : ; le iss : Se : + ee Fig. A.8. Lhe Hellespontine Sibyl, British Museum, London.

EIGHT Nomen: Sibilla Elispontica (The Hellespontine Sibyl) Epigramma: (Barbieri) De excelsis coelorum habitacolo prospexit Deus humiles suos. Et nascetur in diebus novissimis de virgine hebrea

in cunabulis terrae. (Baldini Engraving) Ex eccelso habitaculo respexit Deus humiles et in terris novissimis diebus ex hebrea virgine nascetur.

Forma: (L-T) Octaua sibilla, annorum quinquaginta, depingitur caput habens ligatum per totum ut morista; terribilis in aspectu et tenet scriptum: Sibilla Elispontia in agro troyano nata, que scribitur Solonis fuisse et Cyri temporibus, de qua scribit Eraclius et ayt: Lhesus Christios nascetur de casta: Felix ille

Deus ligno qui pendet ab alto. (M) Sibilla helespontina annorum

XL; in agro troyano nata, vetula et antiqua, veste rurali induta, ligato velo antiquo capite sub gula circumvoluto usque ad scapulas qui despectu habitu, de qua scribit Heraclius, dicit sic: De excelsis coelorum habitaculo prospexit Deus humiles suos

...(Barbiert) vetula et antiqua, veste rurali induta, ligato velo antiquo capite sub gula circumvoluta usque ad scapulas, quasi

despecta... Octave from Baccio Baldini’s Engraving of the Sibilla Elispontica

Nella mie scola stando vidi fare tanto ’n una fantina grand’onore quale ‘n verginita st vuol salva] re |

e per divina grazia e ssuo valore 299

Appendix

discende | in] Ilei e vien ancarnare figluol che ffia di tanto splendore e ffre d'Iddio suo figluol veracie che ttut’ tolse col nostro porran pacie The Octave for the Sibilla Elispontica Reconstructed

Nella mia scuola stando, vidi fare tanto ‘n una fantina grand onore, qual in verginita st vuol salvare; e per divina grazia e suo valore, discende in let e viene incarnare figliuol che fia di tanto splendore. Vaticinare una parola basta: Cristo Gesti nascera della casta.

Comment: The couplet is transcribed and correctly assigned

to the Hellespontine Sibyl in Belcarts Annunciation play (N), following a sestet spoken by the Persian sibyl. It is also preserved in the Annunciation play (A-B) in an octave attributed in its entirety to the Persian sibyl. The same corruption is repeated in Baldini'’s engraving of that sibyl (no. 1). Baldini is the unique source for the Hellespontine sibyl’s sestet.

300

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