The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature 0823273369, 9780823273362

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures and Color Plates
Introduction: A Japanese Friend
Part: I
1. The Rebirth of Poetics
2. The Rebirth of Ruins
Part: II
3. Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence
4. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Erotics of Fragments
5. Du Bellay’s Cendre and the Formless Signifier
6. Spenser’s Moniment and the Allegory of Ruins
Epilogue: Fallen Castles and Summer Grass
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
Color plates

Citation preview

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

v er ba l a rts : : st udies i n poet ics series editors

::

Lazar Fleishman & Haun Saussy

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

Andrew Hui

fordh a m univ ersit y pr ess

New York

2 016

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, and a subvention grant from Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or thirdparty Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16

54321

First edition

To my mother, father, and wife

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con ten ts

List of Figures and Color Plates

ix

Introduction: A Japanese Friend

1

Part I 1. The Rebirth of Poetics

27

2. The Rebirth of Ruins

52

Part II 3. Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence

89

4. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Erotics of Fragments

131

5. Du Bellay’s Cendre and the Formless Signifier

144

6. Spenser’s Moniment and the Allegory of Ruins

177

Epilogue: Fallen Castles and Summer Grass

223

Acknowledgments Notes Index

229 231 277

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figu r e s a n d color pl at e s

figures Giambattista Vico, frontispiece, New Science, 1744 Maso di Banco, from The Life of St. Sylvester, ca. 1341 Anonymous, Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse miniatures, ca. 1290– 99 4 Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maestà, Nativity panel, ca. 1308–11 5 Sebastiano Serlio, frontispiece of book 3 of Tutte l’opere d’architettura, 1537 6 Authorship uncertain, frontispiece of Antiquarie prospettiche Romane, ca. 1499–1500 7 Giorgio Vasari, Paul III Farnese Directing the Continuance of St Peter’s, 1546 8 Maarten van Heemskerck, pillar of the crossing of new St. Peter’s Basilica, 1532–36 9 Maarten van Heemskerck, interior view of the nave of old St. Peter’s Basilica, ca. 1532–36 10 Donato Bramante and Bernardo Prevedari, Ruined Temple, 1481 11 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499 12 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499 13 Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 3, Theatre for Worldings, 1591 14 Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblems, 1568 15 Edmund Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos, 1609 1 2 3

color plates 1

Maarten van Heemskerck, Self-Portrait with the Colosseum, 1553

16 62 64 65 68 70 78 80 81 82 134 135 184 186 217

x

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Figures and Color Plates

Tommaso Laureti, Triumph of Christianity, 1585 Li Cheng, Reading the Stele, mid-tenth century Ambrogio Lorenzetti, detail of ruins, Allegory of Good and Bad Government, ca. 1338–40 Sandro Botticelli, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1478– 82 Herman Posthumus, Landscape with Ancient Ruins, 1536 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563 Roma, directed by Federico Fellini, 1972

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

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Introduction A Japanese Friend

Ex ungue leonem The lion from its claws — Latin commonplace

One summer. Rome. After a morning of Italian lessons, a Japanese friend invited me to a walk in the Forum. As we ambled between the Temple of Saturn and the Arch of Septimus Severus, she turned to me and asked, “Andrew, why are there ruins here? Why are they not rebuilt or just demolished?” This question perplexed me, for it was a moment of cultural dissonance for me as much as it was for her. Hailing from the hypermodern metropolis of Tokyo, she was unused to seeing the monumental detritus of antiquity occupying prime real estate in the city center. Instead, in the heart of her capital, nestled within innumerable twentieth- century high-rises, is a fully functioning imperial palace, the residence for a royal line that claims to be the longest continuing in the world. Her query unsettled a large archive of cultural assumptions I had held: from the Tower of Babel to the Fall of Troy, from Pausanias’s records of abandoned Greek temples to the Old English elegy “The Ruin,” from the prints of Piranesi to the paintings of Hubert Robert, from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” to W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, Western culture has always expressed its fascination with the physical past through its monuments and ruins. (I discuss some East Asian examples in the epilogue.) I returned to her question again and again over the years, for it made me wonder about Europe’s relationship to classical culture: Why is it in love with the past as past? This book is a long answer to her question. The ruins are still there in the Roman Forum because they are the invention of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was, if I may say so, the Ruin- naissance, 1

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Introduction

the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse that became an inspirational force in the poetic imagination, artistic expression, and historical inquiry of fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Europe. The ruin functions as a privileged cipher or master topos that marks the rupture between the world of the humanists and the world of antiquity. The discourse of Roman ruins coincides with a renewed interest in the classical past: architects used ancient buildings as models for their own construction; antiquarians systematically collected their remains; artists illustrated the desolate urban views as exercises in spatial and historical perspective; philologists sought to understand the past through inscriptions on buildings and fragments of manuscripts. And poets? They used ruins as a way to think about the production and reception of the texts of the ancients as well as their own work. Confronted with the monumental detritus of antiquity, Renaissance writers hoped to craft a more enduring artifact. And faced with the contingency of cultural survival, they reached back to classical literature for an answer. Already in Homer, Simonides, and Pindar we see the striving for “undying songs,” but early modern authors knew their Latin texts best: Ovid at the end of the Metamorphoses boasts, “And now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo,” iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas (15.871– 72). Virgil in the Aeneid promises to Nisus and Euryalus, “If my poetry has any power, no day shall ever blot you from the memory of time,” si quid mea carmina possunt, / nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo (9.446–47). Horace, perhaps most memorably, proclaims, “I have constructed a monument more lasting than bronze, more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids,” Exegi monumentum aere perennius, / regalique situ pyramidum altius (Ode 3.30).1 What all three poets share is a confident assertion that the powers of poetry, realized in evanescent performances (carmina) or labors of writing (opus, monumentum), will outlast all other solid materials—wood, stone, bronze— as media for cultural preservation. 2 This bid for immortality became a favorite topos of humanist poetry.3 Upon Petrarch’s coronation as poet laureate in 1341 on the steps of the Capitoline (the first since Statius, he is proud to claim), the Italian poet cites the authors above verbatim and explains that immortality comes in two forms, “both the immortality of the poet’s

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own name and the immortality of the names of those whom he celebrates.”4 Du Bellay translates Horace’s ode as J’ay parachevé de ma main / Un ouvrage plus dur qu’airain, and the final lines of the Metamorphoses as Un œuvre j’ay parfaict, que le feu ny la fouldre, / Ny le fer, ny le temps ne pourront mettre en pouldre.5 Spenser at the end of the Shepheards Calendar similarly invokes: Horace of his Odes a work though ful indede of great wit and learning, yet of no so great weight and importaunce boldly sayth. Exegi monimentum aere perennius, Quod nec imber nec aquilo vorax etc.6

As summations of the poet’s craft, the hope that is enshrined in these lofty lines embodies their highest ambitions. We also find this dynamic in post-Augustan Roman authors. Lucan writes, “The poet snatches all things from destruction and gives to mortal men immortality. Posterity shall read my verse and your deeds; our Pharsalia shall live on, and no age will ever doom us to oblivion,” omnia fato / eripis et populis donas mortalibus aevum / . . . venturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra / vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aevo (9.980– 81, 985– 86). So too Statius at the end of his epic: “My Thebaid, on whom I have spent twelve wakeful years, will you long endure and be read when your master is gone?,” durabisne procul dominoque legere superstes / o mihi bissenos multum uigilata per annos Thebai? (12.810–12).7 Usually appearing at the conclusion of a work (or at moments of high emotive intensity), these verses seek a coalescence of literature’s ultimate power. Yet when juxtaposed, they seem to replicate each other rather than encapsulate any definitive, conclusive omega. In light of this catalogue we see that the topos of poetic immortality, reprised in early modernity, is not so much a given fact as a circular wish-function. Its fulfillment comes not by the authors’ bold demands but by repetition, by transformation, and by those who come later, in their reception and re- creation. The task of this book is to show how the Renaissance poetic response to ruins is not to strive for fixity or permanence but to create a work of art that absorbs the past and is in turn open to future appropriation and mutation. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature imagines fluid multiplicity rather than fixed monumentalization as a survival strategy in the classical tradition.

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Beneath this exultant sheen of poetic everlastingness, however, early humanist poets were never entirely comfortable with such hyperbolic claims, since so much of ancient letters clearly did not survive. In the era before print they were poignantly aware that texts, including their own, were often destroyed, expurgated, lost, or simply ignored. In one of his “Letters to Dead Authors,” Petrarch laments that Cicero’s manuscripts are “in such fragmentary and mutilated condition that it would perhaps have been better for them to have perished” (Familiares 24.4).8 Addressing Livy, he writes, “We know you wrote 142 books on Roman affairs. Alas, with what enthusiasm and labor! Scarcely thirty of them survive!” (Familiares 24.8).9 Two hundred fifty years later, with the full capacity of the printing press, Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605) writes: ANTIQVITIES, or Remnants of History, are, as was saide, tanquam Tabula Naufragij [only the plank of a shipwreck], when industrious persons by an exact and scrupulous diligence and obseruation, out of Monuments, Names, Wordes, Prouerbes, Traditions, Priuate Recordes, and Euidences, Fragments of stories, Passages of Bookes, that concerne not storie, and the like, doe saue and recouer somewhat from the deluge of time.10

The most poignant word in this passage is “somewhat,” for the chancellor of England knows full well how impossible complete retrieval is, no matter how “industrious” and “scrupulous” a scholar be. In the course of this book we shall see how, from Petrarch to Bacon, philological reconstruction, literary production, contemplation of fragments, and gazing on ruins exist on the same humanist continuum. To be a poet in the Renaissance, then, was to think about ruins. When Petrarch gazed at the obsolescent grandeur of Roman decay in the 1340s, the dilapidated city was little more than sad farmlands: “As in our travels through the remains of a broken city [fracte urbis], there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins [ruinarum fragmenta] lay before our eyes.”11 These words are from the Rerum familiarium libri (Letters on Familiar Matters, written 1325– 66), and the epistle has rightly been considered the founding document of the “cult of ruins.”12 In the cultural efflorescence of the fifteenth century, Rome’s gleaming churches, palaces, and monuments were built from stones pilfered from ancient buildings. By the mid-sixteenth century, when Du Bellay spent four ambivalent years there, the city was still suffering from the aftershocks of its re-ruination in the devastating Sack of 1527.13 The Petrarchan sonnet sequences Les Antiquitez de Rome and

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Les Regrets (1558) document his responses to the decayed grandeur of the city. In the 1580s Spenser, never having visited Rome, was composing The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) literally under the shadow of ruins; he lived in New Abbey, County Kildare, and his Irish homestead Kilcolman Castle while he was colonial administrator and settler there.14 Across the Irish Sea the landscape of England, bearing the scars of Henry VIII’s Act of Suppression, was dotted with hundreds of ruined monasteries, abandoned churches, and wayside shrines.15 Shakespeare’s evocative line “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” bears witness to these damaged topographies. What, then, is the “poetics” of “ruins”? As readers will know, “poetics” is from the Greek poiesis and the verb poiein, “to make, to do.”16 “Ruin” is from the Latin verb ruere, “to fall with violence . . . to hasten, hurry, rush, to fall,” and the noun ruīna, “a rushing or tumbling down . . . a downfall, fall; accident, catastrophe, disaster, destruction.”17 Etymologically these two words seem to have contrary meanings; one is about the crafting of artifacts, while the other is about the dissolution of things already created. One way of rephrasing the “poetics of ruins” would be the “order of disorder,” the “discourse of falling things,” or “putting back together broken things.” This book, in short, explores the dynamics of these oppositions and explains how Renaissance poets used the topos of architectural ruins to think about the life cycle of their own works—from conception, composition, print, revisions, and circulation to afterlife. A conjoined interest in poetics and monuments certainly existed in antiquity, as we see already, but I wager that the intertwining of poetics and ruins emerges only in the period now known as the Renaissance.18 The Renaissance sees a new understanding of both ruins and poetics, made possible by sustained meditation on the crumbled monuments of antiquity. This rumination requires a new understanding of the ruin as neither monumentalizing the past nor making a gesture toward something extrahistorical (i.e., immortality) but as gesturing toward a poetic practice that is deeply invested in time, leaving traces for others to follow and ultimately transcend. Whereas classical poets used ruins as a way to think about the endurance of art and the brevity of life, ars longa vita brevis, the Renaissance writers I study— Francesco Petrarch, Francesco Colonna, Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare— problematize this dichotomy. As they self- consciously constructed their work on the ruins of antiquity, they reflected intensely on this

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ambivalent foundation. They were not artists given to liturgical rituals of exact replication; each insisted on the freedom to reject, appropriate, or absorb his predecessor. At times they wanted ancient buildings to be rubble so that they could have the space— the clearing— to construct their own monuments. In a moment of exasperation Du Bellay laments, “The broad fields of Greek and Latin are already so full that very little empty space remains” (La Deffence 2.12).19 In Les Antiquitez de Rome he promises, “I would, with the ardor that inflames me, undertake to rebuild with the pen what hands cannot construct in stone,” J’entreprendrois, veu l’ardeur qui m’allume, / De rebastir au compas de la plume / ce que les mains ne peuvent maçonner (Sonnet 25). NON FI NI TO

Since at least Horace it has become commonplace to refer to a finished work of art as a monument. Yet many humanist authors had precisely the problem of finishing their literary creations. What, then, is the relationship between the aesthetics of the unfinished and the ruin? Petrarch was the first man in European letters to call his works “fragments,” as the title of his poetic collection, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Things), attests. This is more than a conceit: he obsessively reorganizes and edits the order of his poems until the night of his death. 20 Petrarch had many other projects. He wanted to write an epic in Italian (distinct from his Latin Africa), a biography of the Neapolitan king Robert, an encyclopedia on the origins of the arts, a treatise against Averroes, and much else. But true to his roving interests, he never got around to completing them. 21 The Africa itself remains unfinished. Ronsard’s Franciade (begun in the 1540s, the first four of a projected twenty-four books published in 1572), Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (first three books appeared in 1590, second three books in 1596, also a part of a projected twentyfour books), Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (printed in 1590, 1593, 1598, 1621, each with substantial additions) are all famously, magnificently incomplete. All great Renaissance authors had their own monumental ruins. Though we instinctively associate the unfinished or unfinishable work of art with the Romantic yearning for the infinite, the non finito was already an aesthetic category in the Renaissance. 22 This was anticipated in antiquity, when Pliny in the Natural History writes,

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“Another most curious fact and worthy of record is that the latest works of artists and the pictures left unfinished at their death are valued more than any of their finished paintings. . . . The reason is that in these we see traces of the design and the original conception of the artists, while sorrow for the hand that perished at its work beguiles us into the bestowal of praise” (35.145). 23 Vasari remarked on Michelangelo’s sculpture the Medici Madonna that “though the parts are unfinished, what is left roughed out and full of chisel marks reveals, in its incomplete state, the perfection of the work,” nella imperfezzione della bozza la perfezzione dell’opra. 24 Montaigne is conscious of the interminable project of his life-writing: “Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?”25 Ruins and the incomplete work of art commingle in Renaissance aesthetics. And even the invention of print did not arrest the mutability of supposedly finished literary texts. The codex often did not exist as a fixed unit: printers would frequently issue texts in loose sheets, leaving it to the reader to collect, arrange, and bind them. 26 Authors themselves were happy to incorporate fluidity into their process of revisions and editions, encouraging translations, imitations, performances, and even forgeries. 27 When a correspondent complained to Erasmus that he revised his multidecade Adages too much, the Dutch humanist shot back, “No book is wrought such that it cannot be made more perfect.”28 Similarly Montaigne writes, “My book is always one. Except that at each edition, so that the buyer may not come off completely empty-handed, I allow myself to add, since it is only an ill-fitted patchwork, some extra ornaments.”29 And we know very well the instability of the oxymoronic “true, original copy” from the riddles of Shakespeare’s quartos and folios. 30 My point is that the unfinished, the complete, and the ruin are usually plotted on different points of a work of art’s time graph; in the Renaissance these three modalities intersect in the matrix of the fragment.

Gilded Monuments The conjunction of architectural survival, cultural loss, personal recovery, and poetic endurance is hauntingly explored in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). In an extraordinary cluster of poems, roughly from Sonnet 55 to 65, the poet grapples with the power of words to keep in abeyance the degeneration of the world. 31 (This sequence is

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treated in depth in chapter 1.) But for now I want to show how Shakespeare rehearses many of the late Renaissance anxieties about the corrupting forces of time and the fragile powers of verse to combat them. In exploring his poetics of preservation, he turns again and again to the figure of the ruin: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defacèd The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razèd, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, Increasing store with loss, and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate That Time will come and take my love away This thought is as a desire, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose. 32

Sonnet 64 is an exercise on the reality and imagination of ruins, presenting an encyclopedia of decay and destruction. The ruin’s lesson is didactic, personal (“me”), and logical (“thus”). The sonnet’s narrative arc brings us from surveying this vast, impersonal panorama of the world to an intimate, singular “my love.” The syntactical buildup of the multiple “when” creates a sense of anticipation that is finally resolved in the melancholic insight of the volta, the turn: “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / that Time will come and take my love away.” As readers of the Sonnets know, the arrangement of polysemous words contributes to a dizzying array of their interpretations. The magic combination here is “state,” “ruin,” and “ruminate.” From the Latin status, “state” primarily means “a particular manner or way of existing” or “original, proper, or usual condition of a person or thing” (OED). But of course it also refers to a political entity. Hence line 2, “The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,” can be additionally glossed as an expansive sense of “state” as “costly and imposing display associated with monarchs and other persons of high rank; splendour, pomp, magnificence” (OED). The course of the poem turns from the flux of material “states” to the collapse of political institutions, from architecture to ruin, from metal to rust, from soil

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to water. By conjoining the word with “interchange” and “decay,” Shakespeare destabilizes the meaning of “state” itself. Like “state,” “ruin” has ample semantic range. Similar to its Latin roots, the English noun can signify a state, a disposition, or a person; as a verb it is an event, an action that is both transitive and intransitive. The ruin can be internal or external, allegorical or real. When Shakespeare uses “ruin” in the plays he is interested in human action, not architecture. A minor character in Antony and Cleopatra complains of “the noble ruin of her magic, Antony” (3.10.19).33 In the last act, as Cleopatra prepares for her suicide, she threatens, “This mortal house I’ll ruin, / Do Caesar what he can” (5.2.50). The mother in Coriolanus shouts, “Come all to ruin; let / Thy mother rather feel thy pride than fear / Thy dangerous stoutness” (3.2.125). And the son says, “Though there the people had more absolute power, / I say, they nourish’d disobedience, fed / The ruin of the state” (3.1.117–18). Gloucester, in an existential vein, asks King Lear, “O ruined piece of nature, this great world / Shall so wear out to naught. Dost thou know me?” (4.61.30–31). “Ruin” in these tragic examples denotes imminent existential calamity brought upon by political ambitions. In the Sonnets, however, “ruin” is brought upon by Time herself. She doesn’t need anyone’s help. Meditation upon the transience of the world occurs by way of alliteration: “ruin” and “ruminate.” (If we omit “m,” ruminate becomes “ruinate.”) Although this lexical pun might suggest a semantic equivalence or even a shared ancestry, the etyma of “ruin” and “ruminate” are quite different: “ruin,” as previously stated, means an impulsive action or a “headlong rush, headlong fall, downward plunge, collapse (of a building), fallen mass of debris.” To ruminate is “to revolve, turn over repeatedly in the mind; to meditate deeply upon,” derived from rumen, “the first and largest stomach of a ruminant . . . and from which it may pass back to the mouth as cud for further chewing” (OED). Thus the direction and velocity of both words go in contrary directions: “to ruin” is precipitous thoughtless action, whereas “to ruminate” is recursive slow contemplation. For Shakespeare, thinking about falling things makes us philosophers and poets, not cows. Ruminating on ruins provokes the poet to ruminate on the general state of the world and on the particular mortality of his beloved. Sonnet 64 thus vividly illustrates the central crisis of the Sonnets: how to stop Time from taking the poet’s beloved away. In the early sonnets the poet’s solution is that this nameless beloved must have children.

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But as the rhetoric of biological reproduction gradually collapses, the poet must take the task of his friend’s survival into his own hands. What children cannot do perhaps the poet’s pen can. The rest of the sonnet sequence thereby becomes metapoetic, in the sense that it increasingly broods on the function and efficacy of its own existence. In defiance of the kingdom of the shore and the conceit of inconstant stay, Shakespeare recuperates Horace’s celebrated vaunt in Sonnet 55: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. ’Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room, Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgement that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Given the nonsequential development of the sonnet sequence, Sonnet 55 proleptically resolves the crisis presented in Sonnet 64: both sonnets are preoccupied with the destruction of material things: “when sometime lofty towers I see down-razed, / And brass eternal slave to mortal rage” (64) is equivalent to “when wasteful war shall statues overturn, / and broils root out the work of masonry” (55). Yet whereas the ruminations in Sonnet 64 result only in an affective paralysis (the poet can only weep), Sonnet 55 realizes that writing itself— even writing about the poet’s anxieties— already means that he has produced a “living record of your [the young man’s] memory.” In short, Sonnet 64 reaches an impasse with the poetics of ruins. Sonnet 55 presents, with the help of the classical tradition, a lyric solution. Although Renaissance poetry seems merely to mimic ancient thought in its poetic hopes of immortality, Shakespeare has something in his lyric arsenal that his ancient sources lacked: the Christian Apocalypse. “Till the judgment that yourself arise” and “ending doom” in the final lines are clear references to the belief in the resurrection of the body, something that can happen only through the Messiah. Recently Ramie Targoff has explored how post-Reformation poetry saw a lack of posthumous love between poets and their beloved, as

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opposed to an earlier Petrarchan continuum of love in this world and in the next. According to Targoff, poets had to develop other ways of lyric compensation: “The idea that death would bring an absolute end to tortuous erotic affections does not lead to a consoling vision of a heavenly afterlife with the divine. Instead this poetry is overwhelmingly secular, often suggesting a strain of materialism that seems more consonant with classical than with Christian models for the afterlife.”34 True, but much of Renaissance poetry is in fact preoccupied with the Apocalypse and the resurrection of the body, as we see here. The response that this book offers is that meditation on love, whether posthumous or not, is contiguous with meditation on ruins, and that poetic survival is accomplished not so much through the physical leaves of a codex, which, after all, are no more permanent than brazen statues or unswept stone, but through the experience of reading by later generations. As such, poetic “immortality” in the fullest sense will always fall short of providential time. The way verbal works become immortalized is always within secular time, “in the eyes of posterity.” The life of the poet, his poetry, and his beloved endure beyond the confines of the page in the lived hermeneutic experience of the reader, dwelling “in lovers’ eyes.” We see from Shakespeare’s Sonnets how Renaissance poetics is proleptic and analeptic, inscribing its hopes about its own survival through the repetition, imitation, and appropriation of its classical predecessors. Moreover, Doomsday was never far away from early modern poets’ minds. This is why ruins appealed to them so much, since ruins, like poetics, are by nature Janus-faced, looking backward and forward. By saving their predecessors poets create an implicit contractual obligation that future readers and other poets will do the same for them. The promise of literature, then, is that the author can survive his own death. As Horace put it: “I shall not wholly die,” non omnis moriar (Carm. 3.30). Yet this hope is accompanied by a fear, for this future is contingent upon others. The poetics of ruins is thus the shadow of the poetics of immortality.

The Lion’s Claw The method of this book is avowedly philological. I believe this approach is particularly appropriate to my subject matter since both philology and the study of ruins are fundamentally concerned with the figure of synecdoche, about imagining the whole through their

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parts. By definition, philology takes the ancient past— always in fragments— as its object of inquiry and therefore cannot but think about ruins in their textual and material forms. Indeed to look at ruins and to do literary history we meditate on some enduring fragment from which we try to reconstruct some image of the past. One of the most provocative recent interventions in the theory of philology is Werner Hamacher’s Minima Philologica. Hamacher’s bold claim is that to think about philology, to think philologically, is to penetrate nothing less than the origins of language: “Language is archiphilology” (thesis 1). But philology must ultimately escape from itself to go above and beyond language. This results in a tragic failure, a “transcending without transcendence” (thesis 4), for the antinomy of philology is such that philology asks questions that it cannot answer, or by answering them it annihilates itself. As philology advances in its inquiries, its goal is nothing less than “the entirety of language.” But because this totality is infinite, philology cannot but collapse in its overreaching ambition. Even with all its virtues of meticulous patience, it cannot but ultimately puncture, sever, implode upon itself. This leads Hamacher to posit that “philology is decreation.”35 For Hamacher, philology necessarily thinks about ruins but itself ends in ruin, hence method and subject collapse on each other. Perhaps philology in this rarified, theoretical sense does lead to the “unwording” of language. In its praxis, however, I would argue that its goal is actually the healing of linguistic and cultural rupture. To understand this, let us turn to a much earlier reflection on philology, Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth- century Genealogia deorum gentilium. An encyclopedic synthesis of ancient myths, it stands as one of the first works of classical scholarship in early humanism. In the preface Boccaccio vividly states: [As] if I were collecting fragments along the vast shores of a huge shipwreck, I will collect [vastum litus ingentis naufragii fragmenta colligerem sparsas] the remnants of the pagan gods strewn everywhere in a nearly infinite number of volumes, and once found and collected, even if they are ravaged and half eaten by time and nearly worn to nothing, I will reduce them into a single corpus of genealogy [unum genealogie corpus]. (Book 1, preface 1, §40)

Later he uses the same imagery of catastrophe but adds the arresting figures of Aesculapius and Hippolytus: I can quite realize this labor to which I am committed— this vast system of gentile gods and their progeny, torn limb from limb

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[membratim discerptum] and scattered among the rough and desert places of antiquity and the thorns of late, wasted away, sunk almost to ashes; and here am I setting forth to collect these fragments, to consolidate [collecturus] them together, like another Aesculapius restoring Hippolytus. (1.1.50)36

Readers will know that the terror of mortal disembodiment by the divinities is a mainstay of classical mythology. Boccaccio now hauntingly imagines the entire archive of antiquity— even the gods themselves— as dispersed and scattered. His membratim discerptum recalls membra disjecta, a term from Horace’s Satires that is used proverbially to describe the surviving fragments of ancient text.37 The Roman poet, when talking about the strategies of writing verse and how to arrange syntax, quotes Ennius: “‘When foul Discord’s din / War’s posts and gates of bronze had broken in,’ where even when he is dismembered, you would find the scattered limbs of a poet,” ut si solvas postquam Discordia taetra / Belli ferratos postes portasque refregit / invenias etiam disiecti membra poetae (1.4.60– 62). What started for Horace as a poetic invention has come down to us as philological discovery. Both are about Orphic sparagmos. The goal of a scholar, then, is restorative. As logos is from legein, to “collect, gather, assemble,” humanist philologia, out of love of the ancients, as an act of philia, reassembles the fragments of myth from its “infinite number of volumes” into a “single corpus of genealogy.” Interestingly, like Boccaccio, Hamacher also associates textual criticism with mythological figures from antiquity: “Orpheus is a philologist when he sings” (thesis 74); “The ground of philology is a wound. It screams. But no one hears this Philoctetes except, maybe, himself” (thesis 82); “Philology is the Trojan horse in the walls of our sleeping languages. If they awaken [sic]” (thesis 91). Boccaccio reveals the necessity of philology as the science of restoration and conservation. Hamacher polemically reveals, if we align him to this unlikely Italian interlocutor, that philology is both the wound and the cure, the pharmakon of language. With its tutelary deity Aesculapius and its mortal subjects Hippolytus and Orpheus, wounding and disembodiment and violence become the starting grounds of the humanist enterprise. When it comes to historical, textual inquiry, philology is still the most effective art of healing we have for the broken torso of antiquity, pace Hamacher’s claims about philology’s own wounding. It is instructive to read Hamacher alongside World Philology, edited by

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Sheldon Pollock, for both wrestle with the relationship between linguistic and hermeneutic understanding. 38 Informed by cross- cultural comparisons of textual scholarship, the volume is notable for the ways it regrounds philology as the foundation of the cultural sciences. Constanze Güthenke’s chapter insightfully discusses one of the most highly developed visions of philology in nineteenth- century Germany, August Boeckh’s Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Philologischen Wissenschaften (posthumously edited 1877).39 Like Hamacher, Boeckh is concerned with the potential failure of philology: “Like every other science, [it] is an infinite task of approximation. . . . Antiquity is more remote, more alien, more incomprehensible and fragmentary and thus in need of reconstruction to a far higher degree.” Yet he takes a much more constructive stance. Knowledge, for him, can be achieved by means of a collective enterprise, in a thousand heads, partial, dismembered, broken, not to mention strange and in a broken tongue; but the great love alone . . . is nothing other than the reconstruction of the constructions of the human mind in their totality. . . . [The philologist thus] stands at the highest level together with the artist and the philosopher, or rather they merge in him. His task is the historical construction of works of art and science, the history which he must grasp and represent in vivid intuition [in lebendiger Anschauung].”40

We see how the language of fragmentation— and the hope of total reconstitution— pervades discourses on classical scholarship in its long arc from Boccaccio to Boeckh to Hamacher. So does the fear of ruination. Yet unlike Hamacher, both Boccaccio and Boeckh posit the possibility of knowledge in the human sciences. My work is closer to this more affirmative strand of philology. In particular my methodology embraces the principles of close reading and cultural semantics developed by Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, the two great twentieth- century representatives of this humanist enterprise. Auerbach proposes that, faced with myriad sources, a secure reading must locate a point of departure, what he calls the Ansatzpunkt, “the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy.”41 Spitzer saw that semantic change is an index of larger human phenomena: “Word change is cultural change and spiritual change.”42 Starting with the etymology of a particular word and examining its stylistic shifts as patterns of broader intellectual

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development, the philologist would finally arrive at a correspondence between the “inward form” and the “spirit of the age.” We begin to see a hidden kinship between the study of words and the study of ruins, for both abide by the hermeneutic presupposition that “the detail can be understood only by the whole and any explanation of detail presupposes the understanding of the whole.”43 As an adage of Erasmus has it, ex ungue leonem, “[one deduces] the lion from its claws.”44 For Giambattista Vico, since human beings made their own institutions and laws, human beings themselves alone are able to know fully their own origins, developments, and ends. Hence ruins become intelligible since human beings made them. “The great fragments of antiquity, hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered,” he states in the New Science (1744), “shed great light when cleaned, pieced together, and restored.”45 The visual enigmas of the work’s frontispiece capture the contingencies of civilization (fig. 1). In the foreground are its fallen artifacts: an altar, a columbarium, a toppled column, an alphabet- chiseled stele, a cracked pedestal on which the blind Homer stands. In the background a muse bestriding the globe has her gaze fixed on the effulgent, clouddispelling rays of the all-seeing eye of providence. Vico insists that from their broken remains one can piece together the archives of history and deduce the forms of the true: whereas philosophy articulates the intelligibility of the universal, philology illuminates the empirical artifacts of the particular. Because ruins are fundamentally about parts and wholes, they prompt the beholder toward an interpretation, the movement of the imagination to fill absence with presence. The ruin’s empty space thus creates an opening, an aperture, toward the hermeneutic creation of meaning. Under the shadow of contingency, loss, and oblivion, the poetics of ruins thus reaches out in two directions: backward in an attempt to sustain the past, and forward in the hope of future survival. In making silent monuments speak, in giving a voice to inert matter, poetry aspires to a higher condition of permanence. The Sonnets, philology, and the contemplation of ruins have this in common: the play of desire across vast historical and physical expanses. In all three practices the temporal distance between antiquity and modernity allegorizes the space between absence and presence: Shakespearean meditation on “bare ruined choirs” tarries between fullness and emptiness; the lyric seeks to unite the lover and the beloved; philology tries to bridge the gap between historical distances. It is no accident that the humanist’s

Figure 1. Giambattista Vico, frontispiece, New Science (Naples, 1744). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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relationship to antiquity is often described as one between the lover and his unrequited beloved. Philology— in its etymological sense of “love of words”— underlies the humanism’s passion, whether its object be a text, a beloved, or a ruin.

Three Authors, Three Words As philology served as a rallying cry for humanist erudition from Petrarch to Vico to Auerbach, more recently, along with Hamacher and Pollock, there has been a concurrent philological and rhetorical revival in early modern English studies.46 Most notable is Roland Greene’s Five Words (2013), an attempt at a cultural semantics of early modernity through, in particular, the vexed words “blood,” “invention,” “language,” “resistance,” “world.”47 By way of a lexical methodology, Greene asks not simply what a word denotes in one text, author, or national language but how it functions in a wider network of European intellectual discourse. I too believe that a single word contains within itself a microhistory of ideas, resonating with overtones beyond its literal sense. Auerbach’s magisterial essay “Figura” (1938) is a brilliant demonstration of how careful attention to the capacious career of one word can reveal the Weltanschauung that underlies historical development.48 Barbara Cassin, in her project Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004), reminds us that all words belong to a network, often in languages that become before, besides, and after it.49 To map the trajectory of a word is to map out a history of a concept. At the same time, Cassin uses Deleuze’s idea of deterritorialization to demonstrate that meaning does not reside in any origins or fixed center but is diffused throughout a semantic network. Through its accumulations and juxtapositions from text to text, language to language, century to century, a word gains philosophical complexity and poetic density. As such, I have chosen three words with expansive semantic reach and deep etymological roots: vestigium in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. On the one hand these dense, pregnant words are the metamorphic rocks, the materia prima, of my project. On the other these three words also form “word clouds” in their authors’ oeuvres, verbal constellations of associations that provide different iterations of the materiality of memory. We may use them as heuristics to think about how each writer’s engagements with ruins tap into a larger discourse about ruins, prompting writers to

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think more deeply about the material conditions and metaphysical aspirations of their writing. The conceit of this book, then, is that the career of words mirrors the flux of architectural instability. Through their diachronic shifts words can be considered either linguistic ruins in need of renovation or monuments that are adorned and refurbished from century to century. Starting with the smallest unit of linguistic speech— the word— and expanding to the larger world-picture that it embodies, my book not only revisits some of our most basic ideas about early modern texts and how they came to be but also offers a renewed cultural philology for understanding the fundamental theme of survival in the classical tradition at large. As Erasmus says in De Ratione Studii (1511), “In principle, knowledge as a whole seems to be of two kinds, of things [res] and of words [verba]. Knowledge of words comes earlier, but that of things is the more important.”50 The first two chapters establish this Renaissance opposition of words through poetics and things through ruins. Chapter 1, on verba, “The Rebirth of Poetics,” is a diachronic history that presents a literary trajectory of ruins and monuments from antiquity to the Renaissance. Poetics, in particular the lyric desire for literary immortality, was born from reflections on architecture. Chapter 2, on res, is a synchronic portrait of Renaissance Rome. The recognition of ruins arose with the Renaissance self-invention as a period distinct from its medieval forebears. “The Rebirth of Ruins” explains how the architectural detritus of ancient Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries sparked its urban rebuilding and inspired countless artistic representations. The central chapters examine Petrarch, Du Bellay, and Spenser, with a glance at the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. These authors are not only the most illustrious writers of their vernacular literature who talk about ruins, but they also talk to each other precisely on the subject of ruins. From this perspective Renaissance literary production and the reflections on ruins go hand in hand: Du Bellay in his poems on ruins translated Petrarch, and Spenser in his own poems on ruins translated both Du Bellay and Petrarch. Together they form a larger trajectory of intertextual production in which the figure of the ruin serves as the key topos (or rather, atopos) of cultural transmission. Petrarch was one of the first to mourn the tragedy of antiquity’s disappearance. He did so by conflating cultural and erotic loss in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (or the Rime Sparse, 1374). The prose fantasy Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) exhibits a Petrarchan obsession

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with the ruins of antiquity that verges on delirium. A French translation of the Hypnerotomachia, entitled Songe de Poliphile, appeared in 1546 and deeply influenced La Pléiade’s imagination of Roman ruins. Du Bellay was captivated by Rome’s faded grandeur, and his Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) explored the ruin’s kaleidoscopic complexities and ambiguities in a Petrarchan sonnet sequence. Appended to the end of Les Antiquitez, his apocalyptic Songes unmistakably imitates the visions of destruction in Rime Sparse 323, with perhaps a nod to Songe de Poliphile. Spenser translates Du Bellay as well as Petrarch in his Complaints (published 1596, written much earlier). Following this poetic itinerary, the layers of translations from Latin to Italian to French to English form a literary palimpsest in which one can explore the metaphors of textual erasure and additions. As the architectural ruins of Rome are demolished and transported bit by bit throughout the empire in Europe and beyond, the production and reception of literary works express the desire for monuments that transcend the contingency of the material. This practice thus becomes one of the “building blocks,” so to speak, of the classical tradition. Chapter 3, on Petrarch, argues that his encounter with the past can be conceived of as a search for vestigia— traces, footprints, remnants. Sequi vestigia, “to follow in the footsteps,” can mean both imitation and investigation. Petrarch the lover followed the footsteps of Laura by following in the footsteps of his vernacular predecessor, Dante. He created an ideal, imaginary Rome in the Africa by imitating Virgil and Lucan. But his fragments are not only textual; his impulse to collect the remains of ancient manuscripts exists in a continuum with his attempts at gathering together the existential fragments of his self. Haunted by a world of absence, Petrarch produced perfectly composed fragments. The apotheosis of Renaissance fascination with ruins reaches perhaps its ludic culmination in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The short chapter 4 explores Francesco Colonna’s wild and wonderful novel of pagan mysteries and magical gardens, at the center of which is a very weird protagonist obsessed with architecture. The novel makes us wonder: What does it mean to have sexualized dreams about antiquity in ruins? Chapter 5 shows that, unlike Petrarch, Du Bellay wanted Rome to be in ruins, to lie in cendre (ashes), so that he could plunder its scattered remains and export them to France. Du Bellay frequently uses la poudreuse cendre in Les Antiquitez de Rome to imagine Rome as

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a human body lying in ruins. His poetic ambition is to transport its dislocated fragments to adorn the architecture of his own nation. For his lyric to emerge from the smoldering ashes of antiquity, he willed, dreamed, needed Rome to be in ruins, in order to create his new vernacular monument. In chapter 6 I argue that Spenser’s career, punctuated by the word moniment maps a larger itinerary of his poetic project that engages in a fundamental rethinking of the activities of monument making and its dialectical other, ruination. He deliberately uses moniment (a variant form of monumentum that more audibly evokes their common root, monēre, “to warn”) to think about the limitations of the poetic immortality topos. His poetic monuments are as much about the allegory of ruins as the ruins of allegory. The epilogue, “Fallen Cities and Summer Grass,” departs from the Renaissance and returns to my Japanese friend’s perplexing question: Why ruins, after all? As it turns out, even though there might not be physical ruins in premodern East Asia, there is a long tradition of poems about ruins.

Transnational, Philological In the past generation Thomas M. Greene has been the most eloquent and erudite reader of Renaissance ruins. Primarily concerned with the practice and theory of imitation, The Light in Troy (1982) uses the topos of the ruin to think about how Renaissance writers coped with cultural devastation.51 My book takes a somewhat different approach from his question of imitatio: I argue that the ruins topos dramatizes its own dynamic agency in its production and reception, contrary to Greene’s emphasis on the ruin as a symbol of the indeterminacy of language. His title alludes to a line in Yeats’s “The Gyres,” “Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy,” and exudes Greene’s melancholic vision of the Renaissance: any glow is but a residue of the smoldering ashes of a primary culture. Though Greene was right in identifying the significance of the ruin for the period, he was wrong, I hold, in diagnosing it as a “pathology of failure.” The ruin is much more generative. It inspired an entire generation of poets, painters, architects, antiquarians, and other humanists to reflect on antiquity and produce their own works. Moreover Greene’s Derridean view of language as “drift” is problematic. With my three selected words, I argue that within each word is embedded a compressed history of ideas, a

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rich accumulation of semantics that carry traces of cultural memory. These traces, in my view, are sufficient to outweigh the “drift” of semantic instability. Some of the richest recent contributions to Renaissance studies have been a reexamination of material culture and aesthetics in the period’s formation. The works of Leonard Barkan, Christopher S. Wood and Alexander Nagel, and Jonathan Gil Harris all reveal the profound multifolded historicity of cultural artifacts in early modernity.52 This book intervenes in these critical conversations by arguing that our concepts of “poetics,” “ruins,” “Renaissance” all emerge from and are interwined in the same aesthetic phenomenon. Ruins inspire poets to create works that aspire to be monuments but often end up as ruins themselves; this anxiety gives rise to a poetics that is deeply self- conscious of its own historicity, endurance, and artistic survival. The idea of “rebirth” in the period that we have defined as the Renaissance cannot be understood without recognizing that it is also the rebirth of “ancient monuments” as “early modern ruins.” Hence the ruin is “anachronic” and “untimely” matter par excellence. The phenomenon of ruins in Renaissance literature has not been ignored by other scholars either. Margaret M. McGowan and Eric MacPhail explore how Rome as idea and place gripped the aesthetic imagination of sixteenth- century France, while Margaret Ferguson and Hassan Melehy tease out the dynamics of cultural exchange between Italy, France, and England. 53 Philip Schwyzer and Rebeca Helfer argue that the discourse of archaeologies and memory were formative to early modern English literary production. 54 Still, a more ample comparative and philological study is necessary because, as Ferguson and Melehy rightly recognize, ruins and texts are in fact not rooted to their native geography or language. In the Renaissance, material and literary fragments are endlessly mobile, traveling as spolia across national boundaries, as raw material and conceptual models. Situating the poetic discourse of ruins within diachronic literary history and the synchronic rediscovery of Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth century requires that we take a transnational and philological perspective, one that excludes neither historical change nor poetic recurrence. Poetic discourse on ruins takes place within the complex literary network of Petrarchan imitation and anti-imitation. The study of this ubiquitous phenomenon has produced some of the most fruitful scholarly inquiries on the lyric genre. 55 Yet almost all criticism focuses

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exclusively on questions of subjectivity, nationhood, gender, or style, while very little is said about Petrarchan lyric’s engagement with materiality. This book demonstrates that erotic poetry is in constant dialogue with the poetry of ruins. Contemplating ruins and yearning for the beloved both play with desire for the whole through its parts (fragments, the anatomy of blazon) and are often about the wish for something impossible and idealized (the resurrection of Rome and the dead Laura, the eternity of verse). Corpus, after all, means “a text” and “a body.” Textual recovery, existential reflection, and love poetry are all about searching for what has been lost. In vernacular Petrarch lyric, the strands of erotic voice, fragments of antiquity, and fascination with architectural decay are all entangled. N AC HL EBE N

Cultural phenomena are always aleatory, susceptible to rupture, regression, extinction. Aby Warburg (1866–1929) used the term das Nachleben der Antike, “the afterlife of antiquity,” to describe how ancient images persist and haunt artistic production across vast chronology and geography, even though some cultural periods do their best to exorcise this spectral lingering. 56 Though ruins were never extensively discussed in his work, they would be the prime exemplars of the Nachleben that give form to what he called the “engrams” or “memory traces” retained in the cultural archive of the present. We may put it in even stronger terms: the ruin is always already a Nachleben; it never had a prior Leben since, as I later argue, there is never a perfect building, for it is always in the flux of becoming and unbecoming. Walter Benjamin, a thinker much attuned to Warburg’s sensibilities, states in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925) that the ruin is the perfect emblem to capture the late Renaissance baroque aesthetic, for its practice is “to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification.” For Benjamin this practice, in which the Renaissance artist plunders the fragments of antiquity, is nothing other than allegory. But since allegory is put under so much pressure to subsume everything in its all-embracing domain, it collapses, like a ruin. Thus “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”57 In the Spenser chapter we shall interrogate these enigmatic claims.

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For Georges Didi-Huberman, an astute reader of the Warburg school, “a surviving image is an image that, having lost its original use value and meaning, nonetheless comes back, like a ghost, at a particular historical moment: a moment of ‘crisis,’ a moment when it demonstrates its latency, its tenacity, its vivacity, and its ‘anthropological adhesion.’”58 The ruin is precisely this surviving image for it manifests in the dynamic energies of Renaissance thought. Yet if the ruin embodies continuing identity in the midst of material change, we must emphasize that the ruin not only instantiates Didi-Huberman’s metaphor of a ghost; it is also equally a corpse. As a dismembered body that has lost its vital spirit, the ruin has long lost its use-value, yet it assumes a new monument-function as a sign of its former glory, stubbornly fixed to its geographical habitus; all the while its specter is ubiquitous, haunting the cultural imagination far and wide. RU ī N A

The question remains: What is a ruin? As I mentioned, etymologically the Latin ruīna is derived from the verb ruere, falling, collapsing, tumbling, rushing headlong or downward, or in the substantive, the aftermath or residual of such activity. A ruin can be a person, a building, a city, a civilization, the earth, or the cosmos itself. How do ruins come to be? The causes of architectural ruin are many: time, weather, the elements, divine intervention, human destruction or neglect. A ruin can emerge from a single catastrophe, from a fire or a deluge, or it can come about gradually, by the creep of vegetation that smothers polished stones. “For what are ruins if not the partial, still incomplete dissolution of the solidity of form?” asks Robert Pogue Harrison in Dominion of the Dead, a beautiful meditation on the ways we remember and bury.59 Indeed the ruin always stages a dialectical encounter between art and nature. From his study of the movement of water, Leonardo imagined nature herself to be both the agent and the object of destruction. In his notebooks he recorded scenarios of deluge from a mountain valley: “Descending in devastation from these precipices let it pursue its headlong course striking and laying bare the twisted and gnarled roots of the great trees overturning them in ruins; and let the mountains as they become bare reveal the deep fissures made in them by ancient earthquakes.”60 For Leonardo the process of ruination is a manifestation of the infinite complexity of nature and a symptom of her internal dynamics.

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Or the ruin can be wrought by divine punishment. Ruination runs like a red thread through the Old Testament: from the expulsion from the garden to the worldwide flood, the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt, or the prophetic lamentations over the fall of Jerusalem. Writing after the destruction of the Holy City, the prophet Isaiah foretold, “The earth shall be utterly laid waste and utterly despoiled; for the Lord has spoken this word. The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. . . . The city of chaos is broken down, every house is shut up so that no one can enter” (24:3–4, 10, New Revised Standard Version). The biblical ruin is a curse for transgressing the laws of God; such cataclysm is necessary for the cleansing of iniquities. “To ruin” is active and passive, transitive and intransitive; remnants can be pondered, reflected on, meditated upon, or removed, recycled, and further destroyed. A ruin is an ontological paradox: as the degeneration of material and form, its perfection is its very nonexistence. The ruin exists to remind one of what has endured, what has been lost, but most importantly, what is yet to be. Floating at the edge of nonbeing, the fallen monument embodies an intriguing set of binaries: transient and persistent, a source of alienation and recognition, upright and fallen, scarce and abundant, visible and invisible, matter and metaphor. In short, a thing that is and is not.

Pa r t I

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chapter 1

The Rebirth of Poetics We fix our gaze on the remains of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace, and we plunge into meditation. We anticipate the ravages of time, and our imagination scatters over the very buildings in which we live. All at once, solitude and silence reign around us. We alone remain, of an entire nation that no longer exists; and this is first line of the poetics of ruins. — Denis Diderot

According to the Bible, the languages we speak today were born from the first great ruin, the Tower of Babel. The monumental edifice did not last long. In fact it is both an incomplete artifact and a ruin, disturbing the linear temporality of construction and destruction. Left standing in the plains of Shinar, the unfinished structure caused global havoc in the world of humans: Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered [dividamur] abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered [divisit] them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered [dispersit] them abroad over the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1–11, New Revised Standard Version)1

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Human beings’ greatest potential, the narrator implies, lay not so much in their engineering skills as in their innate ability to communicate: the same tongue that defied the Lord by eating the fruit now defied him again by attempting to raise a skyscraper to the heavens. Their ambition was for immortality. This wish was fulfilled, but not as the builders had hoped. Their dream: “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Yet their name was unmade by God and now lives on only ironically because of their folly: “Therefore it was called Babel.” The Lord could have simply and only reduced their bricks and mortar to rubble, but he did something much more drastic: he confounded their very instrument of thought. The Babel builders’ greatest fear, to be “scattered,” dividamur, came true: “The Lord scattered [divisit] them abroad from there over the face of the earth: and they left off building the city.” Loss of a common language was the result of a divinely sanctioned fragmentation. The story of Babel spells out in elemental terms a primal poetics of ruins: all people yearn to create something that will outlast themselves, yet this attempt is thwarted by the divine. Architecture is a collective attempt at survival; without a common tongue, human communication, much less construction, is impossible. In short, the Bible in the very beginning articulates a close relationship between language, building, and mortality. The questions posed are farreaching: What can we do to heal the wounds of Babel? How do we talk to one another after the rupture of universal language? How do we remember after the confusion of tongues? In the biblical tradition, the loss of memory was born from ruins. In the classical tradition, however, the art of memory was born from ruins. Though classical antiquity of course did not know the text of Genesis, I want to propose that Simonides’s invention of ars memoriae offers one solution to the trauma of linguistic dispersal. This etiology exists in several versions, but its most complete survives in Cicero’s De oratore. 2 This anecdote too deserves to be told in full. One of the characters in the dialogue, Antonius, recounts: I am grateful [gratiam habeo] to the famous Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have first invented the art of memory [artem memoriae]. There is a story that [dicunt] Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets [poetarum more] by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he

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would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndareus, as they had gotten halves in the panegyric. The story runs [ferunt] that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins [ruina] and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but they were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that [dictur] Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement [hac tum re admonitus invenisse fertur ordinem esse maxime qui memoriae lumen afferret]. (2.86.351–53)3

Here, as in the myth of Babel, destruction is caused by divine intervention. Humans are left to cope with its aftermath. Notice how Antonius foregrounds his story—“I am grateful” (gratiam habeo; charis in Greek, “grace” in English). Simonides was given a gift, the gift of angelic messengers in the form of two young men. He passes on this gift to others in two ways: locally to the kin of the deceased and more generally to the future, by discovering the truth of memory. The poet ultimately provides not only verbal flourishes for dinner entertainment but something more basic: he is now the coroner who identifies his erstwhile host. The original function of poetry was praise. Its postlapsarian work is to remember the site of catastrophe and disseminate the memory of the lives lost there. Through the powers of the verbal arts, the poet makes present what has vanished. We indeed should be grateful. Simonides was known in antiquity as a businessman; his poetry is conducted as a commercial transaction, what Leslie Kurke calls the “traffic in praise.”4 The reciprocal relationship between the patron and his client is clear: Scopas sustains Simonides’s earthly existence, and in turn the poet sustains the memory of Scopas. The birth of ars memoriae destabilizes the normal system of economic exchanges, for gratia is that which is beyond business. In his narrative Antonius stresses the fact that he is only the transmitter (dicunt, ferunt, dictur). Quintilian’s version in Institutio oratoria records the uncertainty to whom Simonides’s poem was dedicated. Many things are in dispute, including whether the poem was written in honor of “Glaucus of

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Carystus, Leocrates, Agatharcus or Scopas, and whether the house was at Pharsalus (as Simonides himself seems to indicate in one passage, and as Apollodorus, Eratosthenes, Euphorion, and Eurypylus of Larissa all say), or at Crannon, as according to Apollas and Callimachus, whom Cicero followed when he popularized the story” (11.2.14–15).5 There is something ironic about the fact that the art of memory itself has a disputed provenance— nobody really knows. Even the identity of the patron of its inventor is subject to loss. Cicero’s Antonius draws a purely utilitarian lesson: we assign specific places to people and images, and thereby they become easier to recall. Hence a well- constructed memory palace requires the orderly arrangement of parts. But modern readers from Frances Yates onward have taken the story to be something grander: not only a mnemonic technique but a system of organizing universal knowledge.6 As the classical tradition took shape, the art of memory became a philosophy of cultural transmission: if physical monuments are prone to collapse, the poet’s more durable words might offer a better vehicle of memory. Stories must be repeated over time, as Cicero, Quintilian, and the narrator of Genesis insist. All the better, according to Renaissance writers, that each iteration gains new permutations. If the confounding of tongues marks the mythic inception of the diversity of languages, now literary production must flourish in this multiplicity, in manifold tongues. By doing so poetry does not so much heal as celebrate the wound of Babelic fragmentation. And if, as Anne Carson has claimed, Simonides is the first literary critic in Western culture because he is the first to practice and theorize about the nature of poetry, I propose that the site of the ruin is the birthplace of poetics.7

Rebirth The Renaissance poetics of ruins is a descendent of the Babelic and Simonidean etiologies. Haunted by the antique ruins that surrounded them, Renaissance poets thought intensely about the survival of the classical past as well as their own work. And haunted by the biblical confusion of tongues, they also thought intensely about the proliferation of languages. One way to transcend the contingencies of the word and the world, the Renaissance poet learned from ancient verse, was to create a myth of literary immortality. “I have created a monument more lasting than bronze,” Exegi monumentum aere perennius,

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Horace claims and his successors repeat. By this boast authors ancient and modern claimed that their work would be more durable than that of architects, sculptors, or painters. Yet, after all, the immortality topos is a metaphor impossible to realize. And it is precisely in the Renaissance, when ruins were recognized as ruins and ancient manuscripts were being rediscovered every day, that humanists became aware of how much of the past was lost and how difficult it was to recover. This consciousness of the contingency of culture marks the poetics of ruins as a distinctly Renaissance phenomenon. This chapter traces the genealogy of the poetic immortality topos from antiquity to the sixteenth century. I argue that the yearning for timelessness that underlies the Renaissance poetics of ruins is realized through the strategy of a temporal multiplicity, a process that transmutes the past and is in turn open to its own transformation, from author to author, reader to reader. In other words, Renaissance poetry, implicitly or explicitly, hopes to transcend its temporal and spatial horizons (aspiring to be a monument) yet survives in the immanent world by being recycled, cited, and transformed by successors (living as a ruin). This tension drives much of the discourse surrounding ruins. Architectural destruction always compels poets to create works that rise above the sublunary world, while at the same time it inevitably leads them back into the mundane thickets of exchange and mediation.

The Lapse of Time The hope that poetry would offer imperishable fame—kleos aphthiton in Homeric Greek and śrávas . . . ákṣitam in the Rig-Vedas—is a common formula found in Indo-European poetry.8 So too is the analogy between the verbal arts and physical artifacts, a phenomenon Jesper Svenbro aptly calls la parole et le marbre.9 In the Iliad tombs and other constructions such as the Achaean wall correspond to the text itself, insofar as both are objects meant to preserve the memory of Troy.10 In Homeric Greek sêma means “thought,” “sign,” “memory,” “tomb,” “monument,” and “grave.”11 Thus sêma is the word used for the scar of Odysseus, the tomb of Hector, and the Achaean wall. Eustathius, a twelfth- century Byzantine archbishop and scholiast, writes, “Thanks to the poet’s eloquence, the Achaean wall in some way is, having emerged out of nothing, while the real Troy, which formerly was, in the course of time came to naught, having vanished.”12

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Greek lyric frequently compared itself to the material crafts. In his poem commemorating the dead at Thermopylae, Simonides sings: Theirs is a glorious fortune and a noble lot: For grave [taphos] they have an altar [bumos], for mourning [goōn] remembrance [mnastis], For pity [oiktos] praise [epainos]. Such a burial decay [entaphion] shall not darken, Nor time the all- conqueror destroy. This tomb of good men has chosen The glory of Greece as its inhabitant.13

According to Herodotus, no Spartan corpses were found in the aftermath of the battle of Thermopylae (7.228). Simonides’s rhetorical juxtapositions of “grave/altar,” “mourning/remembrance,” “pity/ praise” thus participate in what Carson calls “the economy of the unlost,” for the function of the poet’s memory is to recover that which has vanished. He will provide all the life-affirming parts of these antitheses. Through Simonides’s “clean machinery of appositions, vanishing points and conceptual shocks,” in Carson’s words, he renders the “visible and invisible together in the mind’s eye.”14 The physical tombs that house the dead will disappear soon enough, whereas the poet’s lyric epitaph offers a living altar because it is sung by an animating voice. Pindar in Pythian 6 reiterates the primacy of the verbal monument: A treasure [thesauros] house of hymns, has been built in Apollo’s valley rich in gold, one which neither winter rain, coming from abroad as a relentless army from a loudly rumbling cloud, nor wind shall buffet and with their deluge of silt carry into the depths of the sea. (7–14)15

In the literal sense a thesauros is a treasure house dedicated to an Olympian victor. Its construction signaled the immense wealth of its sponsor; usually only individuals like the Sikyonian tyrant Myron could afford the expense of such a lavish structure to commemorate a winner.16 The evocation of such physical monument signals Pindar’s awareness that his craft is competing with different forms of commemoration: statues, inscriptions, garlands, or other trophies. James I. Porter calls Pindar’s words a “sound sculpture” in which poiesis, with its root meaning of “making,” is imagined as a literal construction out of earthly materials. In Porter’s formulation, this is an

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expression of the “sublimity of matter itself, which we may define as an aesthetic value that results from experiencing the very paradoxes of matter—its reliance on sensation, its resisting character, its firm yet uncertain place in the order of things, and its ineluctable relation to the human world.”17 The poet’s verses are dearer to the gods and more valuable to humans because, whereas the natural elements will deface monuments of stone and bronze and flowers, Pindar’s immaterial works are designed to be sung and will therefore be renewed at every iteration. In Nemean 5, Pindar asserts: I am not a sculptor, so as to fashion stationary Statues that stand on their same base. Rather, on board every ship And in every boat, sweet song, Go forth from Aigine and spread the news that Lampon’s mighty son Pytheas Has won the crown for the pancratium in Nemea’s games. (1– 7)18

Whereas a statue is fixed and mute, Pindar emphasizes that the virtues of his artifice are its mobility and multiplicity. A statue can be admired only by locals and travelers; it cannot escape from what archaeologists call “the matrix,” the material grounds on which an object is embedded and supported.19 And though a statue may represent an athlete’s beautiful body, it cannot reproduce his raison d’être: swift movement. Pindar’s lyric, however, runs along liquid and aural paths (“in every boat, sweet song”), broadcasting his patron’s fame everywhere. In the hymn’s utterances— spreading from ship to ship, city to city, wind to wind— it assumes a sort of permanence through repetition. But how exactly does poetry exist in time yet aspire to transcend it? Time, for Aristotle, is the measure of all motion and change, which are the necessary conditions of poetry. In the Physics the philosopher writes: We are wont to say that time crumbles things, and that everything grows old under the power of time and is forgotten through the lapse of time. But we do not say that we have learnt, or that anything is made new or beautiful, by the mere lapse of time; for we regard time in itself as destroying rather than producing. (221b1– 3)20

Those things that come to be and pass away belong to the world of nature (phusis). Time is always receding, each moment negating the one before, such that the present can come into being only by ceasing

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to be. For Aristotle, all living things want to counteract the corrosive forces of time. They do this by their power of reproduction, driven by a primal need. The urge to have offspring is related to the desire for permanence and, by extension, immortality: For the most natural function of living things . . . is to produce another thing like itself . . . in order that they may partake of the eternal and the divine as far as they can; for all living things desire [the eternal and divine], and it is for the sake of this that those which act according to nature do so. (415b)21

Those things that are incorruptible belong to the world of the gods, or eternity (aiôn). The closest mutable things can come to this blessed state ironically entails more change— in the replication of themselves. In drawing the connection between procreation and participation in the divine, the author of On the Soul is referring to the passage in Plato’s Symposium in which Diotima argues that the only way for mortal beings to preserve life is through reproduction and birth in beauty. 22 Ancient philosophy’s concept of immortality through biological reproduction is important for us, since Renaissance poets (Spenser and Shakespeare in particular) enlisted this as a metaphor to argue that their works allowed them to “partake of the eternal and divine.” Their hope of poetic immortality is achieved through a sort of cultural reproduction within the literary communities of readers and authors. If time destroys, man’s task is to re- create, through progeny and poetry. Our desire to construct monuments, Lucretius claims, stems from our fear of death. Near the beginning of the Latin epic tradition his De rerum natura vividly describes the impermanence of the cosmos: Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi Expugnata dabunt labem putrisque ruinas. (2.1144–45) So therefore the walls of the mighty world in like manner shall be stormed all around, and shall collapse into crumbling ruin. Una dies dabit exitio multosque per annos Sustentata ruet moles et machina mundi. (5.96– 97) One day will consign it to an end, and the huge structure Of the universe upheld through many years, will rush to ruin. Denique non lapides quoque vinci cernis ab aevo, Non altas turris ruere et putrescere saxa, Non delubra deum simulacraque fessa fatisci. (5.306– 8)

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Again, do we not see that even stones are conquered by time, that tall turrets fall and rocks crumble, that the gods’ temples and their images wear out and crack? 23

Although Lucretius flirts with the idea of literary immortality, he knows that death is inevitable and that all things— texts, people, the universe itself—will dissolve into formless atoms. 24 Ovid playfully suggests that “the songs of lofty Lucretius will perish only when one day consigns the world to its end,” carmina sublimis tunc peritura Lucreti / exitio terras cum dabit una dies (Am. 1.15.23–24). Thus the “great deeds of men,” remembered in “eternal monuments of fame” (facta virum . . . aeternis monumentis famae; Lucr. 5.328) are meaningless from the vantage point of cosmic time. 25 Against this universal entropy one of the most famous Latin iterations of the poetic immortality topos is of course Horace’s Ode 3.30. 26 As the poem that closes his first three books, this ode acts as his poetic tombstone, his self-inscribed epitaph. The poet believes that the enduring value of his work will ensure his own afterlife: Exegi monumentum aere perennius, regalique situ pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens possit diruere aut innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum. Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam. Usque ego postera crescam laude recens. Dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex. Dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnavit populorum ex humili potens, princeps Aoelium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos. Sume superbiam quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam. I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze, more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids, one which neither corroding rain nor the ungovernable North Wind can ever destroy, nor the countless series of the years, nor the flight of time. I shall not wholly die, and a large part of me will elude the Goddess of Death. I shall continue to grow, fresh with the praise of posterity, as long as the priest climbs the Capitol with the silent virgin. I shall be spoken of where the violent Aufidus thunders and where Daunus, short of water, ruled over a country people, as one who, rising from a

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Part I lowly state to a position of power, was the first to bring Aeolian verse to the tunes of Italy. Take pride, Melpomene, that you have so well earned, and if you would be so kind, surround my hair with Delphic bay.

Horace follows archaic lyric in comparing his monument to bronze, the material Romans usually used for statues, tombs, and promulgations such as the laws of res gestae. Monumentum in Latin letters can mean a physical object such as a tomb or a written record. Already in Annales Ennius writes, “Kings seek through rule statues and tombs, they build a name, they strive with all the strength of their resources. . . . Finally the long of age shall have finished them,” Reges per regnum statuas sepulcraque quaerunt / Aedificant nomen, summa nituntur opum vi. . . . Postremo longinqua dies confecerit aetas (16, frr. 411–13). Horace’s innovation is to contrast his written monument to the material remains of the pharaohs. 27 This comparison of written verses to pyramids, scholars note, has no precedent in Latin literature. 28 One reason Horace refers to pyramids could be that ancient writers from Herodotus onward marvel at their scale and craftsmanship. Like Pindar’s thesauros, the immaterial artifice of the poet is immune to the onslaught of time. One ambiguous word, situ, might help us understand this paragone. Commentators note that the noun situs can mean either “site” or “decay.” Horace might have meant situs as “site” to evoke the common sepulchral inscriptions of hic situs est. Alternatively he could have been using the word in a proleptic sense, “higher than the pyramids which themselves must soon decay.”29 I favor the second reading, which sets up a more nuanced juxtaposition between his words, which are immaterial and cannot be touched by the elements, and stone, which the corroding rain and the ungovernable North Wind gradually wear away. Horace claims that his poetry will have a measure of life-preserving power: “I shall not wholly die, and a large part of me will elude the Goddess of Death.” This claim must be qualified, however: Horace acknowledges, first, that his survival is partial (multaque pars mei), and second, that his survival depends on the survival of Rome herself. The construction holds only “as long as” (dum) the priest climbs the Capitol with the silent virgin, the winds blow, and rivers flow in Italy. Interestingly Virgil in the Aeneid also uses the clause si / dum, “if” and “so long as,” to underscore the connection between the preservation of an empire and the continuity of language. On commemorating the deaths of Nisus and Euryalus, the poet boasts:

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si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo, dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit. (9.447–50) If my poetry has any power, no day shall ever blot you from the memory of time, so long as the house of Aeneas dwells on the Capitol’s unshaken rock, and the Father of Rome holds sovereign sway!

Given that, at the time of writing, the horrors of the civil war were still fresh in Roman collective memory, this passage seems to contain an element of wishful thinking; the perpetuity of Rome was not at all a certain thing. Though most of their literary production is invested in securing an enduring Roman identity, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid are all acutely aware of the contingencies of this project; the specter of Troy looms large in their cultural memory.30 The authors of the passages cited above are silent about textual instability. Indeed there are few examples of such statements that are explicit about their medium’s fragile conditions. Martial repeats the sentiments of his Roman predecessors about the enduring nature of verbal monuments yet acknowledges the stuff on which his words are written: Marmora Massallae findit caprificus et audax Dimidios Crispi mulio ridet equos: at chartis nec furta nocent et saecula prosunt, Solaque non norunt haec monumenta mori. (10.2.4–12) The fig-tree splits the marbles of Messalla, the bold muleteer laughs at Crispus’s halved horses, but thefts do not harm papyrus and the centuries benefit it. These are the only monuments that do not know how to die.

Whereas Martial is certain of the durability of his written materials, Catullus is not so sure: Haec charta loquatur anus, [versibus et nostris etiam post funera vivat] notescatque magis mortuus atque magis, Nec tenuem texens sublimis aranea telam In deserto Alli nomine opus faciat. (68.49–50) Let the papyrus speak this in its old age, [so that he may continue to live on in my verses even after his death]. . . . Let not the spider who weaves her thin web aloft spread her work over the neglected name of Allius.

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Ironically the lines in brackets, which speak precisely about textual survival, have been lost; the Latin here is only a conjecture by scholars. Though Ovid’s later tempus edax rerum, “time, devourer of all things” (from the verb edere, “to eat”; Met. 15.234), would become proverbial, Catullus already imagines the damage wrought to his papyrus by the radiating threads of the spider. However, the verbs loquatur and nec faciat are, importantly, in the subjunctive, a projection toward the future. My point is that Roman authors did not have the same melancholy experience of finding mutilated manuscripts and anxieties about their future that Renaissance authors would. Moreover one must remember that these vaunts of poetic immortality coexisted with the disturbing Roman practice of damnatio memoriae. 31 As the severest punishment of a citizen, this sanctioned erasure purged his or her name from all civic records: statues would be removed, names chiseled out of public inscriptions, the corpse unmourned. According to Harriet I. Flower in her important study The Art of Forgetting, the fall of Gaius Gracchus in 121 bce was a turning point in this practice: the Senate was driven to reach for unprecedented powers, which included legislating what could and could not be remembered.32 Before, Flower argues, the leading aristocratic families served as guardians of memory, imposing sanctions privately on their members. In the shadows of these memory sanctions, the poets’ dream of eternal fame is but a wishful response to the dangerous realities of political oblivion. The connections between politics, poets, and patrons in the Augustan period are thus inextricable and vexed.33 So is the process of cultural transmission: earlier in his ode Horace claims that he was the first to bring Aeolian verse—the dialect of Sappho and Alcaeus in Lesbos— to the Italian shore. Ovid and Virgil too based their writings on Hellenic models. Roman cultural construction through linguistic appropriation at this historical period is particularly significant since, as Horace quips, “Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium,” Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio (Epist. 2.1.156). The beginnings of Latin literature, Denis Feeney observes, were anything but inevitable.34 The cultural enterprise that eventually produced masterworks like the Aeneid and Metamorphoses happened not by any native genius but, as Horace suggests, by adaptations of Greek forms and myths into Latin. But how, then, did Roman authors think about their own future? At the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses the poet hyperbolically proclaims,

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“Wherever Rome’s power extends over the conquered world, I shall have mention on men’s lips, and, if the prophecies of bards have any truth, through all the ages shall I live in fame,” Quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, / Ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / Siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam (15.871– 79). The way to immortality is accomplished here through his theory of metamorphosis. In the prologue Ovid announces that “the spirit drives me to speak of forms changed into new bodies,” In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora (1.1–2). At the end of his work he himself has changed into a different corpus and assumed a textual forma. He becomes a mutable monument: in his poem the experience of metamorphosis is antithetical to the fixity of monuments, and it is precisely this sense of endless mutability that ensures the survival of the poem itself. Like the mutable bodies of gods and humans, his stories are never stable but are always open to fluid transformation into and beyond other texts. Could Ovid and his Roman colleagues have imagined the possibility that their works might find new life beyond the confines of the Latin tongue?

Homeric Syllables In order to answer this question, let us leap forward to the Renaissance. The superiority of poetry against the other forms of commemoration was intensely debated within early modern humanist circles. Rome’s chancellor in the first decade of the fifteenth century, Francesco da Fiano, led one such coterie. He gathered the leading enthusiasts of antiquity for fervent conversations on the wisdom of the ancients.35 In Against the Ridiculous Obstructers and Angry Critics of the Poets (Contra Oblocutores et Detractores Poetarum, 1404), Francesco cites the authority of Horace to argue for the superiority of poetry over sculptures and other monuments: There can be no possibility of eternal memory in [statues of triumphal arches] because the ages carry everything off and ravenous time endeavors to consume all things; they tumble in on themselves and collapse with age and lethargy, perishing in the rust of human forgetfulness. On the other hand, illustrious deeds can be glorified through the divine songs of poetry by merit of its eternal fame. . . . Horace was not eager to build himself a marble tomb made elaborate and sumptuous by human artifice, which ravenous decay in no time would so easily efface from the fragile and fallen memory of the living. For he was happy to be buried within the sacred, eternal vigil of

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Part I his own verses, and his fame will surely live among them and through them for all time, as he wrote in the third book of his lyric poems: exegi monumentum aere perennius. 36

He goes on to rehearse some well-known arguments: poets have memory that is more than material; words summon into presence things that are not there; poets have allegory at their disposal; they have the faculty of the imagination; they are not beholden to the limitations of reality. These are, certainly, Trecento defenses of poetry that Mussato, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, and others had already formulated a generation before.37 And they would be repeated for generations afterward.38 But what is unique is that the humanists in Francesco’s circle directly engaged with the fragments and ruins of Rome, undertaking archaeological walks and holding poetic competitions amid these evocative surroundings.39 It was precisely during the great Quattrocento project of archaeological and manuscript recovery that early humanists became aware that the material containers of poetry were not so durable. Scores of verbal tomes, “elaborate and sumptuous,” did not survive longer than marble or bronze. Ravenous time certainly did take its toll on ancient letters; even though some works of Propertius and Plautus have survived, those of, say, Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Pacuvius have not.40 As his “Letters to Dead Authors” so hauntingly attest, Petrarch was fully aware of the contingencies of transmission. He closes most of these epistles with this formula: Petrarch, “from the land of the living,” apud superos, addresses the ancients “in the underworld,” apud inferos (Fam. 24).41 The rhyming antithesis of superos and infernos explicitly underscores the chasm that divides him from his beloved authors. The letter to Cicero ends with a typical jab: “in the year 1345 from the birth of that Lord whom you never know” (Fam. 24.3, my emphasis). Petrarch thus constructs the distinction of antiquity and modernity as one of theological, metaphysical, and existential alterity. On 7 December 1350 he wrote to Quintilian just after receiving a manuscript of the Institutes from a young scholar named Lapo di Castiglionchio. Holding the “lacerated” text fills Petrarch with pathos: I became acquainted with your intellect when your work De institutione oratoria came into my hands, but alas, mangled and mutilated. [Discerptus et lacer venit ad manus meas.] Seeing I saw the dismembered limbs of a beautiful body [vidi formosi corporis artus effusos],

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my mind was overcome by admiration and grief; perhaps someone now possesses you in your entirety who is doubtlessly unaware of his guest’s renown. Admiration mingled with grief seized me. . . . I hope to see you in your entirety, and if you are anywhere in such condition, I beg you not to hide from me any longer. (Fam. 24.7)42

Petrarch conflates the senses of corpus as a text and a human body. As A. Bartlett Giamatti notes, discerptus (mutilated) and lacer (mangled or lacerated) have deep poetic resonance. Discerptus is the word Virgil uses in the Georgics 4.522 to describe the mutilated Orpheus; lacer occurs in Aeneid 6.495 to describe how Deiphobus appeared to Aeneas in the underworld, and it is used again in Aen. 9.491 to describe Euryalus, who fell as a purple flower cut by the plow. Moreover in a passage “buried so deep that Petrarch does not seem to know it, though others would almost instinctively bring it to the surface,” Giamatti cites Aen. 7.765– 73, describing the death of Hippolytus, his resurrection at the hands of Aesculapius, and finally his new life in Latium. Giamatti concludes: We have a version of what I have been calling the romance of early humanism— the sense that return or rebirth or restoration of origin and original form is possible, a hope that not only sustained but necessitated Petrarch’s sense of exile. I suggest that in the mutilated body of Hippolytus, mangled like those other Virgilian heroes but older than all save Orpheus, Petrarch might see a figure for the shapes of all those ancients, now known only in fragmentary texts, in mangled corpora, whom he desired to see whole, and be with— if not one of.43

The philologist then is supposed to stitch back together the mutilated parts of the ancient texts, just as Aesculapius healed and resurrected Hippolytus. As I showed in the introduction, this hope pervades the philological tradition from Boccaccio to Vico, from Boeckh to Hamacher. Likewise Poggio Bracciolini would cite the very same lines from the Aeneid: Up till now, Quintilian in Italy was so lacerated [laceratus] and cut about, the fault of the times, I suppose, that one could not recognize the shape or bearing of a human being in him. You yourself have so far seen the man: “his face cruelly riven, his face and both his hands and his ravaged temples, his ears ripped away and his nostrils grotesquely cut.”44

The recipient of this letter, the learned Guarino Veronese, would have instantly recognized that the haunting dactylic hexameter inserted

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within the author’s elegant prose comes from the death of Deiphobus in Book 6 (lines 495– 97). In antiquity, according to Carlotta Dionisotti, a text might be decurtatus et laceratus corrosusque but not lacer, mancus, mutilus, truncus, adjectives used exclusively for human limbs.45 For Petrarch and the humanist generations that followed him, the body of the text and the human body become conflated; the task of philology is to heal the wounds of history by means of textual surgery— to resuscitate the broken body of ancient Latinity through its dismembered scripts. More than two centuries later, in Reformation England, texts were in the process of further disintegration, as we will see in the chapter on Spenser. Dozens of libraries were dispersed and sold as part of Henry VIII’s appropriation of church property.46 In some ways the Protestants’ suppression of texts was even more brutal than what happened in the Middle Ages, for the former was a deliberate destruction rather than just monkish neglect. Later, men like John Leland, Matthew Parker, and Robert Cotton would undertake the laborious task of cataloguing all that was lost and all that remained. In the formation of libraries in England of the sixteenth century, the activities of scholars and collectors remade the medieval past by transforming the archives. In the light of such social flux, Francis Bacon still claims in the Advancement of Learning (1605) that Homer’s epics have been preserved in their entirety: Let vs conclude with the dignitie, and excellency of knowledge and learning, in that whereunto mans nature doth most aspire; which is immortalitie or continuance; for to this tendeth generation, and raysing of houses and families; to this tend buildings, foundations, and monuments, to this tendeth the desire of memorie, fame, and celebration; and in effect, the strength of all other humane desires; wee see then howe farre the monuments of wit and learning, are more durable, than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For haue not the verses of Homer continued 25. hundred yeares, or more, without the losse of a sillable, or letter: during which time, infinite Pallaces, Temples, Castles, Cities haue been decayed, and demolished?47

This declaration seems surprising from the author who wrote elsewhere that the surviving works of the ancients are nothing more than the flotsam and jetsam of the disused past: “It was only in still later times, with the flooding of the barbarians into the Roman Empire and the virtual shipwreck of human learning, that the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato, like light and insubstantial flotsam, survived

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the waves of time” (1.77).48 This contrast tidily illustrates the Renaissance ambivalence of poetic immortality. Taken literally the claim that no letter or syllable of Homer has been lost is, of course, patently false. But as Gerard Passannante has argued, what is conserved in the archaic epics is not so much the letters of the alphabet as the ideas that are carried in them.49 In other words, letters can be transmitted and transmuted faithfully beyond the contingencies of any particular embodiment in papyri, parchment, or paper, something that pyramids, palaces, and statues cannot do. Knowledge can be “atomized” in the Lucretian sense, broken down into its smallest units and endlessly recombined to form new meanings. Bacon’s view of “wit and learning” is famously, and fundamentally, logocentric: texts as carriers of memory can tell us more about the past than buildings or other silent artifacts. Fame is not achieved with extravagant displays of political power but with the progress of knowledge and science, here represented by Homer.

Accents Unknown So far we have seen how the fear of death compels poets to make a work more lasting than life. Yet the creations of mortals are mortal, whether they be of bronze or words. A solution is to make something that is open to further transformations. Renaissance writers picked up on the point of survival beyond one’s native grounds. Now I return to my earlier question: Could Ovid and his Roman colleagues have imagined the possibility that their works might find new life beyond the confines of the Latin tongue? In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), after assassinating Caesar, Cassius says to his conspirators, “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” (3.1.112–14). That last phrase—“states unborn and accents yet unknown”—is crucial to my argument, for it suggests Shakespeare’s recognition that his work will survive in political bodies and language that have not existed and do not yet exist. Such is the power of his imagination that he is able to conjure the futurity of his creations beyond his own language and nation. This Shakespearean declaration makes explicitly programmatic what was only latent in ancient literature: the possibility that one’s work would survive beyond one’s cultural horizons, even one’s own tongue. In an absolute moment of dramatic tension, one of the chief actors draws attention to their theatrical mise- en-abyme: the

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historical event that happened in ancient Rome, the Shakespearean literary adaptation in late sixteenth- century England, and any subsequent staging of the play in languages and countries unknown to the playwright. Each dramatic performance of the play, then, is an instantiation of the prophetic dictum “states unborn and accents yet unknown.” Though one can claim that classical architecture is imitated everywhere and also transcends its rootedness in place, texts become monumentalized precisely due to their dislocation and evanescence. Julius Caesar lives in the breaths of the actors and in the activity of Shakespeare’s audience and readers— us. Moreover the literary monument is unlike, say, the Pantheon and Trajan’s Column, whose architectural meaning cannot be separated from their immediate surroundings. In short, architectural monuments aspire to permanence through their fixity but lapse into ruins. Literary monuments, however, survive through mouvance, to appropriate a term by the medievalist Paul Zumthor.50 They are able to have an afterlife in multiple rewritings and transformations. The way Latin came to dominate the civic and sacred culture of the West was ironically through its adaptation and reuse beyond its identity as a language.51 As Sheldon Pollock points out, through the Roman Empire’s political and military might, Latin grew into a cosmopolitan language from “a local idiom spoken in the lower Tiber Valley into a superregional language” on the cusp of the first millennium.52 It eventually fragmented into the Romance languages. Architecture was the material analogue, the most tangible part of the imperium romanum. It too eventually fragmented. Broadly speaking, the rise and fall of the empire’s monuments reflected the expansion and collapse of Latinity. It is therefore no wonder that later poets would contemplate Rome’s ruins. Although the house of Aeneas no longer stands on the top of the Capitol, Rome’s political power does not extend over the conquered world, and priests no longer climb the Capitol with silent virgins, much of Latin poetry still remains—in that language as well as others. Thus the dreams of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid came true beyond their wildest hope. Their textual survival occurred in the transmission of medieval manuscripts, to be sure, but, more vitally, their literary transformations occurred through poets writing in a language Horace and his compatriots never knew, beyond the reaches of the Roman realm. Though a text is inscribed in its native soil,

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it is not inextricable. Tropes, topoi, plots, and figures are endlessly mobile, easily detachable from their surroundings and incorporated into a new body. Renaissance poets’ practice of imitation is akin to the architectural practice of spolia, in which the altered material past is ever ready to be configured into virtually inexhaustible matrices.

Mouths of Men “A written speech [oratio scripta] is nothing but the record [monumentum] of a spoken pleading,” declares Quintilian (Inst.12.10.5). Reciting words from the inert inscriptions on paper, voice renews life through the evanescence of breath. The power of print to revivify is explored in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 81: Or I shall live, your epitaph to make, Or you survive, when I in earth am rotten, From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I (once gone) to all the world must die; The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombèd in men’s eyes shall lie: Your monument shall be my gentle verse, which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, And tongues-to-be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men (my emphasis). 53

This sonnet articulates all the things that can go right, or wrong, with preservation. The double “or” in the first two lines drives the logic of this sonnet: either the young man will die before me so I will write about him, or he will live and I will be forgotten. Juxtaposing the hard substance of the “earth rotten,” “grave,” “common grave,” “entomb,” and “monument” with the softer imageries of “gentle verse,” “eyes,” “tongues,” “breath,” and “mouths,” Shakespeare intertwines the fate of the poet and the young man in these binary options. If Simonides initiated the ars memoria tradition by recovering the corpses of those to whom he sang, Shakespeare subsumes the identities of the dead and living into one fragile voice: “Your monument shall be my gentle verse.” The moral of both Simonides and Shakespeare suggests the inefficacy of physical remains as markers of identity and

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points to the privileged power of verses: only poetic language can repair the wounds of mortality. In the Sonnets salvation is not to be found in an eternal afterlife but in the worldly life of the “eyes not yet created,” a synecdoche of Julius Caesar’s “in states unborn and accents yet unknown.” This earthly endurance can be attained only through the “virtue” of the poet’s “pen,” not the powers of Christ. The promise is even more hyperbolic and a bit contradictory, exhibiting what Aaron Kunin calls Shakespeare’s “preservation fantasy”— that the young man shall still live on even though everyone else is dead.54 The Renaissance poetics of ruins differs from medieval poetry of ubi sunt in its invocation of the ancient immortality-of-verse topos. 55 In turn it differs from its ancient precedent in two major ways: its emphasis on apocalyptic time and an increased awareness of the contingencies of survival. This tentativeness is a prominent feature of Sonnet 65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o’ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays? O fearful meditation; where, alack, Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid? O, none, unless this miracle have might, That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

This sonnet comprises five questions, and its answer is withheld until the final couplet. The length of each question (four, four, two, two single lines) is inversely related to the intensity of their desperation. Like Sonnet 81, the lines here pit the strong against the weak: the “rage” of “sad mortality” against the delicate “flower”; “the wrackful siege of batt’ring days” against the defenseless “summer’s honey breath.” The fulcrum of the sonnet pivots on the last couplet, the two monosyllables “O, none.” This sigh of resignation is to be saved only by “this miracle.” “Miracle” has a singular weight here, for this is a hapax legomenon, the only time Shakespeare uses the word in all 154 sonnets. By nature inscrutable, miracles are not within the agency

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of the poet; they are performed from without. The unlikeliness of the event is underscored by the oxymoron of “black ink” and “shine bright.” The hope of poetic immortality remains precisely that— a hope. In the final analysis the “miracle” of immortality is granted neither by the poet’s skill nor by divine dispensation but by the generations of mortal readers. Thus if we rethink the opening line of the Sonnet 1, “From fairest creatures we desire increase,” and apply it not only biologically but also poetically, we arrive at a poetics of preservation that is based, ultimately, on multiplicity. In defiance of brass, stone, earth, and the boundless sea, children generate children and poetry generates poetry, always with immortality on the horizon, as we saw in Plato and Aristotle. But since the young man is “niggardly” in his affections, the promise that Shakespeare’s verses could maintain an image of the young man becomes an alternative system of survival. The first order of representation is the young man as an embodiment of Nature’s beauty. The second is the failed attempt to have progeny. The third is the reproduction of the young man in verse. The fourth is the textual print, “black ink,” which of course finally depends on the reader’s reception. This is the reciprocity of literary exchange: the beloved inspires the poet, and the poet gives birth to verses praising the beloved’s name, which also bear the name of the poet. Only in the hope that future generations might remember the poet’s work does the bargain of literary immortality, “this miracle,” work; the fate of both the poet and the young man is ultimately dependent on the charity of others. From the reception history of the Sonnets we know how cantankerous and polyphonic such future voices will be: we are the “eyes not yet created” who have “o’er-read” these verses. Inasmuch as the Sonnets explore both the ethics and the metaphysics of reproduction through language, what they propose is not survival as an exact replica or perfect portrait of the beloved; rather they embody a uniquely Renaissance poetics that acknowledges and records the difficulties of such representation.56 This aporia is not nonexistent in classical literature, but it is inchoate and not explicitly theorized until the period from Petrarch to Shakespeare. 57 Moreover it is uniquely in the post-Petrarchan sonnet sequence that the senses of loss in a ruin and a vanished beloved are intertwined. At the twilight of the Renaissance lyric tradition, the poet is troubled with the efficacy of words and repeatedly expresses the exhaustion

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of linguistic verbosity. What the Sonnets reproduce is not the eternal portrait of a young man, who, after all, remains anonymous, but the poet’s multitudinous thoughts and feelings about him. In other words, the thing that is preserved in the Sonnets is the crisis of preservation itself. And such mimesis is inevitably attended with the fear of ruins, either architectural or of oneself. The poet reflects on his own decay in Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Since at least William Empson, this elegiac sonnet has been famous for the line “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” which recent critics rightly observe is a reference to the dissolution of the monasteries in the Henrician period. 58 Colin Burrow notes the visual correspondence between “the silhouette of a bare tree and of the ruined framework of Gothic tracery.”59 And Tiffany Jo Werth remarks that the imagery “provide[s] mute evidence to the protracted, recursive nature of English church reform.”60 Indeed the scene is sad: in the 1609 Quarto the judiciously placed commas in line 2 mimic the iambic fall of the line on the page and the leaves on the tree. Not only is the church a vanished site, but the “sweet birds” have stopped their warbling (since “sang” is in the past tense). Where hallowed stones once reverberated human voices, and where once in more temperate days the exposed stalls echoed with avian songs, there are now no sounds except the rustling of a fading autumn. As apposite as the commentary on the Reformation is, an important element has been missing in the received readings. I propose that the uniqueness of this sonnet hinges on the triple repetition of “in me.” This little iambic foot runs like a basso continuo in lines 1, 5, and 9, demarcating the substance of each quatrain, moving from the

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dying of a season, resting briefly at the crepuscular hour, and finally fading in the embers of a fire. With the insertion of “in me,” the face itself becomes an index of human senescence as reflected in the changing of the seasons. In this sonnet Shakespeare ingeniously transforms the landscape of the face into a poetics of architectural ruins. If the modernity of the Renaissance lay in its discovery of the individual, as so many have argued, this sonnet initiates the exercise of self-reflection by imagining the other imagining oneself, since the poet’s decay is projected onto “thou.” The poem thus functions essentially as an anamorphic “mirror more than one,” or a second-order self-observation from the viewpoint of another. The insight gained in this meditation on external ruins recognizes that the self is a ruin. Philip Schwyzer connects Sonnet 73 to the Dutch painter Maarten van Heemskerck’s self-portrait with the Colosseum (1553), painted twenty years after his first visit to Rome (plate 1).61 In this retrospective and introspective portrait, the artist’s furrowed brows and wrinkles resemble the arches of the ancient amphitheater, and the tufts of his hair mirror the wild shrubs protruding from the arcades. The artist is rendered in two sizes: as a full portrait and as a diminutive draughtsman with his back to the viewer— one gazes at us and the other at the collapsed monument. In Shakespeare and Heemskerck external ruins manifest what is exhausted within. In a much more tragic vein Gloucester in King Lear (1606) would say to his old master, “O ruined piece of nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to naught” (4.5.130–31).

Afterlife As François René de Chateaubriand puts it, “All men have a secret attraction for ruins.” So compelling and ubiquitous did the ruin motif become that almost every age has its own iteration.62 In literary history, at least, it has mostly been associated with the Romantic period, and I hope that my argument has dislodged this critical commonplace by locating its origins in the Renaissance. Ruins in other periods have also been well documented, and I will not rehearse that scholarship here.63 Instead I want to conclude this chapter by turning to an unlikely predecessor, a poem written between the sixteenth and fifteenth century bce of the Ramesside reign in New Kingdom Egypt. Interestingly the ancient Egyptians themselves compared their texts to the pyramids. Jan Assmann observes that scribes frequently

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boasted that their texts were superior to their sublime architecture.64 The hieratic papyri preserved in the British Museum contain perhaps the oldest surviving poem on the immortality of writers. This text begins with the complaint: “Those writers known from the old days, / the time just after the god, did not build pyramids in bronze or leave patrimony in children, but their progeny was by means of writing.”65 The anonymous writer, like Aristotle, bases his claim regarding the superiority of words over pyramids on the model of biological reproduction: texts outlast pyramids because they can be copied and reproduced. Indeed the speaker argues that writing is an alternative to sexual reproduction, claiming that scribes did not build pyramids in bronze With gravestones of iron from heaven; They did not think to leave a patrimony made of children Who would give their names distinction. Rather, they formed a progeny by means of writings . . . books of wisdom were their pyramids, the reed-pen was their child, smoothed stone their spouse . . . and the writer was the father of them all. . . . What they built of gates and chapels now are fallen, their soul-priests and their gardeners are gone, their headstones undiscovered in the dirt, their very graves forgotten. But their fame lives on in their papyrus rolls composed while they were still alive; And the memory of those who wrote such books shall last to the end of time and for eternity. (Pap. Chester Beatty IV = Pap. BM 10684)

Here we see an early version of logocentrism. Words are more potent generators of fame than the pyramids because whereas the pyramids are the silent and mute markers of death, for the Egyptians hieroglyphs were symbolic manifestations of eternal truths. Tom Hare observes that most Egyptian tombs were inscribed; the commodities necessary for daily life—various kinds of bread, beer, and oil—were stored within. Sometimes only the things’ names would be inscribed on the walls. “From this economy of substitution,” Hare concludes, “we have come to understand a certain Egyptian belief in the word, in its ability to replace reality, to substitute for the materiality of existence with language.”66 Words exist in order to be read, and every act of reading recalls not the dead but the living body “behind” the letters. Whereas the pyramid materially commemorates death and is a

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passageway to the afterlife, it is actually the power of words—whose ultimate meanings transcend their signifying signs— that prepares the soul for eternity. Thus we see that the ruin motif seems to be transhistorical and universal: poetry on ruins is everywhere. As Vico says, “Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.”67 A deep impulse within the cultural imagination, the ruin motif is universal yet always already derivative, for, in my view, it is but a transposition of the metaphysical desire for immortality, which is itself a nobler version of our basic survival instinct, as Aristotle and Lucretius tell us. The finitude of life, then, is the foundation for all our aesthetic desire, as the story of Babel and Simonides tell us. The fear of ruination and the attendant yearning for timelessness give comfort to the fear of death through the verbal arts, as all poets tell us. Shakespeare could not possibly have known about the Egyptian odes, yet his Sonnets share a spiritual resonance with them and so are haunted by these spectral memories unbeknownst to them. Shakespeare and other poets know full well that all artifices— ruins and verses—will dissolve into nothing if they are not renewed. In short, what distinguishes the Renaissance poetics of ruins from other world poetry about ruins is that Renaissance poets problematized the claim of artistic immortality and thought deeply about the contingency of literary genealogy and their position within it. The Egyptians were confident of textual survival (“And the memory of those who wrote such books shall last to the end of time and for eternity”), whereas Shakespeare had plenty of doubt about it. For him the chances of survival are “none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” The English poet and his Renaissance colleagues proposed that the poetic competition with stony architecture can be won only through the multiplication and transformation of one’s work beyond one’s language and geography.

chapter 2

The Rebirth of Ruins What is the antique in Rome if not a great book whose pages have been destroyed or ripped out by time, in which each day modern research fills in the blanks and bridges the gaps? — Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy

At the beginning of his account of the Peloponnesian Wars, in a remarkable moment of prolepsis, Thucydides warns that if one day we were to compare the ruins of Sparta and Athens, the viewer would falsely deem Athens to be twice as powerful because of her splendid temples and public edifices. Monumental architecture is not always a reliable guide to a city’s true power: “the greatness of cities,” the Greek historian writes, “should be estimated by their real power and not by appearances.”1 Thucydides believes his work— an ergon—will give a more accurate account of Athens’s rise and fall, more complete and truthful than any physical monuments. 2 Along with his predecessor Herodotus, he inaugurated the idea of history as lasting for all time— aei— so that generations might be edified by the lessons of the past. Reprising the monumentality of written history, Livy remarks in his preface that the Roman past should “be set in illustrious monument,” in inlustri posita monumentum (1.10–11). Like the architectural achievements of Augustus, Livy’s work will be a reminder to future ages of the noble deeds of the Romans. The imperial reconstruction project created an urban topography in which the built environment— palaces, temples, fora, baths, obelisks, inscriptions, statues, trophies, gardens—were the material coordinates that instantiated the ideology of power.3 In Livy’s work too cityscape, narrative, mental topography, and enargeia intersect to form the ideology of his text.4 The Roman historian in this sense creates a reality of the text by amplifying, reducing, and crystallizing the reality of the city. 52

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Ruins sometimes lie, but not those of Rome; she occupies a singular locus in our cultural memory, for the city and her ruins are coextensive. Ovid went so far as to claim that “the land of other nations has a fixed boundary, but the space of the city of Rome is the space of the world” (Fasti 2.684). If ancient historians had their moments of prolepsis, imagining their cities in ruins, Renaissance humanists had many moments of analepsis, imagining Rome in her complete glory. “How Rome was, her ruins themselves teach,” Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet, was a Renaissance commonplace (to be discussed later). In chapter 1 we saw how the poetics of ruins emerged in the Renaissance from the millennium-long desire for immortality and how it was expressed in the transmigration of languages from antiquity to the sixteenth century. Writers thought that their craft was superior to monuments of mere stone and marble, so they turned their documents into monuments.5 We now move from the study of words to the study of things in order to consider the physicality of ruins— how monuments turned to documents. In this chapter I argue that the idea that material ruins could be objects of empirical knowledge not only was born in the Renaissance, but it defined the period as such. We will also see how Rome, the proverbial palimpsestic city, came to be written and rewritten upon. The identity of the Eternal City perdured in its temporal mutations and representations, surviving multiple displacements and spoliations. In this way the Renaissance became the Ruin- naissance.

The Beauty of Ruins The revival of antiquity that began in full force in the late fourteenth century was concomitant with a new understanding of the ruins of Rome. Jacob Burckhardt writes that the dilapidated city “awakened not only archaeological zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but an elegiac or sentimental melancholy.”6 The broken monuments underscored with haunting pathos the vast gulf between the time of humanism and antiquity and made observers realize just how irretrievably lost the classical past was.7 In 1398 Pier Paolo Vergerio lamented, “Rome, once the center of the world, is now nothing but a name and a legend.”8 Manuel Chrysoloras wrote to the Byzantine emperor in 1411, “Even these ruins and heaps of stones show what great things once existed, and how enormous and beautiful were the original constructions. For what in Rome was not beautiful?”9 So too Alberto degli

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Alberti to Giovanni de’ Medici in 1443: “The modern things here are in a very sorry state, the things that have fallen are Rome’s beauty.”10 For the first time in the postclassical world, the ruins of antiquity were seen as beautiful, an aesthetic phenomenon, something deserving of wonder. In his letter Vergerio reported, “It is often said, and with some foundation in truth, that in ruined cities— those which have been destroyed by some violent act, or those that have been gnawed away by old age— the air is not healthy.”11 The intermingling of urban trash and architectural collapse gave rise to the popular belief that the city was pervaded by a noxious miasma. In 1420, when Pope Martin V returned to Rome after a long exile in Avignon, “he found it so dilapidated and deserted,” according to Bartolomeo Platina in Lives of the Popes (1479), “that it bore hardly any resemblance to a city. Houses had fallen into ruins, churches had collapsed, whole quarters were abandoned and the town was neglected and oppressed by famine and poverty.”12 The population lived in dwellings little better than huts; the Pantheon was a stockyard, the Forum a pig market; horses ambled around the Column of Trajan; sheep roamed over at least four of the Seven Hills; and the Tiber flooded during the seasonal rains. It was little more than a provincial village, with barely twenty thousand residents, whereas at its greatest, in the late imperial period, the caput mundi had had a population of more than one and a half million.13 So writes Cristoforo Landino (1424– 98): Et cunctis rebus instant sua fata creatis Et, quod Roma doces, omnia tempus edit. Roma doces olim tectis miranda superbis, At nunc sub tanta diruta mole iaces. Heu, quid tam Magno, praeter sua nomina, Circo Restat, ubi Exquilias sola capella colit? Nec sua Tarpeium servarunt numina montem, Nec Capitolinas Iuppiter ipse domos. Quid Mario, Caesar, deiecta trophaea reponis, Si quod Sylla fuit, hoc sibi tempus erit? alta quid ad coelum, Tite, surrigis amphitheatra? Ista olim in calcem marmora pulchra ruent. Nauta Palatini Phoebi cantaverat aedes, Dic tua, dic Phoebe, nuc ubi templa manent? Heu, puduit statuas Scopae spectare refractas, Haec caput, ista pedes, perdidit illa manus. Nec te, Praxiteles, potuit defendere nomen, Quominus ah, putris herma, tegaris humo;

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Hanc nec Phidiaca vivos ostendere vultus Arte iuvat: doctus Mentor ubique perit. Quin etiam Augusto Stygias remeare paludes Si licet et vita rurus in orbe frui, Inquirens totam quamvis percursitet urbem, Nulla videre sui iam monumenta queat.14 Fate weighs down on all things created, Rome, you teach how time devours all things. Rome, you teach how once you were renowned for your high roofs, and now you lie underneath a great pile of ruins. O what remains of the Circus Maximus, except in name, when only a lone she-goat pays homage to the Esquiline? No longer is the Tarpeian Rock guarded by her gods, nor does Jupiter dwell in the Capitoline. Why Caesar, do you take up Marius’s cast- off trophies, now that time will be for him [the enemy that] Sulla once was? Why, Titus, do you build your high amphitheater up to the skies? Those oncebeautiful marbles are melted down into lime. The sailors once sung of Apollo’s Palatine Temple. Tell me, Apollo, where is your temple now? Oh, it was shameful to see the broken statues of Scopas— one has lost its head, this one its feet, that one its hands. Scarcely, Praxiteles, could your name defend you, so that oh, you putrid herm, would no longer be covered with earth. Nor does Phidian art help him show living faces; Learned Mentor everywhere perishes. Even if Augustus could come back from the shores of the Styx, even if he could return to earth to live again, if he goes searching over the city he would not find any of his own monuments.

To the humanist, the monuments of Rome— dilapidated and neglected—presented themselves as the illegible remnants and hidden repositories of the ancient world. Landino’s catalogue of pleading questions underscores a commonplace of the period: the difference between the Rome that was and the Rome of now only heightens the inexorable course of history and the decay of time. From inert rubble the ruin is elevated from lowly mass to lofty metaphysics, its stony silence aspiring to a sublime philosophy of history. In its material substance and allegorical significance, the ruin became a true “symbol.” This word—from syn (together) and bole (a throwing, a casting, the stroke of a missile, bolt, beam)— originally meant “a pact,” “an agreement,” or “a token torn in two.”15 The ruin is such a sundered object. In 1796 the French archaeologist Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy would ask, “What is the antique in Rome if not a great book whose pages have been destroyed or ripped out by time, in which each day modern research fills in the blanks and bridges the gaps?”16 But already, at the dawn of humanism, the vestiges of the

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classical city had been figured as a network of effaced signs, a text that was alternately legible or indecipherable. SPOLI A

As scholars from Rodolfo Lanciani to Salvatore Settis to Maria Fabricius Hansen have argued, the ruins of Rome were the result not of foreign invasion but of spolia, the practice of exploiting older structures for building materials.17 Since ruins evoked little nostalgia in medieval discourse, their constitutive parts— columns, capitals, entablatures, friezes, doors— could be wrested from their original whole, transposed to any building, and made to inhabit new identities. Participating in a living trade that circulated the old amid the new, marmorarii (marble cutters) and calcararii (lime burners) flourished as they pillaged the city’s material remains. From at least the first to the seventeenth century much of Roman architecture was constructed from recycled marbles. The heads of classical statues were replaced with those of Christian saints; sarcophagi were disinterred for Christian burial; ancient cinerary urns were turned into stoups for holy water in churches. Certainly spoliation happened for pragmatic reasons; the quality of ancient materials was very high. But theologically builders literalized Augustine’s metaphor in De doctrina christiana: “Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and graven images which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to a better use.”18 As the Old Testament “prefigured” the New, so did the marble of classical culture analogically pave the way for Christianity. Spolia is a material and metaphorical translatio— a transfer from one place to another as well as one discourse (pagan) to another (Christian). One can see how this is a material analogue to the literary practice of imitation, citation, and allusion. As fragments of ancient texts were incorporated into the new textual body, architectural parts from old temples and pagan monuments found new life in ecclesiastical buildings. The fragments of defunct pagan temples are to be submitted to the edifice of the new religion, so that a consecrated house of God becomes the spatial realm in which the sundry materials of the saeculum are united into the mighty architectonics of faith. Almost two centuries after Augustine, Pope Gregory (ca. 540– 604) boldly transposes Augustine’s appropriation. He instructs the

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missionaries to Britain, “The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there. . . . We hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts may come to know and adore the true God.”19 Though the legends of Gregory consigning the Palatine library to flames and abolishing antique statues in Rome itself were wildly exaggerated, these myths were perpetuated polemically by humanists from Boccaccio to Ghiberti to Vasari. 20 The material remains of antiquity became the ground of contentions twice over; first the early Christians considered them to be idols and thus wanted them destroyed, then Renaissance humanists valued them and mourned their obliteration. Tommaso Laureti’s 1585 Triumph of Christianity in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican perfectly illustrates this cultural ambivalence; a muscular classical statue, beheaded and dismembered, falls prostrate at the feet of a smaller crucifix (Plate 2). Though the idol has been laid low, the entire action takes place in a richly marbled classical interior, as if the Counter-Reformation builders had followed Gregory’s directive to cleanse and consecrate the space to the glory of God. Because ancient remnants were used primarily for instrumental purposes, before the Renaissance they were rarely studied on their own terms. Arnaldo Momigliano, in his classic “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” writes, “The Middle Ages did not lose the classical interest in inscriptions and archeological remains. Inscriptions were occasionally collected. Monuments were noticed. What was lost, notwithstanding the reminder contained in St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei, was the Varronian idea of ‘antiquitates’— the idea of a civilization recovered by systematic collection of all the relics of the past.”21 The genre of medieval guidebooks to Rome, mirabilia, confirms Momigliano’s insight. These travel itineraries were interested in the surviving monuments not as documents of history but as sites of pilgrimage. The steady flow of pilgrims to the Holy City created a need for reliable itineraries to the main churches and famous sites. Instead of presenting “the idea of a civilization recovered by systematic collection of all the relics of the past,” the guidebooks presented the idea of faith as experienced by the systematic visiting of all Roman churches that contained the relics of the saints. The anonymous author of the twelfth- century Mirabilia urbis Romae does record their surviving inscriptions and archaeological remains but is more interested in the

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material riches of sites: “How great was their beauty in gold, silver, brass, ivory, and precious stones.”22

Enigma How is knowledge through Rome’s physical monuments possible? Armando Petrucci’s masterful study Public Lettering examines the way Rome, the epitome of the “written city,” embodied its ideology and civic memory in the inscriptions on its busts, bas-reliefs, colonnades, triumphal arches, baths, circuses, theaters, and imperial residences. 23 But throughout the millennia, especially in the Middle Ages, weathering, neglect, and vandalism made many monuments virtually impossible to decipher. Monumental epigraphy, Petrucci notes, had all but ceased in medieval Rome; the art of the elegant incised Latin capitals was lost. Master Gregorius’s twelfth- century Narracio de mirabilibus urbis Romae is a case in point. Discovered in 1917, it survives as a single manuscript in St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. The work is important because it stands between the tradition of mirabilia, medieval guidebooks on Rome for pilgrims, and the more accurate humanist treatises. Master Gregorius describes what he sees, supplemented by knowledge drawn from history and local authorities (he has a fairly good working knowledge of Lucan and Virgil, quoting them ten times), but on the whole his accounts lean toward the fanciful and legendary. He makes some attempts at awareness of historical accuracy, acknowledging that much has been lost. In the final lines the contingencies of form and content merge: “On this tablet I read much, but understood little, for they were aphorisms, and the reader has to supply most of the words.”24 Even so, the remainder of the folio page is cut off: there is only a small slip at the top. The verso is blank. Gregorius’s confession underscores the hermeneutic difficulty of deciphering material monuments. The enigma of inscriptions is also present eight hundred years earlier in a late antique poem of Ausonius (ca. 310–395): Lucius una quidem, geminis sed dissita punctis Littera: praenomen sic nota sola facit. Post M incisum est: puto sic non tota videtur; Dissiluit saxi fragmine laesus apex. Nec quisquam, Marius, seu Marcius, anne Metellus Hic iaceat, certis noverit indiciis.

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Truncatis convulsa iacent elementa figuris, Omnia confusis interiere notis. [Miremur periisse homines? monumenta fatiscunt, Mors etiam saxis nominibusque venit.] Lucius is one letter, but it is separated by twin points: in this way a single sign indicates the praenomen. After an “M” is inscribed, at least I think [it] is— it is not all visible. The top has been damaged by the stone breaking and has fallen off, nor could anyone know through certain clues whether a Marius, a Marcius, or a Metellus lies here. The letters lie disturbed with their shapes truncated, all have perished in a confusion of signs. [Are we surprised that men die? Monuments gape apart, death comes even to stones and names.]25

These verses are remarkable for they present the uncertain process of epigraphic decipherment as the shape of the poem itself. It begins with the specific problem of textual decipherment— the weight of a single letter, “M”— and expands to a general gnōmē on the transitory nature of all things: “death comes even to stones and names.” The visible and the invisible intersect while the weathered monument maintains a minimal legibility. Reading its scripts becomes a matter of conjecture, moving from the perceived (the “M”) to the imagined (“a Marius, a Marcius, or a Metellus”). The poem’s Nachleben too mirrors its message. Don Fowler notes that modern editors differ in the placement of the last two lines, since the last four verses appear as a separate poem in some manuscripts, whereas in the oldest it is part of a preceding epitaph. 26 This is most ironic, for the very lines that lament the erasure of stones and names themselves have been ravaged. The difficulty of deciphering inscriptions in Ausonius and Master Gregorius raises an epistemological problem that would later become fundamental to the humanists: How much of the past is really knowable? This aporia is also expressed in one of the earliest extant AngloSaxon poems, “The Ruin,” where all signs of inscriptions have been erased, leaving only inscrutable detritus. Since this poem is preserved in the so- called Exeter manuscript within the genre of riddles, it leaves the reader to construct meaning out of enigmas: Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate; The city-buildings crumble, the works of the giants decay. Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed, Barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to the mortar, Houses are gaping, tottering and fallen, Undermined by age. The earth’s embrace,

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60 Its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen; They are perished and gone. This wall, grey with lichen And red of hue, outlives kingdom after kingdom, Withstands tempests; its tall gate succumbed. The city still moulders, gashed by storms. 27

Scholars conjecture that the site described is Bath. At the time of the poem’s composition, circa 975, the Romans had been gone from England for three hundred years already. 28 Thus to the anonymous author of this poem that vanished culture was but a dim myth. In his 1911 essay “The Ruin,” Georg Simmel writes that architecture illustrates the struggle between “the soul in its upward striving and nature in its gravity.” The ruin is a result of “collaboration” between human and the world: “Nature has transformed the work of art into material for her own expression as she had previously served as material for art.”29 A thousand years separate the Old English poem and the German sociologist’s insight, but they both share a concern with how ruins embody a dialectic between art and nature.30 The unknown tenth- century author devotes as much time to describing the works of nature as to describing the works of man, observing the inevitable dissolution of artifacts to their biological and geological origins. Imagining the bright days when the “mead-hall was filled with delights,” he laments that the ingenuity of these unknown makers, crafting the impressive “well-wrought” walls, “showershield,” and “high arch,” are finally overcome by the humble persistence of “the earth’s embrace,” “grey with lichen, red of hue.” Unlike his Renaissance successors, this anonymous writer does not proclaim the power of poetry to transcend the ravages of time. The fact that the manuscript itself is a badly damaged fragment— seared by a diagonal burn mark— only underscores the poet’s message of mortal futility. What is striking about Master Gregorius, Ausonius, and the author of “The Ruin” is that their very message about loss and erasure is mirrored in their fragmentary material form. Thus they might serve as coordinate points on which we can map the late antique and medieval ways of grappling with the instability of material inscriptions. Let me add an intriguing cross- cultural analogue. There is a traditional Chinese hanging scroll that beautifully resonates with these examples. I am thinking of Master Li Cheng’s (919– 67 ce) famed Reading the Stele (Plate 3). The scene depicts a desolate landscape with a faded stele (bei), framed by an enormous grove of trees painted in the “dragon claw” style, their branches contorting, twisting, in a struggle

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against the sky for their survival, along with two small figures, an elderly gentleman on horseback and his attendant holding a staff. Like Simmel and the Exeter “Ruin,” Li’s composition establishes a set of proportions between man, art, and nature: the stele towers over the diminutive humans, and the tree branches encroach on and overwhelm the stele. Sinologists have long debated the painter’s intention: Does it represent a particular object, a particular figure, a particular historical event?31 What is inscribed on the stele has also prompted much discussion. From the men’s facial expressions, the stele presents an utter enigma. Yet unlike Master Gregorius or Ausonius, reading is not just difficult, it is impossible, for there is no inscription at all— the stele is wordless, completely blank. The art historian Wu Hung compellingly argues that its empty surface is intentional, for it dramatizes the travelers’ alienation in encountering an anonymous past.32 Thus from a Chinese vantage Reading the Stele offers a compression of the Roman problems of erasure, memory, and representation into the cipher of a blank tablet.

Before and After Let us return to Europe. To understand the emergence of the ruin as a distinct category of discourse, we risk reifying two historical periods— the medieval and the Renaissance— as autonomous cultural systems. Of course the fourteenth- and fifteenth- century humanists’ distinctions between themselves and their predecessors have been replicated in many ways by those who study them today. 33 In the past generation there has been much scholarly debate about whether such periodization expresses a definite break or masks a continuity. 34 The ruin, denoting persistence and rupture, perhaps becomes a cipher of both. Though depictions of ruins were, to be sure, not completely absent in the medieval period, as the examples above demonstrate, they were less common and differed in emphasis. In Dante ruina merely means “landslide” (Inf. 23.137). When ruins do appear in the visual tradition, they usually teach lessons of morality. Maso di Banco’s Life of St. Sylvester (ca. 1341, Church of Santa Croce, Florence) depicts the taming of a dragon in the Roman Forum (fig. 2). The fresco contains clear depictions of collapsed walls and rubble, but, with the exception of one lone Ionic column, there is no classicizing impulse or nostalgia for what has been destroyed. Likewise Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory

Figure 2. Maso di Banco, from The Life of St. Sylvester, , ca. 1341. Fresco, Bardi di Vernio Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence. Scala/ Art Resource, New York.

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of Good and Bad Government (ca. 1338–40, Palazzo Publico, Siena) juxtaposes a flourishing city with a desolate one, but the message the painting conveys is that this city has been rightfully destroyed and there is no desire for recovery (Plate 4).35 The aftermath does not really matter; the important thing is the destruction itself. Or consider the scenes of ruination in illuminated manuscripts: the fall of cities such as Babylon or Jericho is depicted at the moment of collapse, with tumbling men, beasts, and stones suspended in midair (fig. 3). Medieval scribes were much more interested in rendering ruins as spectacles of present destruction than as retrospective scenes of destruction’s aftermath. With the perils of periodization firmly in mind, we can nevertheless say that the European fascination with ruins came into being near the beginning of what we now call the Renaissance. Perhaps no other genre illustrates the stark differences between medieval and Renaissance perceptions of the ruin more than its emergence in Quattrocento Adoration and Nativity paintings. 36 In early Trecento examples, such as the Nativity panel of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà altarpiece in Siena (ca. 1308–11), there is little emphasis on architectural features (fig. 4). Mary and the infant Jesus are enveloped within an inconspicuous manger, itself enfolded in a grotto, the former a typical motif of the Northern European Gothic style and the latter found in Byzantine manuscript illuminations.37 In contrast, Sandro Botticelli’s late Quattrocento The Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1478– 82) demonstrates a renewed interest in antiquity with the unmistakable prominence of a classical structure in its perspectival center (Plate 5).38 No longer housed in a cave, the once humble manger is transformed into an impressive Doric structure of three rows of smooth rectilinear columns bearing a broken entablature on which a gabled wooden roof rests, all in accordance with the rules of axial symmetry. A broken brick wall stands behind the Holy Family. In the background, barely visible and slightly off center, the bluish-gray spires and dome of a Gothic church protrude; in the foreground rest scattered pieces of rocks, the leftover shards, perhaps, of some catastrophe; on the sides are structures in various stages of decomposition with vegetation sprouting around them. The temporalities of nature and artifact are intertwined in the painting; the ruins signify the collapse of pagan culture while also foreshadowing the death of Christ. The scene in some ways resembles a cantiere, a construction site. The cycle of architectural works

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Figure 3. Anonymous, Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse miniatures, ca. 1290– 99. Fol. 40v, lot 60b, no. 2v, Cleveland Art Museum. Index of Christian Art, Princeton University.

in progress and works in ruins corresponds to the various stages of nature in the painting: the ruins on the left are covered in dead branches and twigs; on the right there is flourishing verdant growth. The wooden roof in the center suggests either a scaffold or a frame for the permanent structure to come; the stones on the ground suggest potential building materials. In these distinct architectural and seasonal units we see the entire trajectory of architectural life, from the elements of nature that serve as raw construction materials to architecture’s humble beginnings in wood, from noble marble edifices to, finally, their reversion to their origins. The painting thus circulates from purpose to obsolescence, from design to destruction. All these elements can be interpreted as the history of Christianity allegorically mapped onto the history of architecture— a history, as Joseph Rykwert argues, that is a slow progress from the primitive hut of Adam and Vitruvius to an unfinished triumphant classical structure that is now used as a sacred edifice.39 Old temples had to die before new ones could be born; a myth persisted well into the Renaissance that the Temple of Peace in Rome was

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Figure 4. Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maestà, Nativity panel, ca. 1308–11. Tempura, altarpiece in Siena. Wikimedia Commons.

shattered the night Christ was born because a prophecy said that it would stand until a virgin gave birth.40 To illustrate the inexorable arc of Christianity, Renaissance painters made the once pastoral manger into a rich, multilayered site announcing the fate of paganism as well as celebrating the architectonics of the Church as a vessel of Christ within universal history. Renaissance painters turned the graves of antiquity and Judaism into the birthplace of their redeemer. Allegorically the juxtaposition of the rude manger against the proud classical structures is significant for the emergence of the Renaissance because the death and resurrection of Christ is conflated with the period’s own conception of the death and resurrection of classical culture. The appearance of the ruin in these paintings therefore suggests the conflation of two historical propositions: first, classical culture

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was surpassed at the moment of Christ’s birth; second, classical culture had subsequently been dead up to the point of the Renaissance. By conjuring the ruin, the Renaissance delivered, in a single stroke, a fantasy of antiquity’s death and its resurrection. By inventing the ruin, the Renaissance also invented itself as a selfconscious age. Broadly speaking, the Middle Ages did not see the ruin as a ruin but only as a remnant of a lost civilization or a foreign symbol. As Erwin Panofsky argues, scholars in the Middle Ages did not envisage classical antiquity as wholly different from their own time; therefore it was not necessary to preserve or venerate its material remains. In Panofsky’s eloquent formulation, “the Middle Ages had left antiquity unburied and alternately galvanized and exorcised its corpse. The Renaissance stood weeping at its grave and tried to resurrect its soul.”41 More recently scholars have complicated the art historian’s grand distinction between the medieval and Renaissance intellectual worldviews; for instance, Silvia Ferretti argues that Panofsky’s notion of the Renaissance artwork was temporally “antinomic,” occupying two incompatible schemata simultaneously.42 On the one hand, the artwork was fixed within a historical and immanent time; on the other, it inhabited an ideal and transtemporal order constructed by the artistic imagination. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood have studied how both medieval and Renaissance works of art situate themselves in a dense network of temporalities, pointing backward to a remote ancestral origin, sideways to other replicas and citations, and forward toward a promise of its future remembrance.43 In short, all works of art exist as ruins in potentia.

Old and New It is with the rebuilding of Rome in the mid-fifteenth century that ruins finally came to be imbued with a pervasive energy. After the return of the papacy for good in 1443, the efflorescence of culture and economy in Rome is inextricable from the changing perception and new appreciation of ruins.44 The ruins of Rome became the discursive signs and the raw materials of a true renovatio, constitutive of the very self-definition of the Renaissance. There arose a dense network of industries around the fallen monuments. In a collective effort to reassemble the past, popes, cardinals, architects, craftsmen, engineers, merchants, antiquarians, printers, numismatists, philologists,

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and poets all collaborated in the preservation, lamentation, and celebration of ruins. When the humanists saw ruins, what did they see? What did they want to see? The lapidary phrase Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet, “How Rome was, her ruins themselves teach,” epitomizes their didactic value. 45 First recorded in Francesco Albertini’s 1510 Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris urbis romae and made prominent in the frontispiece of the third book of Sebastiano Serlio’s 1537 Tutte l’opere d’architettura, et prospetiva, every word of this epigram carries weight (fig. 5). The contrasting tenses of fuit and docet underscore continuity and rupture between time past and time present. Quanta is about the magnitude, the distance between now and then. The pronoun ipsa as the intensifier stresses the evidentiary power of the ruin and the coextension between Rome as a totality and its materiality. In medieval thought the ruin has the power to teach (docere), but only as a moral lesson on the vanity of all things. For the early humanists the ruin teaches because it has real empirical value. It demonstrates the achievements of a past age and embodies recoverable knowledge. The leading humanists strove to make rational order out of the ruin’s irrationality. In 1481 Leonardo writes to the Works Department of the Milan Duomo, hoping to get a commission: “I shall show what is the first law of weight and what and how many are the causes that bring ruin to buildings and what is the condition of their stability and permanence.”46 Almost every notable architect at some point used Rome as a classroom to study its lessons. Baldassare Peruzzi, Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio, and Andrea Palladio measured the broken remains of buildings and scrutinized the text of Vitruvius to deduce an ideal form all’antico.47 Others were not content with only recovering the epistemology of the material. They desired to use the ruin as a foundation to restore the totality of Rome. The titles of Flavio Biondo’s works are telling— De Roma instaurata (1444–48), Italia illustrata (1448, 1458, 1474), De Roma triumphante (1479)—for they trace the arc of his ambition, an enterprise to uncover Rome’s hidden physical, political, mythological, and architectonic structures so that they might become the foundations of nothing less than a complete restoration of ancient Rome. His contemporary, the antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona (1391– 1453 or 1455), undertook adventures across southern Italy, Dalmatia, Egypt, Chios, Rhodes, Anatolia, and Constantinople, recording ruins and inscriptions in his Commentarii.48 In 1551 Leonardo Bufalini

Figure 5. Sebastiano Serlio, frontispiece of book 3 of Tutte l’opere d’architettura. Lyon, 1537. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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produced an extraordinary map of the Eternal City. Spanning six feet by six feet, it was “a horizontal ground plan based on survey[s] and made to scale— the first orthogonal representation of Rome since antiquity.”49 Pirro Ligorio, a man of immense energy, produced an enormous set of collated maps called Antiquae urbis imago (1561), showing the Rome that was. His goal, as he himself described it, was to “revive and conserve the memory of ancient things and satisfy those who take pleasure in them.” Accordingly this led him “to study, with enormous effort, every place and portion” of ancient remains, “not leaving a bit of wall, however small it was, without seeing it and examining it minutely: always accompanying this with the reading of . . . authors and . . . often having recourse to conjectures where the ruins were lacking.”50 Dozens of treatises on and view books, sketches, and prints of Rome were issued in the years following Albertini’s Opusculum (1510).51 Made mostly by foreigners, such as Antoine Lafréry, Étienne du Pérac, Hieronymus Cock, and Maarten van Heemskerck, these illustrations juxtapose the ruin as it is with the shining monument that it was imagined to be. 52 In their voluminous virtuosity all these works transfer the material remains of the past to the textual record of the present. By doing so they become double monuments: the ruins testify to the achievements of antiquity, and, in preserving them, the modern documents are themselves impressive monuments of cultural productions. As representative of the newfound power of the humanist, consider the frontispiece of the anonymous Antiquarie prospettiche romane (ca. 1499–1500), a short humorous poem about the ruins and rediscovered statues of Rome (fig. 6).53 The image anticipates William Blake’s depiction of Newton: a muscular nude man kneels in the center, enclosed in a circle, drawing geometric figures on the ground with a compass in one hand while holding aloft an astronomical sphere in the other. In the background the Colosseum and some generic ruins split the frame. There is a clear parallel between the nudity of the man and the ruins, since ruins are in fact “naked” architecture— the human body and buildings reduced to their purest, unadorned state. His chiseled anatomy mirrors the lineaments of the crumbling monuments. Geometry and ruins hover between the concrete and the abstract, the mathematical and the material. In the erudite domain of the humanist, the study of the ruin is made into a branch of the

Figure 6. Authorship uncertain, frontispiece of the Antiquarie prospettiche Romane, ca. 1499–1500. British Library.

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lofty Vitruvian liberal arts, since to decipher its foundations one must know history, geometry, mechanics, and physiognomy.

Building by Destroying Many of the central events in the Roman Renaissance involved ruins: the almost daily unearthing of statues, the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, the discovery of Domus Aurea around 1480, the Sack of Rome in 1527, and the discovery of the catacombs in 1578. As Leonard Barkan remarks, “The glories of new Rome were built on the ruination of old Rome.”54 Yet the exuberant rebirth of Rome came at a price: there was almost no edifice in Rome from the fifteenth century whose erection or renovation did not simultaneously cause the mutilation of some ancient structure. Conservation and destruction existed side by side. Though the enormously erudite Pope Nicholas V (r. 1447– 55) founded the Vatican library, reinforced the city’s fortifications, cleaned and paved the main streets, and restored the water supply, he also permitted his architects to strip marbles from abandoned churches in order to adorn the cosmatesque pavement of St. John the Lateran and to despoil other churches and palaces. 55 Sixtus IV (r. 1471– 84), who reconstructed nearly forty churches and founded seven new ones, launched the symbolic program of the Capitoline Hill with a gift of recently unearthed statues, and built the first modern bridge over the Tiber, also used the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, and the temple of Venus and Jupiter as giant quarries. 56 One contractor, Giovanni Paglia Lombardo, reportedly removed 2,522 cartloads of travertine from the Colosseum in a period of nine months. 57 There were a few official attempts at preservation. Before he became Pope Pius II in 1457, Aeneas Piccolomini wrote admiringly of Nicholas V’s constructions, which rivaled those of the Roman emperors, he “deplored their immense unfinished masses which only added more ruins to the scene.”58 In his Commentaries he writes touchingly on the nostalgic sentiments that the ruins of Ostia, the Alban hills, and Hadrian’s villa evoked in him. 59 Here is one of his verses: Oblectat me, Roma, tuas spectare ruinas Ex cuius lapsu Gloria prisca patet. Sed tuus hic populus, muris defossa vetustis Calcis in obsequium, Marmora dura coquit. Impia ter centum si sic gens egerit annos, Nullum hic indicium nobilitatis erit.60

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Part I It delights me, Rome, to gaze upon your ruins: from your fall the glory of the old is displayed. But now your people dig out the hard marble from the ancient walls and bake it in the service of lime. If this impious race continues thus another three hundred years, no vestiges of nobility will remain.

As pope he turned poetry into public policy by issuing a bull in 1462 proclaiming the prohibition of the destruction of architectural patrimony: Since we desire that our Mother city remain in its dignity and splendor, we need to show all vigilant care that the basilicas and churches of the city and its holy and sacred places, in which are kept many relics of the saints, be maintained and preserved in their splendid buildings, but also that the antique and early buildings and their relics remain for future generations. . . . Thus, under pain of excommunication and of financial penalties expressed in this statute, which those who contravene it may incur forthwith, by our aforesaid authority and capacity we formally forbid all and singular, ecclesiastical as well as secular, of whatever eminence, dignity, rank, order or condition, even if of Pontifical eminence or of any other ecclesiastical or worldly dignity, to dare to demolish, destroy, reduce, break down or use as if a quarry, by any means, directly or indirectly, publicly or secretly, any ancient public building or the remains of any public building above ground in the said City or its district.61

Edicts of such sort had been periodically promulgated, but they had been only half observed and most of the time were ignored by the papacy itself for reasons of expediency and eminent domain.62 Indeed fifty years later Raphael and Castiglione in their 1515 letter to Leo X continue to lament that Roman palaces and churches were less harmed by the “Goths, Vandals and other perfidious enemies” than by those who mined their foundations for mortar and limestone. They urged the Papal See to establish a more robust program of civic preservation: This is something that gives me simultaneously enormous pleasure— from the intellectual appreciation of such an excellent matter— and extreme pain— at the sight of what you could call the corpse of this great, noble city, once queen of the world, so cruelly butchered. . . . Thus those celebrated buildings that would today have been in the full flower of their beauty were burnt and destroyed by the evil wrath and pitiless violence of criminal men— or should I say beasts— although the destruction is not entire, for the framework survives almost intact, but without the ornaments; you could almost describe this as the bones of a body without the flesh.63

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Conscious of the fact that the beautiful structures and ornaments of churches and palaces are built from the recycled mortar of ancient marbles, Raphael and Castiglione go on to inveigh against the popes who allowed these antiquities to fall prey to ruin and spoliation. David Karmon has recently offered a major correction to the accepted view that the worst devastation of the Roman Forum occurred during the fifteenth to sixteenth century, arguing that Renaissance popes did indeed develop a comprehensive program of conservation and preservation.64 Still it is undeniable that the leading humanists used strong polemics against the city’s systematic plunder. When Castiglione does reflect on the surviving ruins of Rome, however, it is only to lament the work of that ultimate destroyer, Time: Superbi colli, e voi sacre ruine, Che ‘l nome sol di Roma anchor tenete, Ahi che reliquie miserande avete Di tante anime, eccelse e pellegrine! Colossi, archi, theatri, opre divine Triomfal pompe gloriose e liete, In poco cener pur converse siete E fatte al vulgo vil favola al fine. Cosi se ben un tempo al tempo guerra Fanno l’opre famose, a passo lento E l’opre e i nomi il tempo invido atterra. Vivrò dunque fra’ miei martir contento, Che se’l tempo da fine a ciò ch’è in terra, Darà forsi anchor fine al mio tormento.65 Proud hills and you sacred ruins Who only keep the name of Rome Ah, what miserable relics you hold Of so many exalted, extraordinary souls! Colossi, arches, theaters, divine works, Triumphal pomp, glorious and happy, You have turned into a bit of ash And finally become a cheap fable for the vulgar. Thus, if for a time the famous works Make war on time, slow-paced time Enviously brings down both works and names. So I shall live happily among my martyrs: For if time brings an end to what is one earth, It may yet bring an end to my torment.

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Francesco Orlando, in his magisterial Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination, writes that this Petrarchan sonnet is a prime example of the category of the “solemn-admonitory . . . a lesson in human transience, proffered, however, by a profane historical event, with the impressiveness of its unrestorable remains.”66 In a lofty, brooding tone, the author of Il Cortigiano enumerates many of the well-rehearsed topoi surrounding Roman ruins: the pleading vocatives to the overwhelming monuments, the disparity between the name of Rome and its immaterial substance (something Du Bellay will reiterate), the battle between a temporality that corrodes and an artifice that endures, the yawning disparities between spiritual permanence and architectural transience. After the catalogue of direct addresses— voi, tenete, avete, sete— the energy of the first three quatrains converges on the emphatic vivrò of the last, “I shall live,” as if taunting the fallen monuments. The author hopes that temporal equity will bring moral restitution (se’l tempo da fine . . . Darà forsi anchor fine); if all things end, his torments too shall be extinguished by time.67 A visual counterpart to Castiglione’s poem might be Herman Posthumus’s Landscape with Ancient Ruins (1536), which illustrates the antiquarian fantasy of accumulation (Plate 6).68 The imaginary landscape seems both haphazard and artfully arranged: the shattered artworks—busts, tombs, reclining figures, columbaria, arches, columns, friezes— demonstrate how much of antiquity has been lost, yet their copious quantity suggests that much remains. Amid such abundance a diminutive figure measures a gigantic broken base inscribed with a passage from the Metamorphoses: tempvs edax rervm tvqve invidiosa vestvstas o[mn]ia destrvitis, “Oh, most voracious Time, and you, envious Age, you destroy everything” (15.234–36). Yet surely not everything is gone, for by filling his canvas with an excess of surviving treasures, the painter ironically defies such Ovidian despair. An obvious way of reading the painting’s message is that it is about the melancholy of lost time. Another way can be instead a translatio imperii; the victor surveys the open-air market filled with spoils from the vanquished that are ready to adorn a discerning patron’s palace. The notion of architectural fragments as leftovers is explored in the episode of Astolfo’s voyage to the moon in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516–32). On a quest to retrieve the lost wits of Orlando, Astolfo is given instruction to ascend to the silvery orb of night, where all things that are lost on earth can be retrieved. This lunarscape is, one might

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say, the ultimate antiruin. By following an imaginative interplanetary law of conservation, the moon serves as an excellent permanent storage facility for all things, halting their disintegration on a scale unavailable even to the most resourceful antiquarian. Yet it is just a cosmic garbage dump. Parodying the connoisseur’s excesses, Ariosto fills the moon with random things— swollen bladders, golden and silver fish hooks, talons: Ruine di cittadi e di castella stavan con gran tesor quivi sozzopra. Domanda, e sa che son trattati, e quella congiura che sì mal par che si cuopra. Vide serpi con faccia di donzella, di monetieri e di ladroni l’opra: poi vide bocce rotte di più sorti, ch’era il servir de le misere corti. (34.79) Ruins of cities and of fortresses Lay scattered all about, with precious stores, Plots ill- contrived, broken alliances, Feuds and vendettas and abortive wars, Serpents whose faces had the semblances Of thieves and coiners and seductive whores. Phials lay broken— he saw many sorts— The futile service of ungrateful courts.69

As David Quint has argued, this episode of the moon reverses the Dantean principle of allegory according to which the scattered signs on earth serve as vectors of divine things above.70 In Ariosto’s fiction the ascent yields only a messier version of Posthumus’s Roman ruins. By refusing to weave the bric-a-brac of the quotidian into a providential order, Ariosto signals the collapse of epic teleology.

Finished Architecture Ruins, of course, need not be seen as tragic reminders of the past; they are a natural part of the life cycle of a building, in which the building exists in the intention of its creator, comes into material being at a specific site, matures, and eventually disappears. In Buildings Must Die Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs argue that architectural theory and practice must be aware of a building’s juvenescence and senescence.71 We usually think of time as blemishing the integrity of a work, but as Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow remark in On Weathering, staining and erosion actually contribute to

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a building’s identity, since architecture is an accumulation of experienced history. “Finishing ends construction,” they write; “weathering constructs finishes.”72 Enmeshed in the very fabric of the city and social life itself, buildings are constantly altered not only by nature but also by their occupants, changing the architect’s noetic intention to accord with the inhabitants’ daily needs. As such, there is never an ideal state of perfection in a building, no such thing as an un- ruin. Indeed all constructions in premodern Europe took place in the longue durée, taking multiple decades, generations, or even centuries. Marvin Trachtenberg characterizes the “premodern regime of architecture” as having “a slow velocity of the time of the building; a high inertial endurance of the resulting structure and a relatively high speed of the life-world.”73 The great, unfinished projects of the medieval cathedrals of Siena, Bologna, and Florence exist as beautiful counterpoints to the Roman aesthetics of ruins, all residing in a palimpsestic locus of urban mutability. For Trachtenberg, Leon Battista Alberti definitively changed the Romanesque and Gothic way of architectural construction by inventing what he calls the “Building-outside-Time” as a bulwark against ruinous contingency. Rejecting an earlier practice that integrated material duration into the identity of monumental architecture, Alberti sought to efface all temporal measures of mutability in order to establish a permanent, spatial representation of the ideal. The polymath writes in De re aedificatoria (1485), “I sometimes cannot stomach it when I see with what negligence, or to put it more crudely, by what avarice they allow the ruin of things that because of their great nobility the barbarians, the raging enemy have spared.”74 Alberti thus aspires to construct a classical building that would be a powerful agent against contemporary disorder, a material reflection of the virtuous magnificence of antiquity. Since a key Albertian principle is that “harmony is a perfection of the parts within a whole,” the slow, collective method of medieval architecture was now unacceptable because additions and renovations would always spoil the original intentions of the singular architect. Thus he aspired to create a building “out of time,” impervious to the forces of contamination. Alberti’s preference for fixed abstraction over the messy fluidity of time is displayed in his Descriptio urbis romae (ca. 1444), the first Roman survey to record the quantitative coordinates of its boundary in respect to the relative distances of the monuments. According to Mario Carpo, the Descriptio transforms the topography of

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Rome into “a system of points designated only by polar coordinates, without any other form of graphical documentation.”75 Carpo argues that, instead of drawing actual monuments, Alberti invented the digital image, in the literal sense of images translated into a sequence of numbers, so that the decaying sites of Rome abstract themselves into mathematical coordinates. The spirit of Albertian mathematics thus arises to annihilate once and for all the ghosts of classical ruins by reducing their corpses to pure numbers. The contrast between the fixed, singular monument and the slowly accrued, multigenerational monument is important to my thinking about the temporality of the work of art. Renaissance artists— whether they used things or words— hoped that their work would transcend its temporal and spatial horizons; at the same time they knew their work lived in the material world, where it faced the possibility of being recycled, spoliated, cited, and transformed by its successors. These two axes— one timeless, the other temporal— drive much of the discourse surrounding ruins.

Mechanical Reproduction: Doubles In the Renaissance construction looks like ruins and ruins look like constructions. The popes envisioned St. Peter’s as the earthly representation of the Kingdom of God. Yet the rebuilding of the great basilica was a controversy from the time of Nicholas V, spanned no fewer than eighteen popes and twelve architects, and for over a century resembled an enormous construction site in disrepair.76 Donato Bramante (1444–1514), the primary architect under Julius II, was dubbed “Il Ruinante” because of the massive destruction he caused.77 In order to realize his unprecedented plans, Bramante ordered the demolition of the area behind the apse and the removal of the Probus mausoleum as well as large parts of the transept and the western half of the nave.78 At multiple points construction came to a halt; a temporary roof covered the basilica’s half-finished walls for decades. Vasari’s Paul III Farnese Directing the Continuance of St. Peter’s in the Palazzo della Cancelleria (1544, fig. 7) shows the disorganized state of affairs: the patrons, planners, and workers all teem about confusedly. In the background it is difficult to tell whether the marble half-rotunda in front of the old Constantine basilica is rising or falling. According to Christof Thoenes, for the draughtsman no basic difference exists between new construction and an antique ruin.79 The

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Figure 7 Giorgio Vasari, Paul III Farnese Directing the Continuance of St Peter’s, 1546. Fresco, Palazzo della Cancellaria, Rome. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Netherlandish artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) drew St. Peter’s from multiple perspectives, capturing the ambivalence of its building process and the porosity between exterior and interior space (figs. 8 and 9). One shows the interior from the east with Bramante’s tegurio. In 1513 Bramante built an improvised shelter on the tomb of Peter and the altar above it. The small Doric arcaded structure was intended to preserve the sacred site’s identity, serving as a transition between the destruction of the old building and the construction of the new. Its style was classical, but it was made of poor peperino stone and was meant to serve only as a temporary facility. Interestingly, Nagel and Wood point out that Vitruvius uses the word tugurium for the primitive huts that are the origins of architecture. In their reading, Heemskerck’s reinvented tegurio pays homage to its humble architectural ancestors and gestures toward its sacred origins, as a memory of

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the tabernacle in the desert and the hut-as-manger motif in the Nativity paintings.80 Susan Stewart insightfully observes that the activity of printmaking shares a close kinship with ruination, since it works by the process of erasure.81 The printmaker’s instruments (etching needles, burins, and rollers) and printmaking’s chemical processes (using acids, water, and ink) literally ruin the plate by “biting” it. Thus the production of the image depends on the destruction of its original incision. Indeed the technical execution and its subject of ruins converse in an appropriate dialectic: the effects of weather and water stains, the geological strata intruding on the urban landscape, and the profusion of greenery twined over decrepit buildings are all represented on the surface of the paper made from wood pulp. Yet the very act of depicting them encloses them as artifacts, thus calling attention to their fragile conditions as well as remonumentalizing them as precious objects to behold and preserve through the medium of print. The surplus of ruins in Rome is mirrored by the very multiplicity of its representations. These range from pocket travel guides, scrapbooks, postcard albums, miscellanies, and architectural treatises to huge antiquarian folios. Blaise de Vigenère in 1579 lambasted the printers who, “in order to make up a book quickly, snatch, borrow, and steal wholesale and haphazardly from ancient authors, just as in the exploitation of the Colosseum, the Antonine baths and of other exquisite buildings in Rome, others have barbarously hastened their decline by making out of them small figures, wretched huts and other appendages.”82 Antoine Lafréry’s Speculum romanae magnificentiae (ca. 1540), reprinted multiple times, is a case in point: assembled from his three-decade-long career as a printer in Rome, the largest collection contains some 994 engraved maps, portraits, and subjects historical, biblical, and mythological.83 Tourists and other collectors would make their own selections and have them bound to their own tastes. If travertine was salvaged for church foundations, why couldn’t prints be reframed for new purposes? Broadly disseminated, reused, copied, prints reflected the bricolage nature of their subject.84 One of the most impressive— and enigmatic—prints of ruins is a collaboration between Bramante and Bernardo Prevedari. As the largest surviving fifteenth- century engraving made from a single plate, Ruined Temple (1481, 28 x 20 inches) presents a scene split between the interior of a highly ornamented church and an exposed side falling into disrepair (fig. 10). Many details are obscure: in the

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Figure 8. Maarten van Heemskerck, pillar of the crossing of new St. Peter’s Basilica, 1532– 36. Pen and brown ink. From Römischen Skizzenbücher I, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Art Resource, New York.

foreground the kneeling monk’s shadow is reduced to a skinny triangle, with its apex pointing to the decorated column; a gigantic candlestick conceals a pagan idol with a minuscule cross atop; friezes on the cupola show an ox-drawn cult procession bearing a small statue of Cupid; centaurs cavorting and nude men wrestling line the wall of the apse; the circular opening above the apse shows the back of a bust; hairline cracks run across the stone pavement; shattered debris lingers. With meticulous incised lines and stippling, Bramante creates the illusion of depth, shadow, and mystery. The image gives the aesthetic effect of estrangement and misrecognition: Is it a converted pagan temple? Is the man lapsing into idolatry? Is old religion really defunct? Whereas much of Renaissance design labored to transfigure the space of the church into a capacious vessel in which the incompatible and the anachronistic were subsumed into a sweeping architectonic whole and theological unity, Bramante’s composition seems to revel in its ambivalence and heterogeneity.85

Palimpsest and Paper “Palimpsest” is the commonplace that describes the ever- changing Rome as an overdetermined site in the classical tradition. It is

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Figure 9. Maarten van Heemskerck, interior view of the nave of old St. Peter’s Basilica, ca. 1532– 36. Pen and brown ink, wash. From Römischen Skizzenbücher II, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Art Resource, New York.

worthwhile to point out that the palimpsest is, above all, an invention of the Middle Ages. As the former skin of an animal— the protective layer that surrounds its body— it is repurposed for human use as the medium for the preservation of memory. The script on a page, like scars on a beast, marks the record of the creaturely experience. The parchment’s unique feature, of course, is its ability to be erased, to be reinscribed by different hands; all the while its traces are buried on the surface, visible upon close inspection. Thus the palimpsest is a good metaphor and metonym to describe what is at stake in the medieval relationship between words, objects, and Rome: a pagan past upon which Christianity was inscribed. Though there is much erasure, much remains. As palimpsest is to the Middle Ages, so paper is to the Renaissance. Parchment bears the qualities of the medieval era: it is singular, unique, and laborious. Mechanical print, however, is replicable,

Figure 10. Donato Bramante and Bernardo Prevedari, Ruined Temple, 1481. Engraving. The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, New York.

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cheap, and prodigious. Above all, it meant a wide diffusion. It is no accident that some of the most popular incunabula were Petrarchan poetry and guidebooks to Roman ruins. With their various copies, editions, and sizes, poetic collections and illustrations of ruin proliferated thanks to the agent of mechanical reproduction. This is the material condition in which the Renaissance poetics and pictorials of ruins were able to survive, expand, and flourish. With the advent of mechanical reproduction, historical monuments have secondary lives as mediated images. They survive and multiply in cultural memory by means of readily available, reproducible images, whether visual or verbal. For the foreigner the power of Roman ruins resides in their distance— the gap between source and destination— and their images come to stand in for the “original.” In other words, the aura of the monument lies in its remoteness, its inaccessibility, its inhabitation of another time and land. The image, on the other hand, lives in its “here-ness”— something to be grasped with one’s hands in the comfort of one’s home, tangible and portable. Sooner or later the very proliferation of the ruin’s representations (including literary ones) may well supplant the yearning to recover an image’s origin, so that we eventually prefer the image to the imagined, nonexistent original, whether it be the ruined Colosseum that still exists today or the perfect one in the time of Vespasian. In the famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1936), Walter Benjamin claims that reproduction not only contributed to originality; it preceded it: an art object became authentic only in its afterlife, not at the moment of its inception.86 In his autobiography Goethe confesses that when he saw Rome for the first time late in life, he was disappointed, because his childhood imagination was conditioned by his father’s prints of Piranesi, which were more impressive than the actual sites.87 In antiquity’s absence the white arena of the printed paper becomes the new space of the imagination. As a dismembered body stubbornly fixed to its geographical habitus, the ruin lost its use-value long ago, yet it assumes a new monument-function as a sign of its former glory; all the while its specter is ubiquitous, haunting the cultural imagination far and wide. In the massive, encyclopedic wreckage that is Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40), one slip in his Konvolut J records: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a

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constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.— Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. [] Awakening. []88

In this sense a dialectic image is the ruin and its representation doubled: the flash of past and present as well as the flash between the original and its representation. As I have noted, the ruin refers back to a monument that might not even have been finished. It is not a representation, but it is not the thing itself either. This is the first derivative: a lapsed identity. The second: the drawing of a ruin poses another paradox, existing as a mimesis of a mimesis, a copy of a shadow. Third, the engraved plate of a drawing, as Stewart argues, is a ruin. Fourth, in the age of mechanical technology, the engraving reproduces multiple copies that occupy multiple spaces simultaneously. Thus the representation of the ruin moves between singular and multiple ontologies, coexisting in overlapping temporalities, projecting lines of futurity beyond itself, much like the Shakespearean promise of literary repetition in “states unborn and accents yet unknown.”

Babel Visualized Recall how chapter 1 began with the dual etiologies of the births of linguistic fragmentation and ars memoriae, one from scripture and the other from classical rhetoric. We see these two discourses coalesce in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1563 Tower of Babel (plate 7). In one image the Dutch artist conflates the allegory of human pride in the Bible with the largest amphitheater of ancient Rome. There are numerous ironies: the construction of the Colosseum begun under Vespasian is funded by the spoils from the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Northern Reformation polemic often referred to Rome as the Whore of Babylon, but the town at the base of the Tower resembles Bruegel’s native Antwerp. In the foreground, where heaps of chiseled stone lie, masons genuflect before Nimrod and his retinue, thus reversing the biblical material of construction (“And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar”; Genesis 11:3). The bottom half represents either a geological crag from which the tower is being quarried, or the collapsed edifice itself. The top half, resembling a gigantic wound, exposes the inside of the Tower, which duplicates its outer

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shape. A closer look reveals a significant detail: its rings are not parallel to the ground; rather the form is in the shape of a spiral. The cyclical form is replicated in diminishing proportion from top to bottom. The mirroring of the inside to the outside induces feelings of both harmony and confusion, as if the dizzying structural sameness is reflective of the builders’ ingenuity, as if in the labyrinthine levels man was so confident of his cleverness that he began to dupe himself. The confusion of logos— coherent architectonic system— seems to both defy and explain the structure. There were many depictions of the Tower of Babel in the early modern period. Bruegel and his son painted at least three.89 It is no surprise that the Tower of Babel, whose very story is about linguistic dispersal and failed architecture, would find so many pictorial representations in this era, for the story marks the mythic origins of cultural differences, the folly of human enterprise, and the ruinous foundations of all art— all problems with which Renaissance thinkers were preoccupied. Thus Bruegel’s painting serves as a fitting final image for this chapter, the purpose of which was to demonstrate that the identity of the Eternal City underwent innumerable metamorphoses through her architectural renovations and innovations. The representations of the Eternal City likewise underwent myriad shifts in texts and images and moved from the singularity of the medieval palimpsest to the multiplicity of the early modern print. As a building’s constituent parts—pediments, cornices, shafts and bases of columns—were ripped from its original site and transported across the city and beyond, guidebooks, prints, récits de voyage, mirabilia, and other memorabilia carried Roman images far and wide. Poetry, then, offers a verbal response to such diverse assemblages. In the chapters that follow, we shall see how Petrarch, Colonna, Du Bellay, and Spenser, each in his own way, wrested poetic order from the chaos of material and linguistic ruins.

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Pa r t I I

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chapter 3

Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are so at their origins. — Friedrich Schlegel

The surge of Roman renovatio described in chapter 2 started in the 1420s, about two generations after Petrarch (1304– 74). Living on the cusp between the late medieval and the early humanist worlds, Petrarch repeatedly lamented that he was born at the wrong time: “It would be better to be born either earlier or much later, for there was once and perhaps will be again a happier age. In the middle, you see, in our time, squalor and turpitude have flowed together.”1 Any study of Renaissance ruins must chronologically begin with Petrarch, for he was one of the first thinkers in the postclassical age to recognize that the signs of antiquity were scattered, dispersed, and mutilated, which necessitated their reconstruction and renovation. In this chapter I argue that Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past can be conceived of as an investigation, a search for vestigia— traces, footprints, remnants, ruins. He searched by creating poetic works that traced the vestigia of his predecessors, above all Dante and Virgil; in turn his successors paid homage to him through imitation and emulation, creating the phenomenon known as Petrarchism. In his letters and dialogues he ceaselessly meditates on the relics of antiquity and the composition of the self. Thus the poetics of ruins for Petrarch is one in which his reflection on the ruins of Rome broadens into a meditation on lost time. This discourse prompts him to compose fragmentary works that attempt to recollect his scattered self. Intellectual historians of the Renaissance have long seen Petrarch as the forerunner of historicism and the emergence of the modern self. 2 Scholars in textual criticism have long explored how Petrarch 89

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spearheaded the humanist enterprise of gathering and collecting fragments.3 In the past generation scholars in literary criticism have been attuned to the fact that in Petrarch’s verse he himself is fragmented and composed in fragments.4 My chapter brings these strands of criticism into conversation. In order to fully understand Petrarch, one must be attentive to his thoughts on ruins, for his passion for architectural fragments is symptomatic of a larger worldview that saw the world in fragments. For Petrarch poetry and ruins exist in a state of interplay, so that ruins prompt poems and poems give ruins a voice. That is why I have chosen vestigium as my entry point, for the word embraces forms of ruins beyond that of buildings and taps into the larger humanist world of present absences—a space in which the nonexistence of a thing is marked by and felt more strongly than its residual signs. Born in exile, haunted by his love for the unattainable Laura, far away from his dead and living friends, Petrarch experienced loss as the fundamental condition of life. In one letter he says he is habituated to loss: “You will surely not deny that even absence itself has its pleasures unless perhaps we restrict all the beauty of friendship (which is indeed great) to the eyes alone and if we separate it from its abode which is in the mind” (Fam. 2.6).5 If we use vestigia (almost always in the plural) as a vector through his writings, Petrarch’s lexicon reveals a self that is fragmented by his experience of the past and a desire to repair the ravages of time by employing the contemplative exercise of writing. In the end, I want to argue, a Petrarchan poetics is nothing if not a metaphysics of impossible yearning— a yearning for a direct, unmediated encounter with an idealized object, whether it be the broken city of Rome, his spectral Laura, a faraway friend, or the tattered manuscripts of Cicero. Indeed, as the quotation suggests, since beauty in the flesh is not possible, it is up to the mind (anima) to re- create it. With the faculties of his imagination and memory, Petrarch strives to create a dimension of praesentia in which vestigial phenomena become tangible in the here and now.6 In the pages that follow we see a writer who encounters the world through a dense network of persistent vestigia. After a brief semantic history of vestigium, I argue that Petrarch’s search for Laura’s footprints in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is guided by a dissembling imitation of Dante’s work. We will see how in his epic, the Africa, Rome as a city is textualized and made whole through a careful reworking of its predecessors, Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Pharsalia. I notice the

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kinship between contemplating ruins and writing letters in Petrarch’s epistles, which are modeled after Cicero’s, and I offer some thoughts on the relationship between gathering the fragments of Petrarch’s self in the Secretum and collecting the fragments of ancient manuscripts in his “Letters to Dead Authors.” As Schlegel says, “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are so at their origins.”7 As Petrarch was the pivotal figure in recognizing the temporal disjuncture between antiquity and modernity, no man felt more deeply the pathos of textual and existential fragmentation.

The Traceless Etymon In the Etymologiae Isidore of Seville writes, “Footprints [vestigia] are the traces of the feet imprinted by the soles of those who went first, so called because by means of them the paths of those who have gone before are traced [investigare], that is, recognized.”8 Yet the origins of vestigium itself are unknown, its own traces vanished. According to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the word has some eight definitions, the most pedestrian being an index of absence, “a footprint, (in pl. also) track (left by a human being or other creature).”9 The word can be taken simply as “an imprint” or figuratively as “a mode of behavior regarded as an object of imitation or example.” It tracks celestial movement, “the path or orbit of a heavenly body,” as well as terrestrial evidence, “a visible trace or remnant of something which no longer exists, a trace or indication of the presence at any time of a person or thing.” And it has a temporal sense, “an instant in time,” when used in the phrase vestigio temporis. Vestigia can be diachronic or synchronic, material or formal, visible or invisible. They make us think of the past as a passing, whether they appear as simulacra that efface their originals or images that are shadows of their Idea. In its figurative sense the word can connote imitation or emulation. Quintilian uses it as a model for the craft of eloquence: “Beginners should be given the material predigested, as it were, according to their individual powers; when they seem to have formed their style sufficiently on their model, brief hints [brevia vestigia] only should be given to them— a sort of track which they can follow and then proceed along under their own power without help” (Inst. 2.6.5). The Roman orator establishes a pedagogical principle of progression: capable students need not be given a complete set of examples to slavishly follow, only brevia vestigia, “brief hints,” as heuristic pointers.

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As Gian Biagio Conte and Thomas M. Greene have taught an entire generation, imitation was the inexhaustible engine of literary creation in classical and Renaissance literature.10 The analogy of creative imitation as following in the footsteps of the past, in contrast to the well-known Senecan simile of writers as bees, offers a temporal model of a trajectory rather than a wandering, digestive model of incorporation.11 In this view literary development is achieved by retracing and surpassing previous vestigia by means of poetic imitation. Statius famously employs the word at the end of his Thebaid as an apparently fulsome compliment to his predecessor: Vive, precor; nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora, “Live, I pray; and tempt not the divine Aeneid, but ever follow her footsteps from afar in adoration” (12.817). Though Statius here conjoins the poetics of imitation with the rhetoric of veneration, it is certain that such tribute also implies a game of one-upmanship, given that he had just spent the previous twelve books remaking an ancient Greek tragedy in Latin verse. As we will see later, Petrarch, in his bid to become a Latin epic poet, in fact bypasses the footsteps of Virgil in favor of his forefathers Homer and Ennius. In this one move Petrarch pays respect to Virgil through his very exclusion. In a letter to Boccaccio he writes, “It is silly to trust only the ancients. The early discoverers were men too. If we should be discouraged by following too much the tracks of our predecessors [si virorum vestigiis deterremur], we should be ashamed” (Seniles 2.3).12 In the Middle Ages vestigia moved from the traces of the past to traces of the divine. Bonaventure writes in Itinerary of the Mind toward God, “The world is itself a ladder for ascending to God, we find here certain traces [vestigium], certain images, some corporeal, some spiritual, some temporal, some aeviternal; consequently some outside us, some inside.”13 The goal of his spiritual exercise is to move from these faint traces to certainty so that we may be drawn closer to the divine. The use of vestigia in these rhetorical, epic, and theological examples is obviously figurative. In its literal sense vestigium’s closest ancient Greek equivalent is ichnos, also meaning “a track” or “footstep.” In Vitruvius’s De architectura, a text not rediscovered until 1414 by Poggio Bracciolini, “ichnography” is one of the modes of representation, a compound of ichnos (print) and graphe (writing).14 In this sense a tracing exists before an building, since the graphic marks on the architect’s sheet are the basis for the construction to come. In Guarino Guarini’s 1686 Disegni di architettura civile ed

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ecclesiastica the ground plan of a church is identified as vestigium S. Laurentii taurini.15 Conversely the draughtsman and engraver Étienne Du Pérac calls his drawings of Roman ruins I vestigi dell’antichità di Roma (1575). Likewise the title page of Piranesi’s 1678 Vedute of Rome reads, urbis aeternae vestigia e ruderibus temporumque iniuriis vindicata. Tracing thus has two important temporal connotations in architectural drawings: the prelife and the afterlife of a building. In a building’s ichnographic prospective, one could say, is already contained the projection of its liminal afterlife. As Louis Marin remarks, “The outline on the ground at the surface level is nothing but the trace that would be left by the building if it were to be destroyed by time, by the violence of meteors or men.”16 In this jagged equivalence of vestigia as foreshadowing and vestigia as detritus, past and future are telescoped; origins and end meet. As such, the ruin has an analogous, though not entirely compatible meaning with vestigia. Vestigia are synecdoche, whereas the ruin is the image itself. Vestigia in the strict definition are formal, whereas the ruin is usually material. The ruin is an effaced semblance— the face— though it can also certainly be a part, or the “foot” of the building, as it were. Giuseppe Mazzotta has written, “Because ruins suspend the principle of identity and show that the past is out of reach, they are the material signs of time as it effaces all signs, emblems of a difference made materially immanent.”17 The ruin was the monument, as the old man was the young man.

Verbal Footsteps Francis Bacon writes in the De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), “Certainly words are the footsteps of reason, and the footsteps tell something about the body.”18 Words themselves are only linguistic traces that contain a partial approximation of a thinker’s idea. They are also but a residuum of their historical environment. Carlo Ginzburg’s classic essay, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” maps out an investigative methodology in which observing minuscule visual details, unintentional evidence, and linguistic slips in the manner of Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes, and Freud reveals the sources of an artwork, a crime, or a psychic disturbance.19 The Italian word he uses is spie, but vestigia too captures Ginzburg’s methodology. The verb vestigare encompasses Ginzburg’s two meanings: the search for traces and the search for something by means of traces.

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Thus the object of inquiry and its methodology are perfectly aligned. Vestigium is thus both model and method. In ancient rhetoric sequi vestigia is a poetic means of production, imitatio, whereas in humanist practice vestigare could be said to be the philological principle of recovery, constitutio. They have divergent goals: the first is to create something artistically new while gesturing toward the old; the second is to construct a critical edition that approximates the original as closely as possible. Hence I wish to posit a deep analogy between the hermeneutics of ruins and the linguistics of vestigia. Contemplating a ruin and analyzing a word engage in the hermeneutic principle that posits understanding within a particular “horizon” that is determined by our own historical coordinates. We trace Petrarch’s vestigia as he traces the vestigia of the ancients and Laura. Any historical interpretation must wrestle with the fragments of the past, whether they be effaced inscriptions on an arch or the obscured lines of a text. In the conclusion of his chorographic treatise on mountains, woods, and rivers, De montibus, Boccaccio writes that it is sometimes possible to guess the ancient names of places from their current vulgar names, but “in other cases, it is especially necessary to divine from the vestiges the things that cannot be followed, but I do not want to teach that now.”20 What cannot be deduced empirically must be intuitively “divined,” and that, for Boccaccio, does not seem like something that can be taught anyway. That is why he does not want to talk about it. Petrarch likewise recognizes that much of the past has vanished and that which remains is difficult to decipher. We will see that to understand the self too one must recover its past through reflection, something equally problematic. Vestigia is thus the perfect word to encapsulate Petrarch’s philological and spiritual hermeneutics.

Laura’s Footprints In Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the two senses of vestigia— literal footprints and models of imitation— operate in tandem on a literary and metaliterary level. The footprints are Laura’s and the model is Dante’s. Each poem documents Petrarch’s vain search for Laura from the traces of her orme, “footprints.” Petrarch’s poetry begins with the imago of Laura born from the moment of the innamoramento, supposedly on Good Friday, 6 April 1327, in the Church of St. Claire in Avignon. Her scattered footprints evoke her original

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presence, and the entire narrative within the collection is the repeated attempt to capture this singular being. As Robert M. Durling writes, “Absence is an experience of scattering, presence one of synthesis; the image of Laura in the memory is a principle of integration.”21 Petrarch’s great predecessor in writing about an unrequited love, of course, is Dante. The relationship of the two poets has been the basis of lively debate in Italian literary studies since Natalino Sapegno’s “Tra Dante e il Petrarca” and Giuseppe Billanovich’s “Tra Dante e Petrarca.”22 Gianfranco Contini, in his influential “Un’interpretazione di Dante,” argues that the presence of the Commedia in literary history is so deep that its influence works on a level of involuntary mnemonics, echoing Petrarch’s own admission of ab ignorante, where the presence of a resonant word signals a “memory- click” through thematic analogy or scattered interference. 23 Paolo Trovato has meticulously documented the “dantismi” in the Fragmenta. 24 For Marco Santagata, Dante is Petrarch’s maestro negato, ignored and disavowed master. 25 And the collection Petrarch and Dante explores the various themes of theology, “anti-Dantism,” and poetic rivalry. 26 My contribution to this tradition is to map the differences between the semantics of vestigia in Dante and Petrarch as indicative of their divergent worldviews. For Dante vestigia are the scattered traces of a fallen world that one must absolve and transcend. 27 So too for Petrarch, but he immerses himself in and indulges in them, finds consolation from them, and seeks to make them immanent. In this section I trace the trajectory of his movements in the Fragmenta through some instances of vestigio and its forms. The absent presence of Laura gives us the occasion to think about the operation of Petrarch’s desires and his way of articulating them through the traces of Dante. Petrarch’s tracking of a beloved’s footprints has an immediate poetic precedent in Dante: toward the incandescent end of Paradiso, moments before he is to receive his divine revelation, the poet gives thanks to Beatrice for aiding him in his journey: “O lady who gives strength to all my hope and who allowed yourself, for my salvation, to leave your footprints there in Hell,” O donna in cui la mia speranza vige, / E che soffristi per la mia salute / In inferno lasciar le tue vestige (Par. 31.80– 81). Toward the penitential conclusion of the Fragmenta, Laura comes to Petrarch in a dream and announces, “From the cloudless empyrean Heaven and from those holy places I have come, and I come only to console you,” Dal sereno / Ciel empireo et di quelle sante parti mi mossi, et vengo sol per consolarti (Rvf 359.9–11). The pathos

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of these lines is in the monosyllabic “sol”; Beatrice offers Dante salvation, whereas Laura offers only “consolation” and nothing more. Laura’s footprints never actually lead to her embodied presence, only an oneiric phantasm. In the final moments of the Fragmenta there is only regret for lost time. Christian Moevs explains, “For Dante the self is metaphysically rooted in a non- contingent reality, for Petrarch it is an evanescent locus of thought and desire, irreducibly other than both God and the world.”28 The first appearance of vestigio is in Rvf 35: Solo et pensoso i piú deserti campi vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti, et gli occhi porto per fuggire intenti ove vestigio human la rena stampi. (1– 3)29 Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow, and I keep my eyes alert so as to flee from where any human footprints marks the sand. 30

The poetic conceit of this sonnet ostensibly is that Petrarch the lover flees from the social world, where nobody understands him, and escapes to the “mountains and shores and rivers and woods,” monti et piagge / et fiumi et selve (lines 9–10), natural surroundings that mirror his internal desolation. Nevertheless he remains unable to escape the personified, omnipresent Love, who accompanies him incessantly: “Love . . . always comes along discoursing with me and I with him,” Amor . . . sempre / ragionando con meco, et io con lui (lines 13–4). It seems that Petrarch cannot escape the vestigie of his predecessor in the vernacular either. On the textual level the sonnet resonates subtly yet unmistakably with the sounds of Dante. Passi tardi et lenti echoes che giva intorno assai con lenti passi of Inferno 23.59 and Noi andavam con passi lenti e scarsi of Purgatorio 20.16. Aspre and selvagge correspond to esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte of Inferno 1.5, and Non han sì aspri sterpi né sì folti / quelle fiere selvagge of Inferno 13.7– 8. The sonnet suggests that after Dante, try as one might, there is no way to talk about Love except through him, for even the conceit of ch’Amor non venga sempre ragionando con meco corresponds to Dante’s own Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia. 31 The difference between the aspre and selvagge woods of Dante and Petrarch is that, in Dante, they are a site of error and confusion, whereas for Petrarch they are the sylvan sources of refuge and comfort.

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In a well-known letter to Boccaccio in Fam. 21.15, Petrarch discusses the vexed issues of conscious and unconscious influences: This one thing I do wish to make clear, if any of my vernacular writings resembles, or is identical to, anything of his or anyone else’s, it cannot be attributed to theft or imitation, which I have avoided like reefs, especially in vernacular works, but to pure chance or similarity of mind, as Tullius calls it, which caused me unwittingly to follow in another’s footsteps [iisdem vestigiis ab ignorante concursum]. 32

Answering the charge leveled against him that he disparages the author of the Commedia, Petrarch explains that he bears no envy for him. He says later in the same letter that Dante (never named explicitly) and his father were even friends. 33 As stated in his prose and demonstrated in his poetry, Petrarchan imitations display their derivation from the original texts but, having done so, proceed to distance themselves from these very texts and force us to recognize the poetic distance traversed. Petrarch’s appropriation of Dante in the Canzoniere is of such subtlety, accomplished with the slightest allusions in lexical, acoustical, and syntactic shading, that its very imitation is an art of dissimulation: “I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, imitating them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind” (Fam. 22.2).34 The difference between Laura’s footprints and Beatrice’s cannot be any clearer than in the second instance of vestigio in Rvf 125. Here Laura’s footsteps touch the earth, whereas Beatrice’s are in Hell. The latter leads one toward freedom from earthly desire; the former intensifies it: Ben sai che sì bel piede non toccò terra unquancho come quel di che già segnata fosti, onde’l cor lasso riede col tormentoso fiancho a partir teco i lor pensier’ nascosti. Così avestù riposti de’ be’ vestigi sparsi anchor tra’ fiori et l’erba che la mia vita acerba lagrimando trovasse ove acquetarsi! (125.53– 63)

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You know well that so beautiful a foot never touched the earth as on that day when you were marked by hers, wherefore my weary heart comes back with my tormented flanks to share with you their hidden cares. Would you had hidden away some lovely footprints still among the flowers and grass, that my bitter life might weeping find a place to become calm!

This poem is perhaps the clearest representation of Petrarch’s signature poetics of presence-absence.35 He seeks the signs of her presence in the impression she has left on other things, nature herself. The absence of Laura only underscores Petrarch’s despair; his verses are insufficient to portray his lady, and his formerly “sweet graceful rhymes,” dolci rime leggiadre (125.27) are now “harsh” and “naked” (parlo in rime aspre et di dolcezza ignude; 125.16). But if Laura fails to leave her dulcet stamp on Petrarch’s verses, her influence on the natural world is, according to the poet, plain to see. In seeking the traces of Laura in the natural world, Petrarch in Rvf 165 fantasizes that Laura’s footsteps have magical generative powers: “As her white foot through the green grass virtuously moves its sweet steps, a power that all around her opens and renews; the flower seems to issue from her tender soles,” come ’l candido pie’ per l’erba fresca / i dolci passi honestamente move, / vertù che ’ntorno i fiori apra et rinove / de le tenere piante sue per ch’esca (165.1–4). The failure to find Laura from her footprints means that Petrarch must turn to the natural environment in order to find her traces. Her attributes are scattered throughout the world, and the world begins to embody the epiphenomena of her features.36 Though the pathetic fallacy of projecting the troubles of the interior mind onto the outside world might be a lovely poetic conceit, doctrinally speaking it borders on the blasphemous, for in medieval theology the term vestigia was often used to describe the traces of God in a fallen world, not the traces of a beloved lady. Bonaventure in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum says we may rise to knowledge of God per vestigia or in vestigiis. The mind in contemplating God has three distinct grades: the senses, which discerns the traces (vestigia) of the divine in the world; reason, which examines the soul itself, the ultimate “trace” of the divine Being; and pure intellect (intelligentia), which progresses from the earthly realm to grasp the divine cause: All creatures of this sensible world lead the mind of the one contemplating and attaining wisdom to the eternal God; for they are shadows, echoes and pictures, the traces [vestigia], simulacra, and

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reflections of that First Principle most powerful, wisest, and best; of that light and plenitude; of that art productive, exemplifying, and ordering, given to us for looking upon God.37

Bonaventure’s vestigia are about the presence of spirit in matter aspiring toward its transcendental creator, in contrast to the lateral direction of vestigia in the ancient authors and Petrarch. In its theological sense vestigia signifies both the absence of divine totality and traces of its partial presence. Instead of seeing the vestigia trinitatis in the created world, in the manner of Bonaventure, Petrarch sees nature as containing vestigia laurae, as it were. From the traces of Laura left in nature, Petrarch, by association, proceeds to say that nature— the flowers, grass, meadows, rivers—will now manifest his psyche, burning with la mia fiamma. The poet is not interested in nature qua nature, but only as a reflection or refraction of Laura. The search for literal vestigia leads not to the divine creator of the footprints but to a projection of the beloved’s attributes that permeate the natural world. Such projection is a desperate attempt to imbue the world with her presence, to reify her absent signs. The vestigia of Laura, to take John Freccero’s influential insight, become idolatrous, for they create a circular referentiality that prevents the mind from ascending to a higher order. 38 Finally, in the grand canzone Rvf 360, vestigio no longer means footprints but something like “the persistence of memory.” Santagata has studied how, in the final months of Petrarch’s life, in 1373– 74, the poet obsessively renumbered the last poems of the collection. 39 In the final arrangement the poems labeled 360 to 366 form a kind of penitential progression that leads to an unfulfilled conversion. Rvf 360 is staged as an interrogation between the poet and an adversarial Love, each pleading their case before the tribunal of Reason. Love defends his actions: Et per dir a l’estremo il gran servigio, da mille acti inhonesti l’ò ritratto, ché mai per alcun pacto a lui piacer non poteo cosa vile giovene schivo et vergognoso in atto et in penser poi che fatto era uom ligio di lei ch’alto vestigio l’impresse al core, et fecel suo simìle. (360.121– 28) And, to tell finally my greatest service, from a thousand vicious acts I have drawn him back, for low things could never please him in any

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way (a young man shy and shamefast in act and in thought) once he had become the vassal of her who impressed a deep mark upon his heart and made him similar to herself.

Vestigio here means an affect, an emotive affect arising from past experience, close to the Virgilian sense of agnosco veteris vestigia flammae, “I recognize the traces of old love” (Aen. 4.23).40 The famous line of Dido is found in book 4 of the Aeneid, when she confesses her burning lust for Aeneas, thus breaking her vow of fidelity to her dead husband, Sichaeus. Here we have a micro- confrontation with the author of the Commedia by way of their Latin master. Upon seeing Beatrice in the culminating cantos of the Purgatorio, Dante translates Dido’s fateful utterance but crucially changes one word: conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma (30.48, my emphasis). Why? Virgilian vestigia are more akin to a retrograde contagion, whereas Dante’s segni are Augustinian, which is to say ultimately redemptive, promising an eventual reunification between the signifying and signified. Simone Marchesi calls this reinterpreted line a “transvaluated fragment of a salvaged text.”41 Petrarch’s small but unmistakable lexical replacement of vestigia for segni indicates his kinship with Dido’s tragic, suicidal eros rather than Dante’s pure, sublime charity. Admittedly Petrarch’s formulation in Rvf 360 is not exactly a direct citation of either the Aeneid or Purgatorio, but this is a prime example of Contini’s “memory- click.” Petrarch restages this drama of literary transmutation through the voice of the god Love, embedding it in a relative clause that describes the effects that Laura has on him, she “who impressed a deep mark [alto vestigio] upon his heart.” His love is equated with Dido’s illicit desire and opposed to Dante’s. The poet’s allusive gestures are so pervasive, the Virgilian and the Dantean atmosphere so suffused, that this single resonant word reverberates singingly in an ambience of thick intertextuality. As the affect of rekindled passion spreads from lover to lover, the poetic practice of allusion becomes contagious, forming a nexus of cultural topoi that spans the literary tradition. In short, instead of Dante’s emphasis on vestigia as a transcendental vector of divine love, Petrarch insists on vestigia as recursive traces of the sorrowful past. There is more. Vestigio here also bears theological traces. Thomas Aquinas teaches that in creatures great and small there is a “vestige” of the Trinity. But the “image of God” truly resides in the highest part of man, his intellect:

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While in all creatures there is some kind of likeness to God, in the rational creature alone we find a likeness of “image,” whereas in other creatures we find a likeness by way of a “trace” [in aliis autem creaturis per modum vestigii]. Now the intellect or mind is that whereby the rational creature excels other creatures; wherefore this image of God is not found even in the rational creature except in the mind; while in the other parts, which the rational creature may happen to possess, we find the likeness of a “trace” [similitudo vestigii], as in other creatures to which, in reference to such parts, the rational creature can be likened.42

In Rvf 360 Love makes his plea to the highest human faculty praised by the Angelic Doctor, in front of the throne of “the queen who holds the divine part of our nature,” a la reina / che la parte divina / tien di nostra natura (v. 2–4). He implicitly gestures toward the medieval tradition of vestigia trinitatis, claiming that the vestigio of Laura has been inscribed in the heart of the creature Petrarch, while he has neglected the image of God dwelling in his intellect. By saying that Petrarch has made himself a vassal (uom ligio) of Laura, Love turns the feudal, sacramental relationship between a subordinate and his earthly lord into the erotic bond of subservience.43 Thus the highest sense of vestigio in the Fragmenta is the coalescence of the tragic presence of Virgilian passion along with the theological absence of imago Dei. In conclusion, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta articulates a poetics of the search for lost time. This is accomplished by the construction of Laura’s vestigi sparsi, which indicate her absence through a nonsemblant signification. The poems as they are collected become the imperfect record of Petrarch’s psychic disintegration. Indeed as the words from the first line of the poem declare (and now the received Italian title), his poetry is but rime sparse, scattered rhymes gathered into a collection. But even the name rime sparse is oxymoronic, for sparse is centrifugal, whereas rime is centripetal. Since the technical function of rima is the linkage of two final syllables with homophony in the last word of continuous verses, a conjoining of sonic semblance with semantic arbitrariness, its operation is based on identity and difference. As Teodolinda Barolini argues, the Petrarchan problematic is a “metaphysical issue of the one and the many. Singular versus plural, whole versus fragment.”44 The act of writing for Petrarch is an attempt to bring into a textual order the scattering of time. The Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as such are the vestigia of vestigia, the fragments of fragments. The entire archive of Petrarchan

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poetry is driven by a passion for articulating the ruins of desire, the ruins of time, and the ruins of the self. It is not time, desire, and self that are made metaphorical ruins; rather ruins are literalizations of the fragmented self through time. The search for the whole, whether the body of Laura, the broken monuments of Rome, or lost voices from antiquity, finds only shadows, ruins, and fragments, ending in frustration. The erotics of absence is the poetics of ruins. The lover’s discourse is the poetics of ruins.

The Textual City I have explored how Petrarch the erotic poet retraces the footsteps of Dante’s Beatrice through Laura. Now I consider how Petrarch the epic poet in the Africa retraces the footsteps of Virgil, Statius, and Lucan. In a twist of allusive logic, Petrarch at the end of his epic follows the ancient precedent of Ennius’s dream of Homer, in which the epic poet proclaims his own future greatness in a work in which he himself becomes a character.45 The fictive Ennius in the Africa describes his epic mission thus: Vestigia famae Rara sequens, quantum licuit per secula retro Omnia pervigili studio vagus ipse cucurri, Donec ad extremas animo rapiente tenebras Perventum primosque viros, quos Fama perenni Fessa via longe ignotos post terga reliquit. (Africa 9.133– 38) Following the sparse footsteps of Fame, with unsleeping application I made my wandering way where possible backwards through all the centuries, until my hurrying spirit brought me to the remotest shades and those great men whom Fame, exhausted by her ceaseless traveling, left forgotten far behind her.46

This formulation of vestigia famae / rara sequens is also Lucan’s description of Caesar searching for Pompey after the battle of Pharsalus: “in vain he followed Pompey’s scattered traces over the land,” cuius uestigia frustra / terris sparsa (9.952–53). Thus in this one expression Petrarch conjoins the beginning and the end of the Latin epic tradition. Moreover these two uses resonate with the famous envoi of Statius’s Thebaid: Nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora, “Live, I pray; and essay not the divine Aeneid, but ever follow her footsteps from afar in adoration” (Theb. 12.817). As Philip Hardie observes, “Statius’ poem follows

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at a respectful distance Aeneas’ instructions to his wife Creusa at Aeneid 2.711 longe seruet uestigia coniunx ‘Let my wife follow at a distance.’ Ennius’ pursuit of Fama’s footsteps back into the past, however, repeats Aeneas’ own attempt to retrace his wife’s footsteps when she disappears, Aen. 2.753–4 uestigia retro / obseruata sequor per noctem et lumine lustro ‘I retraced and followed my footsteps through the night, scanning them with my eyes.’”47 Footsteps follow footsteps, epic follows epic. Petrarch himself acknowledges in Fam. 3.18, “It was the respectful and humble testimonial by the poet Statius Pampinius to the Aeneid of Virgil, whose footsteps deserved so much to be followed and worshipped, that informed his Thebaid as it was about to be published.”48 Through the voice of Ennius vestigia famae / rara sequens encapsulate Petrarch’s lifelong project of reviving antiquity. From writing the Africa to editing the manuscript of Livy to accidentally discovering the letters of Cicero, Petrarch’s intellectual mission has been none other than to retrace the vanished traces of Rome. A few lines after Ennius’s speech, Petrarch in his own voice laments his belatedness: Ipse ego ter centum labentibus ordine lustris / Dumosam tentare viam et vestigia rara / Viribus imparibus fidens utcumque peregi (Africa 9.404– 6), “I myself after the lapse of fifteen hundred years trusting in my unequal abilities to attempt that path through the scrub following those sparse footsteps, achieved it in my fashion” (9.563– 68). It is precisely this sense of historical alienation that gives him the license for such poetic audacity, for in no uncertain terms Petrarch declares that he has written the first epic in Latin since antiquity. The literal footsteps of travelers to Rome follow these vestigia rara in the epic tradition. Indeed one of the most resonant episodes of Petrarchan imitation occurs in book 8 of the Africa, when the Carthaginians are being led around Rome. This passage follows the walk of Evander and Aeneas in book 8 of the Aeneid and Caesar’s tour of Troy with an anonymous guide in book 9 of the Pharsalia.49 In these three perambulations time past and time present coexist within a single topographic narrative. Characteristic of these textual walks is the notion that the ideal Rome never exists in the present— it is either not yet built or already in ruins. Present Rome exists either as an archaeological repository or a pregnant projection. Freud’s famous analogy of the archaeology of Rome and mental life makes clear that each sedimented layer of memory contains traces of what lies beneath

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it; so in poetic Rome, each text, by virtue of its imitative and allusive nature, contains within itself traces of its epic precursors. 50 In Petrarch the perfect Rome exists for but a moment; in Virgil the ideal Rome is projected to the future; in Lucan Rome is shattered, always already in the past. In book 8 of the Africa the Carthaginian envoys are led on their tour of Rome.51 After defeat by Scipio’s army at the decisive battle of Zama, Carthage accepts the terms of surrender and sends a mission to Rome, where Hasdrubal makes a plea for clemency on behalf of his vanquished people. He asks to be shown the site of Rome: “Now that we stand here within your walls, it is our ardent wish to look upon your captives and to meet your citizens” (8.1203– 6), Nos vestre cupidos admittite menibus urbis / Captivosque videre date et cognoscere cives (8.851–56). Their wish is granted. Their itinerary is an inventory of Rome’s greatest hits: they pass through the Via Appia, the Palatine, the hut of Evander, and the birthplace of Romulus, before making their way to the Aventine, Capitoline, Temple of Jupiter, Esquiline, Quirinal: Appia marmoreo suscepit limine porta Prima viros; magno mox obvia menia giro Pallantea vident, quo structa est regia monte Evandri primusque nove locus inclitus urbis; Hic elementa notis impressa. (8.862– 66) First are they welcomed by the Appian Gate With marble threshold, whence they may perceive The Palatine with ancient walls disposed In a huge circle. On that hill was built Evander’s palace; on that famous site First rose the newborn city. Here the guide Points out the traces of the early town Still visible to an experienced eye. (8.1221– 28)

In all they visit some forty sites, almost every one of which has a literary precedent in the Aeneid and Livy.52 The tour becomes in effect a fulfillment of Anchises’s prophecy to his son: “Under his auspices, my son, shall that glorious Rome extend her empire to earth’s ends, her ambitions to the skies, and shall embrace seven hills with a single city’s wall,” En huius, nate, auspiciis illa incluta Roma / imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo, / septemque una sibi muro circumdabit arces (Aen. 6.778– 83).

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Petrarch renders this passage a scene of high pathos for both the Carthaginians and the reader. Quintilian writes in the Institutio about the visual power of verbal art: The person who will show the greatest power in the expression of emotions will be the person who has properly formed what the Greeks call phantasiai (let us call them “visions”), by which the images of absent things are presented to the mind in such a way that we seem actually to see them with our eyes and have them physically present to us. (6.2.29)53

For Quintilian the ideal orator strives to overcome the distance between the audience and the historical past by using his rhetorical enargeia. The relationship between the reader and Petrarch and the relationship between the Carthaginians and their guide operate through the power of Roman rhetoric: the poet is using enargeia to persuade his readers, while the guide is simultaneously using his narratio to describe Rome: “Here the guide points out the traces of the early town still visible to an experienced eye.” The crucial difference is that whereas the Carthaginians see physical Rome and are ignorant of her history, the reader reads the textual Rome of Petrarch and, after seven books on the subject, is fully aware of her past. Keeping in mind the intertextuality of the poem, we can usefully contrast the defeated Carthaginians gazing at the sites of Rome with another defeated race, the Trojans. In book 8 of the Aeneid, the only book in which the action occurs on the actual site of the future Rome, the father of the Roman people contemplates the future site of his empire. Through Aeneas’s eyes, the reader sees the ante-Rome that was and the future Augustan Rome that will be. In their walk from Ara Maxima to Evander’s house on the Palatine in book 8, Evander treats Aeneas to a foundation narrative of the land’s mythohistory, topography, and institutions. There are even pre-Roman natural ruins: “Now first look at this rocky overhanging cliff, how the masses are scattered afar, how the mountain-dwelling stands desolate, and the crags have toppled down in mighty ruin!,” Iam primum saxis suspensam hanc aspice rupem, / disiectae procul ut moles desertaque montis / stat domus et scopuli ingentem traxere ruinam (8.190– 92). Scholars generally agree that Virgil’s vision of early Rome is interfaced with the Augustan transformation of the city. 54 The tour narrative exists on two levels of focalization: the sites that Evander shows Aeneas emphasize the past— the site of Rome before the city of Rome—while Virgil’s parenthetical asides (“where

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valiant Romulus restored an asylum,” quem Romulus acer asylum rettulit [342]; “golden now, then bristling with woodland thickets,” aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis [348]; “they saw the cattle everywhere, lowing in the Forum of Rome and the chic Carinae,” passimque armenta videbant / Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis [361]) point out to the reader resonances with the present Rome. We are shown multiple imaginary Romes: the Latin past and the imperial future, origin and apogee. 55 Virgil conjures a double temporality: what is the future to the characters in the text is simply the present to the Augustan reader. For Virgil, Troy is the city that was, Rome the city that will be. As such, the sites are etiological as well as teleological. For Lucan, conversely, Rome is already the ruined city. 56 When Caesar visits the birthplace of his ancestors, Anchisae thalamos, in book 9 of Pharsalia, ancient poetry revisits its own birthplace, Troy, the ground zero of epic. Thus Lucan plays with the points of departure and arrival of the classical tradition: Virgil’s epic begins at Troy and ends on the threshold of a nascent Rome. Lucan’s epic begins on the threshold of a tottering Rome, with Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, before making its way back to Troy, the original site of civilizational collapse. Caesar’s Trojan tour is an accident. He thought he was chasing his enemy but instead ended up at the birthplace of history. In this resonant detour, instead of discovering Pompey’s “scattered traces,” vestigia (9.952), he happens upon “the mighty traces” of the walls of Troy, magnaque Phoebi quaerit vestigia muri (9.965). Troy is the site of broken myths and desolate ruins. What is left of the “burnt-out” city is nothing but a name: nomen memorabile. As such, the return to Troy is as much a textual as a geographic tour. As de Certeau in his essay “Walking in the City,” says, “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserves, remaining in an enigmatic state.”57 Like Aeneas, Caesar is a mirator famae and remains completely silent, marking one of his rare quasi-reflective moments. But unlike his predecessor, there is no grand prophecy here. In fact Lucan’s snapshots of the Trojan legends stress the divorce of mortal effort and divine guidance: the days when gods would make love to mortals (Venus and Anchises; Jupiter and Ganymede) or care about their opinions (the Judgment of Paris) are clearly in the past (9.970– 74). In Lucan it is as if the poet is announcing that his is the age of the Götterdämmerung, a postmythical, post-Homeric age; there is no contact

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whatsoever between mortals and immortals. So Rome, by extension, is stripped of its divine mandate. Lucan’s destroyed Troy proleptically reminds us of a scene in Dante’s Purgatorio: Vedeva Troia in cenere e in caverne; / O Ilïón, come te basso e vile / Mostrava il segno che lì si discerne! (12.61– 63), “I saw Troy in ashes and in cavernous pits: Oh Ilion, how cast down and and vile it showed you— sculpture which is there discerned!”58 In Lucan’s description two lapidary half-lines in the same metrical position stand out as gnomic remarks: etiam periere ruinae, “even the ruins have perished” (9.968) and nullum est sine nomine saxum, “No stone is without a name” (9.973). Both are insights into the very meaning of the textual city: the materiality of the past can be comprehended only by its literary representation. Etiam periere ruinae is the archaeologist’s worst nightmare but the poet’s golden opportunity. If the coming to be of a thing is its being brought to perfection, then the ruin is a nothing. How, then, does poetry express something that is no longer there? And what does it mean for stones to have names? In his capacious Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination, Francesco Orlando describes Troy as the Ur-city of the monitorio solenne, the category of the solemn-admonitory: “This is a decisive moment in the history of this category. Here the solemn-admonitory is contaminated by the vegetal sterile-noxious far harsher than the herds and flocks of the Greek epigrams: under its crushing weight the end of the ruins themselves—theme within the theme—unfolds.”59 In my reading Lucan is mainly concerned with the mutability of the material world: etiam periere ruinae testifies to a fate worse than the unidentifiable corpses in the anecdote about Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory (De or. 2.86.351–53). Here even the mangled monuments have disappeared. Simmel’s brief but luminous essay, “The Ruin,” discussed in chapter 2, is also helpful here: “Architecture is the only art in which the great struggle between the will of the spirit and the necessity of nature issues into real peace, in which the soul in its upward striving and nature in its gravity are held in balance.” The ruin is a Hegelian “cosmic tragedy” in which “the balance between nature and spirit, which the building manifested, shifts in favor of nature. . . . The decay appears as nature’s revenge for the spirit’s having violated it by making a form in its own image.”60 What remains is suspended between the downward thrust of Natur and the upward thrust of Geist. For Lucan poetry will have to supplement nature’s deficiencies. Even as ruins themselves perish, as stones return to their preanthropomorphic existence and are reabsorbed into nature, the

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fleeting creations of architecture still endure in poetry. Indeed nullum est sine nomine saxum implies that Troy is an overdetermined tourist spot of literary, historical, and mythic attraction. In Roman culture the fate of a place is inextricably tied to the origins of its name— nomen est omen. The Sibylline oracle written in Greek had already prophesied Rome’s end through paronomasia: “Samos too will be a pile of sand [sammos], and Delos will disappear [adelos]), and Rome will be a narrow street [rume].”61 Lucan plays with this by saying tibi, Roma, ruenti (Phar. 7.418). The prophecy of Anchises in book 6 of the Aeneid similarly functions on the principles of naming: Hi tibi Nomentum et Gabios urbemque Fidenam, Hi Collatinas imponent montibus arces, Pometios Castrumque Inui Bolamque Coramque; Haec tum nomina erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine terrae. (Aen. 6.773– 76) These to your honor will build Nomentum and Gabii and Fidena’s town; these shall crown hills with Collatia’s towers, and Pometii, the Fort of Inuus, Bola and Cora: one day to be famous names, these now are nameless places.

In response it is precisely this Virgilian nomenclature that Lucan will betray in his rewriting of the epic genre: Tunc omne Latium / Fabula nomen erit; Gabios Veiosque Coramque / Pulvere vix tectae poterunt monstrare ruinae (Phar. 7.391– 93), “Then all the Latin name will be a fable: Gabii, Veii, Cora hardly will be indicated by their dust- covered ruins.” The Latin nomen of Virgil becomes nothing but a fabula. Caesar destroys not only Rome, the constructed order of society, but by extension the natural order of the universe. Time is not the only agent of destruction, but man too: “It is not devouring time which has eroded and abandoned to decay these memorials of the past: it is the crime of civil war we see, so many empty cities,” non aetas haec carpsit edax monimentaque rerum / putria destituit: crimen civile videmus / tot vacuas urbes (7.397– 99). As Lucan’s Caesar has made Rome into a landscape of destruction and ruin, he in turn is frequently described with the verb ruere, as heedlessly rushing headlong and without forethought. The noun ruina and the verb ruere both denote that ruins and ruining are simultaneously a condition and a process, that is, aftermath and cause. Latin authors often conflate the rushing impulsive motion, the verb, with its effects, the noun. Horace is sensitive to the valences of the word and plays on the ruination that is caused by the civil war in Rome: “Yet

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another generation is already being ground down by civil wars, / and through its own strength Rome itself hastens ruin,” Altera iam teritur bellis civilibus aetas / suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit (Epod. 16.1–2). In Stoic thought the physical activity of rushing is accompanied by a corresponding mental state, often with moral overtones. Ruere, like furor and ira, is often used in contrast to moderatio. The action of ruere implies impetuous and hotheaded behavior in the face of overwhelming odds. In ancient Rome this term was strongly opprobrious. It meant the opposite of the Stoic ideals of forbearance and discipline, of the life led according to ratio—in short, the perfect word to describe Lucan’s Caesar.62 Immediately after Caesar’s prayer, Lucan offers his own envoi: O sacer et magnus vatum labor! omnia fato Eripis et populis donas mortalibus aevum. Invidia sacrae, Caesar, ne tangere famae. . . . Venturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra Vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aevo. (9.980– 83, 985– 86) O how sacred and immense the task of bards! You snatch everything From fate and give eternity to mortal people. Caesar, do not be touched by envy of their sacred fame. . . . The future generations will read you and me, our Pharsalia shall live on, and no age will ever doom us to oblivion.

Lucan’s point is that just as the tourist needs the help of a guide through an unfamiliar terrain, the student of history is ultimately dependent on texts. It is the task of the poet to inscribe the past into the semiotic absence of the ruin in order to make stones speak their names again. The desolate scenes of Troy in the Pharsalia bear comparison with the Temple of Juno in Aeneid 2. As representations they are nothing but names and empty pictures. Indeed the last line of the fresco depicting Troilus can be read as a metaphor of inscription. In the verse “his trailing spearpoint scribbles in the dust,” versa pulvis inscribitur hasta (Aen. 1.479), the noun versa could be reflective of Virgil’s own verses, and inscribere “to write on” or “inscribe.” Françoise Meltzer writes: Troilus’s spearpoint, careening senselessly in the dust as it does, produces no writing— this is a measure of the warrior’s helplessness— but

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does leave its mark in the dust, a mark the fresco imitates by representation. Here is truly the image of an image: for the scribble of the spearhead at once mirrors the tragedy of Troy and the trace left by the tragedy— a trace the frescoes reiterate. This trace— inscription that is not writing per se, but rather recording— insists upon memory and therefore makes the slaughter of Troy an event with meaning.63

Likewise Lucan inscribes the trope of the ruin into his own text. Though the ruins themselves have been “ruined,” Lucan must write so that the names of the original buildings will not perish. For all their sifting and brushing, archaeologists cannot re-create the ancient sites; thus the poet becomes the final guardian of memory. Buildings turn to ruins, ruins turn to stones, stones turn to dust, and dust turns to nothing. It is the poet’s burden to record what might disappear— the ruin—in what might be longer lasting: the text. Let us return to Petrarch. At the end of the Africa the poet is thinking about the fate of his creation. In a remarkable act of poetic authorization and self-fulfilling prophecy, Petrarch audaciously inserts himself into the narrative. On a ship bound to Rome, Ennius recounts to Scipio a dream he had in which he talked to Homer about a later poet who happens to be none other than Petrarch himself: Agnosco iuvenem sera de gente nepotum, Quem, regio Italie, quemve ultima proferet etas. Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grania facta, Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpus in unum Colliget. . . . Titulusque poematis illi Africa. (9.220– 24, 234– 35) I recognize the youth as one of a late line of progeny Whom Italy will bear in times to come. . . . He will be called Franciscus; And all the glorious exploits you have seen He will assemble in one volume. . . . And he will call his poem Africa.

This dream visitation spells out Petrarch’s theory of poetic legitimation. The nearest vernacular precedent to this spectral communion of the poets is Dante’s self-induction into the august company of Homer, Lucan, Ovid, Horace, and Virgil in Inferno 4. Marchesi has shown that Dante’s shadowy simultaneity is radically different from Petrarch’s view of antiquity as “dischronicity.”64 In Petrarch’s choice of Homer and Ennius, he in effect bypasses and effaces Virgil in order

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to retrieve earlier models who stand, respectively, at the beginning of Greek and Latin poetry. Ironically Ennius exists in fragments, and Petrarch could not read Greek. In his letter to “Homer,” collected in the last book of the Familiares, he writes, “I realize how far removed you are, and I fear that it may prove annoying for you to read so many things in the shadows” (24.12).65 Only in the imaginative space of his poetry can he reanimate the dead and dream of how one poet talks to another poet who happens to be the dreamer himself.

Memory and Melancholia I have described several epic walks in Rome. Now I turn to the famous letter— Familiares 6.2—in which Petrarch himself walks these very grounds, this time with his friend Giovanni Colonna.66 The sequere vestigia that was only imaginative before becomes literal as Petrarch treads on the same geographic ground as his favorite authors. In his epic Petrarch is seeking a synoptic and synchronic vision of Rome at its apogee. As we have seen, such vision comes only to the awed and defeated “other.” Here it comes to the writer himself, a temporal “other,” to be sure, but a fully knowing one who appreciates the obsolescent grandeur of the city’s decay. Composed in 1337 or 1341 the letter is written as a response to Colonna’s request that Petrarch recount some of the walks they took and the talks they had.67 The activity of tracing turns metaphoric in the epistolary; Petrarch says that the “affectionate greetings” of letters are “like footsteps of the spirit” (Fam. 21.15).68 Beginning with a leisurely meditation on how one should love truth itself rather than follow a particular school of philosophy, Petrarch then gives a staggering chronological list of some eighty sites that they frequented. Climbing to the top of the Diocletian Baths, they reminisce about the sweep of history and the tasks of moral philosophy. He ends by wryly telling Colonna that he cannot say everything he wants in the short space of a letter and that it will be followed in due time by an entire treatise on the subject of their conversation. Since the Renaissance this letter has been recognized as one of the era’s founding manifestos. The line “For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?,” Quis enim dubitare potest quin illico surrectura sit, si ceperit se Roma cognoscere? became a rallying cry for rebirth. Poggio Bracciolini and Antonio Loschi were inspired to take similar walks, as were Raphael and

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Castiglione, Donatello and Brunelleschi.69 Edward Gibbon at the conclusion of his monumental work recounts Petrarch’s and his followers’ walks as a prelude to his own etiology: “As I sat musing amid the ruins of the capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”70 Jacob Burckhardt begins with this Petrarchan anecdote in the section “Recovery of Antiquity” in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.71 The letter has continued to elicit a number of brilliant readings. Greene writes that Petrarch summons “the archeological, necromantic metaphor of disinterment, a digging up that was also a resuscitation or a reincarnation or a rebirth.” He proposes that Petrarch engages in the activity of “subreading: a decipherment of the latent or hidden or indecipherable object of historical knowledge beneath the surface.”72 Leonard Barkan argues that Petrarch draws his technique of telescoping Rome from the opposite direction of Virgil; whereas Evander guides Aeneas through a pre- created Rome, “Petrarch takes advantage of centuries of ruin and further obliterates the landmarks so that they become little more than an excuse for demonstrating his discursive ability to envisage the golden age.”73 Mazzotta writes, “The dual perspective on history, pagan and Christian, shows that history is not a homogeneous totality or a monolith: there are in the same theater of history, on the contrary, divergent lines, diversified chronologies, and residual layers buried under or scattered over the ground.”74 As insightful as these readings are, they all ignore the basic genre of the text as an epistle. My contribution to this conversation is to posit that Petrarch’s exercise of letter writing deeply informs and is intertwined with his ruminations on ruins. Letter writing in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries was dominated by the ars notarie, mostly business transactions written in simple Latin concerning the contractual details of sales, legal obligations, political or diplomatic agreements.75 With the rise of ars dictaminis and his rediscovery of Cicero’s informal, gossipy Ad Atticum in Verona, Petrarch begins cultivating a warm, friendly, domestic style in the mid-1340s.76 Cicero writes, “Letter-writing was invented just in order that we might inform those at a distance if there were anything which it was important for them or for ourselves that they should know” (Ad familiares 2.4.1). Historically, then, Petrarch’s Familiares as a collection of letters can be situated between this shift from the medieval formal, scribal method

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of dictation to the more personal, intimate style typical of the humanists. Petrarch’s letter presents a double nostalgia: he laments both the disappearance of the magnificence of Roman antiquity and the intimate moments of an abiding friendship. Wandering amid Roman ruins and writing to friends are analogous experiences— the condition of absence prompts the desire to re- create presence. At the core of both is the act of reaching out from the temporality of the present into the recesses of memory in order to stave off oblivion. Writing a letter signals this double absence. Horace’s sermones are “one half of a dialogue” since by definition the addressee is not there.77 The purpose of Petrarch’s letter is the melancholic pleasure of “recreating,” in both senses of the word, what was once two-halves of a dialogue. Colonna is to “enjoy” himself, and Petrarch is to “summon into being” a disappeared conversation. In the next letter, also to Colonna, Petrarch writes, “While I seem to be conversing with you, I have forgotten that I am writing a letter” (Fam. 6.3).78 We see him trying to bridge a number of interstitial gaps: first, the fictive vision of Rome as a whole, from the dizzying grandeur of the empire to its abject squalor during its “Babylonian captivity”; second, the distance between the original day spent wandering in the city and its retelling in writing (or dictation) at his desk; third, a further gap in time between when he finishes the letter and when Colonna receives it; fourth, still more time elapses before the document is revised and gathered with many others in the Rerum familiarum libri.79 Letters about the ancients, letters to the dead, letters to posterity, letters to absent friends: for Petrarch the literary epistle serves as a grand nexus, a meeting point for minds separated by time and space. Petrarch’s bid to fuse past, present, and future is encapsulated in the fact that he self-anthologizes these letters, thus constructing multiple audiences: the original recipient of the individual letter; the dedicatee of the Familiares, “Socrates,” Petrarch’s friend Ludwig van Kempen; and future readers, whom Petrarch addresses in the “Letter to Posterity” as “most worthy reader, whoever you are” (Seniles 18.1).80 Kathy Eden, in recuperating the rhetorical concept of oikeion or familiaritas, calls letter writing the cultivation of an ethical and social bond of “intimacy.”81 Petrarch’s ambition was to reach across what WaiChee Dimock would call “deep time,” the potentiality of literature to span generational divides.82 The Epistola posteritati, belonging to the poet’s later years, expresses this tenuous possibility: “You may perhaps have heard something about me, although even this is uncertain

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[dubium sit], whether a slight and obscure name can penetrate far in space and time [perventurum sit].”83 Of course the hope is a fragile one, since it is tempered by the subjunctive sit, repeated twice; just as Petrarch knows that the transmission of classical authors is fraught with uncertainty, contingency, and loss, so is the process by which future readers will save and remember him. His letters may end up as broken as the monuments of Rome. The letter begins and is punctuated with verbs in the imperfect: deambulabamus, “we used to walk”; vagabamur, “we used to wander”; and solebamus, “we used to stop.” The first-person plural inclusive instantly creates a bond between Colonna and the author, thus making him an equal participant in the production of memory. The activity of walking and wandering, like memory itself, is always past progressive, incomplete, an ongoing activity. In the second sentence of the letter, the first verb, deambulare, “to go for a walk” without a specific direction, is replaced with obambulare, a purposeful “to walk up so as to meet,” which is part of Petrarch’s perypateticum morem, his peripatetic custom. Showing off his erudition Petrarch alludes to the ancient Greek tradition of walking about while teaching. For the philosophers to think is to walk. For Augustine, whom Petrarch read deeply, to think is to remember.84 The argument of the letter, beginning as if in midthought, is as circuitous as his walks. When Petrarch walks around Rome and gazes longingly at the many ruins, his wanderings trigger a first-order recollection; the dissolved architecture as material memory points to the glory of ancient Rome. When he remembers it in the letter, his walk becomes a secondorder recollection, a memory of a memory. The letter itself is further constructed as a series of dialectical oppositions: present and past, sects of philosophy and the nonpartisan search for veritas, the light of Christianity and the darkness of antiquity, self and friend, leisure and business, solitude and company, wandering and sitting, writing and conversation, chatting and silence, the articulate and the ineffable, what is given and what is promised. The perambulations through Rome fill Petrarch with an irrepressible longing for antiquity: “At each step there was present something which would excite our tongue and mind.”85 Petrarch, who had previously experienced Romanitas only through its textual remnants, now believes the actual sites to be the real aide-mémoire to the past. Running the historical gamut from the Palace of Evander to the martyrdom of Pope Calixtus, the millennial events are presented as an

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inventory marked with contiguities, discontinuities, proximities, and juxtapositions. Their divagating itinerary, unlike the Carthaginian tour, is simply impossible geographically. It can occur only through writing; that is, the expression of linearity can happen only in the direction of the sentence. As such, their directionless roaming is wrested from discursive chaos into semichronological order by virtue of syntax. Petrarch’s panorama of the city, a visual summoning of Roman history, is framed by anaphora of demonstrative pronouns, as in the Africa. The repetition of his, hic, hinc— close to eighty times— rises to the pitch of litany: hic Evandri regia, hic Carmentis edes, hic Caci spelunca. This multiplication of locative deixis in effect utilizes the rhetoric of places as an index of memory. The absence of predication in this list creates a sense of the atemporal present. In the words of de Certeau, “Demonstratives indicate the invisible identities of the visible: it is the very definition of place.” 86 Interestingly Petrarch does not describe the physical surroundings of the hic et nunc at all, only what has happened. Scholars such as Roberto Weiss and Angelo Mazzocco have read in this letter antiquarian sentiments, but my take is that he feels more melancholy for the lost day than for the physical monuments; they are merely place markers for the events that have transpired.87 Later humanists would certainly notice the materiality of the ruins: overgrown weeds, multilayered encrusted walls, tottering cornices.88 Not so Petrarch. He is less interested in their status as material things than as historical signs. For Barkan, Petrarch is summoning the “golden age” of Rome through the poetics of Virgil. Most notably in his Invectives he adulates Rome as “head of the world, queen of the cities, seat of empire, citadel of the universal faith, source of every memorable model of virtue.”89 But here Petrarch’s view turns out to be quite dim: he begins by saying that Varro and Cicero lacked the true light of Christianity; therefore they “often stumbled over an immovable stone in the manner of the blind.” Their lack of spiritual illumination is manifested later in their ethical depravity, the horrors spiraling from the pre-Rome of Evander to its foundation and its Republican and Imperial periods. The rhetorical turns, detours, and repetitions intensify, moving from the initial leisurely rhythms of walking to a feverish cascade of historical events. The cumulative effect is vertiginous. Winding down his serpentine annals, Petrarch finishes with the arrival of Christianity and an enumeration of early martyrdoms: the crucifixion of St. Peter,

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the beheading of St. Paul, the violation of St. Agnes, the grilling of St. Lawrence, the immolation of Pope Calixtus. No wonder Rome fell. After such wretched retrospection, the climb to the roof of the Diocletian Baths gives them fresh air, a new horizon, silence, rest. The focus shifts from vita activa to vita contemplativa. The flow of time invites them to a deeper reflection: “As in our travels through the remains of a broken city, there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins lay before our eyes,” Et euntibus per menia fracte urbis et illic sedentibus, ruinarum fragmenta sub oculis erant. Grammatically the double et denotes that ruins surround them, from up top to down below. This means that they could not transcend the ruins— they just experienced them from different points of view, first as a horizontal itinerary and then as a panoramic elevation. But in the sequential order of prose Petrarch does not write this insight until well after their ascent. Ruins are experienced everywhere but can be perceived only from a distance, sub oculis, by casting down your eyes. The phrase ruinarum fragmenta expresses the material allegory of Petrarch’s vision of history. Etymologically fragments are something broken (frangere, “to break into pieces, shatter, fracture”), and in Petrarch’s conception of the “dark ages,” history itself is ruptured. He says to Colonna, “Our conversation was concerned largely with history which we seemed to have divined among us, I being more expert, it seemed, in the ancient [antiquis], by which we meant the time before the Roman rulers celebrated and venerated the name of Christ, and you in recent [novis] times, by which we meant the time from then to the present” (my emphasis). It is here that Petrarch makes the momentous distinction between antiquity and modernity (i.e., “the Middle Ages”), paganism and Christianity, thus giving him the reputation of being “the first modern man.”90 Only in Rome does he realize that there are deep strata of historical time. His pronouncement that he is more expert in antiquis and Colonna more expert in novis opens the chasm of history, a history that is reflected in the negative space of architecture and the emptiness of urban space.91 While they wander, they are excited. But while they sit, they are melancholic. Petrarch ruefully emphasizes the impossibility of recreating the ephemeral day. Their shared memory has become as fragmented as the broken city itself: “Give me back that place, that idle mood, that day, that attention of yours, that particular vein of my talent and I could do what I did then. But all things are changed: the place is not present, the day has passed, the idle mood is gone. Instead

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of your face I see mute words.” Redde mihi illum locum, illud otium, illam diem, illam attentationem tuam, illam ingenii mei venam: potero quod unquam potui. Sed mutata sunt omnia; locus abest, dies abiit, otium periit, pro facie tua mutas litteras aspicio. The author cannot render into script the evanescence of oral discourse that once flowed so spontaneously. Interestingly whereas the catalogue passage of remote history cited above is punctuated by the closer demonstrative of hic, here their more recent day is described ironically with the more remote ille, perhaps suggesting that Petrarch is even more nostalgic about their shared intimacy than the grand events of history. In contrast to the entangled, excited plethora of hic in the catalogue scene, here there is a measured clarity in the forms of ille. The parallel construction of locus abest, dies abiit, otium periit also suggests a quiet regularity. Finally the impossibility of renarration is suggested as the passage calls into question the rhetorical efficacy of grammatical repetition: silent letters cannot replicate living voices. Colonna originally wanted Petrarch to answer his question about their last topic of conversation— the origins of the liberal and mechanical arts—when the aura of Rome made Petrarch loquacious. Now very far away from that, he is in a less expansive mood. His response is cloaked in playful evasion, teasingly postponing what Colonna had requested: “Let us put off what remains until another day.” Petrarch wants to send him to do his own homework, claiming that he himself has nothing original to say about the matter: “I would say nothing new, nothing that was really mine.” The project would require too much time, “and the letter is already too long.” Reflecting on the reflections of time at the site of a ruin, Petrarch reflects on the present impossibility and promises a future project: “It requires a book which I shall undertake when fortune returns me to my solitude.” The future book containing “what was written by others and followed by my conjectures” never appeared. All these excuses are different ways of saying that philosophy and ruin-gazing in life can lead to much chatter, but recounting such experiences is ineffable.

Collection and Fragments In the final lines of the Secretum, a dialogue begun after Fam. 6.2, Franciscus says to Augustinus that after he has finished composing his Africa and De viris illustribus, “I will collect the scattered fragments of my soul [sparsa animae fragmenta recolligam], and I will diligently

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focus on myself alone.”92 This notion of re- collecting or gathering the soul through memory is also found in the historical Augustine. In the Confessions we find similar formulations: “I will collect myself [colligens me a dispersione] out of that broken state in which my very being was torn asunder because I was turned away from Thee” (2.1); “Nor in all these things that my mind traverses in search of You, do I find any sure place for my mind save in you, in whom all my scattered parts are gathered [in te, quo colligantur sparsa mea]” (10.40).93 He calls the house of his soul a ruin.94 Petrarch’s and Augustine’s formulations of colligere fragmenta are ultimately derived from the Vulgate Gospels. After feeding the five thousand by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus commands his disciples to gather up what was not eaten: “Collect these leftover fragments lest they perish,” Colligite quae superaverunt fragmenta ne pereant (John 6:12). These miraculous fragments have a double meaning: the broken parts of the original and the remainders produced by distribution. On the one hand, these preserved fragments are from the boy’s initial offering of the seemingly inadequate five fish and twelve loaves. On the other, as leftovers of an improvised feast, the twelve basketfuls (!) are more noteworthy for their exponential abundance, the supply exceeding the demand. As a signum pointing to the divinity of Jesus and God’s plentitude, the excess of the sign’s materiality mirrors the inexhaustibility of its referent.95 According to A. C. Dionisotti, fragmenta in ancient letters always refer to material things— pieces of food, stone, metal, bone, wood, clothing— not portions of discourse.96 The corporal sense of fragmenta shifts to the textual in the early Christian exegetical tradition, when it takes on a figurative meaning: the choice bits of God’s word on which one meditates. For Augustine the five loaves symbolize the Pentateuch, and the twelve baskets the apostles: “What are those fragments, if not what the people were unable to chew? So they refer to hidden areas of understanding, which the multitude is unable to grasp.”97 Bernard of Clairvaux interprets this as a hermeneutic story, turning it into reading scripture itself: the act of breaking down the bread into fragmenta stands for the allegorical breaking down of the biblical text, so that it can feed men’s minds. For Caesarius of Heisterbach the fragmenta become individual saintly or virtuous acts, exempla virtutum, which is the duty of the clergy, fratribus literatis, to expound to the illiterate lay.98 In this transmission from the miracle to

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biblical text to exegesis to sermonizing, fragments undergo a metabolism of event, representation, and dissemination. Petrarch turns this biblical metaphor into a humanist exercise of biographical reflection by consuming and digesting his own past. Rather than the carefully selected passages of scripture, his fragments are his own creation. And the activity of collection helps him think about the process of compositions both massive and tiny: Meanwhile, so that my stay in the country should not be useless, I am gathering fragments of past meditations [cogitationum consumptarum fragmenta recolligo] in order to add something each day to my major works, if possible, or to complete some minor ones. I have consumed and digested, so that every day may either add something to larger projects or complete a minuscule one. (Fam. 13.6)99

Petrarch’s insistence on collecting his cogitationum consumptarum fragmenta helps explain why he chose Rerum vulgarium fragmenta for the title of his poetic anthology. Each of the 366 poems is the little “something” that is gathered into the grand collection. Though the scattered attributes of Laura recorded in the poems—feet, hands, limbs, hair— are constructed from Petrarch’s memory, the true subject of the Rime sparse is not Laura, but Petrarch himself, for it is he who is fragmented.100 On the clean surface of the modern printed text, the Canzoniere stands as a beautifully wrought poetic artifact. The number 366 speaks of a highly organized pattern of the days of the year. The poems are polished formally and lexically. Petrarch labored at them for more than forty years. In what sense, then, are the poems rime sparse and fragmenta? We can understand the collection of poems as fragments when we consider what the genre of the collection meant before Petrarch. Medieval songbooks, as Marisa Galvez has recently shown, contain a heterogeneous assemblage of lyric, music, images, and other texts that were communally produced and received.101 Before Petrarch there is indeed evidence of a single-authored poetic anthology as a unified body, such as Guittone, but it was also customary to keep different metrical forms separated in different sections of a manuscript.102 As far as the earliest codices attest, sonnets have always existed as a sequence. Moreover sonnet sequences (the corone) were already present in the Duecento, such as those of Folgore da San Gimignano. Finally, before Dante came up with the tercet and Boccaccio

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responded with the octave, the sonnet was considered the governing narrative form in verse.103 In the wake of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s was the first collection of lyrics to be deliberately arranged according to a predetermined sequential order. By omitting the prose commentary of Vita nuova, Petrarch perfected the independent sonnet sequence. Thus his greatest formal accomplishment lies in the idea itself of a unified collection. Yet Petrarch spent the last forty years of his life obsessively recompiling, adding, redacting, and re- editing the Fragmenta. In Dante’s early work the prose narrative acts as his commentary on his verses; the libellus is presented as a youthful piece that the author of the Commedia never cared to revise.104 Whereas Dante documents his unidirectional transformation in his prose, Petrarch’s thoughts are ever recursive, exposed in the surviving marginalia and postilla of the Vaticano Latino 3196. The elder Petrarch looks back on his life, in effect becoming the silent philologist of his young self. His frequent expressions of his own alterity in time in the poems—“I was in part another man from what I am now,” quand’era in parte altr’uon da quel chi’i’ sono (Rvf 1.1)— are both reflected and dissolved by his own editorial practices. Thus the Secretum’s locution “I gather the scattered fragments of my soul,” Sparsa animae fragmenta recolligam, offers an existential gloss on the “rime sparse” of the first sonnet.105 Tellingly in Rvf 23 Petrarch describes himself as Actaeon, the paradigmatic character of dismemberment. In Ovid he is chased by his own dogs, one of which is appropriately called Ichnobates, “seeking for traces” in Greek (Met. 3.208). Petrarch is both the master and the dog. The poems are rime sparse and fragmenta because the author himself is scattered and fragmented. I NE X PL ET UM

When Marsilio Ficino asserted in the fifteenth century that “bodies are shadows and vestiges of the soul and mind” (I corpi sono ombre et vestigi dell’anima e della menti), Petrarch might have replied, So is writing.106 In the unbound collection that has come to us as “Il Codice degli Abbozzi,” Vaticano Latino 3196, the poems are emendated, corrected, rewritten, shuffled until the very night of Petrarch’s death.107 In the postilla appearing on c. 5r, on what would become poem 211 in the Fragmenta, Petrarch scribbled that it almost didn’t make the cut:

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Miru(m), h(un)c ca(n)cell(atum) (et) da(m)natu(m) p(ost) m(u) ltos a(n)nos, ca(s)u relege(n)s, absoluj (et) tr(anscripsi) i(n) ord(ine) stati(m), no(n) obst(ante) 1369 Iu(n)ii 22, hora 23, uen(er)is, pauc(a) p(ost)ea, die 27, i(n) uesp(er)is, mutauj fine[m] . . . h(oc) f . . . e(r)it a. Amazing. By chance rereading this deleted and rejected sonnet after the many years, I readmitted it and transcribed it immediate into the order, notwithstanding . . . Friday 22 June 1369 at 5 a.m. A little later, the 27th, in the evening, I changed the ending.108

Earlier I described Petrarchan poetic imitation as following in the footsteps of ancient authors; now his marginalia reveal the tiny tracks of his own thoughts. Even the abbreviations themselves are vestigia, the incomplete parts of whole words.109 Though he says he rescued this poem by “chance,” the statement is undercut by the remarkable specificity within the poem, which ends with Mille trecento ventisette, a punto / su l’ora prima, il di sesto d’aprile, / nel laberinto entrai, né veggio ond’esca, “One thousand three hundred twenty-seven, exactly at the first hour of the sixth day of April, I entered the labyrinth, nor do I see where I may get out of it” (Rvf 211.12–14). Besides the Virgil flyleaf, this is the only reference to the exact date of his falling in love. It seems that forty-two years, two months, and twentytwo days later, Petrarch is still trapped in the “labyrinth.” In a letter to his friend Philippe de Cabassoles, who had requested copies of some old verses, Petrarch complained: It was difficult to find them among my other writings, still more to find them in my memory. . . . Eventually, by means of the datings that I habitually use in filing them away, with toil and dust I found them, and they now come to you as they were, half mangled and dirty [semilaceri ut erant et squalentes], nor am I changing anything in them although I could change much, so that you may see not what I am but what I was, and so with a certain delight you may recall the first essays of our youth. (Seniles 15.15)110

His writings now are “half mangled and dirty,” semilaceri et squalentes, whereas in another letter he calls those of Quintilian completely “mutilated and mangled,” discerptus et lacer, thus underscoring the contingencies of manuscripts, whether they be ancient or modern. Whatever its state of disfiguration, textual materiality reflects the different chapters of an author’s life or afterlife. For Petrarch this demonstrates that the self can never be fully captured in writing but only as snapshots in time, recoverable only thanks to one’s haphazard filing habits. It is impossible to fix the endless flux of life into a

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collection of texts, or, as Petrarch suggests here, it might not even be appropriate to mend their textual holes or clean their grime since they are indices of the author’s historicity. Earlier I showed that Petrarch’s use of the imperfect tense in Familiares 6.2— deambulabamus, vagabamur, and solebamus—was a function of past progressive memory. We may well say that the “imperfect” embodies an aesthetic category too, thus initiating the Renaissance practice of the non finito.111 It is significant that Michelangelo chiseled on his Pietà, michael.a[n]gelus.bonatorus. floren[inus].faciebat, with the verb in the imperfect tense rather than the usual perfect, fecit.112 We usually think of the ruin and the fragment as things that happen post factum; buildings and poems were once whole, and now, due to the destructive agent of time or the hands of man, they lie in waste. But Petrarch’s compositions are fragments before they can even be completed, much less ruined. Life and art are always capable of correction, improvement, emendation, and erasure, hence Michelangelo’s aesthetics (and grammar and theology) of the imperfect. The title of Familiares 18.7 is “To Francesco of the Church of the Holy Apostles, that unpolished works are often more pleasing to the intellect.”113 All of Petrarch’s immense collections— Fragmenta, Familiares, the Africa— are unfinished, proleptic ruins, not to mention all the books he planned to write but did not get around to.114 The pervading anxiety in the Secretum is that a life’s work is left uncompleted (labores . . . interruptos), the Africa half-finished (semiexplicitam), and the self as inexpletum, “unfulfilled,” “incomplete.”115 Would not Petrarch agree with Goethe that “literature is a fragment of fragments; only the smallest proportion of what took place and what was said was written down, while only the smallest proportion of what was written down has survived”?116

Traces of Methodology Gerard Passannante’s recent The Lucretian Renaissance has an illuminating discussion of vestigia from Lucretius to Montaigne to Bacon as a method of tracing the ideas of the past as well as a way to think about the swerve— the clinamen— of the classical tradition. Passannante points out, “For readers from Petrarch onward, the figure of vestigia and the proverbial pack of hounds were Renaissance clichés that applied widely to the book hunter seeking out the remains of textual traditions or the humanist filling in the

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holes of corrupted manuscripts.”117 Lucretius explains his methodology thus: Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci sunt, per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute. namque canes ut montivagae persaepe ferai naribus inveniunt intectas fronde quietes, cum semel institerunt vestigia certa viai, sic alid ex alio per te tute ipse videre talibus in rebus poteris caecasque latebras insinuare omnis et verum protrahere inde. (1.402– 9) But for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks [vestigia] are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself. For as hounds very often find by their scent the leaf-hidden resting-place of the mountain-ranging quarry, when once they have hit upon certain traces [vestigia] of its path, so will you be able for yourself to see one thing after another in such matters as these, and to penetrate all unseen hiding-places, and draw forth the truth from them.

So far there are four paradigms for investigating something: Quintilian’s pedagogy by means of partial models; Lucretius’s deciphering the hidden arguments of a philosophical text; Bonaventure’s traces of the divine that marks the earthly world; and the humanist’s philological reconstruction of a received text. Let me add one more: the fashioning of the self in an autobiographical text. Montaigne in “Of Vanity” explains his psychology of self-representation by quoting from De rerum natura: “At all events, in these memoirs, if you look around, you will find that I have said everything or suggested everything. What I cannot express I point to with my finger: Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci / Sunt, per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute.”118 Using the lines of Lucretius not to illustrate the enterprise of philosophy but to describe his own autobiographical project (which in any case might be the same for the author of the Essais), Montaigne in this characteristically sly move privileges ineffable gestures over dazzling verbal exhibition. Petrarch’s textual works anticipate Montaigne’s essays as incomplete self-portraits that reveal too much and too little.119 Investigation is pressed to its epistemological limits: if self-writing leaves only traces, perhaps unknown even to the author himself, how does the philologist decipher the clues in order to establish a critical edition? Can his erudition bypass the biographic fallacy? Investigation opens up two directions, what today we would call a historicist one, in which we create the past “as it was,” independent of

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us, and a hermeneutic one, in which there is a coproduction of meaning in the dialectical encounter between the text and the reader. As illuminated by Anthony Grafton, in the humanism of early modernity there were those who saw the study of the past as scientific and those who saw history as a form of pedagogical training in eloquence and virtue.120 Petrarch perhaps straddles both: he recognizes that to understand antiquity one must recover the original senses of words and texts, hence his meticulous reconstruction of Livy and his revival of the classical Latin style.121 But as we have seen, he also made the enterprise intensely personal and ethical. So far my own idiosyncratic choice of using vestigia as the verbal lens to comprehend Petrarch reveals his mind as much as it reflects our own judgments. We are not interested in vestiges only because they tell us what the past was like, but also because, in their ambiguity, they allow us to interpret the past according to our own interests, precisely as Petrarch himself did.122 The divergent scholarly approaches to Vaticano Latino 3195 codex in the past sixty years prove to be a direct descendant of the two methods of interpretation outlined by Grafton— the scientific and the hermeneutic. Ernest Hatch Wilkins’s study “The Making of the Canzoniere” embodies the former, influencing an entire generation with his conjecture that there were at least nine forms of the collection, from its primitive state in 1336 to its last form as the Vaticano Latino 3195 in 1374.123 Recent critics have offered major correctives to this received wisdom. Pleading for more theoretical approach, Barolini bristles against such strict scientific chronology and instead reads Petrarch’s fluid divisions as “a way of probing into the very nature of transition.”124 H. Wayne Storey, examining the Vaticano Latino 3195 under ultraviolet light, discovered that the text was full of erasures and corrections by both Petrarch’s and later hands; thus he questions the nature of a “final” or last copy of an authorial work.125 As such, the irresolution of Petrarch’s own traces becomes an allegory of the philological debate about his compositions.

“My Rome, My Athens” Humanism is able to posit a past and the possibility of its continuation, in altered form, in the present. Seeking a way out of the historicist dilemma, Petrarch wants to peer beyond the ruin into the perfect Roman temple. His desire to speak to the dead by writing letters to

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them is a yearning for this sort of unmediated presence. He writes to Cicero as “if he was a friend living in my time with an intimacy that I consider proper because of my deep and immediate acquaintance with his thought” (Fam. 1.1).126 For the humanist writing to and conversing with others are the means by which one forges one’s identity.127 Reading in turn becomes a solitary meditation in which one can commune with the past. Sharing one’s readings with friends becomes the process of actualizing in conversation what was interior understanding. Meditation on ruins is another humanist exercise. Contemplating disappeared architecture both intensifies and bridges the gulf between the experience of everyday life and the hallowed world of antiquity. In a letter written during his habitual solitary stays in Vaucluse, Petrarch gives an extraordinary account of his self-imposed exile: Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings, wherein I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits or at their customs and lives or at their eloquence and genius. I gather them from every land and every age in this narrow valley, conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive because they see traces of their stale breath in the frosty air. (Fam. 15.3)128

From the depths of his contemplation Petrarch conjures a utopia. Here the vestigia are even more evanescent than the tracks on the ground— they are the “stale breath in the frosty air.” This spellbinding summoning of spirits ancient and modern, far and near, can be positioned between Dante’s self-induction into the spectral circle of ancient poets in the Inferno 3 and Machiavelli’s nocturnal communion with ancient authors recounted in his famous letter to Francesco Vettori. Petrarch is decidedly closer to the author of the Discourses on Livy, for whereas Dante banishes the worthy pagans to the kingdom of shadows, Machiavelli revivifies them in the darkness of his library. For four hours nightly he casts off his tattered street clothes, dons regal garments, and enters the visionary court of ancient men, who receive him, he says, “with affection. . . . I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me.”129 Petrarch is even more expansive, because he commingles not only with the august thinkers of antiquity but also recent intimate friends. By isolating certain nearly

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forgotten moments in the human past and by endeavoring to establish communication with them, Petrarch paved the path toward the humanist movement as a universal, transhistorical community.130 The ruins of Rome that devastated him earlier dissolve here, replaced with the perfect synchronic society of “my Rome, my Athens.” His virtual republic of letters crosses time and space, and, in a twist of selfaggrandizing rhetoric, he thinks he is the only one to recognize his imaginary society’s true genius. By the mimetic powers of his imagination, all signs of the historical abyss— traces, ruins, fragments, even death itself— are filled with the plentitude of friendship and tradition. The emptiness of vestigia is, at least for a moment, filled by the fullness of presence.

Immortality and Destruction On Easter Sunday, 8 April 1341, on the Capitoline Hill, the Senate of Rome crowned Petrarch poet laureate. Inspired by the solemnity of the occasion, he declared, “We are drawn by the places, I do not know how, where there remain vestiges of those we love or admire,” Movemur enim nescio quo pacto locis ipsis, in quibus eorum quos diligimus aut admiramur adsunt vestigia.131 This sentence is in fact lifted verbatim from Cicero’s De legibus: We are drawn by the places, I do not know how, where there remain vestiges of those we love or admire. [Movemur enim nescio quo pacto locis ipsis, in quibus eorum quos diligimus aut admiramur adsunt vestigia.] My beloved Athens delights me not so much by the stunning monuments or the exquisite works of antiquity found there, but rather by recalling to my mind great men—where each one lived, where he used to sit and carry on disputations; why, I even enjoy looking on their graves.132

In Cicero places serve as the catalysts not only of memory but also of associations and imaginations. Set in the locus amoenus of Cicero’s villa at Arpinum, the dialogue also recalls how important a leisurely setting is to philosophical inquiry. Like Petrarch, Cicero cares much less for the “stunning monuments” of architecture than for the monumental thoughts of “great men.” Petrarch’s oration, however, is not about philosophy but about “the poet’s reward,” which includes immortality, “immortality of the poet’s own name and the immortality of the names of those whom he celebrates.” Petrarch invokes the familiar Latin boasts of poetic

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everlastingness: Ovid at the end of the Metamorphoses, Statius at the end of the Thebaid, Virgil as he remembers Nisus and Eurylaus, Lucan in his ninth book of Pharsalia, and Horace in his fourth book of the Odes.133 In the trajectory of citation from Cicero to the poets, Petrarch gathers a set of ambitions about permanence and succession. Yet his exercise is pure citation, without assimilation or alteration. This is what Greene calls the “reproductive or sacramental; it celebrates an enshrined primary text by rehearsing it liturgically, as though no other form of celebration could be worthy of its dignity.”134 In its exact repetition Petrarch the celebrant and the celebrated reproduces but does not remake. Petrarch’s intoning of poets’ immortal longings is a sort of ritual summons that installs him as a new vates for Rome, the apotheosis of sequere vestigia, as it were. He explains: There have indeed been many men who in their lifetime were glorious and memorable for what they wrought in writings or in arms, whose names have nevertheless fallen into oblivion for this one reason, that they did not succeed in expressing in the stable and enduring style of a true man of letters what it was that they really had in their minds and spirits.135

Expressing the highest aspiration of verse, the poetic immortality topos promises not the fixity of the text but its open future horizon. Cultural survival and flourishing is based not on fixed replication but on poetic multiplicity. Standing in the midst of Roman ruins and believing himself the first poet since Statius to be crowned with laurels, Petrarch here fulfills the Latin poet’s prophecy of survival and pleads for his own immortality. At least one contemporary reader paid heed to Petrarch’s call. Gathered at the start of the Vaticano Latino 3196 are a couple of poems addressed to Petrarch, one of which is by Giacomo Colonna, the brother of Giovanni: Se le parti del corpo mio destrutte Et ritornate in athomi et faville Per infinita quantità di mille Fossino lingue et in sermon ridutte. . . . Quanto lo corpo et le mie membra foro Allegre et quanto la mia mente leta, Odendo dir che nel romano foro Del novo et degno fiorentin poeta

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Sopra le tempie verdeggiava illoro, Non porian contar né porre meta.136 If the parts of my body, destroyed and reduced to atoms and sparks of fire by infinite thousands, were all tongues and brought to speech . . . they could not recount or reach the end of telling how much my body and my limbs were delighted and how happy my mind was, hearing tell that in the Roman Forum, on the temples of the new and worthy Florentine poet there grew green a laurel wreath.137

With this memorable sonnet Colonna can be considered one of the first proponents of Petrarchism, the poetic movement that engulfed literary Europe from the moment of its creation to the time of Shakespeare.138 Rehearsing the sparagmos topos and monumentalizing the poet as a new Florentine temple in the Roman Forum, in one stroke Colonna epitomizes the Petrarchan conventions of dismemberment and perpetuation. In the Secretum, however, we find a very different story. Though the dating of the text is difficult, most scholars agree that Petrarch drafted it in 1347, six years after the laureate address, and revised it continuously until 1353.139 In the dialogue Augustinus, a fictional Augustine, criticizes Petrarch for his excessive longing for the “worthless” immortality of fame that blocks his path to true spiritual immortality. Writing might last longer than human life, but it too will someday end: Add the decay of tombs, which can be shattered, as Juvenal said, “by the evil strength of a sterile fig branch.” In your Africa, you elegantly called this “a second death.” And so, if I might here address you in the same words that you made another speak, “Soon the bust will lie in ruins, and the inscribed marble will fall in shattered stone; from this, my son, you will suffer a second death.” This is bright and immortal glory, this glory that totters at the blow of a single stone? Add the destruction of books in which your name has been written either by your own or another’s hand. Although the memory of books lasts longer than that of tombs, and thus books seem longer-lived, their destruction nonetheless is inevitable, because of the innumerable calamities of nature and fortune alike, to which books, like everything else, are subject.140

Augustinus, quoting Petrarch’s own words from the Africa, enacts multiple frames of ironic self- citation. Petrarch has co-opted the historical Augustine, putting into his mouth lines from his own Latin epic, saying, “I might here address you in the same words that there you made another speak.” Augustinus says that Franciscus writes

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too much and thus forgets the soul, making a paradox of Petrarch’s entire vocation and questioning humanism’s very principle of studying the classical past for self-cultivation. Yet we must remember these are all Petrarch’s own words. He writes that he is writing too much. He remembers that he forgets his soul. The dialogue becomes a selfreferential game of refracted mirrors.141 If the hubristic bid for poetic immortality is declaimed so assuredly in the laureation, the deepest fear of its destruction is anticipated in the Secretum. Later Augustinus commands Franciscus, “Let the sight of an ancient building make you think: ‘Where are the people whose hands built this?’ When you see a newer building, think, ‘Where will those who built this soon be?’”142 Indeed after Petrarch’s death his considerable library was dispersed.143 At a certain point in the dialogue Franciscus complains of the harshness of Fortune, of how, “in a single day, with one wicked stroke, she dashed me to pieces along with my hopes, my resources, my family, my home.” Commentators are unclear of the precise event to which Petrarch refers. Perhaps it was the fire that destroyed his house in Vaucluse in 1353, or it could be the confiscation of his father’s property after death by the city of Florence in 1326, which deprived Petrarch of his inheritance.144 Augustinus responds to him: If you consider, in truth, not the disasters of private families only, but the ruins also of empires from the beginning of history, with which you are so well acquainted; and if you call to mind the tragedies you have read, you will not perhaps be so sorely offended when you see your own humble roof brought to naught along with so many palaces of kings. Now pray go on, for these few warning words will open to you a field of meditation.145

Whatever the cause of Petrarch’s sudden catastrophe, Augustinus aligns the individual with the universal by framing personal tragedy alongside the vast sweep of fallen empires. The ironic swipe contained in the conditional construction, with the modifiers “with which you are so well acquainted” and “you have read,” suggests that Petrarch himself is having difficulty finding consolation from exemplary history, which he incessantly urges others to do in his letters. Not even the long meditations on historical calamities can help the expert on ruins with his own catastrophe. In his final work, Triumph of Eternity, Petrarch yearns for an eternity now, when “‘Yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow,’ ‘morn’ and ‘eve,’ / ‘Before and ‘soon,’ will pass like fleeting shadows, / ‘Has been,’ ‘shall be,’ and ‘was’ exist no more,” Dianzi, adesso, ier, diman, mattino

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e sera, tutti in un punto passeran com’ombra; / non avrà loco “fu,” “sarà,” ned “era” (lines 65– 67).146 The metaphysics of yearning I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter would find its ultimate fulfillment in this eternal present. Sub specie aeternitatis poetry is no longer necessary, whatever its boasts of immortality. All of the discourses surrounding vestigia—from his erotics of Laura in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta to his epic construction of Rome in the Africa, from his poetics of ruins in his Familiares to his contemplation of time in the Secretum— can be measured by the yawning distance from this blessed state of eternity. In the mundane world, however, the humanist enterprise of historical recovery is still necessary. Ruined architecture is just one cipher of yesterday. Ancient texts, also ruined, are the material objects that enhance Petrarch’s capacity to imagine such a world. His exercise of the historical imagination begins with sensible vestigia, proceeds by way of them to the past, which is then experienced as a spiritual absence. The ruin is one such vestigial material, an external object that reflects an internal condition, and meditations on it set into motion Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past.

chapter 4

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Erotics of Fragments For Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die. — Roland Barthes

Any inquiry into antiquity can be categorized as having two extremes: either the search for the past is a projection of our own desires, thus only a reflection of us, or the past is unattainable— too far away, too transitory, too inscrutable. In the eighteenth century Friedrich Schlegel succinctly notes in the Philosophical Fragments, “Everyone has found in the ancients whatever he needed or wished for; especially himself.”1 And Hegel states even more expansively, “This [ancient] world separates us from ourselves, but then at the same time it grants us the cardinal means of returning to ourselves: we reconcile ourselves with it and thereby find ourselves again in it, but the self which we then find is the one which accords with the tone and universal essence of mind.”2 In the seventeenth century this first view is exemplified in John Webster’s macabre Duchess of Malfi (1612). One of the villains, Antonio, chances upon the ruins of a graveyard. Moved by the strange, desolate piles, he waxes: Antonio: I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history. And questionless, here in this open court, Which now lies naked to the injuries Of stormy weather, some men lie interred Loved the church so well, and gave so largely to’t They thought it should have canopied their bones Till doomsday. But all things have their end: Churches and cities which have diseases like to men, 131

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Must have like death that we have. Echo: Like death that we have. Delio: Now the echo hath caught you. Antonio: It groaned, methought, and gave A very deadly accent. Echo: Deadly accent. (5.3.9– 21)3

The joke is that while Antonio thinks he is hearing the graves speak back, as if communing with some spectral spirit, in fact he hears only his own echo. We think we hear other voices when speaking to the dead, but we are actually only projecting our anxieties and fears. Webster thus playfully affects a failed Ovidian recognition of echoesas-self in his revenge tragedy. At the opposite extreme of the antiquity-as-ourselves paradigm is that of antiquity-as-wholly-other. The impossibility of experiencing antiquity en tout is brilliantly played out in Federico Fellini’s 1972 film Roma. In the process of digging the first subway of the Eternal City, engineers by chance discover an underground Roman villa filled with pristine frescoes. Everyone is spellbound. But when the workers bore through an ancient wall, the beautiful pigmentation disintegrates on first exposure to air (Plate 8). This subterranean scene demonstrates the terrifying irony that the object of study perishes all the more quickly once it is scrutinized. The past is tantalizing yet ultimately irretrievable. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) of Francesco Colonna hovers between these two paradigms. At the end of the prose romance Poliphilo gets what he wants: union with his beloved Polia. In purple prose he breathlessly reports, “Winding her immaculate, milk-white arms in an embrace around my neck, she kissed me, gently nibbling me with her coral mouth” (F2’, 464).4 Yet bitter disappointment immediately follows: “This deified, celestial image then dissolved in the air, like the smoke, perfumed with musk and ambergris, that rises to the ether from a stick of incense, to the great delight of the heavenly spirits as they smell the strangely fragrant fumes” (F2’, 464). The moment of embrace collapses with the moment of vanishing. Poliphilo awakes and everything disappears: “I was desolate at the violent theft of this lovely image, this happy presence, this venerable majesty, it transported me from wondrous sweetness into intense bitterness as this glorious dream left my sight” (F3, 465). Nothing lasts in the world of the Hypnerotomachia. As for the consummation that Poliphilo imagined he had obtained, it turned out to be nothing more than a dream, originating and ending in his own head.

Plate 1. Maarten van Heemskerck, Self- Portrait with the Colosseum, 1553. Oil on panel. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 2. Tommaso Laureti, Triumph of Christianity, 1585. Fresco. Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 3. Li Cheng, Reading the Stele, Northern Song dynasty, mid-tenth century. Ink and light color on silk. Osaka Municipal Museum. Google Art Project.

Plate 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, detail of ruins, Allegory of Good and Bad Government, ca. 1338–40. Fresco. Palazzo Publico, Siena. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 5. Sandro Botticelli, The Adoration of the Magi , ca. 1478– 82. Tempera and oil on panel. National Gallery, Washington, DC. NGA.

Plate 6. Herman Posthumus, Landscape with Ancient Ruins, 1536. Oil. Liechtenstein. Princely Collection of Vaduz-Vienna.

Plate 7. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Oil on oak. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 8. Roma, directed by Federico Fellini, 1972. Fox Pictures.

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The apotheosis of Renaissance fascination with ruins reaches perhaps its most ludic heights in this prose romance. Traditionally translated as The Strife of Love in a Dream, the book recounts the phantasmagorical journey of Poliphilo as he searches for his Polia in a made-up world of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Etruscan antiquities.5 One of the most richly illustrated texts in fifteenth- century humanism, it was also one of the first vernacular texts to be published in Venice by the Aldine Press (figs. 11 and 12). The sprawling work is at once utterly eccentric and typical of elite Renaissance cultural production. Its bizarre language (a macaronic mélange of Italian and Latin, with many Greek puns thrown in) and its no less bizarre illustrations (woodcuts of impossible architecture) make it a hyperbolic text that presents antiquity as a cipher, a mystical journey of sex, strife, and rarified connoisseurship. The erotics of ruins is the focus of this chapter. Architecture— both heartbreakingly ruined and dazzlingly complete— teaches Poliphilo how to see, how to interpret, how to love. His is an erotic paideia. His sensual encounters with ruins set a crucial stage for his attempted formation, but the book ends up as a failed Bildungsroman. The Hypnerotomachia is as such a late fifteenth- century developmental tale of a protagonist’s quest for self-knowledge and realization through sexy archaeology and licentious antiquarianism. The vanishing of his two beloveds— ancient remains and Polia—leads to a radical loss of the self. His quest could be seen as a failure of Neoplatonic enlightenment: the love of an individual beauty does not lead our protagonist up a ladder to universal Beauty. Instead he mourns amid the contingent world of rubble and fragments. The Hypnerotomachia is an important text in Renaissance humanism not only because of its prominent treatment of ruins but also because it is one of the more poignant essays on how rekindling a relationship to the classical past is an enterprise fraught with a Petrarchan frustration. What unites Colonna with Petrarch, Du Bellay, and Spenser is the sense of loss and desire that haunt their romances with ruins.6 Poliphilo has a manifestly erotic relationship with them: “I gazed intently at this with my lips agape, my fluttering and mobile eyelids motionless, my soul enraptured, as it contemplated these scenes which were so beautiful, so well arranged and perfectly in order, depicted with such art and executed so elegantly, and preserved without the slightest damage” (d2’, 61). Multitudinous desire and desire for his beloved Polia (meaning “many” as well as a

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Figure 11. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldine Press, 1499). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

“precious stone of gray color,” in Liddell Scott Lexicon, s.v.) constitute the very identity, indeed the very name of Poli(a)- philo.

Excess of Language The Hypnerotomachia has a lot of excessive prose. The macaronic language mimics the broken syntax of ruins; its jagged punctuation mirrors the heaps of rubble. In book 1 Poliphilo embarks on his dream-odyssey. After his escape from the dark forest he finds himself in a locus amoenus filled with tall trees, lush plants, and overgrown vegetation. It is here that he encounters a gallery full of curatorial

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Figure 12. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldine Press, 1499). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

delights: an enormous pyramid with a towering obelisk on top; various statuary, including a horse, a reclining colossus, and an elephant; and an elaborately wrought portal. Below the gargantuan obelisk he sees a rubbish heap of fragments: Quivi dunque tanta nobile columnatione io trovai de ogni figuratione, liniamento & materia, quanta mai alcuno el potesse suspicare, parte dirupte, parte ad la sua locatione, & parte riservate illaese, cum gli Epistyli & cum capitelli, eximii de excogitatio & de aspera celatura. Coronice. Zophori, ouero Phrygii, Trabi arcuati di statue ingente fracture, truncate molti degli aretati & exacti membri. Scaphe & Conche & uasi & de petra Numidica & de Porphyrite &

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de vario marmoro & ornamento. Grandi lotorii. Aqueducti & quali infiniti altri fragmenti de sculptura nobili, de cognito quali integri susseron, totalmente priui, & quasi redacri al primo rudimento. Alla terra idi & quindi collapsi & disiecti. I discovered there a colonnade of the noblest form imaginable as to its decoration, design and material; it was partly fallen, partly still in place, and partly undamaged. There were epistyles and capitals, excellently designed and roughly carved; cornices, zophori or friezes and arched beams; huge, broken statues missing many of their brass details; niches, shells and vases of Numidian stone and porphyry, ornamented with various marbles; great baths and aqueducts, and a host of other fragments that lay shattered here and there, nobly carved, but reduced, as it were, to their first elements, so that one could not tell what they had been when whole. (a7’, 22)

Colonna creates a thesaurus of hybrid words, bilingualisms, and pastiche from Latin, Greek, and various dialects of the vernacular. He forms new words by adding Latin suffixes and prefixes to Italian words, and vice versa, creating adverbs, verbs, adjectives, diminutives, and augmentatives (potesse, illaese cum, susseron, collapsi, disiecti). Giorgio Agamben suggests that the work’s recondite language induces a sort of trance state in the reader in order to enhance its oneiric landscape.7 Here we witness an insider’s lexicon of architectural and botanical terminology, one that exults in arcane knowledge: columnatione, figuratione, liniamento, materia are all highly specified and theorized terms used by Alberti.8 Caelatura, used by Quintilian and Pliny, is a technical word that means “intaglio” or “engraving” and is used by Alberti to describe marble revetment in buildings. Scaphe were niches in which statues were placed. Conche were bits of conch and oyster shells used to decorate Roman villas. Numidian and Porphyry marbles are praised by Pliny and Isidore of Seville. In contrast to the well-wrought lyrical monuments of the Renaissance poets, we may say that Colonna gives us a rhapsodic prose of ruins rather than an elegant poetics of ruins. Brevity, as we see, is not the soul of Poliphilo’s wit. How, then, do we account for the relationship between copious words and absent things? There is a sense in which the novel’s excessive prose tries to fill the void of ruins. Since value, in any economy, is determined by scarcity, the material objects of antiquity became the loci of an inflationary yearning. Susan Stewart writes, “The possession of the metonymic object is a kind of dispossession in that the presence of the object all the more radically speaks to its status as a mere substitution

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and to its subsequent distance from the self. This distance is not simply experienced as a loss; it is also experienced as a surplus of signification.”9 Ruins are defined by their absence, but the ruins of Renaissance Rome overwhelm by their sheer quantity— the multitudinous monuments and their copious fragments. In this way Colonna’s linguistic and visual ingenuity seeks to compensate for the material scarcity of the ancient past by its very excess. At one point Poliphilo ponders, “If the fragments of holy antiquity, the ruins and debris and even the shavings, fill us with stupefied admiration and give us such delight in viewing them, what would they do if they were whole [quanto farebbe la sua integritate]?”10 As early as the twelfth century, Hildebert of Lavardin already grasped the evocative powers of the partial: Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina; / Quam magni fueris integra fracta doces, “Nothing, Rome, is equal to you; even when you are nearly all in ruins, you teach us how great you would be if your fragments were whole.”11 The truth of the fragment resides in its status as a material embodiment. In its semblance to some disappeared whole (Poliphilo’s “integritate,” Hildebert’s “integra”), the thingness of the thing is the means by which we can envision the lost totality. This totality for Poliphilo becomes a hyperbolic expansion into the infinite as the part-whole ratio exceeds any rational proportion. In short, the search for antiquity is at heart an exercise in the imagination of synecdoche, of pars pro toto, a yearning for an unattainable wholeness. Liane Lefaivre remarks that the novel’s ekphrastic language is a “product of the ‘dream work’ . . . shaped by a combinatorial mathematics that negates the contradictions between elements that by definition are mutually exclusive in normal waking life; they are new, previously unthinkable ‘composite structures’ made up of elements that could not otherwise be brought together.”12 Lefaivre is certainly astute in drawing out the dreamlike ambience of the narrative, but I am also struck by the exactitude and precision with which Poliphilo describes his buildings. Though his narrative follows a reiterative syntax and compulsive verbiage, his enthusiastic frenzy is tempered by meticulous descriptions of dimensions and ornamentations, reveling in both geometry and chaos. For example, on admiring the upper cornice of a splendidly wrought portal, he notes, “Adding together the entire figure of twenty-four squares, one obtains the sesquialter proportion that gives the figure OPQT, which clearly contains in itself a rectangle and a half. Dividing that half equally by straight lines into

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six portions, there will result five interstitial lines and six partitions” (c2’– c3, 44–45). Such descriptions fill the bulk of the text. By inventing nonexistent building types that are impossible to create in reality, Colonna spoofs the careful, methodical approaches of antiquarians such as Cyriaco D’Ancona, Giovanni Marcanova, and Poggio Bracciolini. Poliphilo records the proportions of almost every work he sees, so that the specificity of measurement creates a fiction of accuracy.

The Eros of Stones I have talked about the relationship between ruins and language; now I turn to the relationship between ruins and the human body. The idea that a building is an analogy of the human body is an ancient one, first espoused by Vitruvius and later revived by Alberti.13 And since the body is the locus of all our physical desire, this means that there is an erotic dimension to architecture. As Alberto Pérez- Gómez has observed, “Architectural meaning, like erotic knowledge, is a primary experience of the human body and yet takes place in the world, in that pre-reflective ground of existence where reality is first ‘given.’”14 Antonio di Pietro Averlino, known as Il Filarete, in his Treatise on Architecture (ca. 1464) makes the production of buildings an experience of erotic joy: Building is nothing more than a voluptuous pleasure, like that of a man in love. Anyone who has experienced it knows that there is so much pleasure and desire in building that however much a man does, he wants to do more. . . . His soul is drawn to it and he always desires the things that he thinks are best for it, exactly as a man in love [would] do.15

Here is an unambiguous gendering of the creator as male and the act of producing as an aphrodisiac— appetite increases the more you satisfy it. Filarete later extends this corporeal metaphor to the conception of a building, comparing an architect to a mother: Since no one can conceive by himself without a woman, by another simile, the building cannot be conceived by one man alone. As it cannot be done without a woman, so he who wishes to build needs an architect. He conceives it with him and then the architect carries it. When the architect has given birth, he becomes the mother of the building. Before the architect gives birth, he should dream about his conception, think about it, and turn it over in his mind in many ways for seven to nine months, just as a woman carries her child in her body for seven to nine months.16

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Whereas the previous analogy compares building to the sex act and the builder to the triumphant paternal master, this dense passage reverses the imagery, making the architect a nurturing mother who patiently waits for her child’s gestation. Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs in their manifesto Buildings Must Die identifies Filarete’s gendering of the architect’s craft as partaking of the “natalist” tradition, that is, an approach to architecture that is explicitly conscious of a life cycle of buildings.17 Instead of pretensions to permanence, the natalist approach acknowledges the eventual senescence that is inherent in all built dwellings. In the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilo also employs such corporal imagery in describing the nature of architecture: For just as in the human body, when one quality is discordant with another, illness ensues (because well-being consists only in the harmony of the compound, and when the parts are not distributed in their proper places, deformity follows) thus a building is no less dissonant and sickly when it lacks due harmony and proportionate order. The ignorant moderns confuse these things, knowing nothing about spatial arrangement. But our wise master likens a building to a human body with well-proportioned parts and decorously dressed. (c6’, 52)

Both the human body and the building follow the orders and cycles of nature; asymmetry and dissonance are somatic and aesthetic defects that mar the good life. The savants of today know nothing about this lost principle. If the old masters were the progenitors of these beautiful creations, later humanists assume the role of physicians who must diagnose and cure the ills of an ugly modernity. Pérez- Gómez has argued that early modern architectural treatises articulate the metaphysical dimension of buildings in the world and embody a set of transcendent values within a coherent cosmos.18 Renaissance architecture is the site where the humanist ideals for antiquity are projected; the humanist yearns to fill up the wretched condition of the present with well-intentioned designs of the classical past. “The proper goal of architecture, which is its supreme invention,” Colonna states, is “the harmonious establishment of the solid body of a building” (c4, 47). In the theories of Filarete, Alberti, and Palladio we see a correspondence between the order of their creations and the cosmos at large.19 Their buildings are noetic, bridging the worlds of the ideal and the real; buildings provide the ordered place conducive to the good life. On the one hand, we can place the

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Hypnerotomachia alongside this great tradition of the learned architecture treatise. On the other, Colonna is equally interested in the rhetoric of the hyperbolic, rejecting the utopian in favor of the fantastical. Unbound by the limitations of reality, Colonna’s creations depart from strict rational architectural models to embrace the more capricious impulses of the Wunderkammer: How many magnificent works have been partly and completely ruined? This is why I was seized and overcome with pleasure and unthinkable happiness, and with such gratitude and admiration for holy and venerable antiquity, that I found myself looking around with unfocused, unstable and unsated gaze. I looked eagerly here and there, filled with wonder and overwhelmed in my mind as I thought over the meaning of the carved scenes I was examining, looking fixedly at these with the utmost pleasure and remaining for a long time with my mouth agape. Even so, I could not satisfy my hungry eyes and my insatiable appetite for looking again and again at the splendid works of antiquity. (d1, 57)

The remnants of the past are experienced psychosomatically; antiquity is not desolate but “holy and venerable.” His aporetic moments of the intellect are experienced as erotic frustrations. Poliphilo’s syntax swells, clashing between the realms of the tactile and visual, living and dead, reality and reverie, and climaxing into a synesthetic jumble. Panting, eyes darting to and fro, he almost suffers an epileptic fit of aesthetic pleasure. The narrative of antiquity is thus articulated as a structure of desire, a structure that both invents and distances the classical past, thereby inscribing again and again the gap between what has survived and what has perished. Language is the indirect bridge across this gap. As Rosemary Trippe notes, Poliphilo’s erection can been seen as a metonymy (denominatio), what the Rhetorica ad Herennium defines as “the figure closely akin to or associated with an expression suggesting the object meant, but not called but its name.”20 What is a rhetorical device for the pseudo- Cicero and a hyperbolic simile for Hildebert becomes fleshly enlargement for Poliphilo. Sexual fantasy is thus sublimated into the rhetoric of architectural and archaeological desire. The one builds up; the other digs down.

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SA X A LOQU U N T UR !

At this point I bring Freud into the conversation, for he was equally fascinated by the intermingling of ruins, eros, and antiquity. It is well known that he deployed much archaeological imagery in his work.21 From his fascination with Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of the reputed Troy to his personal collection of antiquities, from his experience of Entfremdungsgefühl, a “feeling of derealization,” on the Acropolis to the famous analogy between Rome and the unconscious in Civilization and Its Discontents, he noticed many similarities between the work of psychoanalysis and archaeology. It is not known whether Freud read the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, but in 1907, shortly after writing Interpretation of Dreams, he turned to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novella Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy as a way to explain the interpretation of dreams through literary analysis. 22 Jensen’s archaeological story bears an uncanny resemblance to the Hypnerotomachia. The protagonist, Norbert Hanold, is also a sensitive soul prone to antiquarianism, falling in love with a bas-relief titled Gradiva, which depicts a nubile maiden in the act of graceful walking (hence the name). Like Poliphilo, Hanold transfers his sexual repression to the desire of inanimate objects: “For his feelings marble and bronze were not dead, but rather the only really vital thing which expressed the purpose and value of human life.”23 In a dream he travels to Italy in search of his fictive beloved, where he is transported to Pompeii moments before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 ce. His timid erudition eventually gives way to his erotic longings, and he is inspired to take a real trip to Pompeii: “The impulse for travel had originated in a nameless feeling.”24 Upon his arrival Gradiva does appear in the flesh. Hanold slowly comes to realize that his love for the idealized woman is actually the repressed memory of his love for a childhood friend, Zoë. What interests Freud in Gradiva is how the novelist’s imagined dreams of a fictional character can undergo the same analytic scrutiny as the remembered dreams of a real patient. In his analysis of the novella Freud introduces three analogies: between childhood and antiquity, between repression and the burial of ancient cities, and between psychoanalysis and archaeology. Hanold’s delusion is diagnosed as “fetichistic erotomania,” a condition that uncannily resembles Poliphilo’s— sexual obsession with parts of wholes.25 A decade before, in the essay “The Etiologies of Hysteria” (1896), Freud had

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already made the comparison between psychoanalysis and archaeology explicit: Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half- effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants—perhaps semibarbaric people—who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him— and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self- explanatory; the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur!26

For the psychoanalyst the psyche is the site of investigation where forgotten stories and suppressed desires are buried. 27 Hidden under layers of repression, inaccessible to himself and others, a patient’s desires resemble the ruins and relics of antiquity. The analyst, like the archaeologist, must painstakingly excavate objects from the past in order to make sense of the present. The psyche, inscriptions on stone, and the writing of the text all have a jaggedly similar topography of surface and depth, visible and hidden, inscription and erasure. Analysis of the ruin, like analysis of the psyche, is interminable, for neither can ever be made whole. Needless to say, Freudian sensibilities of romance and ruins are not identical to those of the Renaissance, but Colonna’s obsessions, fetishes, and expatiations can be partially illuminated by psychoanalysis. Conversely Freud’s musings on archaeology can be partially illuminated by the Renaissance discourse of cultural recovery, for both enterprises sought to make the long-buried past speak in the present. 28 It is well known that Freud had a deep interest in the Renaissance: he read Hamlet as a confirmation of his Oedipus complex, and he wrote essays on two of the era’s greatest minds, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” (1910) and “The Moses of

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Michelangelo” (1914). Like Burckhardt, whose work he knew well, Freud saw in the Italian Renaissance the rebirth of the individual from antiquity. But he recognized that this rebirth, like all births, is traumatic and painful and requires the suppression of the old. Freud’s greatest insight— that our actions and unconscious are guided by repressed childhood memories— can be magnified into a general theory of historical agon: a present culture is always unconsciously haunted by the earlier, older age that it tries to displace and overcome. Childhood memories and antiquity by nature have a priori temporal positions. Historiography’s categories of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance enact a Freudian version of the “family romance,” in which the child repudiates his parents and claims a more remote, aristocratic lineage in his long-lost grandparents. 29 The Renaissance humanists rejected the medieval heritage (their parents) and embraced the more distant classical antiquity (their grandparents). Antiquity is thereby the primal scene in the master narrative of civilization, mankind’s repressed infancy that returns with a vengeance in a later age. The ruin is a symptom of such trauma.

Tragedy and Comedy Broadly speaking, the dream of humanism can be read as a tragedy because it is aware of what has been lost, the little that has survived, all that we cannot know. It recognizes that erudition cannot possibly recapture the whole of ancient wisdom; Fellini’s vision is that the objects of the past are so delicate that a puff of air would destroy them. It is also aware that the project of recovery at times is nothing other than a narcissistic reflection, in the manner of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi; we discover nothing but the dumb echoes of ourselves. Though Poliphilo is shattered at the end of the novel, waking up “from wondrous sweetness into intense bitterness” (F3, 465), the reader may find some pleasure in Colonna’s ironic descriptions. Though ruins overwhelm and paralyze the protagonist, the author tames and domesticates them by making them ludic. The landscape of the Hypnerotomachia becomes the playground, pleasure garden, laboratory, theater, workshop, battlefield of the mind, where the imagination is given free rein. With his astonishing virtuosity Colonna turns the romance of ruins into a comedy, a satire about the folly of seeking the past.

chapter 5

Du Bellay’s Cendre and the Formless Signifier If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Joachim Du Bellay’s 1558 verse collection, Les Antiquitez de Rome, opens with a spellbinding incantation: Divins Esprits, dont la poudreuse cendre Gist sous le faix de tant de murs couvers, Non vostre loz, qui vif par voz beaux vers Ne se verra sous la terre descendre, Si des humains la voix se peult estendre Depuis icy jusqu’au fond des enfers, Soient à mon cry les abysmes ouvers, Tant que d’abas vous me puissiez entendre. Trois fois cernant sous le voile des cieux De voz tumbeaus le tour devocieux, A haulte voix trois fois je vous appelle: J’invoque icy vostre antique fureur, En ce pendant que d’une sainct horreur Je vays chantant vostre gloire plus belle. Divine Spirits whose dusty ashes lie under the weight of so many ruined walls (but not your praise, which lives in your fair verses and will never sink beneath the earth), If a human voice can reach from here to the depths of the underworld, let the abyss open to my cry so that from far below you may hear me. Thrice devoutly circling your tombs under the veil of the heavens, aloud I thrice call out to you.

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I here invoke your ancient inspiration, while with a holy dread I sing your fairest glory.1

With this self-assured gesture of propitiation, Du Bellay summons the dead, announcing that the real antiquitez lie beneath the visible ruins, hidden in the dark subterranean depths. This opening sonnet demonstrates the poet’s superb craft: he deftly constructs two balanced hypotactic sentences equally distributed through the four stanzas; the main clause of the first is delayed until the commanding hortatory subjunctive soient in line 7; the second is subordinated until the magisterial je vous appelle / J’invoque icy in lines 11–12. His mantic gesture is achieved sonically in the internal rhyme and alliteration of lines 3–4 (vostres, voz, vers, verra, terre) and lines 10–11 (trois fois, voile, voz, voix trois fois). By demarcating the spirit and the body, time past and time present, the archaeological and the poetic imagination, Du Bellay penetrates the deep strata of myth to retrieve the dusty ashes of antiquity. Assuming an orphic voice, he alone is the versifying necromancer who awakens the Divins Esprits. He will be shaman, archaeologist, architect— one who poetically constructs by way of incantatory excavation. Two centuries after Petrarch’s walk with Colonna and some halfcentury after the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, what defines the poetics of ruins for Du Bellay is that the ancient wreckage should be not nostalgic relics of veneration but the raw material for vernacular production. Du Bellay’s encounter with antiquity was not like Petrarch’s, who saw the rebirth of Rome in Rome as the salvation to European culture; rather Du Bellay hoped for a linguistic and spatial translation of Rome to France. 2 For his new lyric to emerge from the smoldering ashes of antiquity, he willed, dreamed, and needed Rome to be in ruins. Du Bellay has an aggressive ambition toward as well as ambivalence about antiquity. His work signals a polemical confidence in France’s encounter with Rome, especially in its aspiration to forge a vernacular national literature out of the ashes of Latinity. Textual pieces, like architectural ornaments, are plundered, reworked, and refashioned into new works. By exhuming and collecting the dusty ashes of Rome, Du Bellay transports these formless materials to France, where they come to constitute the new body of a nation. He rejects antiquity, plunders it, yet mourns it. Each time we get the sense that each response is his primary or only relationship to antiquity, when in fact the full picture is some combination of all of these facets.

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In the past two decades or so scholarship has explored how literary forms such as the Petrarchan sonnet played a decisive role in shaping early modern French national identity as well as how the French vision of Rome was mediated through the prolific récits de voyage, guidebooks, antiquarian trade, and poetic production that circulated among learned circles.3 My approach is to use la poudreuse cendre, “the dusty ashes,” of the first line of “Divins Esprits” as the lexical guide to this chapter. Signifying a persistent, formless materiality, this formulation is repeated like a mantra throughout Les Antiquitez.4 Cendre and poudre play an operative role in Du Bellay’s poetics, for the two words are used to describe the matter of literary tradition itself and to rethink the nature of poetic representation. Just as cendre is without form and without direction, drifting here and drifting there, I will follow a circuitous path of associations between la poudreuse cendre, Christian rites and Latin letters, relics, ruins, translation, architecture, poetic immortality, and cultural resurrection. Given the general tendency of this list, one can see a movement from the minute to the monumental, from the infinitesimally small to the invisibly pervasive, from objects in transit to, finally, a whole that unifies. Thus the chapter, befitting Du Bellay’s poetics, moves through the agitations of associations rather than the trajectory of a single argument. I will first give a mini-history of the cendre topos in the literary and biblical tradition, which will help me explain the nature of signs and their signified vis-à-vis Rome. Then I will look at how Du Bellay uses repetition in order to evoke the innumerable permutations of Rome. From circulation, repetition, and fragmentation I will branch out to discuss relics and translation, which leads me to linguistic and architectural transmission. Architecture will return me to the exegi monumentum topos as it is played out in the reception and imitations of Du Bellay’s sonnets. Under the long shadow of a ruinous antiquity, Du Bellay crafts his monuments as fluid, mutable things. The promise of literary immortality is fulfilled not by creating a work that is fixed and permanent but through the dynamics of a lyric mobility in which the poet absorbs the works of previous writers and is in turn imitated by his predecessors. This poetic engagement both binds him to a long literary genealogy and propels him into a rich afterlife in which he assumes his lofty stature.

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Letters to Letters, Dust to Dust The rich associations of cendre and poudre are apparent in the vision of mortality as it is repeatedly expressed in the Old Testament, Latin poetry, Villon, Du Bellay, Shakespeare, and Donne. Within this shadowy genealogy of dust and ashes we can comprehend Du Bellay’s resonant lexicon. Read alongside these quotations, Du Bellay’s uses of poudre and cendre come from an accumulation of earlier discourses, linguistic layers that become not dustier but fresher with age. As Giuseppe Ungaretti puts it, a word is that which “returns us to the presence of so many people whose bodies have disappeared from the earth but whose spiritual presence remains when their words are operative within us.”5 One of the first enunciations of the relationship between dust and mortality is in Genesis. In punishing man for eating the forbidden fruit, the Lord God promises, In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris (3:19). By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Until you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; You are dust, And to dust you shall return. (New Revised Standard Version)

Divine justice is always ironic: whereas man aspired to divinity through the faculty of the mind, man’s brow is now downcast. While the Lord God’s hand molded man from a watery mixture of clay to raise him to the summit of divine creation, man now has to labor with his hands. Characters later in the Bible describe themselves as formed of dust and ashes, or sometimes cover themselves with dust and ashes when they want to emphasize their wretched condition. In the Sodom and Gomorrah episode Abraham recognizes the sovereignty of the Lord and his own lowly status when he refers to himself as dust and ashes, therefore unworthy to negotiate with him (Genesis 18:27). Job sits in ashes and covers his head in dust as he patiently endures his sufferings (Job 2:8, 12). Through the voice of the prophets the Lord promises that he will cast the enemies of Israel “to the ground, even to the dust” (Isaiah 25:12). In Ecclesiastes the Teacher says: Remember your creator in the days of your youth . . . before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken,

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and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, [et revertatur pulvis in terram suam unde erat] and the breath returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher; all is vanity. (12:6– 8)

In this passage of haunting parallels, the initial two couplets depict broken materiality, but the last one establishes through its semantic repetition of Genesis (pulverem reverteris, revertatur pulvis) a coupling of evanescence: dust and breath. Human beings have a dual nature, possessing flesh molded from the earth and spirit inspired by heaven. In death man’s end is both upward and downward—in the ascent of the soul and the descent of the body. Du Bellay gestures to this double movement when he anthropomorphizes Rome thus: “The body of Rome has returned to ashes, and her soul has gone to rejoin the great soul of the material universe,” Le corps de Rome en cendre est devallé, / et son esprit rejoinder s’est allé / au grand esprit de ceste masse ronde (5.8–10).6 In Latin literature philosophers and poets have long found meaning in dust, the smallest unit of matter visible to the human eye. They used it to ponder the nature of the universe, which they believed to be composed of tiny, indivisible particles called atoms. Lucretius in De rerum natura asks us to imagine: Cum solis lumina cumque inserti fundunt radii per opaca domorum: multa minuta modis multis per inane videbis corpora misceri radiorum lumine in ipso et vel ut aeterno certamine . . . conicere ut possis ex hoc, primordia rerum quale sit in magno iactari semper inani. (2.114– 23) When the sun’s rays let in Pass through the darkness of a shuttered room, You will see a multitude of tiny bodies All mingling in a multitude of ways Inside the sunbeam, moving in the void, Seeming to be engaged in endless strife. . . . From this you can imagine what it is For atoms to be tossed perpetually In endless motion through the mighty void.7

Derived from Democritus and Epicurus, this vivid analogy of dust in a sunbeam to the swirl of atomic motion provides a helpful

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heuristic image for the reader and is an example of Lucretius’s signature methodology of moving from observed phenomena to underlying atomic causation. Clinamen is the poet’s term to describe the unpredictable “swerve” of atoms, which is ultimately responsible for the makeup of the universe. From their imperceptible “endless strife,” an innumerable plurality of worlds is formed and deformed. Later in the poem Lucretius acknowledges that all mortal endeavors will end in a state of dissolution: “by some hidden power / Human affairs are ground to dust” (5.1234– 36). Thus human dust and cosmic dust intermingle in the great universal dance of becoming and unbecoming. In the linguistic world the smallest indivisible unit, a letter, is the atom of language. Known in Latin as elementa (which might have been derived from the alphabetic sequence of L, M, N), the alphabet’s complex arrangement becomes intelligible through its ordering. The analogy between letters and atoms produces a theory of poetic production that is based on the disintegration and reconstitution of literary predecessors in order to create a new textual body. Thus in the letters’ cumulative iterations the classical tradition is formed, as is the world from atoms. Their combination forms visible and coherent bodies. In the analogy between ashes, atoms, and letters, the Renaissance production of literature coincides with the philosophy of materialism as a story about reading and letters— a story that, as Gerard Passannante has demonstrated, materializes in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering.8 As the Lucretian clouds of dust float in the air and land on the earth, the poet tries to gather and reconstitute the universal elements of the forgotten past into the corpus of his words. As in the Bible, the commonplace of dust and ashes in classical literature also underscores the transience of life. Horace’s reflection on the coming of spring in Ode 4.7 emphasizes the contrast between the cycles of nature and the linear trajectory of human life: Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribusque comae; mutat terra vices, et descrescentia ripas flumina praetereunt. . . . Damna tamen celers reparant caelestia lunae: Nos ubi decidimus Quo pater Aeneas, quo Tullus dives et Ancus, Pulvis et umbra sumus. (Carm. 4.7.1–5, 12–16)

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The snows have fled, now grass returns to the fields and leaves to the trees, earth alters its circumstances, and the waning streams pass within their banks. Yet the swiftly changing moons repair their losses in the sky. We, when we descended whither righteous Aeneas, whither rich Tullus and Ancus have gone, are but dust and shadow.

Horace reminds the reader that the endeavors of man always cut against the inexorable recurrence of nature. The moon comes and goes, but when mortals die their end is permanent. In juxtaposing the cyclical natural world to linear human life, Horace suggests that the only inevitable thing in our future is the uninterrupted presence of death.9 Yet we might find a measure of relief: the emphatic nos, “we,” unites the speaker, dedicatee, and reader and also connects us to the mythical past of Aeneas, Tullus, and Ancus. Dust from different epochs and different bodies can commingle in a way that living flesh cannot. The movement of ashes is centrifugal, prone to disorder, scattered by the wind. But poetry is centripetal, seeking to bring order to a world of contingencies and accidents. Through the logos of poetry, Du Bellay imbues the pulvis et umbra of antiquity with new life. Indeed this very Horatian expression finds new life when Du Bellay translates it in “Du retour du printens”: Mais les lunes volaiges Ces celestes dommaiges Reparent: et nous hommes, Quand descendons aux lieux De noz ancestres vieux, Umbre & poudre nous sommes. (Ode 8)10 But the fleeting moons repair the heaven’s abode and we men, when we descend to the places of our old ancestors, we are nothing but shadow and dust.

This poem is found in Vers lyriques, part of L’Olive (1549), notable for the ways Du Bellay appropriates other poets.11 In the preface Du Bellay confesses that he freely imitates not only the Italians, such as Petrarch and Ariosto, but also ancient Latin authors.12 Indeed in “Du retour du printens,” the Horatian passage is set within Du Bellay’s own original verses as well as other Horatian and Virgilian

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imitations.13 In recuperating the classical tradition by reassembling it with the inventions of the vernacular, Du Bellay offers the view that literature is produced out of an atomization of other texts. His poetry and poetics decompose in order to recompose, deconstruct in order to construct. In other words, as various scholars have argued, his theory of the vernacular arises from Lucretius’s atomic poetics.14 Du Bellay’s engagement with the Epicurean poet is demonstrated in his translations of the opening hymn to Venus (book 1.1– 9, 1.21– 24, and 1.10–20), collected in Divers jeux rustiques.15 His materialist conception of literary history leads him to posit that the way to compose vernacular texts is through the fragmentation of old ones. This practice is also clear in his earlier writings: along with a translation of and commentary to Plato’s Symposium, Louis Le Roy commissioned Du Bellay to translate Virgil, Lucan, Juvenal, Propertius, Homer, and Lucretius.16 And numerous passages in his manifesto on the vernacular, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (The Denfense and Enrichment of the French Language, 1549), Margaret W. Ferguson has persuasively shown, are effectively loose translations and paraphrases of Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue (1542), Quintilian’s Institutio, and Cicero’s de Oratore.17 Here is his rendition of Horace’s Ode 3.30: J’ay parachevé de ma main Un ouvrage plus dur qu’airain, Un ouvrage duquel l’audace L’orgueil des Pyramides passe: Que l’eau rongearde, ny l’horreur De la Scytienne fureur, Que des ans l’innombrable suyte, Ny du temps la légère fuyte Ne pourront renverser à bas. Tout entier je ne mourray pas, De moy la meilleure partie De la mort sera garantie: Et d’un loz tousjours se suyvant, A moy je seray survivant.18

In the French the topographic and allusive elements in the last lines are omitted: no more Libitina, Aufidus, Daunus, Aeolic song, Italian meters, or Melpomene. This deliberate silence is strategic for, as I said in chapter 1, priests no longer climb the Capitoline with silent maidens and the violent Aufidean wind roars no more. Du Bellay has made Horace’s conditional hope of survival in Latin into a more universal

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poetics of survival in the vernacular, one that transcends cultural specificities of individual myths and regional geography. Nevertheless in translating a work that prophesies its own existence in future time, the translator becomes the shamanic medium of the Roman authors and the medium of his own continuity. Poetic immortality is achieved through this sort of imitative translation. In an earlier period of French literature the juxtaposition of cendre and pouldre likewise underscores the ultimate fate of all human beings, such as in François Villon’s “Epitaph” (1461): Frères humains qui après nous vivez N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis, Car, se pitié de nous pauvres avez, Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis. Vous nous voiez cy, attachez, cinq, six Quant de la chair, que trop avons nourrie, Elle est pieçà devorée et pourrie, Et nous les os, devenons cendre et pouldre. De nostre mal personne ne s’en rie: Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absouldre!19 Brothers who live after us, Let not your hearts be too hard against us, For if you have some pity for us poor folks, God may pity you soon too. You see us here, hanging, five and six, With flesh that was once too well-fed, Now rotten and eaten in pieces, And we the bones become but ashes and dust. Let no man laugh at our fate, But let God absolve us all!

The speakers of this ballade—cy attachez cinq, six—beg not for justice but for mercy from the living ones. No matter what crimes we may have committed, they suggest, everyone will share the fate of death: Hodie mihi, cras tibi, “Today me, tomorrow you,” as a medieval Latin proverb goes. The pronominal adjective used by Villon— notre, grammatically exclusive but implicitly inclusive—is the crucial hinge of his poem, for, like Horace’s use of nos, this shared sense of the human condition is what imbues this macabre ballade with a measure of pathos. There is perhaps some consolation in this idea of a shared fate, but for the most part ashes and dust represent the dissolution of meaning

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and matter into nothingness. Perhaps this is the reason Hamlet calls man the “quintessence of dust” (2.2.310). In the beginning of the play Gertrude warns her son to “not for ever with thy vailed lids, / Seek for thy noble father in the dust” (1.2.70– 71). Yet this is precisely what he does: seek in the dust for some kind of meaning— the metaphysical origins of mourning, no less. On beholding the skull of Yorick, he speculates, “To what base uses we may return, Horatio! / Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, / till a find it stopping a bung-hole?” (5.1.200). Though man in his ambitions is likened to the great Hellenic conqueror, in the end his dusty remains are reduced to filling the hole in a leaky barrel. John Donne’s final sermon, Deaths Duell (1631), can be read as a sustained exegesis of the ultimate human predicament as dust: Even those bodies that were the temple of the holy Ghost, come to this dilapidation, to ruine, to rubbidge, to dust. . . . I must dye againe in an Incineration of this flesh, and in a dispersion of that dust: That a Monarch, who spred over many nations alive, must in this dust lye in a corner of that sheete of lead, and there, but so long as that lead will laste, and that private and retir’d man, that thought himselfe his owne for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave bee published. 20

Like the Prince of Denmark, the dean of St. Paul’s wonders at death’s blind equality: royalty and paupers, fathers and daughters mingle indistinguishably in the soil after decomposition. He rehearses the prophet Ezekiel’s scene in the valley of dry bones (37:1–14): Can this dust live? Perchance it cannot. . . . This death of incineration and dispersion, is, to natural reason, the most irrecoverable death of all. . . . By recompacting this dust into the same body, and reanimating the same body with the same soule, hee [God] shall in a blessed and glorious resurrection give mee such an issue from this death.

Delivered only weeks before his death, Donne’s sermon reimagines one of the most abiding subjects of his writing: the union and inevitable division of body and soul. 21 What’s more, he imagines our body as a building, “the temple of the Holy Ghost.” Death certainly renders this into dissolution, or, as the melancholic Hamlet has it, “the noble dust of Alexander . . . stopping a bung-hole.” But Donne the preacher finds grace in this dissolution, for he has certain hope of the body’s resurrection— the reanimation of formless dust into a perfected, living, sanctified flesh.

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If dust and ashes are indeed the transhistorical master topos of dead matter, let me extend my early modern trajectory to some three centuries later. One of the most vivid experiences of rebirth through dust is found in the great nineteenth- century historian Jules Michelet. A pioneer practitioner of social history, he labors to uncover all the nameless dead who have been ignored in the inexorable march of time. In the autobiographic preface to L’histoire de France (1869) he describes his early days in the Archives Nationales in Paris. From the “catacombs of manuscripts” he unearths inert papers that contain the silent lives of peasants, “their families and their fiefdoms, emblazoned in their dust [poussière], crying out against oblivion.”22 In a necromantic tone not unlike Du Bellay’s, he recounts, “As I breathed their dust [poussière], I saw them rise up.”23 Poussière is the activating force in Michelet’s historical imagination. In a real case of archive fever, he starts to hallucinate: “From the sepulcher they took now a hand, now a head, as in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment or in the Dance of Death. This frenzied dance, which they performed around me, I have tried to reproduce in this book.”24 It is perhaps no accident that in these dusty analogies he summons the masterworks of the High Italian Renaissance; we clearly see how persistent the topoi of pulverization and resurrection are to cultural memory. Ultimately the task of both the historian and the poet is to make these voices speak, to act as a conduit between the past and the present.

Marks on the Ground The Greek word sêma means “sign” as well as “grave.”25 Scholars say that the first figural representation, the statue, came into being as the effigy of the person who lay buried at the site of its erection. Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “This sema is not just a sign amongst others, it is the very source of signification itself, since it stood for what it stood in— the ground of burial.”26 In fact in its earliest appearance the statue was not strictly a sign in the sense of an object that denotes something else, since it was, according to Michel Serres, the mummified corpse.27 Sêma as both sign and grave is defined by a certain resemblance between word and thing, the memorial and the memorialized. In the case of Rome such likeness is difficult, for Du Bellay insists that the Eternal City exists now only in her nom, a name without a body, a verbal signifier whose signified has vanished. The dissolution of

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material Rome— nothing but dust— leads the poet to a tautology of signification: “Rome alone could resemble Rome,” Rome seule pouvoit à Rome ressembler (Sonnet 6.9). She is so singular that there can be no other adequate form of signification except herself. As such, la poudreuse cendre articulates the difficulties of representing the city, since the phrase denotes precisely the impossibility of containment, the impossibility of matter adhering to or being contained in form. If Rome herself is both the corpse and its representation, then Rome is indeed the original and final sêma: “Rome was the whole world, and the whole world is Rome, / And if we call the same things by the same names, / just as we could do without the name of Rome,” Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome / et si par mesmes noms mesmes choses on nomme, / Comme du nom de Rome on se pourroit passer (Sonnet 26.11–12). When Du Bellay makes such rhetoric of equivalence, what seem to be mere linguistic parallels are actually deeper signs that point to the difficulties of referential meaning. Can signs as words on the page truly serve as signs of marks on the ground? What kind of signs are dust and ashes? In Les Antiquitez the poet turns the triumphal monuments of Rome into her funerary monuments and makes her stunning architecture into her own graves: Qui voudra voir tout ce qu’ont peu nature, L’art, et le ciel (Rome) te vienne voir: J’entens s’il peult ta grandeur concevoir Par ce qui n’est que ta morte peinture. Rome n’est plus, et si l’architecture Quelque umbre encore de Rome fait revoir C’est comme un corps par magique sçavoir Tiré de nuict hors de sa sepulture Le corps de Rome en cendre est devallé Et son esprit rejoinder s’est allé Au grand esprit de ceste masse ronde. Mais ses escripts, qui son loz le plus beau Malgré le temps arrachent du tumbeau Font son idole errer parmy le monde. (Sonnet 5) Whoever wishes to see all that nature, art, and heaven have been able to do, let him come see you, Rome— if, that is, he can imagine your greatness from what is only your lifeless portrait. Rome is no more, and if her ruins still show us some shade of Rome, it is like a body raised by magic powers from its sepulcher at night.

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The body of Rome has returned to ashes, and her soul has gone to rejoin the great soul of the material universe. But her writings, which in spite of time wrest her fairest praise from the grave, keep her specter wandering throughout the world.

Du Bellay’s reduction of the body to the formless materiality of ashes, besides having its intertextual resonances, also gestures at the ancient Roman burial practice of cremation, the process by which a corpse is incinerated. 28 In ancient Rome places of burial were tightly regulated. Usually no one except the emperor could be buried inside the pomerium, the protective wall that surrounded the sacred boundary of the city. Corpses were believed to be a source of pollution and so were kept away from the center of life, the metropolis. Instead the remains were to be stored in columbaria, large underground structures whose walls were lined with hundreds of niches. In cremation the bodies of the deceased were dissolved while their identity was retained since urns were always marked with their names. 29 The proper domain of the poet, as a master of the sêma, is to remember the names of the dead through his writing (escripts), since the body is nothing but ashes (Le corps en cendre est devallé). Yet this conjuring causes a certain slippage of meaning in the poetic sequence as ruins become monuments, monuments tombs, tombs ruins, and texts monuments. In fact tombeau was a genre of occasional poetry in the sixteenth century composed in commemoration of the death of nobles.30 In 1536, upon the death of the dauphin, François de Valois, there were a number of poetic tributes. After François I’s death in 1547 there appeared Tumuli Francisci Valesii, to which Du Bellay contributed. Du Bellay also composed les tumbeaux to Henry II, Marguerite de Valois, and M. Antoine Minard. 31 In Les Antiquitez Du Bellay makes Rome into her own grave. By overturning the topographic limits of a place as that which is defined by its boundaries, he strategically reduces physical Rome to formless matter so that he can re- create it as a phantasm in his poetry. As such, he forces his readers to revisit both architecture’s and poetry’s primal function as the burial place and practice of remembering the dead. Rome is at once corpse and monument, like an Egyptian mummy. As poetry it exists as a sêma of a sêma: “Rome is the only monument to Rome, and only Rome conquered Rome,” Rome de Rome est le seul monument, et Rome Rome a vaincu seulment (Sonnet 6). The city loses its identity and becomes merged with the undifferentiated mass

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of the cosmos. And since ashes and dust as particles do not remain fixed in any earthbound location, what is left in the Roman landscape, Du Bellay suggests, is la grandeur du rien, nothing but a geography of emptiness, scribbled marks on the dust.

No

SÊ M A

Les Antiquitez has an almost complete absence of physical description. In his Romae descriptio, published the same year as Les Antiquitez (1558), Du Bellay asks: Ardua Pyramidum dicam, truncosque Colossos, Maestaque nunc vacuo muta theatra sinu? Aspice ut has moleis, quondamque minantia Divis Moenia luxurians herba situsque tegant. Hic, ubi praeruptis nutantia culmina saxis Descendunt caelo, maxima fuit. (109–14) Shall I speak of the height of the obelisks, the ruined colossi, the theaters, now gloomy and silent, their enclosures empty? Behold how a luxuriant growth of weeds and decay cover these piles of stones and these walls that once threatened the gods. Here, where pinnacles of stone break off and topple from the sky, was greatest Rome.

The answer, at least in Les Antiquitez, is no. Du Bellay mentions generic palais, arcz, and murs throughout the poems, but he does not provide a single proper name— Rome is only ces grands monceaux pierreux (Sonnet 18) and vieux fragments (Sonnet 31). Though the poetic sequence shares the same title as many contemporary illustrated guides to the city, such as Lucio Mauro’s Delle antichità di Roma (1542), Bartolomeo Marliani’s L’antiquità di Roma (1548), Andrea Palladio’s Le antichità di Roma (1554), Pirro Ligorio’s Libro delle antiquità di Roma (1554), and Etienne du Pérac’s I vestigi dell’antiquità di Roma (1575), Du Bellay actually had very little antiquarian interest in the city’s materiality.32 He could have composed a poetic mirabilia, similar to the Antiquarie prospettiche Romane (ca. 1499–1500, discussed in chapter 2), and chosen sonnets as an ekphrasis dedicated to, say, the Temple of Vesta, the Baths of Caracalla, Trajan’s Column, or the Arch of Constantine. But he chose not to. Why? To understand this, let us take a detour to Montaigne. The grand essayist also takes a skeptical view of antiquarian description, and in his Roman sojourn he wonders whether one can arrive at knowledge of the city empirically. His Journal records that upon his arrival

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in early 1580, he spent the evenings consulting books and maps of Rome, while in the daytime he diligently surveyed the physical sites. In a passage written by his secretary we read: He said that one saw nothing of Rome but the sky under which it had been founded and the plan of its site; that this knowledge that he had of it was an abstract and contemplative knowledge of which there was nothing perceptible to the senses; that those who said that one at least saw the ruins of Rome said too much, for the ruins of so awesome a machine would bring more honor and reverence to its memory: this was nothing but its sepulcher. 33

Montaigne puts under pressure what it means to see Rome and, indeed, what it means to know Rome.34 The surviving monuments have no correspondence to the reality of the ancient world: The ruins of Rome are only to be seen, for the most part, by the massiveness and thickness of the buildings. They made thick walls of brick, then encased them either with sheets of marble or another sort of white stone, or a kind of cement or large bricks plastered on top. Almost everywhere, this crust on which there were inscriptions has been worn away over the years, so that we have lost the greater part of our knowledge of such things. . . . But in truth, many conjectures that we make from the description of this ancient city have hardly any verisimilitude, since even its site has infinitely changed in form, some of the valleys having been filled up, even in the lowest places that were there. . . . He thought that an ancient Roman could not recognize the site of his city even if he saw it. 35

Montaigne shows a remarkable awareness of ancient construction techniques. He knows the insides of Roman buildings were made of a mixture of bricks and then encased in marble. 36 The aggregates varied, and usually included pieces of rock, ceramic tiles, and the remains of demolished buildings. In Montaigne’s description the vanishing of the building’s surfaces threatens to erase its very identity; individual buildings through their ruination become nothing but abstract configurations of geometric patterns. Roman space— its physical sêma— has been altered so much that it is no longer a useful index to the past. Like Montaigne, Du Bellay refuses to name specific sites in Rome, as if to say that the ancient city has become so ruined that even her greatest achievements cannot be identified. I believe that the lack of specific sites is strategic: the nonvisuality of the poems enhances the representation of dustiness, for the absence of physical description

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contributes to his sense that Rome is only a vague campagne (Sonnet 31) and a pouldreuse plaine (Sonnet 15). How can words capture the exhausted plentitude of antiquity? We saw this problem in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Verbal excess challenges the reader’s capacity to comprehend Rome’s magnitude, reaching the limits of representation: Du Bellay says, “And if we call the same things by the same names, just as we could do without the name of Rome,” Et si par mesmes noms mesmes choses on nomme, / Comme du nom de Rome on se pourroit passer (Sonnet 26.11–12).

Repetition/Reiteration In the thirty-two sonnets and the additional fifteen songes, the French poet’s rhetoric iterates, permutates, and recapitulates. The oxymorons that describe Rome— eternal and vanished, infinite and incomplete— inspire him to a maximal copia that seeks to capture these antinomies.37 Each sonnet encapsulates a myth of catastrophe, a different account of Rome’s grandeur and subsequent fall, whether from civil war, fratricide, pride, overextension, barbarian invasions, the gods’ will, natural calamity, or cosmic inevitability. Each sonnet’s periphrases, antitheses, parallelisms, and repetitions mimic Rome’s rise and fall, replaying the oscillations of the course of empire. The more often Rome falls, the more poems can be written about it. The revivifying verbal sêma of the poets must displace and replace the absent physical sêma of the architects, since they are nothing but dust and ashes. For Du Bellay shadows of antiquité appear once solid bodies become formless cendres. Writing is that which wrests them back to shape. This performance expresses a central paradox of the poetics of ruins: by their nature ruins are about absence, and poetry is about bringing to presence (to “re-present”), seeking to supply the emptiness of ruined matter through language. Ruins, as we have seen, are about incoherence, about the dissolution of meaning into mere mass. Renaissance poetics, however, strives toward coherence, organizing and binding verbal elements together, as if its repetition of language could arrest the dissolution of matter into dust. The poetry of Rome thus becomes the semiotic substitution of her physical monuments. In earlier chapters I suggested that for a humanist steeped in the study of ancient texts, it is impossible to see Rome for the first time. Rome is so deeply inscribed in the master text of culture that one’s encounter with it can never be unmediated; it is always seen through

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a dense, reiterative network of history, memory, and desire. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Sonnet 3, which has attracted so much attention because of its rich origins and afterlife:38 Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois, Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme. Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine: et comme Celle qui mist le monde sous ses loix Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois, Et devint proye au temps, qui tout consomme. Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit, Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistance. Newcomer, you who seek Rome in Rome and find nothing of Rome in Rome, these old palaces, these old arches that you see, and these old walls, this is what they call Rome. See what pride, what ruin, and how she who brought the world under her laws, in vanquishing all, at last vanquished herself and became the prey of time, which devours all. Rome is the only monument to Rome, and only Rome conquered Rome. Only the Tiber, which flees toward the sea, Remains of Rome. O worldly inconstancy! Whatever stands firm is destroyed by time. And whatever flees resists time.

This sonnet is a good example of how a work becomes monumental by despoiling its predecessors. G. Hugo Tucker has studied Du Bellay’s famous nouveau venu sonnet as a multilingual palimpsest: the French poet reworks Janus Vitalis’s Latin sonnet, just as Vitalis reworks the Polish poet Janus Pannonius.39 These four stanzas are a tour de force of graphic and phonetic repetition— a lesson in lyric sound play, alliteration, and assonance. “Rome” is repeated no fewer than ten times. With the sounds en and venu, vieux, vois, voy, vers, as well as the internal rhyme nomme and Rome, these repetitions provide a sonic chamber of memory and associations. Rien is echoed in the sounds of om, en, and on.40 The line et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistance suggests that the poet is trying to arrest the flight of time through an almost liturgical

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repetition of vowels and consonances (which is precisely the function of ritual: a repetitive activity that bridges the past and the present). It is as if Du Bellay hopes to awaken the inert cendre of Rome through these verbal echoes, so that the disappearance of physical Rome gives rise to a phantom, infinitely reiterative sonic Rome.41 For a humanist, you can never be a nouveau uenu to Rome. Rome— with its vieux palais, vieux arcz, vieux murs— is such a preconditioned, overdetermined entity that visual topography always intersects with textual memory. The ruins of Rome, to employ Pierre Nora’s famous notion, are the absolute lieux de mémoire of cultural memory, “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself.”42 Indeed the absence of material signs makes poetry an even more powerful force of enargeia in recovering Rome’s meaning. Sonnet 18: Ces grands monceaux pierreux, ces vieux murs que tu vois Furent premierement le cloz d’un lieu champestre: Et ces braves palais dont le temps s’est fait maistre, Cassines de pasteurs ont esté quelquefois. Lors prindrent les bergers les ornemens des Roys, Et le dur laboureur de fer arma sa dextre: Puis l’annuel pouvoir le plus grand se vid estre, Et fut encor plus grand le pouvoir de six mois: Qui, fait perpetuel, cruet en telle puissance, Que l’aigle Imperial de luy print sa naissance: Mais le Ciel s’opposant à tel accroissement, Mist ce pouvoir es mains du successeur de Pierre, Qui sous nom de pasteur, fatal à ceste terre, Monstre que tout retourne à son commencement. These great stone piles, these old walls that you see, at first enclosed country fields, and these brave palaces, which time has overthrown, were once the cottages of shepherds. Then the shepherds assumed the ornaments of kings, and the rough plowman armed his right hand with steel. Then the year-long power became greatest, and still greater was the power of six months, which, made perpetual, grew to such strength that from it the imperial eagle was born. But heaven, opposing such increase, placed that power in the hands of the successor of Peter, who, under name of pastor, a name linked by fate to that land, shows that everything returns to its beginnings.

The first stanza establishes the opposition in time and the opposition in material states: the sight of the present state (tu vois) is contrasted

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to what once was (furent premierement). Containing a touch of an Arcadian mood, these lines underscore the transformation of the fields of Rome from a pastoral to an urban landscape, before arriving at a spiritual pastoralism through the ministry of the Church, a new development that nevertheless, according to Du Bellay, strangely harks back to the city’s origins described in the country poems of Virgil. The third and fourth stanzas provide a mini history lesson of Rome’s rise to greatness through an extension of temporal powers: the yearlong power of the consuls, the six-month reign of the dictators, and the perpetual rule of the emperors. The final turn is signaled by the causative mais, which adds a divine moral judgment and establishes a play of names with the pierreux of stones and the Pierre of Peter, the humble pasteurs and the great Pasteur of the Church. The shifting rhymes in the sonnet mimic the cyclical patterns of history: ces, ces, cloz, ces, cassines pierreux, premierement, palais, Pasteur, prindrent, pouvoir, plus, pouvoir perpetual, puissance, print, pouvoir, Pierre. And the repetition of the nasal sound— monceaux, monstre, commencement—likewise mimics the ceaseless alternation between Rome’s rise and decline. As literary critics have long argued, repetitions in rhyme, alliteration, assonance, meter, and refrain are the mnemonic elements in the poet’s toolbox that allow “the ear, the eye, the mind to make connections, conscious or unconscious, between different textual moments.”43 In repetition the past and present are elided— old Romes fade into new Romes. As I showed in my discussion of Lucretius, dust is a visible atomic element— matter without form. Likewise sounds and letters are the elements of language— matter without meaning. Their combination in the hands of the poet creates the verbal order of semantic meaning. As the sonnets of Les Antiquitez attest, the copia of Rome stretches its coherence to a breaking point, so that tout retourne à son commencement. Du Bellay’s iterations— repetitions with a difference— mimic the infinitely pliable figure of Rome. As Rome herself is composed of innumerable permutations, paradox abounds: “Whatever stands firm is destroyed by time. And whatever flees resists time,” Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit, / Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistence. Du Bellay’s rhetorical postures provide linguistic abundance to compensate for the lack of material remains of Roman ruins. Thus the only adequate monument of Rome is a verbal one, since, again, “Rome is the only monument to Rome, and only Rome conquered Rome,” Rome de Rome est le seul monument, et Rome

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Rome a vaincu seulment. Even the force of this statement is based on semantic equivalence and sonic echo. Since physical Rome has all but vanished, Rome can only take shape, finally, as poetic monuments.

Relics of Antiquity Now that we have examined the topos of dust and ashes in the literary tradition, and how the analogy between dust, atoms, and letters inform Les Antiquitez, let us think about severed body parts. That is, we move from poudreuse cendre to the “holy body, holy dust” of religious relics.44 Toward the conclusion of the first book of La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (1549), a treatise written before his sojourn in Rome (1553–57), Du Bellay conjures an arresting image to describe the hushed reverence some feel for the languages of antiquity: Il me souvient de ces reliques, qu’on voit seulement par une petite vitre, et qu’il n’est permis toucher avecques la main. Ainsi veullent ilz faire de toutes les disciplines , qu’ilz tiennent enfermées dedans les livres Grecz et Latins, ne permettant qu’on les puisse voir autrement, ou les transporter de ces paroles mortes en celles qui sont vives et volent ordinairement par les bouches des hommes. (1.10, 352–53) I am reminded of those relics that one can see only through a small window and that one is forbidden to touch with one’s hand. That is what they would do to all the learned disciplines, which they keep shut up in Greek and Latin books, not allowing them to be seen in any other way or to be translated from those dead words into words that are alive and fly commonly through the lips of men.

Du Bellay’s analogy of how language was elevated to such a rarified position as relics is most likely a reference to the cult of Neo-Latin. This topos appears again in the second book of La Deffence: Ne doute point que le moderé usaige de telz vocables ne donne grande majesté tant au vers comme à la prose: ainsi que font les reliques des sainctz aux croix et autres sacrez joyaux dediez aux temples. (2.6, 384) Do not doubt that the moderate use of such terms gives great majesty to verse as to prose, just as relics of saints do to crosses and other sacred jewels consecrated to the use of churches.

Reliquaries, containers encrusted with gold and jewels that encased fragments of a saint’s bones or blood, were frequently exhibited in

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churches.45 As Caroline Walker Bynum notes, in the Middle Ages the visibility and circulation of relics were signs of their prestige.46 The more they were displayed, distributed, and traded, the more valuable they became. In the early modern period relics were made into precious “art.” Encased in reliquary altars, they were eventually transformed into worldly cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammern. Following this secularizing custom, Du Bellay turns the practice of displaying relics into one of mere ornamentation, decorous furnishings rather than the occasion for sacred encounters. Instead of having miraculous powers, they become aesthetic objects. In the fifteenth to sixteenth century interest in the material fragments of the past underwent a shift from the aura of holy relics to a humanist taste in the sculptural and textual fragments. One close analogy between religious and textual fragments is the issue of translation. The circulation of relics by gift, theft, and sale was called translatio. Patrick Geary has studied the widespread phenomena of furta sacra— the theft of relics in the Middle Ages.47 Instead of arousing condemnation, these acts were generally met with approval, and the thefts paradoxically gave churches more authority and legitimacy. To survive as a valuable commodity, St. Cecilia’s finger or a piece of the True Cross, say, had to continue to meet the high expectations raised by the mode of its exchange. Its mode of circulation reflects the cultural assumptions of an exchange value between two communities: acquiring a relic gave it value because it was worth acquiring, and this acquisition was itself evidence that the relics were genuine. The more relics traveled, the more they increased in potency. The crown of thorns in the Sainte- Chapelle, for example, looted from Byzantium in the thirteenth century, gave prestige to the French royal court. This relation to the sacred past is therefore a combination of rapine (sacking) and veneration. A similar circulation occurs in humanist texts. Literary allusions or imitations are predicated on the shared knowledge of prior texts that are esteemed to be of a superior value. The more prestigious a text, the more it was circulated, translated, imitated. The difference between a relic and a text is that a relic divorced from its specific context has no fixed code, sign, or meaning. It is pure materiality, like the ashes in the columbarium.48 Texts, on the other hand, so long as someone is able to read them, are inherently intelligible objects. As such, mutatis mutandis, we can think about the humanist’s reverence for ancient texts and ruins as a sort of secular relic veneration. As Francis Bacon

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wrote in 1605, “First Libraries, which are as the Shrynes, where all the Reliques of the ancient Saints, full of true vertue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserued, and reposed.”49 Like valuable relics, dusty texts emerging from a millennium of neglect functioned as symbolic capital whose worth was determined and endowed by a community.

The

T R A NSL AT IO

of the Vernacular

At this point we can draw a closer nexus between translations of ruins, dust, and relics: they are all figures of dynamic, material change, forming a deep analogy between the composition of the corporal past and the textual present. A translatio of a relic moves the precious object from place to place, wresting it from its original context and reinvesting it with local meaning. A translation of a text moves it from language to language, across national and temporal boundaries, also divorcing it from its origins and reendowing it with new meanings. In the Lucretian paradigm of dust as atoms and atoms as letters, all elements are capable of infinite change. Whether translating a text or a relic, the act rescues precious objects from their own slow dissolution by transporting them into a foreign body. What, then, is the relationship between ruins and translation? Ruins are the remnants of the original body, fixed in place but living in a foreign time. They ensure the survival of the original in two senses—both a continuity or “living on,” in Walter Benjamin’s sense of Fortleben, and “life after death,” Überleben.50 A translation is a new body altogether, linguistically mobile but adapted to the present. Thinking about ruins and translation evokes the problem of presence, how the surviving ruin and the text make the “original” palpable. They both speak, in Glyn P. Norton’s words, to “the credo of translatio studiorum or the narrowing of gaps between cultures remote in time and space.”51 In La Deffence Du Bellay presents a program of literary production that is coextensive with the fashioning of the national state. Making linguistic and cultural translatio the central trope in his theory of culture, he presents a transnational nationalism, as it were, a formation of a national identity that is not autochthonous but a version of translatio studii in which the latecomers plunder the best from the warehouse of antiquity in order to fashion their new monuments. At this point in mid-sixteenth- century literary humanism, the remains of the past fill the poet with dread. Either the achievements

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of the ancients are so great that it is impossible to equal them, or the achievements of the ancients are so fragmented that it is impossible to know them. One feels asphyxiated by the weight of the classical tradition: “The broad fields of Greek and Latin are already so full that very little empty space remains,” Les larges campaignes Greques et Latines sont déja si pleines, que bien peu reste d’espace vide (Deffence 2.12). In Bernard Fontenelle’s Dialogues of the Dead (1683), two men argue over whether fame can come from acts of destruction as well as creation. Young Herostratus, having burned down the Temple of Artemis, justifies his act: “The earth is like a large tablet, on which each man wishes to write his name. When it becomes full, then the names already written there have to be erased, in order to put new ones in their place. What would happen if all the monuments of the ancients were still standing?”52 Du Bellay might agree with this enfant terrible: the new generation needs its own espace vide to create. For Du Bellay literary production is possible only when there is a rupture with the past. Du Bellay is the Renaissance thief, ready for an act of pagan theft, a translatio of the corpus of ancient literature: “March courageously on that proud Roman city and from her captured spoils (as you have done more than once) adorn your temples and altars,” Là donq, Françoys, marchez couraigeusement vers cete superbe cité Romaine: et des serves despouilles d’elle (comme vous avez fait plus d’une fois) ornez voz temples et autelz (Conclusion de tout l’Œuvre). Humanist writing is inherently an act of despoiling. The parenthetical phrase comme vous avez fait plus d’une fois refers to the invasion of both Greece and Rome by the Gauls in the third century bce. 53 It is now France’s turn again to take the Romans captive. In Du Bellay’s case, he takes a foreign text captive and incorporates it into his own work. In fact his rallying cry is a slight modification of Cicero’s justification for introducing Stoic philosophy to Rome found in his Tusculan Disputations: “For this reason I encourage all, who have the capacity, to wrest [eripiant] from the now failing grasp of Greece the renown won from this field of study and transfer [transferant] it to this city, just as our ancestors by their indefatigable zeal transferred here all the other really desirable avenues to renown” (2.2). The purpose of the dialogue is to infuse what Cicero considered to be the ailing Republic’s health with salutary ideas found in Greek philosophy by way of translation. 54 Believing that the Romans have surpassed the Greeks in all aspects of life— morals, statecraft, family structure, the military— except letters and

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philosophy, Cicero frames his translation of Hellenic philosophy into Latin as one of civic duty. Both Cicero’s eripire and Du Bellay’s despouiller are violent acts of seizure, grabbing, and snatching. Du Bellay’s rhetoric, in turn, is based on an ironic reasoning: he uses the authority of the ancients to legitimate his own appropriation of the ancients. The inaugural moment in both Roman and French cultural production, then, is to make the foreign domestic.

Buildings and Words Similar to the architectural practice of spoliation, Renaissance authors cut up ancient texts into fragments that could be incorporated into their own texts.55 The archive of the past is too enormous, too dispersed, and therefore must be collected into mobile units so that modern hands can put them back together. Montaigne in “Defence de Seneque et de Plutarque” acknowledges that his book is “built up purely from their spoils.”56 Such an expression equates the essayist with the contemporary architects of “this misbegotten Rome” (cette Rome bâtarde) who fashion their work out of ancient spoils. Eric MacPhail writes that “in both cases the modern artist commits a sort of offense against his ancient model which alienates him. . . . Du Bellay captured this dilemma in the term ‘rediviva’ or used building materials whereby he described modern Roman building and, by implication, by his own poetic reconstruction of classical literature.”57 With the pillaged textual spoils Du Bellay attempts to “illustrate” or adorn the French language, like the relics that decorate the interiors of churches. But how will his configuration of Rome be constituted in a uniquely French guise? He says in the dedication to Henri II: Ne vous pouvant donner ces ouvrages antiques Pour vostre Sainct- Germain, ou pour Fontainebleau, Je les vous donne (Sire) en ce petit tableau Peint, le mieux que j’ay peu, de couleurs poëtiques. Qui mis sous vostre nom devant les yeux publiques, Si vous le daignez voir en son jour le plus beau, Se pourra bien vanter d’avoir hors du tumbeau Tiré des vieux Romains les poudreuses reliques. Que vous puissent les Dieux un jour donner tant d’heur, De rebastir en France une telle grandeur Que je la voudrois bien peindre en vostre langage.

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Unable to give you these ancient works for your Saint Germain or for Fontainebleau, I give them to you, Sire, in this little picture, painted, as best I could, with poetic color Which, placed before the eyes of the public under your name, if you deign to view it in its best light, will be able to boast of having pulled from the tomb the dusty remains of the ancient Romans. May the gods one day give you the good fortune to rebuild in France such greatness that I would willingly paint it in your language.

Comparing texts to monumental buildings in praise of one’s patron is common enough in early sixteenth- century France, but Du Bellay goes further by citing the actual palaces of St. Germain and Fontainebleau. 58 The architectural trope of poetic making is also found in sonnets 157–59 of the Regrets. The first two are addressed to the seigneur of Clagny and Pierre Lescot, the architect of the Louvre, and the third to Diane de Poitiers, for whom Philibert de l’Orme built the château d’Anet. 59 Just as Lescot renovates the Louvre, Du Bellay constructs the palace of words toward a new architecture of poetry. His fellow Pléiade poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524– 85) also addresses an ode to Diane de Poitiers using architectural terms: Je chanterois d’Anet les édifices, Termes, piliers, chapiteaux, frontispices, Voutes, lambris, canelures, et non Comme font plusieurs, les fables de ton nom. 60 I would sing of the buildings of d’Anet, The baths, pillars, capitals, frontispieces, Vaults, panelings, fluted ribbings, and not As many have done, the fable of your name.

These dedications articulate the crucial trope that I have been exploring: “pulled from the tomb the dusty remains of the ancient Romans . . . to rebuild France.” The constructions of these magnificent chateaux, along with Du Bellay’s poetry, are all part of the cultural program of renewal. The Italian campaigns of Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I had provided firsthand experience of the glories of the Renaissance.61 As France broke free of its earlier political upheaval, the monarchy sought to forge a sense of national identity by cultivating the arts of sculpture, painting, poetry, and not least architecture. In Sonnet 25 Du Bellay promises, “I would, with the ardor that inflames me, undertake to rebuild with the pen what

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hands cannot construct in stone,” J’entreprendrois, veu l’ardeur qui m’allume, / De rebastir au compas de la plume / ce que les mains ne peuvent maçonner. The crucial word bastir is used in the literal sense by the architect Philibert de l’Orme, who published Nouvelles inventions pour bien bastir et à petit frais in 1561. As one of the most polemical architects of Du Bellay’s day, he sought to bring the art of classical architecture to France: Have I not provided other services, to wit having brought to France the method of building well [la façon de bien bastir], eliminating barbarous methods and coarse joints, showing all and sundry how to observe the right measures in architecture, even training the finest workers of our day, as they themselves acknowledge? Let it be recalled how people worked before I began Saint Maur for Cardinal du Belloy!62

De l’Orme, the director of all official construction for Henry II, stresses the importation of foreign technique and ancient models. This practice underlies much of the cultural contradictions of his generation: they were nationalist, yet they hated their own heritage (“barbarous methods”) and looked abroad for inspiration. But as soon as they adopted foreign techniques, they spurned them. They first looked to Italy as a model, but eventually rejected it. Then they took antiquity as their model, and also rejected that. What they ultimately wanted was a foreign-trained, native-grown vernacular.

Language as Ruins At a certain point in La Deffence Du Bellay mentions the idea of “acclimatizing” classical words, which “will be in our language like strangers in a city, and for whom periphrases will always serve as interpreters,” seront en notre Langue comme etrangers en une cité: aux quelz toutefois les periphrases serviront de truchementz (347). Writers have always compared language to architecture. In the Philosophical Investigations (1953) Wittgenstein writes, “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”63 Interestingly Wittgenstein’s architectural analogy has an early modern ancestry. In the Discourse on the Method (1644) Descartes has a strikingly similar passage:

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Thus we see that buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are usually more attractive and better planned than those which several have tried to patch up by adapting old walls built for different purposes. Again, ancient cities [that] have gradually grown from mere villages into large towns are usually ill-proportioned, compared with those orderly towns which planners lay out as they fancy on level ground.64

Descartes uses this extended analogy of building over time for the purposes of dismantling the entire structure of scholastic and humanist learning so that he can create philosophy anew. Like Wittgenstein and Descartes, Renaissance humanists used striking architectural analogies to describe the ruinous state of their culture and language. Petrarch thought medieval Latin was crude, barbarous, and in need of repristination. In a spellbinding poem in the Canzoniere he forcefully writes: L’antiche mura ch’ancor teme et ama et trema ’l mondo quando si rimembra del tempo andato e ‘n dietro si rivolve, e i sassi dove fur chiuse le membra di ta’ che non saranno senza fama se l’universo pria non si dissolve, et tutto quel ch’una ruina involve, per te spera saldar ogni suo vizio. . . . “Roma mia sarà ancor bella!” (53.29– 35, 42) The ancient wall, which the world still fears and loves and trembles at when it remembers past time and looks back, and the stones where were enclosed the bodies of men who will not be without fame until the universe is dissolved, and everything which this one ruin carries down, hope through you to repair their every flaw. . . . My Rome shall be beautiful again65!

In Petrarch’s formulation the ancient stones of Rome assume a cosmic significance as the long-forgotten sepulchers of heroic memories— Petrarch’s vision is nothing less than their complete revivification. Leonardo Bruni in the Life of Petrarch (1441) praised Petrarch as “the first who had such a faculty of genius that he recognized and revived the ancient lightness of the lost, extinguished style, and though it was not perfect in him, still by himself he saw and opened the way to this perfection.”66 For Erasmus almost a century later this supposed linguistic renovatio (dubbed “the Ciceronian controversies”), although all the rage in humanist circles, was nothing but naïve and anachronistic; the radical

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purity that these men espoused— the tempus perfectum of the Roman statesman— in fact contradicted the fundamental rhetorical principle of suiting speech to specific time and place. As Bulephorus, a character in Erasmus’s satirical dialogue Ciceronianus (1528), observes: Cicero always spoke in a manner absolutely befitting his subject, Longueil hardly could do so, since today Rome does not have the conscript fathers or the senate, or the authorization of the people. . . . In short, Rome is not Rome. It has nothing but ruins and rubble, the scars and signs of the disasters that befell [it] long along. [Nihil habens praeter ruinas ruderaque priscae calamitatis cicatrices ac vestigia.]67

This passage is telling in its conflation of the ruinous calamity that befell Rome with the impossibility of its reconstruction. In denoting linguistic and architectural desolation, the evocative imageries of ruinas, rudera, cicatrices, and vestigia are as haunting as those of Petrarch in Rvf 53. Du Bellay too employs architecture in La Deffence to describe his project: “Since the poet and the orator are like the two pillars that support the edifice of each language [l’edifice de chacune langue] . . . I wanted to sketch [ebaucher] as well as I can the one [poetry], hoping that it may be brought to perfection by me or by some more learned hand” (362– 63). Du Bellay is conscious of the impossibility of exact and total reconstruction of the ancients and sees the attempt as nothing but a hopeless dream: And if you hope that with those gathered fragments they can be brought back to life (as Aesculapius did with the limbs of Hippolytus), you are fooling yourselves, not realizing that at the fall of such proud structures, together with the predestined ruin of those two powerful empires, one part was reduced to dust and the rest must be in many pieces which it would be impossible to reassemble. [La cheute de si superbes edifices conjointe à la ruyne fatale de ces deux puissantes monarchies, un partie devint poudre, et l’autre doit ester en beaucoup de pieces, les queles vouloir reduire en un seroit chose impossible.] Besides, many other parts have remained in the foundations of old walls, or, scattered in the long course of the ages, can no longer be found. As a result, in undertaking to rebuild that edifice you will be far from restoring its original grandeur, when in the place where the great hall once stood you may perhaps put the bedrooms, the stables, or the kitchen, confusing doors and windows, changing, in short, the whole form of the building. (356)

Du Bellay here employs metaphors of corporal sparagmos and architectural ruins to launch a polemic against faithful restoration. In the

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introduction I discussed how Petrarch dreamed of reconstituting the mutilated manuscripts of Quintilian with the image of Aesculapius making Hippolytus whole. Du Bellay here regards as an illusion this attempt to follow the ancients exactly, as tragic as the god of medicine struck by a lightning bolt. This acknowledgment of the irretrievably broken remains of antiquity allows him license to dismember classical texts, transpose them, and reconstitute them, thereby enacting the process of turning ancient ashes and dust into a uniquely French body.

Poetry beyond Architecture This chapter opened with a reading of the first sonnet of Les Antiquitez as a humanist invocation to recall the buried spirit of Roman antiquity. We then saw how in La Deffence Du Bellay advocated the dissembling and reincorporation of the ancients into the new literary edifice of France. In the end he believed that poetry would be longer lasting than buildings. In an October 1559 letter to Jean Morel, he likens his Tumulus Henrici secondi to un ovrage Dorique and boasts, Il ne doit ceder ny à l’excellence du Mausolée, ny à l’orgueil des Pyramides Egyptiennes.68 Elsewhere he writes: Roma ingens periit, vivit Maro doctus ubique, Et vivunt Latiae fila canora lyrae. Nasonis vivunt, vivunt flammaeque Tibulli, Et vivunt numeri, docte Catulle, tui. . . . Forte etiam vivent nostri monumenta laboris, Caetera cum domino sunt peritura suo. (Romae descriptio 133– 36, 145–46) Enormous Rome has perished. Learned Virgil lives everywhere, and the harmonious chords of the Latin lyre live on. The flames of Ovid live, living still are those of Tibullus, and your verses live, learned Catullus. . . . Perhaps the monuments of our labor will indeed live on, while all the rest will perish with its master. Ce qu’avient à tous ceux qui mettent l’asseurance de leur immortalité au marbre, au cuyvre, aux collosses, aux pyramides, aux laborieux edifices, et autres choses non moins subjectes aux injures du Ciel et du tens, de la flamme, et du fer, que de fraiz excessifz et perpetuelle solicitude. (La Deffence, 2.12, 380) [Destruction] is what happens to all those who put their assurance of immortality in marble, in brass, in huge statues, in pyramids, in laborious buildings, and other things that are no less subject to the

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injuries of heaven and of time, of fire and of steel, than to excessive costs and perpetual care.

As we have seen, in the face of material ruins the poet tries to craft an enduring lyric work that will outlast all other forms of commemoration. Du Bellay’s invocation of this perennial topos is given in the last sonnet of Les Antiquitez: Esperez vous que la posterité Doive (mes vers) pour tout jamais vous lire? Esperez vous que l’œuvre d’une lyre Puisse acquerir telle immortalité? Si sous le ciel fust quelque eternité Les monuments que je vous ay fait dire, Non en papier, mais en marbre et porphyre, Eussent gardé leur vive antiquité. Ne laisse pas toutefois de sonner Luth, qu’Apollon m’a bien daigné donner: Car si le temps ta gloire ne desrobbe, Vanter te peuls, quelque bas que tu sois, D’avoir chanté, le premier des François, L’antique honneur du peuple à longue robbe. (32) Do you hope, my poems, that posterity will read you forever? Do you hope that the work of a lyre can win such immortality? Were there any eternity under heaven, the ancient monuments of which I have made you speak would have survived intact not on paper but in marble and porphyry. Do not for all that cease playing, lute, which Apollo has deigned to give me, for if time does not steal away your glory, You can boast, however lowly you are, that you have sung, first among the French, the ancient honor of the long-robed people.

Du Bellay recapitulates the ancient topos of the immortality of verse by following Horace’s claim in Ode 3.30, Virgil in the beginning of Georgics 3, and Propertius in book 3. As I said in chapter 1, Horace emphasizes that the fate of his words depends on the continuity of his culture’s sacred rites: “I shall continue to grow, fresh with the praise of posterity, as long as the priest climbs the Capitol with the silent virgin,” Crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex. As Horace brought Greek letters to Rome, so will Du Bellay bring ancient verse to France. Du Bellay weaves this

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translatio into his French narrative by proclaiming that he is the first to have sung about the peuple à longue robbe. Yet read in the light of the entire sonnet sequence, this is highly ironic, given that he has just spent the last thirty-odd poems declaring the end of the Roman Empire.

Afterlife As Du Bellay skillfully absorbs the style and substance of his predecessors in Les Antiquitez, the collection’s afterlife was equally imitated and emulated. Jean de la Jessée (1550–1600), reacting to the turmoil of the war of religions, in La France desplorée turns Du Bellay’s famous phrase Rome n’est plus dans Rome into La France n’est plus la France (“Rome is no longer Rome,” “France is no longer France”).69 Jacques Grévin (1539– 70) gives his version of Sonnet 3 of Les Antiquitez as Arrivé dedans Rome, en Rome je cherchois / Rome qui fut jadis la merveille du monde, “Having arrived in Rome, I searched for Rome, Rome who was long ago the marvel of the world.”70 Jérome Hennequin (1547–1619) expresses the inconstancy of human affairs by turning Rome into France: Toy estranger qui viens ici chercher la France, / Si rien de France, en France, esbahy n’aperçois, “You stranger who come here to look for France, / Yet— astonished— nothing of France in France can you see.”71 Charles-Julien Lioult de Chênedollé (1769– 1833), an associate of Chateaubriand, writes in “Rome ensevlie dans ses ruines,” Ton regard vainement cherche Rome dans Rome! Tu ne vois que son ombre; et d’un destin si beau / Il ne reste aujourd’hui qu’un orgueilleux fantôme, “You search Rome in Rome in vain! You see only its shade / There is nothing left today except for a proud phantom.”72 Let us look more closely at Grévin’s rendition: Arrivé dedans Rome, en Rome je cherchois Rome qui feut jadis la merveille du monde; Ne voyant cette Rome à nulle autre seconde D’avoir perdu mes pas honteux je me faschois Du matin jusqu’au soir çà et là je marchois Ores au Colizée et or’ à la Rotonde, Ores monté bien haut, regardant à la ronde, De voire cette grand Rome en Rome je taschois.73 Having arrived in Rome, in Rome I searched for Rome who was once the marvel of the world

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Only seeing this Rome was second to none, Having shamefully lost my steps I am angry at myself From the morning to the evening here and there I walk Now at the Coliseum and now at the Pantheon, Now I climb high above, surveying all around To see this great Rome in Rome— I become silent.

This is very clearly a close imitation of Sonnet 3 of Les Antiquitez. Rome en Rome is identical to Du Bellay’s phrase first and second lines; Du Bellay’s Rome l’on nomme of verse 9 resonates with Rome on nomme. Even though Grévin does not see the physical Rome on his walk, in his verses he sonically, semantically, and syntactically follows in the vestigia of his predecessors. Earlier in this chapter I quoted from the twentieth- century Italian poet Ungaretti, who said that words can “return us to the presence of so many people whose bodies have disappeared from the earth but whose spiritual presence remains when their words are operative within us.” Grévin’s reprise of Du Bellay conjures such a spiritual presence, binding him in a poetic tradition that stretches back to Vitalis and forward to Jean Antoine de Baïf, Jean Doublet, Jérome Hennequin, Jean de la Jessée, Thomas Heywood, and Francisco de Quevedo.74 This lyric genealogy illustrates how the poetics of ruins in Renaissance poetry finds its survival in multiplicity and metamorphoses. Other vernacular languages also had their own ruination fever. Later English and Spanish poets rework Du Bellay’s sonnet in their own language, adding their national perspective. Spenser’s translation of Du Bellay, which I discuss in next chapter, in his Ruines of Rome reads, “Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, / And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all. . . . Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what wast.” Thomas Heywood (1575– 1641) writes, “New Stranger to the City come, / Who midst of Rome enquir’st for Rome, / And midst of Rome cast nothing spye.” Francisco de Quevedo’s (1580–1645) version is Buscas en Roma a Roma, ¡oh, peregrino! Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas: cadáver son las que ostentó murallas, y tumba de sí proprio el Aventino.75 Every new literary movement needs the previous generation, especially foreign ones, to degenerate because ruination provides the open space for new work as well as the raw materials for spoliation. Benjamin claims that “translation, unlike art, cannot claim permanence for its products, its goal is undeniably a final, conclusive, decisive stage of

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all linguistic creation.”76 But in the Renaissance there were few works that were ever final, conclusive, or decisive. In that sense everything was a translation. Originals were perpetuated precisely by multiple, overlapping matrices of transformations. This is finally how la poudreuse cendre finds immortality. The ruin’s worst fate is to be consigned to oblivion, to float at the edge of collective memory. Having no agency of its own, it finds life only by moving from atom to atom, dust to dust, letter to letter, poet to poet.

chapter 6

Spenser’s Moniment and the Allegory of Ruins Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. —Walter Benjamin

The earliest surviving definition of monumentum comes from the first- century Latin lexicographer Varro’s De lingua latina: Meminisse, “to remember,” comes from memoria, “memory” since there is once again movement back to that which has stayed in the mind; this may have been derived from manere “to remain,” like manimoria. And this the Salii when they sing “O Mamurius Veturius” signify a memoria, “memory.” From the same word comes monere, “remind,” because he who reminds is just like memory; so are derived monimenta, “memorials,” which are in burial places and for that reason are situated along the road, so that they can remind those who are passing by that they themselves existed and that the passersby are mortal. From this use other things that are written or produced for the sake of memory are called monimenta, “reminders.” (6.4)1

Varro’s gloss of the monument underscores the affinity between places and memory, remembrance and projection, tombs and writing. Roman necropoli were located on the exit roads of cities, separating the residences of the living and the cultic sites of burial. 2 The Via Appia, punctuated by reminders of death, not only measures the distance traversed from one geographical point to another but also maps the larger itinerary of life, acting as a hinge in which the past and future are in the hic et nunc. Proleptic and analeptic, a tombstone interrupts the quotidian activity of walking, seizes the pedestrian’s imagination, and pitches his thoughts toward mortality. Spenser’s career, punctuated in an analogous way by the word moniment, measures the distance his writings have traversed and

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maps a larger itinerary of his poetic project, which engages in a fundamental rethinking of the activities of monument making and its dialectical other, ruination. In his poems monuments and ruins function as allegorical signifiers that shape both the content and the form of his work. Within the moral topography of Spenser’s world a ruin is usually a false monument, a sign of our postlapsarian state. The destruction of Roman temples in A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldings (1569) or The Ruines of Rome (1591) is a sort of righteous disenchantment. In the attempt to turn a ruin back into a monument, idolatry threatens to reemerge, as in The Ruines of Time (1591). Monuments in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) are supposed to instruct, yet more often than not they are on the verge of catastrophe. For Spenser true, lasting monuments—whether Britons monuments in Book II or the text of The Faerie Queene writ large— are those that spur the mind to action. A true monument, more than a thing to be passively gazed at, must be decoded, interpreted, and interrogated. An earlier generation of Spenserians— Northrop Frye, Harry Berger Jr., Angus Fletcher, James Nohrnberg, Judith H. Anderson, and more recently Kenneth Gross and Gordon Teskey— are particularly attuned to the English poet’s allegorical imagination and engagement with the mythopoeic strains of the classical tradition. A younger generation— Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Willy Maley, Rebeca Helfer— are more concerned with the local textures, historical complexities, and struggles of national formation in the 1590s. They read monuments and ruins as the aftermath of Reformation iconoclasm and the dissolution of the monasteries. My critical position pivots between these two spheres in order to argue that Spenserian ruins are both a rupture caused by a failure of the allegorical imagination to yoke together the ideal and the apparent, and a material instantiation of the iconoclastic upheavals of late sixteenth- century England. Because allegory in essence traffics between two worlds— the earthly and the eternal— it is a particularly apt method to understand the dialectic between the monument and the ruin. This dialectic turns out to be symptomatic of a host of other important frictions in Spenser’s work: paganism and Christianity, concealment and revelation, iconoclasm and idolatry, degeneration and consummation, fragments and totality, accidents and teleology. These tensions— highly unstable, always on the brink of chaos— constitute the very structure of meaning in his poetry. Allegory as a means of subsuming all these

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elements is therefore put under enormous pressure. Thus a Spenserian poetics is always in danger of fragmentation. His poetic monuments, then, are as much about the allegory of ruins as the ruins of allegory. That is to say, ruins are allegorized, but allegory itself is ruined in this antagonistic struggle between poetic making and interpretative disorder. In the previous chapters I examined authors who tenuously traced the shadows of the past through the melancholic science of a philological poetics (Petrarch), oneiric inventions of architectural follies (Colonna), and a nationalist zeal for creative destruction (Du Bellay). Here we have an English poet whose imagination is invested in allegory in its most intense form. If vestigium (the trace) is form without matter, and cendre (ash) pure matter without form, then moniment is supposed to be the coalescence of form and matter into a wellwrought artifact of allegory. We shall see how fragile this artifact is.

Ruinous Beginnings The Italian Renaissance, as we have seen, drew its inspiration from the mighty obsolescence of ancient Rome. The landscape of England, however, was dotted with not only Roman remains— the diffusion of roads, walls, fortifications, and baths throughout the region— but also the faint traces of Celtic, Anglo- Saxon, and Norman cultures. To this palimpsestic landscape the sixteenth century added many more ruined sites, wrought by the Suppression Acts that dissolved churches, monasteries, and other religious property. 3 The Royal Injunctions of 1559 stated that all “tables, candlesticks, trindles, and rolls of wax, pictures, paintings all monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition” of Catholic institutionalization must be destroyed.4 Iconoclasm is the practice that cleanses such millennial accretion to reveal the true meanings of the faith. In the Protestant imagination a true monument is supposed to transmit spiritual radiance to the world of earthly decay. As James Simpson observes, “The official programmes of iconoclasm between 1536 and 1550 seek to distance the past from the present as rapidly and decisively as possible either by demolishing the medieval, or more enduringly perhaps, by creating the very concept of the medieval as a site of ruin.”5 The English countryside was indeed filled with Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73). Yet as Alexandra Walsham has explored in her important The Reformation

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of the Landscape, iconoclasm was prolonged and contentious, not the definitive eradication of sacred sites that earlier scholars had claimed.6 Landscapes still retained traces of the sacred. Popular belief considered wells, trees, stones, rivers, wayside crosses, and ecclesiastical buildings to exude supernatural qualities. Shrines and places of pilgrimage continued to exert their centrifugal pull. Ruined abbeys, such as the chapels of Glastonbury and Cornwall, glowed with the aura of the numinous. The initial spasms of Henry VIII’s despoliation prompted a nostalgic desire to preserve the relics of the past— even if they were by the Druids, Saxons, Celts, or Danes.7 It is not surprising, then, that scenes of ruination occupy an ambivalent place in Spenser’s work: are the ruins to be mourned, or were they the victorious signs of divinely sanctioned punishment? His first publication, in 1569, at seventeen, was his translation of Jan Van Der Noot’s Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, containing visions of apocalyptic destructions; in the 1590 Faerie Queene there is the despoiling done by Kirkrapine in Book I, the violence wrought upon the Bower of Bliss in Book II, and the conflagration of Busyrane’s castle in Book III. The Complaints, published as a collection in 1591, begins with the Ruines of Time; at its center is a translation of Du Bellay’s Ruines of Rome; it concludes with Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, The Visions of Bellay, and The Visions of Petrarch, all of which are reworkings of the Theatre translation. There are countless moments of destruction in the 1596 Faerie Queene: Book V takes as its central theme the use of violence in pursuit of the good; and finally the entropic force of the Blatant Beast concludes Book VI. Throughout, the razing of buildings testifies to the self- defeating hubris of human ingenuity. Within the moral universe of Spenser’s poetry, an effort to create something physically permanent merely hastens the hour of doom. Spenser’s personal life too was dominated by real forms of the ruin. After his employment as private secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, the lord deputy of Ireland in 1580, the poet inhabited a series of appropriated Irish properties, including a dissolved monastery at New Ross until 1584. He also leased a house in Dublin and a ruined Franciscan monastery called New Abbey, near Kilcullen in the County Kildare. In 1586 he was assigned 3,028 acres in Cork, which included Kilcolman Castle, his principal residence until it was sacked by rebels in 1598.8 Thus as he was composing The Faerie Queene he was literally living in the shadow of Irish ruins.

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These individual encounters with ruins were, of course, all part of a much larger project of ruination with which Spenser was actively involved. England’s colonialist enterprise in Ireland was a project that, like the dissolution itself, entailed the eradication of a culture that in Elizabethan terms was theologically pagan and politically barbarous. Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland (written in 1596, published posthumously in 1633), advocates for the English subjugation of Ireland. As scholars have noted, in light of the View’s radical policies Henry VIII’s abolishment of monasticism was but a prelude to a much more devastating solution to the Irish problem.9 His plan— to convert the country from the rule of oppressive, warring regional chieftains to the rule of the oppressive, warring, centralized English Crown—was to repair Ireland by ruining it.10 Even Spenser’s language can be considered a self-fashioned ruin. With his penchant for obscure puns and archaizing orthography, the famous strangeness of the Spenserian style bespeaks his larger project of reforming the English language by excavating its various dialects as well as Anglo- Saxon, continental, and classical roots.11 In his desire to lend prestige to his style, Spenser invents an archaic tongue that takes on a vintage patina. He rummages through the relics and remains of these antiquated lexicons, at times restoring them, at times distancing them. The unusual orthography of moniment reflects this: as a variant form of monumentum that more audibly evokes the root monēre, “to warn,” it resembles a self-fashioned dusty artifact. In other words, the signifying sense of the word is venerable and the word as a sign itself appears old. In the epistle to The Shepheardes Calender (1579), E.K. declares: I am of opinion, and eke the best learned are of the lyke, that those auncient solemne wordes are a great ornament both in the one and in the other; the one labouring to set forth in hys worke an eternall image of antiquitie, and the other carefully discoursing matters of gravitite and importaunce. For if my memory fayle not, Tullie in that booke, wherein he endevoureth to set forth the paterne of a perfect Oratour, sayth that ofttimes an auncient worde maketh the style seeme grave, and as it were reverend: no otherwise then we honour and reverence gray heares for a certein religious regard, which we have of old age. yet nether every where must old words be stuffed in, nor the commen Dialecte and maner of speaking so corrupted therby, that as in old buildings it seme disorderly and ruinous. But all as in most exquiste pictures they use to blaze and portraict not onely the

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daintie lineaments of beautye, but also rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy clifts, that by the baseness of such parts, more excellency may accrew to the principall; for oftimes we fynde ourselves, I knowe not how, singularly delighted with the shewe of such naturall rudenesse, and take great pleasure in that disorderly order. (15–16)12

Spenser here carefully spells out his theory of linguistic archaism. Invoking the authority of Cicero, he advocates for ornamenting a text with “naturall rudenesse” and “disorderly order” so that it imparts the prestige of seeming “grave” and “reverend.” This aesthetics of purposeful rustication is part of his greater program of the reformation of language. In recuperating old words, the author of The Faerie Queene recovers the sedimented layers of the antique and tries to civilize a rude tongue through rhetorical invention. As one critic has noted, “Just as the universe appeared to Spenser to have decayed visibly since antiquity, so words had decayed; and the consequent mismatch between words and things was an index of moral confusion. To retrieve the etymons would be to repair the original bond between words and things on which are predicated epistemological distinctions between truth and falsehood and moral distinctions between good and evil.”13 Traces of an earlier epoch and culture are underscored on the surface of his texts, and Spenserian language builds into itself as part of its alienating effect an index of conflicting temporalities. As such, there is a “double historicity” in Spenser’s unusual style: the poet’s self- exegesis and lexical choices are ways of staking his claim that he belongs to an earlier time and temperament as well as ways of signaling his oblique participation in current Elizabethan politics through the dissembling guise of allegory. His use of “moniments” and “ruines” is one way of constructing his aesthetics and ethics of decay.

“Grauen” Images But before all that the young Spenser’s first publication was A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldings (1569), which partakes in the iconoclastic and apocalyptic energy of the Reformation. Lawrence Manley suggests that the true beginning of Spenser’s career “rests not in Arcadia, but in the urban ruins of antiquity.”14 Between his education at Merchant Taylor’s School in London and his entrance into Cambridge, Spenser published a translation from the French of Jan van der Noot’s Dutch Het theatre oft

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toon-neel.15 It comprises three blocks of texts: a translation of the visions of Petrarch after the death of Laura in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 323, Du Bellay’s Songes, and four sonnets by van der Noot based on St. John’s visions in the Book of Revelation. A Theatre, reworked in the hands of Spenser, essentially contains in nuce his idea of monuments as moral warnings: all material artifacts are transitory; they must be supplanted by verbal ones that reveal their inconstant nature. According to van der Noot, the purpose of A Theatre for Worldlings is “to settle the vanitie and inconstancie of worldly and transitorie thyngs, the liuelier before your eyes, I have broughte in here twentie sights or vysions, & caused them to be grauen, to the ended al men may see that with their eyes, which I go aboute to expresse by writing, to the delight and plesure of the eye and eares.”16 Notice the irony—whether intended or unintended— of “grauen.” Clearly it means “printed” here, but it is a small semantic step from the Mosaic prohibition of graven images or idols. For Calvin the nature of man is “a perpetual factory of idols” such that he “conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God,” leading him to express this phantom in the manufacture of actual idols.17 A mid-sixteenth- century preacher warned his congregation, “Good friends, you must by science and cunning, learnedly speak of Images and Idols, and not to confound the words, or the things signified by them, taking one for another.”18 When images such as those depicted in A Theatre for Worldlings are valued too much, they turn into idols. Whereas the exterminating agent of monuments in sixteenthcentury England is the Reformer’s hand, in A Theatre for Worldlings it is the divine will, expressed through the force of natural calamity, that provides the destruction: wind, thunder, earthquake, and fire. The destroyed things in the poems— human constructions, such as a ship, a temple, an obelisk, and a triumphal arch, as well as things of the natural world, such as deer, a spring, a tree— are thus instantiations of the transience of all earthly things. Drawing from the fervor of Protestant millennial anticipations, apocalyptic destruction in Spenser’s verses goes hand in hand with the impulse of iconoclasm, for both operate under the guise of purification. Ruins in Worldlings constantly point to the temporal limits of material things. Hence the language they speak is that of the Apocalypse, an unveiling that cleanses the world of physical dross.19 Spenser thus turns the trope of the ruin from a humanist exercise of remembrance of things past into a Christian anticipation of time’s

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Figure 13. Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 3, Theatre for Worldings (London, 1591). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

end. Indicative of the Reformation’s privileging of word over image, the movement generally preferred textual monuments— scriptural or poetic— to physical ones. 20 Martin Luther’s translation of the Old Testament was called the Denkmal, German for “monument.” Similar to the etymology of monimenta, “to remind,” a Denkmal, with the root of denken, “to think,” is clearly meant to provoke reflection. 21 Spenser’s textual practice also harks back to the operations of the mind: through the activity of reading, the materiality of the poet’s letters dissolves into the discursive space of his words. This operation is completed with the use of emblem poetry, in which an image is juxtaposed with explicatory verses. Careful exegesis disentangles true images from empty idols. The best example of a false monument becoming a ruin is the illustration of the obelisk in the third sonnet (fig. 13). In Renaissance Europe there was a craze for all things Egyptian, especially obelisks. They encapsulate multiple ambitions of power throughout the ages:

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in Egypt they were a demonstration of the pharaoh’s divine mandate; in imperial Rome they were booty that represented the triumph of Rome over Egypt; in the Renaissance the indecipherable hieroglyphs enchanted humanists as sources of hermetic mysteries. 22 In the Worldlings an ornamented obelisk inscribed with hieroglyphs, containing “the ashes of a mightie Emperour,” is destroyed. The poet describes his vision in the concluding couplet: Je vy du ciel la tempeste descendre, / Et fouldroyer ce brave monument (Songe, 3.13–14), “A sodaine tempest from the heaven, I saw, with flushe stroke downe this noble monument.” Later Spenser would revise the lines in “Visions of Bellay” into “I saw a tempest from heaven descend, / Which this brave monument with flash did rend.” The “flushe stroke” and “with flash did rend” indicate the singularity of the event, an immediate destruction rather than a gradual decay. Alois Riegl, in his 1908 essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” distinguishes “intentional” and “unintentional” monuments: the first are artifices meant for perpetuity; the second’s meaning is determined not by their makers but by our modern valorization of them. 23 In Riegl’s terminology Spenser’s “flash” renders the “intentional” monument an “unintentional” one. In other words, the moral insight offered by lyric fiction turns the public commemoration of a supposedly great man into a divine admonishment of human vanity. Through allegory, physical destruction is reduced to moral exemplum; matter is converted into words. The effect is to preserve all the monitory power of the physical monument, while shrinking its grandeur and vanity to the less dangerous size of a few inches, where they can be duly chastised in an adjoining text. 24 In this way the image, so distrusted in early Protestant art, is rendered harmless, even profitable; its pretensions are exposed, and its diminished attractions are made to serve the moral interests of the reader, who learns to be wary of fair exteriors. In his first efforts at versification through translation, Spenser thus negotiates the mortality of all things through Protestant eschatology, crafting enduring verbal monuments about the ephemerality of physical ones. The juxtaposition of images and words illustrates the vanity of the phenomenal world; in fourteen lines the beginning stanzas narrate the destruction, and its moral principle is concentrated into a simple sententia, the “unveiling” of a truth about the world, such as in the sixth epigram: “Alas in earth so nothing doth endure / But bitter griefe that dothe our hearts anoy.” Spenser’s poetry, with the

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Figure 14. Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblems (London, 1568). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

explicit goal of “delight and plesure of the eye and eares,” disenchants the false monuments, and by purifying the carnal senses replaces vain images with edifying, wholesome words. E X EGI MON UM E N T UM ?

All physical monuments will decay or be destroyed; that is the commonplace wisdom in A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldings. Yet poetry itself is a mortal thing; writing too will someday disintegrate, its

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letters dissolving into the elements of the cosmos. This problem can be expressed in terms of what I call the antinomy of lyric hope: poetic creation is meant to endure, yet all human artifice will perish. The poet’s paradoxical response to destruction is to claim that his verses will outlast the material things in the world, even though poetry is a human artifice. We see this clearly expressed in Geoffrey Whitney’s celebrated Choice of Emblems (1586, fig. 14): Scripta manent If mightie Troie, with gates of stelle, and brasse, Be worne awaie, with tracte of stealinge time: If Carthage, raste: if Thebes be growne with grasse, If Babel stoope: that to the cloudes did clime: If Athens, and Numantia suffered spoile: If Aegypt spires, be euened with the soile. Then, what maye laste, which time dothe not impeache. Since that wee see, theire monumentes are gone: Nothing at all, but time doth ouer reache, It eates the steele, and weares the marble stone: But writings laste, thoughe it doe what it can, And are preserv’d, euen since the worlde began. 25

The main claim of this sonnet— textual endurance—is succinctly captured in the last two lines. In this perennial locus communis there is irony and tautology in its boasting of immortality as well as pathos in the impossible distance between its wish function and its realization for, interestingly, the sonnet does not go on to list all the great authors from Troy, Carthage, Babel, or Numantia. After all, we don’t have any that survive. Seen from the vantage point of Christian doctrine, the poetics of immortality can be read as a hindrance to the “true immortality” of the eternal world, nothing but the vanity of writers. Spenser endeavors to escape this trap by skillfully deploying Neoplatonic allegory to imbue his lyrics with cyclical patterns of timelessness. A Spenserian moniment, then, is an artifice that mediates temporality and immortality, illusion and reality. Sonnet 51 of the Amoretti begins with the question: Doe I not see that fairest ymages Of hardest Marble are of purpose made? For that they should endure through many ages, Ne let theyr famous moniments to fade. Why then doe I, untrained in lovers trade, Her hardnes blame which I should more commend?

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The passage opens with an image of material durability, but only to introduce a nobler, spiritual durability, the “hardnes” of his beloved. As in the Worldlings, the poet is able to abstract what he needs from material monuments— the “hard” metaphor—while at the same time draw a contrast between their slow-decaying deadness and the true, living immortality of the spirit, happily enshrined in verse. Praising a mortal beloved, no matter how pure or true, is ultimately a category mistake because it tries to impart timelessness to something that is inherently subject to time. But since love is a force of conjugation in the world, it can inspire the poet to celebrate its unifying powers with his worthy monuments. “A Sonnet is a moment’s monument, / memorial from the Soul’s eternity / To one dead deathless hour,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti once quipped.26 The Pre-Raphaelite’s precious description illustrates the disproportion between an enormous monument, the brevity of time, and the miniature size of the sonnet. Amoretti 57 strikes a similar balance: The famous warriores of the antike world, Used Trophees to erect in stately wize: in which they would the records have enrold, of theyr great deeds and valarous emprise.

The poet’s response is to create something even better: “This verse vowd to eternity / shall be thereof immortall moniment / and tell her prayse to all posterity.” This metaphysical insistence on poetic durability must be read alongside the more transient “leaves, lines, and rymes” in the first sonnet. 27 Since poetry is experienced in time, verse finds its fluid permanence in its sonic repetition and its written stasis. By investing the poem with a wish of timelessness, Spenser posits a paradox between the temporality of art and its ontology as an “immortall monument.” The poet’s creation thus counteracts the corrosive agent of time and is immune to the charges of idolatry, for the Amoretti precisely celebrate the sacrament of marriage. True moniments for Spenser are supremely nonmaterial. Yet the poet expresses some anxiety about such possibility, for example, in Sonnet 75: One day I wrote her name vpon the strand, But came the waues and washed it away: Agayne I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray. Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay, a mortall thing so to immortalize,

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for I my selue shall lyke to this decay, and eek my name bee wiped out lykewize. (1– 8)

The beloved’s rebuke in the Amoretti calls to attention the fragility of Spenser’s poetic composition and the hyperbole of his wish. The poem additionally underscores the futility of repetition (“Agayne I wrote it with a second hand”), as well as the sameness of all mortal finitude (“I myselue shall lyke to this decay”; “my name bee wiped out lykewize”). The poet’s response at the end is “My verse your vertues rare shall eternize, and in the hevens wryte your glorious name” (11– 12). But these conflicting metaphors—writing on sand and writing in the heavens— are surely signs of the ambiguity of writing, since the poet is literally writing on neither. The lyric thus stages its own anxieties of permanence by celebrating the instability of its inscription. The relationship between material finitude and poetic permanence culminates in the last line of Spenser’s Epithalamion, where the poem itself is described as “for short time an endlesse moniment” (433). For Alastair Fowler and A. Kent Hieatt this phrase captures the quintessence of Elizabethan numerological symbolism. 28 In an exquisitely crafted poem filled with precise prosodic, semantic, and phonic patterns, “for short time an endlesse moniment” mirrors the circular structure of a text that celebrates the constancy of diurnal and astral change, since the paradoxical juxtaposition of “short” and “endless” reinstates the chiastic relationship between transience and durability, natural time and artistic creation. The use of “endless” here instead of “timeless” is intriguing, for “endless” denotes a nonfinitude that is within rather than without time. In fact the specific day the poem commemorates is St. Barnabas’s Day, 11 June, which, according to the Elizabethan calendar, is the summer solstice, the most “endlesse” day of the year. Spenser cleaves to the view that faced with the decay of all material things, the poet’s task is to craft immortal words that will survive the eventual destruction of the physical. This is articulated most fully at the end of The Shepheardes Calender: The meaning wherof is that all thinges perish and come to Theyr last end, but workes of learned wits and Monuments of Poetry abide for ever. And therefore Horace of his Odes a work though ful indede of great Wit and learning, yet of no so great weight and importaunce boldly sayth. Exegi monimentum aere perennius,

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190 Quod nec imber nec aquilo vorax etc. Therefore let not be envied, that this Poete in his Epilogue sayth he hath made a Calendar, that shall Endure as long as time etc. folowing the ensample of Horace and Ovid in the like. Grande opus exegi quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis, Nec ferum poterit nec edax abolere vetustas etc. Loe I have made a Calender for every yeare, That steele in strength, and time in durance shall outweare: And if I marked well the starres revolution, It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution.

The logic of these lines is clear: by means of his poetry the poet ensures his posthumous life. Yet it is certainly ironic that a work proclaiming precisely the changes of the seasons should have hopes of escaping the ravages of which it sings. Whereas earthly time is governed by the rotation of the sun, cosmic chronology is measured by the planetary revolution and the fixed stars, beyond which is the primum mobile, perpetual in its duration. While paying due homage to Ovid and Horace, Spenser subtly reframes this poetics of immortality in the Protestant apocalyptic mode. The crucial word here is “till”: “It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution.” Shakespeare too deploys this preposition in a grammar of resurrection: “So, till the judgment that yourself arise, / You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes” (Sonnet 55). Spenser’s calendar and Shakespeare’s verse shall endure only up to the point of the world’s dissolution. After that presumably neither calendars nor poetry will be needed.

Against Antiquarianism:

T H E RUI NE S OF T IM E

If The Theatre for Worldlings is about material monuments turning into ruins, and the Amoretti about poetry wanting to become immaterial monuments, The Ruines of Time is about material ruins wanting to become verbal monuments. The ruin is Verlame, the personification of the historical Verulamium, a fallen city in Roman Britain. Although not even a “little moniment” of hers remains, she wants to be mourned and remembered in verse. Spenser praises the antiquarian William Camden for preserving in the medium of writing what has been lost in England. But since the objective of antiquarianism is to catalogue the material remains of the past, this project is problematic, since in the end time will “all moniments obscure” (Ruines of Time, 174). Ultimately the material preservation

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of antiquities is futile. Similarly the immortality topos, which classical poetics indulges, is here rejected as empty hubris. Poetry’s aspiration toward immortality is rectified by a series of apocalyptic visions that demonstrate the vanity of mortal ambitions: allegory thus trumps antiquarianism. The poem begins by reflecting on how Verlame has utterly disappeared: It chaunced me on a day beside the shore Of silver streaming Thamesis to bee, Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore, Of which there now remaines no memorie, Nor anie little moniment to see, By which the travailer, that fares that way, This once was she, may warned be to say. (1– 7)

Historically Verulamium represents an England under Roman control. 29 For a national poet such as Spenser, she is the anti-London, a competing ideological voice that he will need to displace in order to establish English independence. As Verlame says, speaking to the mother city, Rome, “Of the whole world as thou wast the Empress, / So I of this small Northerne world was Princesse” (83– 84). Verlame represents a pagan aesthetics that treats poetry as a means of ensuring personal and civic immortality. Clearly Verlame’s physical monuments have failed her; they have perished, and without them, her memory has perished as well, except in the mind of the poet. She is a name without an entity, a verbum without res. She mourns for two things— the fact that all things in the world perish and the fact that these things are forgotten: They all are gone, and all with them is gone, Ne ought to me remaines, but to lament My long decay, which no man els doth mone and mourne my fall with dolefull dreriment. (155–58)

Verlame wants to be mourned, but she cannot be mourned until she is remembered. Yet this is highly problematic for Spenser, who believes that Verlame’s fall was just. Rebeca Helfer insightfully argues that Spenser’s view of the Roman Empire is more Augustinian than Virgilian, for he believed it was founded on pagan pride rather than providential grace; thus there should be no mourning for its righteous destruction.30 Verlame’s case for the “eternizing” power of poetry underscores the fantasy of her wish fulfillment. She holds up learning

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and poetry as means of “restoring the ruines” of the past but fails to make the case for why her ruins ought to be restored. Though Verlame cannot be remembered in the way she wishes, it still behooves posterity to take some notice of her. For this reason Camden’s antiquarian efforts have not been in vain: Cambden the nourice of antiquitie, And lanterne unto late succeeding age, To see the light of simple veritie, Buried in ruines, through the great outrage Of her owne people, led with warlike rage; Cambden, though Time all moniments obscure, Yet thy iust labours euer shall endure. (169– 75)

The use of moniments here refers back to the opening lines in which Verlame as a physical entity no longer exists: “Of which there now remaines no memorie, / Nor anie little moniment to see.” What survives, according to these lines, is Camden’s record of them, not the monuments themselves. His “iust labor” is not so much that of an antiques dealer, who preserves only the physical objects of the past (which anyway will ultimately decay), but the project of writing that is more enduring, historical, and thus didactic. Recent scholarship has amply shown how antiquarian research into England’s past contributed to a defined sense of nationhood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 31 Indeed the stated goal of Camden’s Britannia (1577) was “to restore Britain to its Antiquities, and its Antiquities to Britain, to renew the memory of what was old, illustrate what was obscure, and settle what was doubtful, and to recover some certainty in our affairs.”32 For Spenser there must be a continuum between the interest in material ruins of Camden and his contemporaries John Leland, John Stow, and John Weever and the idea or moral of ruins point back to the fall of empires and forward to Christian eschatology. Pure antiquarianism, in contrast, was in love with the thingness of things— collecting and preserving indiscriminately. Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605) distinguishes between the antiquities, memorials, and perfect histories, and calls antiquities a “Historie defaced, or some remnants of History, which haue casually escaped the shipwrack of time.” (Incidentally Bacon was created baron of Verulam by King James I in 1618.) Though Bacon praises the antiquarians in their skills of “exact and scrupulous diligence and observation” in saving records and evidence from “the deluge of time,” their knowledge is by nature only partial

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and accidental. 33 Spenser’s critique of antiquarianism too concerns its epistemological uncertainty: High towers, farie temples, goodly theatres, Strong walls, rich porches, princelie pallaces, Large streetes, brave hourses, sacred sepulchers, Sure gates, sweete gardes, stately galleries, Wrought with faire pillours, and fine imageries, All those (o pitie) now are turnd to dust, And overgrowen with blacke oblivions rust. (92– 98)

Since his role as “poet historical” strives toward a moral didactic end, he is suspicious of not only of the hubris behind monuments but also the obsessive campaign to preserve them. The desire for physical memorials is in fact a sort of vanity: In vaine doo earthly Princes then, in vaine Seeke with Pyramides, to heaven aspired; Or huge Colosses, built with costlie paine; Or brazen Pillours, never to be fired, Or Shrines, made of the mettall most desired; To make their memories for ever live: For how can mortall immortalitie give? (407–13)

The answer to this question is poetry, specifically Spenser’s. Given that the material has vanished, what can one do except rely on poets to perpetuate what the material cannot? True immortality on earth is bestowed on those who have followed the paths of virtue: All such vaine monuments of earthlie masse, Devour’d of Time, in time to nought doo passe. But fame with golden wings aloft doth flie, Above the reach of ruinous decay, And with brave plumes doth beate the azure skie, Admir’d of base-borne men from farre away: Then who so will with virtuous deeds assay To mount to heaven, on Pegasus must ride, And with sweete Poets verse be glorifide. (419– 27)

Instead of immortalizing the dead, both a futile and a prideful endeavor, monuments should simply help us remember them, and in a way that puts timeless, ethical principles ahead of gaudy display. Spenser’s insistent message is that any attempt to achieve permanence within a fallen world is not only doomed but fraught with moral peril. Negotiating the pulls of preservation and critique, his lyrics are able to reject both material monuments and the “pagan” promise of the

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everlasting in favor of a Christian promise of true eternity, sweetened by the “Poets verse.”

Allegorical Architecture in

T H E FA ER IE QUE E NE

What is a monument and what is a ruin in Spenser’s magnum opus, The Faerie Queene? There are two levels of discourse: the content of the poem and the form of the poem. Things inside the narrative appear in various states of edification, deformation, and ruination: the landscape of Faerieland is filled with buildings on the edge of collapse; characters are often described with architectural analogies; and knights often become makers of ruins. The text itself is famously incomplete; Spenser envisioned twenty-four books but died having published only six, and the incomplete seventh was published posthumously.34 As Gordon Teskey has it, “Considered architectonically, within the well- established conventions of the epic poem, The Faerie Queene stands before us as a ruin, one that might have been completed but was not.”35 To bring posthumous apocrypha to compositional history, there circulated a legend in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that the concluding six books of The Faerie Queene were destroyed in a fire that consumed Kilcolman in 1598.36 It is as if the incompleteness of the poem and the fantasy of some lost totality are telescoped in its reception history. In other words, there are ruinous sites in The Faerie Queene, and then there is the monumental ruin that is The Faerie Queene itself. The polysemy of moniment in the poem has an intriguing relationship to the definitions of Varro and later grammarians. In Isidore of Seville’s seventh- century Etymologiae, “monument” is defined thus: A monument (monumentum) is so named because it “admonishes the mind” (mentem monere) to remember the deceased person. Indeed, when you don’t see a monument, it is as what is written (Psalm 30:13): “I have slipped from the heart as one who is dead.” But when you see it, it admonishes the mind and brings you back to mindfulness so that you remember the dead person. Thus both “monument” and “memory” (memoria) are so called from “the admonition of the mind” (mentis admonitio). 37

By conflating psychic and physical memory, Isidore underscores the porous boundaries between the material and the mental. His citation of the Psalms further underscores the work of memory in the ethics of Christian charity. For Isidore the function of the monument as a

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memorial is not simply to provide a lasting record but to keep in living consciousness a constant devotion to what is no longer there so as to bring absentia into praesentia. In the sixteenth century, however, monuments tended to be understood and defined simply as memorials. In Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca (1548), monumentum is defined as “a remembrance of some notable act, sepulchres, images, great stones, inscriptions, bookes.”38 In Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus (1565), it is almost verbatim: “a remembrance of some notable art: as sepulchers, books, images, a memoriall, a token, a testimonie, A token pledge of love, chronicles, histories of antiquie.”39 Moniment is sometimes confused with muniment, “a document, such as a title deed, charter, etc., preserved as evidence of rights or privileges; an archival document” (OED), though both words span text and object. A monument defends (munire) by remembering (monēre). John Weever states in Ancient Funeral Monuments (1609): A monument is a thing erected, made, or written, for a memoriall of some remarkable action, fit to be transferred to future posterities and thus generally taken, all religious foundations, all sumptuous and magnificent Structures, Cities, Townes, Towers, Castles, Pillars, Pyramides, Crosses, Obeliskes, Amphitheaters, Statues, and the like, as well as Tombes and Sepulchres, are called Monuments. Now above all remembrances (by which men have endevoured, even in despight of death to give unto their Fames eternitie) for worthinesse and continuance, bookes, or writings, have ever had the preheminence.40

These words begin his massive nine-hundred-page tome— a collection of inscriptions from England and parts of the Continent— and are appropriately all- encompassing. The martyrologist John Foxe (ca. 1516– 87) wrote an even more massive collection, Actes and Monumentes, a text reprinted many times and as influential as the Book of Common Prayer. Foxe insists that the most lasting monuments are not things but the deeds of Protestant Christians persecuted for the faith. Nearly four times the length of the Bible, the fourth edition of 1583 is itself a monument, having been called the “most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of its era.”41 Varro’s manimoria, Isidore’s mentis admonitio, Weever’s “remarkable action,” and Cooper’s “notable art” are all about resisting the tilt of human memory toward forgetting. Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes is about commemorating the persecuted Christian

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community. What unites all these examples is an emphasis on the monument’s ethical demands and its physical durability. The history of the word in the longue durée of European consciousness represents an attempt to bring together materiality and memory in the movement from the local to the universal, from the here and now to the past or future, from the individual to the exemplary, from the tombstones that line the Via Appia to the Protestant martyrs who died for their faith. Spenser, like Foxe, is suspicious of the physical sign as a stable carrier of meaningful memory, and trusts narrative more. The first appearance of moniment in The Faerie Queene occurs when the body of Hippolytus is described thus: “His goodly corps . . . Was quite dismembred, and his members chast / Scattered on euery mountaine, as he went, / That of Hippolytus was lefte no moniment” (I.v.38).42 The beginning of Book II has Sir Guyon encountering a dying woman and her child by a fountain: “That as a sacred Symbole it may dwell / In her sonnes flesh, to mind revengement / And be for all chast Dames an endlesse moniment” (II.ii.10.7– 9). These two examples point to how, in William N. West’s words, “in the emergent idea of a ‘moniment,’ what is remembered is not merely imagined but really appears in the external world, only to be abandoned to a future that lacks the key to interpreting it.” Indeed of the almost fifty uses of moniment in Spenser’s poetry, the majority of them, West notes, are counterfactual; “that is, the word signals the absence of a suitable monument or even its erasure.”43 Nearly a third of the word’s occurrences point to the absence of a moniment, and another third are moniments of disaster or failure. Spenser’s monuments—physical or not—tend to lapse into ruin. Taking note of Spenser’s rich play of words, I posit that in The Faerie Queene monuments and ruins represent the inner states of characters in the poem, characters who are always on the way to moral edification or ruination. In other words, monuments and ruins are not only material objects in the exterior landscape but also represent the individual characters’ moral standing. Through their actions (reminding, forgetting, preserving, eradicating), individuals claim their allegorical attributes, whether they be moralizing monuments or ruinous disasters. In the epic the monuments and ruins as actions and artifice coalesce. Beyond a poetics of ruins, then, there is also an allegory of ruins. In Christian doctrine, since we are all fallen, we were ruins before we became monuments. This theme is explicit in Donne’s First Anniversary (1611):

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We are born ruinous: poor mothers crie That children come not right, nor orderly; Except they headlong come and fall upon An ominous precipitation. How witty’s ruine?44

Donne puns on the Latinate meaning of “ruin” with “headlong come and fall upon” by explicitly acknowledging the already fallen state of human nativity. These sentiments are close to Spenser’s, for whom there is a close correlation between moral failings and forms of ruination. He uses “ruin” and its variants (“ruinate,” “ruined,” “ruinous,” “ruins”) eighteen times in The Faerie Queene; in almost every instance the word refers to people, not buildings. Already in verse three of Book I, Spenser underscores the broken nature of mortals. Redcrosse, the very first character we meet, is described as “ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, / wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine, / the cruel markes of many a bloody fielde / yet armes till that time never did he wield” (I.i.1). Too young to have lost a battle, Redcrosse is already marked by the inheritance of original sin. Although born a ruin, he will become a monument of holiness. The telos of the central characters is to personify the “ensamples,” or moniment of their virtues. As Milton would say in On Education (1644), “The end then of learning is to repair the ruines of our first parents.”45 Spenser sees a close correlation between moral failings and forms of ruination. Indeed similes between people and structures are common: Or as a Castle reared high and round, By subtile engins and malitious slight Is vndermined from the lowest ground, And her foundation forst, and feebled quight, At last downe falles, and with her heaped hight, Her hastie ruine does more heauie make, And yields it selfe vnto the victours might; Such was this Gyaunts fall, that seemd to shake The stedfast globe of earth, as it for feare did quake. (I.viii.23)

In Book V a collapse is described: Like as a ship, whom cruell tempest driues Vpon a rocke with horrible dismay . . . So downe the cliffe the wretched Gyant tumbled; His battred ballances in peeces lay, His timbered bones all broken rudely rumbled, So was the high aspyring with huge ruine humbled. (V.ii.50)

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Interestingly the poem never uses “ruin” or its variants to refer to remnants, only to moments of ruination. (I will explain later why its annihilation leaves no traces.) And these moments of destruction are certainly pervasive: the House of Pride is built on a shaky foundation; Alma’s castle is besieged; Malbecco’s castle is on fire; the House of Busirane simply vanishes. Close to the beginning and ending of the poem are the figures of Kirkrapine and the Blatant Beast, the entropic forces at the margins that seek to unravel the entire fabric of the text. Imminent destruction is the basic condition of existence in Spenser’s world. In other words, all architectural constructions in The Faerie Queene are unstable: they exist as potential ruins, poised precariously between the prelapsarian garden and eventual apocalyptic clearance. As Faerieland is the earthly setting of a fallen world that encompasses both good and bad places, would-be ruins exist between order and chaos. Morally corrupted places are not ruins in the usual sense; they are much more insidious, always inhabited, deceptively whole on the outside, gaudily ornamented inside, teetering toward ruin rather than already ruined. Dangerous places in the poem are simulacra, like the duplicitous figures of Archimago, Duessa, and the False Florimell, providing opportunities to the protagonist to exercise his or her powers of moral insight. Part of the training Spenser’s knights undergo is hermeneutic: that of learning to read corruption beneath beguiling architectonic surfaces. Tellingly the word “architect” is a hapax in the poem. In the opening line of Book II, Archimago is described as the “cunning architect of cankred guile” (II.i.1). “Architect” surely means schemer, and the adjective “cunning” underscores Archimago’s deceptive nature, as manifested in his misleading appearance. In examining such shimmering illusions, the crucial interpretative move is the ability to distinguish the modes of seeming. This ability is crucial in Book I, and nowhere more so than in the House of Pride, first introduced as “a goodly building brauely garnished, / The house of mightie Prince it seemd to be” (iv.2) and given a lavish description: A stately Pallace built of squared bricke, Which cunningly was without morter laid, Whose wals were high, but nothing strong, nor thick And golden foile all ouer them displaid, That purest skye with brightnesse they dismaid: High lifted vp were many loftie towres,

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And goodly galleries far ouer laid, Full of faire windowes, and delightful bowres, And on the top a Diall told the timely howres. It was a goodly heape for to behould, And spake the praises of the workmans witt; But full great pittie, that so faire a mould Did on so weake foundation euer sitt: For on a sandie hill, that still did flitt, And fall away, it mounted was full hie, That euery breath of heauen shaked itt: And all the hinder partes, that few could spie, Were ruinous and old, but painted cunningly. (I.iv.4–5)

The adverb “cunningly” in line 2 anticipates the “cunning architect” Archimago. The reality of the House of Pride is revealed in the contrast between its façade (“golden foile . . . loftie lowres”) and substratum (“weake foundation . . . sandie hill”). “On the top a Diall told the timely howres” reminds us that even this seemingly opulent building is subject to mortality, though its inhabitants may arrogantly suppose otherwise. Interred in its underground dungeon is a gallery of fallen mighty princes: All these together in one heape were throwne, Like carkases of beastes in butchers stall. And in another corner wide were strowne The Antique ruins of the Romanes fall; Great Romulus the Grandsyre of them all, Proud Tarquin, and too lordly Lentulus, Stout Scipio, and stubborne Hanniball, Ambitious Sylla, and sterne Marius, High Caesar, great Pompey, and fiers Antonius. (I.v.49)

The interior of the House of Pride is less a temple in ruins than a set of temples dedicated to ruins. Seeing this exquisitely curated antimonumental collection of ruins, the dwarf, “made ensample of their mournfull sight,” discovers the dungeon and tells Redcrosse that they must flee. Only in the last stanza do they discover that strewn about the castle is a “donghill of dead carkases.” And consonant with the theme of reality and deception, the very name “house of Pryde” is withheld until the last line of canto v. Gleaming externally but festering internally, the House of Pride is what Rosalie Colie would call an “anamorphic” image with no single, natural point of view.46 The “cunning architect” deforms images, and it is incumbent upon the

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reader to correct them, not with the faculty of sense perception but with that of the intellect. The House of Ate in Book IV is another site where ruins are instructively displayed. The walls are hung “with ragged monuments of times forepast . . . of all which ruines there some relicks did remain” (IV.i.21). It is a museum of the fallen, displaying “signes” of the vanished empires of “antique” Babylon, “fatall” Thebes, Rome “that raigned long,” “sacred” Jerusalem, and “sad” Ilion. Whereas in their natural condition ruins rush toward irresistible decay, the House of Ate preserves ruins qua ruins and sets into a theological narrative the bric-a-brac of history. “Spectors, great cities ransackt, and strong castles rast” are curated into “ragged monuments of times forepast.” The human ruins of The Faerie Queene— the once-proud Tarquin, Caesar, Pompey and Antony— stand out as types of their reduced essences, much like the sequence of the prideful fallen in Dante’s Purgatorio 12. In Spenser they are made into an intentional museum, suspended in their ripe ruinous fixity, a collection of fragments conserved in a coherent, exemplary order. In Reformation Germany Protestant churches sometimes housed a Götzenkammer, “idol chamber,” in a parody of Catholic collections of reliquaries of saint’s bones and other remains.47 Spenser’s catalogue of the fallen empires is his “idol chamber”: “Of all which ruines there some relicks did remain . . . The monuments whereof there byding beene” (IV.i.24).

Constructing Monuments Having looked at all these negative images of monuments, let us turn to a more positive episode. Of the forty-six times Spenser uses moniment or its plural in the poem, its richest occurrence, eleven times, is in Canto X of Book II, when Arthur reads from the Moniments of Briton.48 It is here that Spenser articulates most fully his vision of a true, enduring monument. Spenser’s poetics of the moniment, instead of seeking to escape the ravages of temporality (what Shakespeare in the Sonnets calls “sluttish time”), actually reinserts itself back into temporality, presenting what I call an ethics of the monument. By retrieving the etymological roots of monēre Spenser recasts moniment into an ethical mandate of memory. Since ruins make us think about mortality, they make us think about what it means to live. His monuments—instead of being funerary— serve a living moral purpose. In other words, his monuments are things of the past

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that are still firmly grounded in the present, always geared toward moral admonishment and self-reflection. Scholars such as Judith H. Anderson, Bart van Es, Andrew Escobedo, and Rebeca Helfer have seen this episode as paradigmatic of Spenser’s articulation of the work of memory.49 Jennifer Summit argues that the scene of the library is Spenser’s response to the destruction of texts wrought by the Reformation.50 John Speed in his 1611 History of Great Britaine laments that during this time monastic buildings were “laid open to the general deluge of Time, whose stream bore down the walles of all those foundations, carrying away the shrines of the dead, and defacing the Libraries of their ancient records.”51 This inspired a generation of antiquarians who attempted to salvage the textual remains of the past. In a 1568 letter to Matthew Parker, the Privy Council ordered him to survey all surviving medieval books: “such historical matters and monuments of antiquity, both for the state ecclesiastical and civil government.”52 During the reign of Mary Tudor, John Dee pleaded for a foundation of a “Library Royall” so as to preserve “all the famose & worthy Monuments that are in the notablyest libraryes, beyond the sea as in Vaticana of Rome [and] S. Marc of Venise.”53 Though this proposal was ignored, it was repeated by a group of antiquarians who urged Elizabeth to “preserve divers old books concernynge matter of hystorye of this Realm [such as] original charters and monuments.”54 But as Summit points out, their plans of restitution were highly selective, for there is a difference between the “monuments of antiquity” that they preserved and the “monuments of superstition”— the breviaries, Psalters, mass books, Catholic prayer manuals, and legends of the saints— that they suppressed. I would add to the status of textual monuments the importance of actual funerary monuments in early modern England, the lavish tombs erected in thousands of churches. Exquisitely composed of sculpted forms, architectural ornaments, painted heraldry, and inscriptions, the tombs celebrated the worthy and virtuous lives of noblemen. 55 When Spenser saw monuments, these were their most ostentatious examples. Prior to the Reformation, Erwin Panofsky argues, funeral monuments were prospective objects in which the living interceded with God and the saints on behalf of the dead for mercy and remembrance. The Protestant conviction that the salvation of the dead could not be altered forced tomb construction merely to prolong their glory on earth and display their family’s prominence. 56

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In this episode of Briton moniments, I see Spenser’s allegory negotiating these three different forms of monumentalizations: the archives of the library, the tombs of the nobility, and the classical tradition of poetic immortality. Instead of physical residuum, Spenser’s moniments are an allegorical reduction of one’s moral essence in which individual signs become universally legible. Arthur reads the Moniments of Briton in the library of Eumnestes, which serves as an allegory of the human brain. Eumnestes (“good memory”) is endowed with “infinite remembraunce” and possesses “old records from auncient times” in his sprawling library of “antique Regesters.” He is “halfe blind, / And all decrepit in his feeble corse, / Yet liuely vigour rested in his mind” (II.ix.55.5– 7). Embodying the duality that is the nature of Alma’s castle, Eumnestes himself is a combination of infinite memory and finite record; his records are “incorrupted” yet “all worm-eaten, and full of canker holes” (II.ix.56.7, 57.9). Briton moniments is thus also a muniment; by defending (munire), it remembers (monēre). Here we have a realization of the antiquarian’s fantasy— the totality of the past carefully documented and collected in a single room. Yet how does one represent the encyclopedia of memory, Eumnestes’s “infinite remembraunce,” in a finite canto of sixty-eight stanzas? David Lee Miller notes that “Eumnestes lacks a principle of elimination.”57 “Tossing and turning” his records “withouten end” (II.ix.58), he keeps on writing and writing: And things foregone through many ages held, Which he recorded still, as they did pas, Ne suffred them to perish through long eld, As all things els, the which this world doth weld, But laid them vp in his immortall scrine, Where they for euer incorrupted dweld. (II.ix.56)

But to what purpose? Outside this archival utopia, how does the scribe determine what to write about and what to leave out? The slippage between event, memory, and representation occurs in all media: in the moniments of historians such as Holinshed, Stow, and Leland; in the monuments left in the landscape, such as Stonehenge and Ludgate; in Spenser’s own conceit of Eumnestes’s scrolls. Spenser’s solution is that as a redactor, he himself prunes the total memory of Eumnestes into a finite, morally useful shape. Spenser, “poet historical,” is the redactor between the library’s “immortall scrine” and the reader. Beginning with ethical acts that are then translated into ethical memory, the poet’s task is to pick from the

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interminable sequence of kings and knights those shining exemplars, or what he calls “brave ensample,” that one can emulate. They should be distilled into monuments. In the catalogue proper, he does this by adding two further meanings of “monuments” that are both prior to and broader than the textual or architectural sense: first, progeny are described as monuments to their parents; second, great deeds themselves are described as monuments to their doers. Instead of immortal “timeless” monuments, Spenser offers us mortal “endless” monuments, echoing Epithalamion’s “for short time an endlesse moniment.” On the legacy of Lud, Spenser writes: He had two sonnes, whose eldest called Lud Left of his life most famous memory, And endlesse monuments of his great good: The ruin’d wals he did reaedifye Of Troynouant, gainst force of enimy, And built that gate, which of his name is hight, By which he lyes entombed solemnly. (II.x.46)

The poet conflates two meanings of “monument” in one: Lud’s gate (the westernmost gate of London Wall) is his tomb, hence his magnificent physical monument, yet it is also the memorial to his great deed of expelling the enemies’ forces. Spenser suggests that true moniments are the records of the exemplary actions of an individual, which constitute the real patrimony that is bestowed on future generations, not an impressive entrance to the great city, or even the lavish splendor of a Westminster Abbey or a St. Paul’s, what Shakespeare calls “the rich proud cost of outworn buried age” (Sonnet 64) and Spenser himself terms “such vaine monuments of earthlie masse” (The Ruines of Time). The use of monument in the ethical sense turns its meaning from memory to action, from the past to the present. We see another example of this when Guyon reads the story of Elfinor, a descendant of Constantine in the “Antiquitee of Faerie lond”: He left three sonnes, the which in order raynd, And all their Ofspring, in their dew descents, Euen seuen hundred Princes, which maintaynd With mightie deedes their sondry gouernments; That were too long their infinite contents Here to record, ne much materiall: Yet should they be most famous moniments, And braue ensample, both of martiall, And ciuil rule to kinges and states imperiall. (II.x.74)

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This stanza suggests an almost biblical blessing in the correlation between good deeds and the generation of children. The grammatical construction here, “That were too long their infinite contents / Here to record, ne much materiall: / Yet should they be most famous moniments,” puts the question of monument and the question of the poet’s efforts into an intriguingly subjunctive relationship. Even after gathering the ruins of antiquity into an archive, the task of sorting through them is impossible because of their “infinite content.” Hence poetic remembrance is a process of distillation, to the point that monuments actually, and appropriately, lose their individuality and merge into the larger moral fabric of the poem, so that they become “famous moniments” or “braue ensample.” Neither the antiquarian, solely preoccupied with preserving everything without discrimination, nor the royal historian, prejudiced in favor of recording only things that serve to glorify the dynastic past, have the poet’s gift of discernment. Briton moniments situates Spenser in the tradition of John Foxe, who uses “monuments” in the title of Actes and Monumentes. For Foxe monuments are not the tombs of mighty personages but rather the deeds of the numerous Reformation martyrs who would have been forgotten had he himself not preserved them. Foxe’s monumentalization of their acts has a didactic purpose, for the actions of the martyrs are precisely those worthy of memory and emulation. This notion has a long legacy: even in archaic Greek commemorative poetry, the true monument of a fallen warrior is not the physical marker over his body but the exemplum he leaves behind.58 Similarly for Spenser lasting fame is derived from noble deeds. This hermeneutical tension between life and the recording of it is exposed when Prince Arthur is reading the prophetic Moniments of Briton. Arriving at his own life, he abruptly stops. In a moment of perfect mise- en-abyme the reader and the read converge: After him Vther, which Pendragon hight, Succeeding There abruptly it did end, Without full point, or other Cesure right, As if the rest some wicked hand did rend, Or th’Author selfe could not at least attend To finish it: that so vntimely breach The Prince him selfe halfe seemed to offend, Yet secret pleasure did offence empeach, And wonder of antiquity long stopt his speech. (II.x.68)

These lines mark a vanishing point, a rupture in the text. As Van Es observes, “Spenser’s wording— Succeeding There— matches the

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grammatical oddity described in the text Arthur is reading. Nowhere else in The Faerie Queene do we find a capitalized adverb not preceded by a full stop.”59 In other words, the Moniments of Briton and Spenser’s textual monument come to a screeching halt in the face of life. As Arthur finishes the register, he finds himself on its edge; it is incumbent on him to continue what “th’Authour selfe” cannot. “The Authour self could not at least attend / to finish it” because Arthur’s life is not finished, and he is supposed to be, in this irresistible pun, his own Authour. And as all of Britain’s history is a preparation to his anointed arrival, it is he himself who must read these moniments and fashion his own moniment. As we have seen, the most common monuments in Book II are the deeds of worthy individuals. There is, however, a notable instance of an actual architectural monument. In the final section of the chronicle, between Caesar’s arrival and Pendragon’s reign, there is a reference to Stonehenge, “whose dolefull moniments who list to rew, / Th’eternall markes of treason may at Stonheng vew” (II.x.66.8– 9). The origins of these stony monoliths are as dark and murky as the origins of Faerieland. Although Spenser asserts that Stonehenge marks the treacherous slaughter of Vortigern’s men and the mass grave containing the victims of Saxon treachery (“Soone after which, three hundred Lordes he slew / Of British bloud, all sitting at his bord” [II.x.66.9]), antiquarians generally held this story to be questionable. Camden reports the story in his Britannia but concludes, “About these points I am not curious to argue and dispute, but rather to lament with much griefe that the Authors of so notable a monument are buried in oblivion.”60 Spenser, however, need not let his moral be bound by facts. Whereas antiquarianism falls silent in the absence of physical evidence, its ignorance exposed, the poet’s imagination can invent its own etiology. The moral of Stonehenge and the divergent accounts of its origins demonstrate that monuments offer competing and contradictory accounts of national history: for the victorious the ruins are the totem of the enemy’s destruction; for the defeated, an ignominious reminder of shame. Stonehenge, at once a surviving structure, a grave, and an imprint of the “eternall markes of treason,” constitutes the irony of a perfect countermonument: the Neolithic formations have survived, but their message to posterity is a famous mystery. The anonymous Stonehenge is an inversion of Lucan’s dictum that I discussed in chapter 3: “Even the ruins have perished,” Etiam periere ruinae

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(9.969) and “Every stone has a story,” Nullum est sine nomine saxum (9.973), for here is an abiding ruin, utterly mysterious to all. Whereas the ruins of Troy and Rome are overly determined with meaning, the enigma of Stonehenge mocks us with its impenetrable silence. In this case Spenser imagines a future in which remembrance does not recuperate the past and offers a way to recognize that a physical monument (with a u) without ethical moniment (with an i) is nothing but an orphaned sign seeking signification.

Erasing Monuments Stonehenge is a unique example of a monument without a story. Stories without monuments, however, occur frequently. Having looked at the construction of monuments, let us turn to their destruction. Kenneth Gross suggests that the most intriguing moments in the poem are those that grapple with iconoclasm: “Spenser always multiplies and opposes perspectives in his poem, always sets one mode of imagination against another— not for the sake of rhetorical display but to keep his ideals from turning into idols, his tropes into traps.”61 The iconoclast, after all, often intentionally leaves traces of what he has destroyed: a statue is decapitated, but the body remains; the face of an icon is obliterated, but the icon still hangs in the vestibule. The ancient precedent is the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae— what remains is as important as what was destroyed.62 Spenserian iconoclasm, however, is usually complete and wholesale; no physical traces of the monument survive, only textual traces, that is, Spenser’s own writing. The destruction of the Bower of Bliss is perhaps one of the most memorable moments of ruin making in the poem and has attracted many prominent readers. As medieval and renaissance gardens responded to what Terry Comito calls a “deep desire for a mythic potency of space, for possessing an original and timeless point of reality,” the Bower is at once a garden and a future ruin.63 And the monument that precedes its ruination is, not surprisingly by now, not ostentatious at all: it is but a tiny piece of the knight Verdant’s equipment, no longer visible: His warlike armes, the idel instruments Of sleeping praise, were hong vpon a tree, And his braue shield, full of old moniments, Was fowly ra’st, that none the signes might see,

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Ne for them, ne for honour cared hee, Ne ought, that did to his aduauncement tend. (II.xii.80)

In this instance it is clear that “monument” does not mean a showy tomb or sepulcher. In fact the OED cites this as the first attestation of the definition: “A thing that serves as identification; a mark, sign. Also: a thing that gives warning; a portent.” The erased monuments on Verdant’s shield represent not only historical but moral amnesia; literally these moniments are a record of Verdant’s knightly deeds, but they also suggest a warning in the etymological sense of monēre. This is Christian imagery, originating in Paul’s catalogue of the armor of God in the Letter to the Ephesians. The shield is meant to represent faith, with which the believer extinguishes the fiery darts of temptation hurled at him (Eph. 6:16). But now the shield, faded and disused, has lost both the power to defend and the power to warn. Ignored by its sole audience, it has become a symbol of the utter laxness of his moral attention. The description of Verdant’s “braue shield” bears comparison to two striking moments of ekphrasis in Latin epics, the death of Turnus in Virgil and the petrification of Phineus in Ovid, for in divergent ways all three cases deal with the various stages of monuments and ethical action. At the close of the Aeneid, Aeneas must decide the fate of Turnus. Until this point Aeneas hesitates to punish his enemy, but the sudden sight of his friend Pallas’s stolen belt fills him with rage: “Aeneas, as soon as his eyes drank in the trophy, that memorial of cruel grief, ablaze with fury and terrible in his wrath,” Ille, oculis postquam saevi monimenta doloris / Exuviasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira /Terribilis (12.944–47). The use of monimenta here is remarkable for the word does not so much denote the material sense of a fixed enduring object as retain a sense of didactic warning. Pallas’s monimenta, like Verdant’s, are portable, part of a warrior’s necessary wardrobe. In the Aeneid visual spectacle does what speech cannot: the belt, depicting the slaughter of forty-nine of the fifty sons of Aegyptus by the daughters of Danaus on their marriage night, motivates Aeneas for revenge. The pictorial image on the stolen armor serves as a typological justification of Aeneas’s ethically problematic decision; as the daughters slew the sons of Aegyptus, so Aeneas exacts vengeance on Turnus. The belt as a tiny monument is a catalyst for action, bringing the poem to its shuddering conclusion.64 Whereas Aeneas slays Turnus because of a monumental reminder, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses the hero Perseus turns his adversary into

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a literal stony monument. Perseus’s contest with Phineus, the former fiancé of Andromeda, is an Ovidian rewriting of the Virgilian duel. The Greek hero says to his suppliant: Quin etiam mansura dabo monimenta per aeuum, Inque domo soceri semper spectabere nostri Ut mea se sponsi soletur imagine coniunx. (5.227– 28) But I will make of you a monument that shall endure for ages; and in the house of my father-in-law you shall always stand on view, that so my wife may find solace in the statue of her promised lord.

Ovid plays on the poetic immortality topos by putting this grim taunt into Perseus’s mouth; the petrified Phineus will be a monument remembered for all time. In this case, though, it is the victim rather than the victor who is caught by the power of sight, and rather than inspiring action, the sight of Medusa’s head puts a permanent end to action. Here the everlasting monument is the person himself; nonmimetic art and life are encased in the same stony material. Phineus’s afterlife is metamorphosed into an ever-fixed stillness. Like Aeneas, and unlike the weak Verdant or the hapless Phineus, Guyon turns seeing into doing. Stephen Greenblatt calls iconoclasm “the principle of regenerative violence” whereby the “act of tearing down is the act of fashioning.”65 In the final stage of his moral education Guyon must resist being a ruin by becoming a maker of ruins: But all those pleasaunt bowres and Pallace braue, Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse; Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse: Their groues he feld, their gardens did deface, Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse, Their banket houses burne, their buildings race, And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. (II.xii.83)

Spenser describes an act of violence that is almost as perfectly symmetrical and orderly as the syntax in which it is narrated. The use of “race” here suggests that it is the just corrective to “fowly ra’st” moniments of Verdant. Similarly “deface” echoes Verdant’s “certes it great pittie was to see / Him his nobilitie so foule deface” (II.xii.79). A skeptical reader might wonder what these epic moments have to do with ruins and monuments beyond their lexical coincidence, but they are important to the chapter’s argument for they reach back to

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the etymological meaning of monēre in the ethical sense at critical moments of epic action. Physical deformation coincides with moral judgment. Materiality gives way to allegory. In Virgil art inspires slaying; looking at a monument, the belt of his dead friend, inspires Aeneas to kill Turnus. In Ovid the slain becomes art; Perseus kills Phineus by turning him into a statue. In Spenser moniments are erased and are in need of recall by an external agent— here the Knight of Temperance. Read in the light of the classical tradition, the episode in the Bower of Bliss puts the making, breaking, and interpreting of monuments front and center: Guyon must destroy the Bower lest he be destroyed by it.

“Lefte No Monument” Guyon’s clearing of the Bower is complete—wounds in Spenser’s world leave no scars behind. As such, ruination in the poem is always the activity itself rather than the aftermath, similar to the destruction in the Complaints. In the expansive landscape of The Faerie Queene we find no desolate tombs, broken Roman triumphal arches, or fallen cities as we do in The Ruines of Time. Nor are there the echo-haunted cemeteries of the Duchess of Malfi or the anachronistic monasteries of Titus Andronicus, to point out just two notable ekphrastic instances of ruins on the early modern English stage.66 Why? First, there is a generic reason why a Bury St. Edmond filled with damaged sacramental fonts would be an impossibility in Faerieland. Because the poem hews closely to the conventions of romance, in which topography and temporality are malleable, places do not provide any sense of fixity. Furthermore ruins would be quite incongruous in Faerieland, since as ciphers of a dismembered past they signal a historicity that posits a rupture between time then and time now. There seems to be no pastness of the past in Faerieland, no disjuncture between antiquity and the present. Freed from the burden of a specific reality, characters within the poem seem not to suffer from the nostalgia of historicity. While the extradiegetic voice of the narrator is often tinged with nostalgia for a golden age, within the diegetic narrative the frequent use of the temporal markers “whilome” and “antique” or allusions to mythological figures serve not so much to distance history as to flatten it. Razed castles and disenchanted palaces cast a retrospective shadow not for the characters, who are usually going forward, but for the reader, always interpreting backward.

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As I mentioned earlier, the targets of the English iconoclasts were never completely destroyed: the hands and feet of the Apostles are chipped off a choir screen, but their effigies remain. In Elizabeth’s reign a Marian rood was covered with canvas and the royal arms painted over it. An indulgence prayer book for the dead was still used, but every mention of the pope’s name was meticulously blackened. The name of St. Thomas Becket was deleted from an antiphonal with the slenderest of pen strokes.67 What is lost can still be seen and touched; hence its capacity to summon nostalgia or fear of return is greater than its utter disappearance. Far from annihilating them, the iconoclast damages idols with aesthetic care. In this sense his conscious decision to leave objects in their injured state is a deeper mockery than complete erasure, for it taunts their former status as efficacious artifacts worthy of adoration. A fallen idol thus becomes its own mocking monument. While the logic of English iconoclasm teaches us to look closely at partial survivals of and substitutions for images, Spenser’s iconoclasm purifies completely, leaving no traces except for its own words. This is how Artegall’s destruction of Lady Munera’s castle is described in Book V: And lastly all that Castle quite he raced, Euen from the sole of his foundation, And all the hewen stones thereof defaced, That there mote be no hope of reparation, Nor memory thereof to any nation. (V.ii.28)

Here, as in other passages in the poem, no traces survive to bear testimony: Verdant’s “braue shield, full of old moniments, / Was fowley ras’t”; the body of Hippolytus is “dismembered . . . his members chast / Scattered on euery mountaine,” and he “was lefte no monument.” Here we see the jagged relationship between iconoclasm and Spenser’s poetry. In their search for retributive justice, Talus and Artegall might pulverize “the wicked customes of that Bridge” into nothing, but writing cannot defeat idols without reproducing them. With the destruction of the Bower and Munera’s castle already preserved in verse, ruined matter in Faerieland would be an unnecessary surplus. Instead Spenser’s catalogue of destruction rescues the false images from utter effacement and remembers them at the moment of annihilation. The absence of vestigia means a loss in material efficacy, but the presence of poetic signs is a gain, a supplement. And because Spenser quarantines idols by turning things into words, readers can

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enjoy the poet’s ravishing descriptions without being held captive to their voluptuous materiality.

Allegory, Decay, and the Unfinished Earlier I examined how Spenser’s lyrics interrogated the problematic relationship between the transience of the material and the endurance of the poetic, and I noted how the moments of ruination in The Faerie Queene are mapped onto the characters’ moral attributes. We are finally in a position to ask the big questions: How do we reconcile the ruins in the poem and the poem itself as a ruin? How does the allegory of ruins turn to the ruins of allegory? No thinker in the twentieth century has interrogated the relationship between ruins as form and content as deeply as Walter Benjamin. As he states in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (1925): Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum. Both are made up of the distinct and the disparate; and nothing could bear more powerful testimony to the transcendent force of the sacred image and the truth itself. The value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea, and the brilliance of the representation depends as much on this value as the brilliance of the mosaic does on the glass plate.68

Benjamin’s philosophical project was to chart the origins of modernity—in this case the role of the sovereign in a state of emergency— through its emergence and disappearance in the dramatic genre of Trauerspiel, or mourning play. Howard Caygill explains that, against the nineteenth- century philosophy of the totalizing “system” that captures the “truth” in symbolic representation, Benjamin’s method, as befitting his subject matter, assembles the fragments that “juxtapose the distinct and disparate,” seeking to construct the constellations out of the material of the vanishing past.69 Mosaics, fragments, and ruins are thus fitting images for Benjamin to probe the incommensurability of how, on the one hand, every idea contains the image of the world (like a good monad of Leibniz), and, on the other, a philosophical history must struggle for an adequate representation of ideas that exist in their irreducible multiplicity. Deep in the dense folds of the last chapter of the Ursprung lies a typically enigmatic passage that teases out the relationship between ruins and allegory:

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The word “history” stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.70

Strictly speaking, in Benjamin’s formulation the ruin would seem to be a counterallegory, for if we take allegory in the sense of a typological reading of history— that is, the fulfillment of a prior anticipated event, as in Erich Auerbach’s definition of figura— then the ruin is the exact opposite, for instead of fulfillment or redemption it is a failed consummation.71 The ruin is an allegory in the sense that it is a figura turned inside out: part- content and part-form, a material shadow of its former whole. Instead of pointing to something beyond itself, it only points back to its former self. There are many ways in which we can see Spenser’s allegory in The Faerie Queene as a ruin. Benjamin characterizes the baroque style as “pil[ing] up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification.”72 Coming slightly earlier, Spenser’s vision is not exactly baroque, for he does have a strict idea of a goal: his epic is to accumulate the entire archive of antiquity, mythology, cosmology, Arthurian legends, British chronicles, and chorography into one continuous narrative. Northrop Frye says that “Spenser is not a poet of fragments, like Coleridge. He thinks inside regular frameworks— the twelve months, the nine muses, the seven deadly sins— and he goes on filling up his frame even when his scheme is mistaken from the beginning.”73 It is precisely this “scheme” that “is mistaken from the beginning” that makes The Faerie Queen’s foundation so wobbly. Spenser’s exuberant synthesis is bound to “irresistible decay” because its ability is incommensurate to its ambition. In his desire to construct an encyclopedic system of allegories Spenser frustratingly fails to achieve any sense of finality.74 Second, in medieval exegesis, if we take allegory of the theologians as the figural anticipation or consummation of an event; the example always used, following Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande,” is the way Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt prefigures

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the coming of Christ and his plan for universal salvation. Compared to the Commedia, The Faerie Queene lacks the tight system of cosmological correspondence between events, personification, and providential salvation. One could say that Spenserian allegory ends up in ruins because it cannot provide an adequate representation of reality. The poet’s matrix of parts and whole aims for the intelligibility of the metonymic but unwittingly becomes incongruent in its own framework. Typology as a system of correspondences cannot find solutions to the scattered intellectual systems of the early modern world.75 Third, allegory is a record of the early modern anxieties concerning the loss of certitude in metaphysics, logic, and political theology. The late Elizabethan and Jacobean worldview saw that nature was in decay and the cosmos in disintegration. As Walter Raleigh writes in his History of the World (1614): All things vnder the Sunne haue one time of strength, and another weakenesse, a youth and beautie, and then age and deformitie: so Time it selfe (vnder the deathfull shade of whose winges all things decay and wither) hath wasted and worne out that lieuly virtue of Nature in Man, and Beasts, and Plants; yet the Heauens themselues being pure and cleansed matter shall waxe old as a garment.76

As result cosmic senescence causes a disjuncture in civic harmony, moral habits, and linguistic meaning.77 So Spenser in the proem to Book V: For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so vs’d of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right, As all things else in time are changed quight. Ne wonder; for the heuens reuolution Is wandred farre from, where it first was pight, And so doe make contrarie constitution Of all this lower world toward his dissolution. And all this world with them [the signs of the zodiac] amisse doe moue, And all his creatures from their course astray, Till they arriue at their last ruinous decay. (V.Proem.4, 6)

The divagations of heavenly movement create not only natural “ruinous decay” (echoing Benjamin’s “irresistible decay”) but also inversions of linguistic and ethical meaning in human society. “Reuolution,” formerly the regular, cyclical motion of planetary bodies,

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now produces “dissolution” and becomes the political meaning of “revolution” as a toppling of civic institutions.78 If “new philosophy calls all to doubt,” as Donne memorably put it, allegory strives to affirm. Yet if the cosmos itself is in decay, then how can allegory as a meaning-making machine depict it? Teskey argues in Allegory and Violence that as Ptolemaic astronomy tries to “save the appearances” by rationalizing irregular measurements of the planets through epicycles, allegory as a system tries to unite the local, seemingly dissonant parts of a work into a universal coherence. Fourth, from the vantage point of metaphysics, as Teskey observes, because allegory strives ever upward to the numinous, it cannot but create a “rift” between the concrete and the abstract, reason and the passions, the individual and the collective, and, most notably, the sacred and the profane. And because allegory also often functions as an instrument of ideology, its struggle for signification has the potential to rupture into chaos, like Guyon’s eradication of the Bower. One aftermath of this violence, I would say, is allegory’s collapse into the ruin. Since allegory is a mode in which verbal revelations lead to the “inexpressible presence of absolute truth,” thus “the end of the work is reduced to the status of a text, a thing that has been woven, a veil.”79 Atextual allegory is born always already derivative. Fifth, as signs of absent immanence, allegory and ruins are ciphers of the contingency of signifiers and thus provoke a hermeneutic obligation for understanding. What the poet himself leaves open, the reader must interpret. This is where allegory shifts from a mode of poetic production to a hermeneutic method. Pliny writes in the Natural Histories, “Another most curious fact and worthy of record is that the latest works of artists and the pictures left unfinished at their death are valued more than any of their finished paintings. . . . The reason is that in these we see traces of the design and the original conception of the artists, while sorrow for the hand that perished at its work beguiles us into the bestowal of praise” (35.145).80 Montaigne gives to the reader not only the responsibility of deciphering an author’s intention but also the production of additional meanings: “An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.”81 The fragmentary state of Spenser’s poem presents us with an openness of form and meaning that demands our active engagement. The title of the Mutabilitie Cantos declares that “both for Forme and Matter, appeare to be parcel of some following Booke

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of the Faerie Qveene.” Its yearning for completion is realizable only in the reader’s imagination. As such, the interpretation of ruins— whether textual or material— demands an allegorical method of reading that is by necessity unfinished and unfinishable.

Mutability, Literary Immortality, and Tradition The idea of the fragmented text’s “openness”— the insistence that meaning is produced by both the creator and the respondent— not only applies to the hermeneutics of the reader but also serves as an invitation to future poets to create their own endings.82 In Spenser’s work, as with any piece of literature, the hope of survival is not fulfilled within the work itself but comes rather from some outside agent. That is to say, poetic immortality is not achieved by the creation of a fixed monument “upon the pillours of Eternity” but by a continuous process of transmission, translation, and appropriation under the ironic smile of the goddess Mutabilitie. Spenser’s appropriation of past authors is close to his master idea of creation that governs all living things: “Over them / Change doth not rule and raigne; / But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintain,” he writes in the unfinished seventh book (VII.vii.58). For Spenser lyric monuments survive and flourish through their earthly movements. As such, the mechanism of poetic survival is the very process of cultural transmission itself. The world that the last book inhabits is highly self- conscious, disenchanted, postmythological, a sort of humanist Götterdämmerung. The personified female Mutability argues in a valedictory address that all in “this lower world . . . be subiect still to Mutabilitie” (VII. vii.47). At the center of Book VII is the distance between the nunc stans of human beings and the aevum of perpetuity inhabited by the gods. Spenser’s late poetry tends toward the cosmological, a striving to go beyond the human.83 With the force of his imagination the poet as vates moves beyond the fragmented monuments of the city and ascends to the firmament of the heavens. This is how Book VII ends: Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd, Of that same time when no more Change shall be, But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd Vpon the pillours of Eternity, That is contrayr to Mutabilitie: For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight:

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But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.

Finis.

The paratextual juxtaposition of “The VIII. Canto, vnperfite” at the headnote and “finis” at the end expresses the very Spenserian paradox of the monumental unfinished ruin (fig. 15). In other words, the posthumous printing of Spenser’s text dramatizes its own fragmentation. The poet’s exhaustion makes him long for the absolute rest that is to be found in the “Sabaoths sight.” But just because the poem ends does not mean it is finished. Change, mutability, collapse— how will literature survive? Recall how Spenser appropriates Chaucer in Book IV: But wicked Time that all good thought doth waste, And workes of noblest wits to nought out weare, That famous moniment hath quite defaste, And robd the world of threasure endlesse deare, The which mote haue enriched all vs heare. O cursed Eld the cankerworme of writs, How may these rimes, so rude as doth appeare, Hope to endure, sith workes of heauenly wits Are quite deuourd, and brought to nought by little bits? (IV. ii.33)

Inserted at a crucial moment in that narrative, Spencer’s continuation of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale is his way of preserving the “noblest wits” and “famous moniment” of the past. In the next stanza he promises that the spirit of the earlier poet will survive through “infusion sweete” (IV.ii.34). Since all works wrought by human hands will be laid waste by “wicked Time,” their perpetuation is dependent on literary inheritors. In fact Spenser imitates Chaucer in his complaint Anelida and Arcite: This olde storie, in Latyn which I fynde Of queen Anelida and fals Arcite, That elde, which that al can frete and bite As hit hath freten mony a noble storie, Hath nygh devoured out our memorie. (10–14)84

Spenser inserts, or more precisely “infuses” himself in literary history through a double imitative bind: by placing the burden of remembering on himself, he is able to find the raw, “sweete” materials of his poetry; in turn he also hopes to be remembered. Chaucer, deeply

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Figure 15. Edmund Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos from The Faerie Queene (London, 1609). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

influenced by Dante’s genealogy of the poets in the Divine Comedy, in House of Fame’s dream vision imagines Homer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, and Claudian inscribed on the palace’s pillars.85 With the “ensamples” of past authors, “famous moniments” that Time “hath quite defaste,” Spenser likewise presents us with monuments that are endlessly mutable in the hands of their successors. This indeed is what Raleigh celebrates in his commendatory sonnet: ME thought I saw the graue where Laura lay Within that Temple, where the vestall flame Was wont to burne, and passing by that way, To see that buried dust of liuing fame, Whose tombe faire loue, and fairer vertue kept, All suddenly I saw the Faery Queene: At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept, And from thenceforth those graces were not seene. For they this Queene attended, in whose steed Obliuion laid him downe on Lauras herse: Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed, And grones of buried ghostes the heuens did perse. Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe, And curst th’accesse of that celestiall theife.86

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Raleigh follows the vernacular tradition in this dream vision of poetic succession, enacting a hermeneutic cycle in which authors and readers enable survival of themselves and their predecessors through their self-insertion into literary history. Thus there is an implicit pact between authors and their forbearers, and authors and readers: as I remember, so I hope to be remembered. T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) presents the idea of the shifting monument that tradition alters and accommodates as it expands and shrinks the canon.87 This is the same rhetoric employed by Ben Jonson in “To my beloved master Mr. William Shakespeare,” printed in the 1623 Folio. He exclaims: My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give.88

Jonson invokes the names of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont, as Raleigh himself summons Petrarch. In the 1632 Second Folio, Milton responds by declaring, “Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.”89 The ancient precedent, among others, of course is Ovid himself, who in the Amores proclaims, “I, too when the final fires have eaten up my frame, shall still live on, and the great part of me survive my death,” ergo etiam cum me supremus adederit ignis, vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit (1.15). The key word here is etiam, for in the previous lines he praises Sophocles, Aratus, Menander, Ennius, Accius, Varro, Lucretius, Virgil, and Gallus. Just as he has remembered his predecessors, Ovid hopes that posterity will remember him. Any reader of Renaissance poetry, in whatever European language, knows that Ovid’s exorbitant dream came true. Ovid’s carmina morte carent, “song untouched by death,” Jonson’s “monument without a tomb,” Milton’s “live-long Monument,” and Spenser’s “pillours of Eternity” are all ultimately poetics of the future; this process of reuse, reappropriation, and adaptation becomes one of the most powerful driving forces in the European literary tradition. This, then, is the paradox of the monument as text and object: designed as a summation of memory, an omega point in which all meaning is concentrated, its survival depends not so much on its singularity as its multiplicity.

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“Ruin All Mankind” Milton, Spenser’s successor and closest reader, also thought much about ruins and poetry. But his focus is not the decayed magnificence of ancient Rome but the decayed magnificence of human nature. The entire arc of his career is an attempt to deliver what I quoted earlier from On Education (1644): “The end then of learning is to repair the ruines of our first parents.”90 The purpose of Milton’s poetry likewise is to redeem our primal state of ruins through construction of a monumental Protestant aesthetics. We may categorize his thoughts on ruins in three broad stages: the abolition of the false voices of the pagan oracles in his Nativity Ode; his formulation of “ruin” as the very condition of a paradise “lost” in his epic; and ruination as a necessary process of destruction against a recursive idolatry in Samson Agonistes. His early “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1645) narrates the cessation of the oracles on the morning of Christ’s birth: “The Oracles are dumb; / No voice or hideous hum. . . . No nightly trance or breathèd spell / Inspires the pale- eyed priest from the prophetic cell.”91 The cessation of the oracles topos is the visual analogue to the appearance of Nativity ruins in the paintings of Quattrocento Italy. It represents a moment of despair, the discharge of the long pent-up pressures of the classical tradition, expelled into a series of terrifying, demonic cries. This chaos finally results in a sonic catharsis—by purging the old pagan gods’ wailing, the poem prepares for the silent purity of the newborn babe and the emergence of the prophetic voice of the young poet. Paradise Lost (1667) is an epic teeming with the ruinous imagination.92 Beelzebub “rising seem’d a Pillar of State . . . Majestick though in ruin” (II.302–5). Chaos, “the anarch,” describes the defeat of Satan’s band: “With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, / Confusion worse confounded” (II.995– 96). As Satan descends upon the garden of Eden in the evening, “he designes / in them at once to ruin all mankind” (V.227–28). Satan seduces Eve “under shew of Love well feign’d, / The way which to her ruin now I tend.” Here the verb “ruin” is used in the transitive sense; thus Satan is the agent. But in Milton’s theology man is responsible for his fall. Thus the ruin of man is both active and passive. The first book of Paradise Lost ends with the demons literally constructing ruins: Pandemonium is “built like a Temple, where Pilasters round / were set, and Doric pillars overlaid

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/ with Gold’n Architrave” (I.713–15). From the bottomless chaos of hell rises a parody of the excesses of St. Peter’s in Rome, as if these cursed builders materialized the formless dark with the wicked genius of their engineering. In Paradise Regained (1671) Christ defies Satan as being “ejected, emptied, gaz’d, unpitied, shunn’d, / A spectacle of ruin, or of scorn” (I.413–14). Instead of dwelling on the architectural sense of ruins, Milton’s poetics emphasizes the ruined state of our nature as the consequence of our fall. The course of our lives is a slow reparation of our natal brokenness. In Samson Agonistes (1671) the protagonist, like Guyon confronted with the Bower, becomes a maker of ruins. As an inversion of the Vitruvian analogue of the column as human form, Samson himself becomes a suicidal pillar of destruction. The chorus reports: Noise call you it or universal groan As if the whole inhabitation perish’d, Blood, death, and deathful deeds are in that noise, Ruin, destruction at the utmost point. Manoa: Of ruin indeed methought I heard the noise, Oh it continues, they have slain my Son. (1511–16)

Manoa promises to erect a tomb for his son: “I will build him / A monument, and plant it round with shade / Of laurel ever green” (1734–35). In Daniel Shore’s reading, “Manoa’s monument amounts to a new object of worship in place of the Philistine idols destroyed with the theater. Iconoclastic destruction gives rise to uncritical devotion to objects, succeeded in turn by new acts of ‘matchless valor.’”93 The inclination toward idolatry endures even in its destruction: the memorial Manoa plans to build “with all his Trophies hung, and Acts enroll’d / In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric Song” shows how the son’s self-annihilating act will be remembered by paternal hero worship. Milton’s temperament resonates deeply with Protestant iconoclastic practice.94 The issue that must be raised but cannot be answered here is the relationship between ruination and violence as the necessary agents for radical political change. If the Protestant mind ushered in the modern age through its disenchantment of the world, as many have claimed, the ruin might be the perfect emblem of this ambivalent world, still lingering with fragments of half-remembered myths.95 Ruins represent the lost certitudes of the medieval closed universe. The rallying cries of the Reformation— ad fontes and sola scriptura— necessitated a deep rupture with the millennial traditions

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of the Catholic Church. This leap back to the supposed original purity of the early churches made iconoclasm possible since it validated destruction as the cleansing agent that wipes away centuries of grimy sedimentation. That ruins remain means that the magisterium of tradition has not entirely been eradicated. In the vexed relationship between art making and iconoclasm, monuments and ruins perpetuate each other in a cycle of repression and return. At the most basic level we have Varro’s pedestrian looking at the monumental tombs on the Via Appia, and at the most imaginative we have Guyon reading the Moniments of Briton and Milton’s Pandemonium. In between we have book hunters like John Leland, Matthew Parker, and Robert Cotton, who, by rescuing certain books, at the same time suppressed others. The razed buildings in early modern England fill you with either triumph or melancholy. What remains, in the twilight of Mutabilitie’s gods, the iconoclast’s hammer, and the rupture of allegory is the task of interpretation. And correct reading, as the Reformation has taught us so well, is a deeply ethical act. Like Rilke’s dictum upon beholding the Archaic Torso of Apollo, Du muß dein Leben ändern, “You must change your life!,” Spenser suggests that all things worthy of survival, including his own poem, must have some life-altering force. The reader’s role is finally to distinguish the true monuments from the idols, just as Marvell’s reading of Milton convinced him that the poet did not “ruin . . . / the sacred truth to fable and old song” but instead composed a “theme sublime / in number, weight, and measure.”96 As ruins demand an interpretative stance, so do they ultimately demand an ethical response.

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Epilogue Fallen Castles and Summer Grass

I am the grass. Let me work. — Carl Sandburg

My Japanese friend turned out to be a travel agent from Tokyo. From her I learned that physical ruins are foreign to the Japanese aesthetic. One obvious reason is that wood, the primary material of its traditional architecture, is naturally much less durable than marble or stone. There is no equivalent of a Tintern Abbey or Temple of Neptune in the countryside of Hokkaido or Honshu. Instead, nestled deep within a forest sanctuary in the Mie prefecture, lies the Ise Shrine, one of the most revered places of the Shinto faith. Its architectural style is characterized by a primitive simplicity, with principles of constructions dating back to the sixth century ce.1 Ritually destroyed and rebuilt every twenty years, the temple looks much as it did one thousand four hundred years ago. Like the ship of Theseus, the Ise Shrine retains its formal identity while its material parts are constantly replaced. Spiritually speaking, this practice of periodic rebuilding, shikinen-zōkan, embraces the Shinto belief in the regeneration of life through ritual renewal. 2 The revered shrine continues to live in an ageless present, its alteration through the centuries imperceptible, whereas, as we have seen, there is an abiding part of European culture that wants the past to stay in the past. Although in the classical Japanese tradition ruins do not linger in the landscape, there actually is a poetics of ruin. Composed toward the end of Bashō’s (1644– 94) life, Narrow Road to the Deep North recounts a journey undertaken to the interior countryside to see the various sites— temples, shrines, palaces, castles—that have enormous cultural resonance in the collective memory of Japan. The poet was disappointed to 223

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see the gap between reality and legend: “Although many of the places that have been composed on from the distant past continue to exist, mountains crumble, rivers change direction, roads are altered, rocks are buried in dirt. . . . As time passes and generations change, the traces of the poetic places [utamakura] become uncertain.”3 When he visited the site of a fallen Samurai castle, he wrote: The ancient ruins of Yasuhira and others, lying behind Koromo Barrier, appear to close off the southern entrance and guard against the Ainu barbarians. Selecting his loyal retainers, Yoshitsune fortified himself in the castle, but his glory quickly turned to grass. “The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain. / The city walks turn to spring, / grasses and trees are green.” With these lines from Du Fu in my head, I lay down my bamboo hat, letting the time and tears flow. Summer grasses— Traces of dreams Of ancient warriors Natsukusa | ya | tsuwamonodomo | ga | yume | no | ato.4

With a graceful economy, the haiku master moves from historical fact to poetic citation to personal reminiscence to lyric production. The absence of physical ruins is conjured by the presence of the lyric voice of the distant past. Poetry here replaces architectural materiality as the transmitter of cultural memory. The evanescence of the seasonal grass is reflected in the brevity of his poem. Though his imagery is simple, Bashō weaves a dense nexus of intertexts and allusions in his evocative and luminous lines. As Haruo Shirane observes, “The four successive heavy ‘o’ syllables in tsuwamonodomo (plural for warriors) suggest the ponderous march of warriors or the thunder of battle. As with most of Bashō’s noted poems, this hokku depends on polysemous key words: ato, which can mean ‘site’ ‘aftermath,’ ‘trace’ or ‘track,’ and yume, which can mean ‘dream,’ ‘ambition,’ or ‘glory.’”5 In these lines Bashō conjures the essence of utamakura, the poetic trope of remembering places that expresses the yugen, “mystery and depth,” of memory. Intersecting time and space, utamakura is a thread for linking allusion and intertextuality in traditional Japanese poetry.6 Bashō is using this trope when he quotes Du Fu (712– 770), traversing geographies, states, and dynasties. The Chinese poet is, after all, writing almost a thousand years before Bashō: 國破山河在 城春草木深

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感時花濺淚 恨別鳥驚心 烽火連三月 家書抵萬金 白頭搔更短 渾欲不勝簪 A kingdom smashed, mountains and rivers remain, Spring in the city, grass and trees grow deep. Moved by the moment, flowers splash with tears, Alarmed at parting, birds startle the heart. War’s beacon fires have gone on three months, Letters from home are worth ten-thousand in gold. Fingers run through white hair until it thins, Cap-pins will almost no longer hold.7

Like Horace in Diffugere nives, Du Fu contemplates the inexorable direction of human life versus the cyclical returns of nature. But instead of invoking distant myth, he lingers on personal details. The vision of the poem sweeps from the vast (kingdom, city, mountains) to the small (trees, grass, hair); from premonitions from the sky (birds and beacon fires) to the harbinger of age (thinning hair); from the passing moment of a flower to the unrelenting signs of war. The pathos of this poem is found in the diffused melancholy of these overlapping temporalities. Objects of sentimental value— letters from home and cap pins— underscore the pain of exile and old age. Du Fu follows a long tradition of the banished scholar ruefully contemplating the ruins of the past.8 In “Lament for Ying,” Qu Yuan (343–278 bce) gazes at the “mounds of rubble” (qiu) left by fallen castles. Qiu is glossed by the earliest Chinese encyclopedia as “emptiness.” Cao Zhi (192–232) in his lamentation on his hometown says, “On foot I climbed up Beimang’s slopes / and gazed afar on Luoyang’s hills / Luoyang, so silent and forlorn, / its halls and palaces all burned away.”9 Bao Zhao (420–589) ends “Rhapsody on a Ruined City” (Wucheng fu) with “For this ruined city, I play the lute and sing. . . . For a thousand years and a myriad generations, I shall watch you to the end in silence.”10 In “Eulogy on the Ancient Battlefield” by Li Hua (ca. 715– 774) the poet gazes down at an old battlefield, imagines the terrible carnage, and listens to the voices of the dead before returning to the present to ponder the meaning of the past.11 Meng Haoran (689– 740) writes, “In human affairs there is succession and loss; / men come and go, forming present and past. / Rivers and hills keep traces [ji] of their glory. . . . Tears soak our robes.”12

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Du Fu absorbs this entire tradition. A generation after the poet’s death, Yuan Zhen (779– 831) explained that Du Fu “attained all the styles of past and present and combined the unique, particular masteries of each other writer.”13 He carves his monuments from the monuments of the past; his tears flow from the tears of Meng. The art historian Wu Hung states that there are two words in Chinese for “ruins”: “The concepts of ji [跡] and xu [墟] thus define a site of memory from opposite directions: xu emphasizes the erasure of human traces; ji stresses survival and display. A xu in a strict sense can only be mentally envisaged because it shows no external signs of ruins; but a ji, being itself an external sign of ruins, always encourages visualization and representation.”14 To my surprise, when Bashō writes “traces of dreams,” yume / no / ato, the Japanese kanji he uses, ato, is 跡, the same character as the Chinese ji. The character in both languages signifies tracks, marks, signs, scars— in a word, vestigia. There are various kinds of ji: some are of antiquarian interest, others are for political, elite, or popular consumption. Shen ji, “divine traces,” are sacred mountains shrouded in clouds where spirits dwell. The concept is related to shen hui, “spiritual meeting,” of like-minded literati throughout the centuries. Divine traces are numinous and ambiguous. Only the poetic imagination can render them lucid. After myriad generations Bashō has a “spiritual meeting” with Du Fu by tracing the vestigia of his Chinese predecessor in two ways: the allusion to hair and the blades of grass. The long, flowing lushness of spring and youth is contrasted to the brevity of the season that withers, whitens, and thins. The original meaning of utamakura is “poem pillows”; as we lay our heads on pillows to sleep, so does Bashō tap into the nocturnal reservoir of classical topoi: “traces of dreams / of ancient warriors.” Ato, ji, vestigia— all signs of memory, traces of tradition. Bashō’s reverence for the cultural past is one of the driving forces of the Japanese appropriation of Chinese poetry, similar to Shakespeare’s remaking of Horace. But the absence of any residue of the Yasuhira castle suggests that it is the very opposite of the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” since the Japanese fortress has now been completely dissolved and all that is left is vegetation. Natsukusa (summer grass) is a seasonal word for summer— a rich, thick, deep growth nourished by the rains that washes away the bloodstained fields of treachery.15 Du Fu’s grass, however, emerges in the

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spring, the earliest signs of renewal. It is as if only after eight hundred years the Tang spring finally matures to an Edo summer. The Japanese- Chinese nexus of poetics of ruins shares with that of the European Renaissance the sense of tradition, of transgenerational dialogue and the recovery of the past through allusions, however subtle and microtextured they might be. What is different is that the East Asian tradition seems to lack any boasting of poetic immortality. Bashō and Du Fu enact a translingual and transcultural friendship by transmitting the intimate moments of personal memory. Instead of burnishing their everlasting fame, their poetic creations seem content to leave impressions that vanish like the summer grass they describe. In his reflection on the autumn leaves in Kyoto, Italo Calvino describes this aesthetic— the Japanese sensitivity to the rhythmic passing of the season— as “the obverse of the sublime.”16 The Renaissance poetry of ruins, in contrast, strives for this very sublimity, even before the term is defined as such in the Enlightenment. Bashō’s and Du Fu’s grass- covered fields are the green sites of memory, dislocated signs of prehistory that are ever in the process of returning to nature, of easing into oblivion, even as they sustain a verbal poetic memory. This sort of poetic memory is strikingly different from Petrarch’s hopeful tracks, Du Bellay’s formless dust, and Spenser’s fragmented monuments. By starting with the unit of a literary quotation, a fragment, or a particularly resonant word, and by looking at these through the vanishing optics of the ruin, a thing that is and is not, we can revise some of our most basic ideas about classical texts and how they came to be. Though empires might crumble and the gilded monuments of princes besmeared, so long as poets can write and readers read, literature shall live. The poetics of ruins, whether east or west, is finally a poetics of mutability— not so much a mode of survival that depends on a work’s imperishability but rather an artistic process of continuous transmission, translation, and transformation.

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ack now l edgm e n ts

A certain poet once said there was a special kinship between thinking and thanking, denken and danken. I never understood what this oracular wordplay meant until I began working on this book. Therefore deepest and highest padeuteria to my teachers at Princeton: Leonard Barkan, Jeff Dolven, Anthony Grafton, Simone Marchesi, and Alexander Nehamas. To compare the great with the small, my favorite poet once said: Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings.

This book was conceived in Rome, written in Pisa and Princeton, revised innumerably in Stanford, New Haven, and London, and finished in Singapore. During so many moments I felt I was gathering all my friends together far and wide. At Princeton, Hans Aarsleff, Rosa Andújar, Kenneth Chong, Andrew Ford, Leslie Geddes, Adam Gitner, Matthew Harrison, Christian Kaesser, John Logan, Joe Moshenska, François Rigolot, Susan Stewart, Nigel Smith, Julianne Werlin, Leah Whittington, and Tom Zanker were all so formative to my Bildung. At Pisa, Lina Bolzoni, George Corbett, David Collier, Carlo Ginzburg, Lisa Marie Mignone, Fabio Pagani, Eugenio Refini, and Mauro Scarabelli made me feel like one of the Normalisti. At Stanford, Dan Edelstein, Catherine Flynn, Phillip Horky, Marisa Galvez, Roland Greene, Sepp Gumbrecht, Robert Pogue Harrison, Josh Landy, Stephen Orgel, and Ben Wiebracht all shone upon me the beneficent rays of the California sunshine. In the wider republic of letters, Christopher D. Johnson has been a stalwart conference companion and friend. In New

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Acknowledgments

Haven, David Kastan, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Howard Bloch, John Rogers, Annabel Patterson, David Quint, Lawrence Manley, Christopher Wood, and the staff at the Whitney Humanities Center welcomed me during the bracing New England seasons. In the perennial summer of Singapore, I’m grateful to Pericles Lewis, Rajeev Patke, Mira Seo, Jane M. Jacobs, Petrus Liu, Robin Hemley, and Emanuel Mayer for the new little community of Rome and Athens that we are building. And we remember Barney Bate (1960–2016), the first ancestor of Yale– NUS College. A long and fruitful conversation with Haun Saussy on a March day in London made the publication a real possibility. I thank Robert Pogue Harrison for his invitation to appear on his radio program, Entitled Opinions, to discuss the project. The Yale English Department’s early modern working group, Pomerium, led by the great David Kastan, gave vigorous critiques to two chapters, and I’m grateful to Carla Baricz, Brad Holden, Sam Fallon, Tessie Prakas, Michael Komorowski, and Aaron Pratt. In an earlier iteration, John Logan read every word of it. When the manuscript was inching toward completion, Ben Wiebracht, Brad Holden, and Clio Doyle read it. At Fordham, two anonymous readers offered brilliant feedback. Tom Lay has been the very model of an editor: encouraging, insightful, timely. Tim Roberts as managing editor, Judith Hoover as copyeditor, and Steven Moore as indexer have all been superb during the production process. Haun and Lazar Fleishmann are terrific series editors. Now and forever, Melissa Kwok makes my fragments whole again. Last, to my parents. For the first poet said: 父兮生我，母兮鞠我。 欲报之德，昊天罔极。 My father— he begot me; my mother— she nursed me; I wish to repay their bounty, the vast sky has no boundary.

So much more to write, so much more to say. . . . But for now, ever more thanks to all.

notes

Note on citations: poetry is cited in translation with original text; prose is cited in translation followed by original when necessary. All unattributed translations are my own. All brief citations to classical texts and their translations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Loeb Classical Library of Harvard University Press. Abbreviations of classical texts and authors follow the conventions in Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition.

introduction 1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2:427; Virgil, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2:144; Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 216–17. 2. On monuments in Latin literature, see Philip Hardie, “Augustan Poets and the Mutability of Rome,” in Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus, ed. Anton Powell (Bristol, UK: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), 59– 82; Don Fowler, “The Ruin of Time: Monuments and Survival at Rome,” in Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 193– 217; Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 27–43. 3. For examples, see J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 27– 94; Stephen Murphy, The Gift of Immortality: Myths of Power and Humanist Poetics (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), with chapters on Petrarch, Poliziano, and Guillaume Budé. 4. “Petrarch’s Coronation Oration,” trans. Ernest H. Wilkins, PMLA 68 (1953): 1241–50, quote on 1247. 5. Joachim Du Bellay, Œuvres Poétiques, vol. 6: Discours et Traductions, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Droz, 1931), 434– 35. 6. William A. Oram et al., eds., Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 212.

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Notes to Pages 3–6

7. Lucan, The Civil War, trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 578; Statius, Thebaid, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 307. 8. Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vols. 1– 3, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (1975, rpt. New York: Italica Press, 2005), 3:321. Original in Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari, 13 vols., ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco (Florence: Sansoni, 1933–42): qui ita truncati fedatique evaserunt, ut prope melius fuerit periisse (4:225). 9. Bernardo translation, 3:332; Centum quadraginta duos rerum romanarum libros edidisse te novimus, heu quanto studio quantisque laboribus! Vix triginta ex omnibus supersunt (Rossi and Bosco edition, 4:243). 10. Michael Kiernan, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 4: The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 66. 11. Bernardo translation, 1:294; Rossi and Bosco edition, 2:58. 12. This letter is treated in depth in chapter 3. 13. See André Chastel’s 1977 A. W. Mellon lectures, published as The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 14. The website Centering Spenser: A Digital Resource for Kilcolman Castle helpfully presents its history, reconstruction, and many topographical images: http://core.ecu.edu/umc/Munster/overview.html. 15. A major reconsideration of this rich topic is Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 16. Liddel and Scott, Greek and English Lexicon, s.v. 17. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. 18. I am aware of the value-loaded terms “Renaissance” and “early modern.” Both will be used interchangeably depending on whether I stress the period’s recursive or projective tendency. The classic account of the invention of the Renaissance as a historical period is William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). For a recent rejoinder, see Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 19. Joachim Du Bellay, The Regrets; with, the Antiquities of Rome, Three Latin Elegies, and the Defense and Enrichment of the French Language, trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 410. 20. See Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima: Storia e racconto nel Canzioniere di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 295– 346. 21. Ernest H. Wilkins, “Works That Petrarch Thought of Writing,” Speculum 35 (1960): 563– 71. 22. See Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nidra Poller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 197– 239; also Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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23. Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). 24. Giorgio Vasari, “Michelangelo Bonarroti Fiorentino,” in Le Vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani (1550), ed. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 2:902. 25. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Vanity,” III.9, in The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 720. 26. See Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 27. Think of the spurious author Avellaneda in part 2 of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615). 28. Erasmus to John Botzheim (1532) in Erasmus, Correspondence 1:36, cited in Margaret Mann Phillips, The Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964), xv. 29. Montaigne, “Of Vanity,” 736. 30. See Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004). Lucas Erne argues that, far from indifferent to his popularity in print, Shakespeare was intensely vested in his rise as a published author: Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 31. This sequence actually runs from Sonnet 18, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / so long lives this, and this gives life to thee,” to Sonnet 55, “Nor marble, nor the gilded monuments / of princes,” to 60, “Like as waves make towards the pebble shore,” to 64, “When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defacèd / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,” to 65, “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,” to 73, “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” 32. Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow, Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 509. 33. All quotations from the Arden Shakespeare, Complete Works, revised edition, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan, and H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Cengage, 2001). 34. Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 4. 35. Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica, trans. Catharine Diehl and Jason Groves (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 130, 131. 36. Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, vol. 1: books 1–5, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon, I Tatti Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19, 23. 37. See Elisabeth Pellegrin, “Fragments et Membra Disiecta,” Codicologica 3 (1980): 70– 95. 38. Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang, eds., World Philology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 39. Constanze Güthenke, ‘“Enthusiasm Dwells Only in Specialization’: Classical Philology and Disciplinarity in Nineteenth- Century Germany,” in Pollock et al., World Philology, 264– 84.

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40. August Boeckh, Encyclopädie und Methodologie der Philologischen Wissenschaften, ed. Ernst Bratuschek (Leipzig: Teubner, 1877), 12, 16, 25– 26; translated in Güthenke, ‘“Enthusiasm Dwells Only in Specialization,’” 279, 280, 278– 79. 41. Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Marie Said and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13 (1969): 14. 42. Wortwandel ist Kulturwandel und Seelenwandel. Leo Spitzer, “Linguistics and Literary History,” in Representative Essays, ed. Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 11. 43. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, trans. and ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 226. 44. Erasmus, Adagia I ix 34 (“Leonem ex unguibus aestimare”), in Collected Works of Erasmus: The Adages, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 32:200. 45. Giambattista Vico, New Science, §357, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 106; I grandi frantumi dell’antichità, inutili finor alla scienza perché erano giaciuti squallidi, tronchi e slogati, arrecano de grandi lumi, tersi, composti ed allogati ne’ luoghi loro. Vico, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1953), 491. 46. Annabel Patterson in Milton’s Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) studies the way the English author galvanizes the full historical tradition and philosophical weight of words like “liberty,” “book,” and “disobedience.” Hannah Crawforth in Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013) argues that writers like Jonson, Spenser, Donne, and Milton use the etymology of English words, with their Anglo-Saxon and ancient roots, to carry out their national project to recover the true meaning of English identity through the reinvention of its language. Catherine Nicholson in Uncommon Tongues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) studies the “eccentricity, strangeness and foreignness” of the language of Lyly, Spenser, and Marlowe. 47. Roland Greene, Five Words: Cultural Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Greene’s methodology explicitly follows the examples set forth by Raymond Williams’s groundbreaking Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Reinhart Koselleck’s Future Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (1985, rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 48. See the new translation in Time, History, Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. and introduction by James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 65–113. 49. Barbara Cassin, ed., Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Editions de Seuil, Dictionnaries Le Robert, 2004); Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, trans. and eds.,

Notes to Pages 18–22

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Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), xvii–xx. 50. Erasmus, “On the Method of Study,” trans. Brian McGregor, in The Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 23– 24:666. 51. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 52. Leonard Barkan’s Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) offers a splendid account of how unearthed sculptural fragments and the hermeneutics of archaeology shaped Renaissance aesthetics. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010) argues for the temporal instability of the period’s artworks: they are self- conscious of their ancestral (or even divine) origins, attuned to their coexistence with other replicas, and aware of their survival in the afterlife. Similarly Jonathan Gil Harris in Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) demonstrates that early modern objects— such as defunct medieval monasteries, prayer texts, and stage props—were “polytemporal, palimpsestic,” and ultimately “untimely.” 53. Margaret M. McGowan, Vision of Rome in Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Eric MacPhail, The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature, Stanford French and Italian Studies (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1990); Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); her “‘The Afflatus of Ruin’: Meditations on Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Stevens,” in Roman Images, ed. Annabel Patterson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23–52; finally, Hassan Melehy, in The Poetics of Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), gathers many of his previously published articles. 54. Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Rebeca Helfer, Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Recollection (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 55. Leonard Foster, Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Roland Greene, PostPetrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); William J. Kennedy, Sites of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 56. See Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles: Getty, 1999). For an illuminating discussion of Warburg’s “pathos formulas” in cultural memory, see Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 151-58.

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57. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 178. 58. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), xxii. 59. Robert Pogue Harrison, Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6. 60. Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, trans. Irma Richter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 178, original in the Codex Urbinus, shelfmark 28, Vatican Library, Rome.

1. The Rebirth of Poetics Epigraph: Denis Diderot, Œuvres complètes, vol. 16: Salon de 1767, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl et al. (Paris: Hermann, 1990), 336. 1. For an encyclopedic account of Babel’s afterlife as the history of linguistics, see Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1957– 63), esp. 1:111– 257. For a perceptive modern reading, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalia: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 219– 32. 2. Other accounts are found in Quintilian, Inst. 11.2.14–15, and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.16– 24. 3. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 465– 67. 4. Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Praise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 5. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5:64– 65. 6. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966, rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See Yates’s followers: Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lina Bolzoni, La Stanza della Memoria (Milan: Einaudi, 1997); Rebeca Helfer, Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Memory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 7. Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 46. 8. Calvert Watkins, “An Indo-European Theme and Formula: Imperishable Fame,” in How to Kill a Dragon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 173– 79. 9. Jesper Svenbro, La Parole et le marbre: Aux origines de la poétique grecque (Lund: n.p., 1976). 10. In Homer “a marked grave with a tumulus and perhaps a stone stele above it is called a sema or sign of the place of burial. To call a tomb a sema is to bring the making of objects as a means of preserving the past very close to the function of epic poetry.” Andrew Ford, Homer: Poetry of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 143.

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11. Gregory Nagy, “Sêma and Nóēsis: The Hero’s Tomb and the ‘Reading’ of Symbols in Homer and Hesiod,” in Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 202– 22. 12. Cited in James I. Porter, “Making and Unmaking: The Achaean Wall and the Limits of Fictionality in Homeric Criticism,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 141 (2011): 1– 36, quote on 1. 13. Preserved in Diodorus Siculus, World History, 11.11.6, in David A. Campbell, ed., Greek Lyric, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 3:425, translation modified. 14. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 55. 15. Pindar, Olympian Odes, Pythian Odes, ed. and trans. William H. Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 314–15. See also Olympian 6: “Let us set up golden columns to support the strong-walled porch of our abode and construct, as it were, a splendid palace” (1–4). 16. See Deborah Steiner, “Pindar’s Oggetti Parlenti,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 95 (1993): 159– 80. 17. James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 453–523, 521. 18. Pindar, Nemean Odes, Isthmian Odes, Fragments, ed. and trans. William H. Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 47. See Maria Pavlou, “Pindar Nemean 5: Real and Poetic Statues,” Phoenix 64 (2010): 1–17. 19. See Susan E. Alcock, Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscapes, Monuments, and Memories (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 20. Aristotle, The Physics, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 403–4. 21. Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, IA: Peripatetic Press, 1981), 24. 22. “Pregnancy, reproduction— this is an immortal thing for a mortal animal to do. . . . For among animals the principle is the same as with us, and mortal nature seeks so far as possible to live forever and be immortal. And this is possible in one way only: by reproduction, because it always leaves behind a new young one in place of the old” (206d– 208e). Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 489– 91. 23. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 403. 24. See Charles Segal, “Poetic Immortality and the Fear of Death: The Second Proem of the De Rerum Natura,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 92 (1989): 193– 212. 25. See Monica Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 229– 31. 26. On Horace’s reading of Lucretius, see Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 180– 228. 27. For insightful discussion of monumentum’s rich semantic range, see Helmut Häusle, Das Denkmal als Garant des Nachruhms: Eine Studie zu

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einem Motiv in lateineischer Inschriften (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1980), esp. 29–40, 41– 63. 28. R. S. G. Nesbit and Niall Rudd, A Commentary on Horace: Book III of Odes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 366– 67. Later Propertius has a similar boast: nam neque pyramidum sumptus ad sidera ducti, / nec Iovis Elei caelum imitata domus, / nec Mausolei dives fortuna sepulcri / mortis ab extrema condicione vacant, “For neither the costly pyramids soaring to the skies, nor the temple of Jove at Elis that mimics heaven, nor the sumptuous magnificence of the tomb of Mausolus are exempt from the decree of death” (3.23). 29. Tony Woodman, “EXEGI MONVMENTVM: Horace, Odes 3.30,” in Why Horace?, ed. William S. Anderson (Wauconda, IL: BolchazyCarducci, 1999), 118. 30. See Michael C. J. Putnam, “Troy in Latin Literature,” New England Classical Journal 34 (2007): 195– 205. 31. The term is not Roman but nevertheless is an apt one invented by scholars. See Eric R. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 2. 32. Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 69. 33. See the classic study by Alessandro Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 34. Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 35. See Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 301–14. 36. Maria Luisa Plaisant, “Un opuscolo inedito di Francesco da Fiano in difesa della poesia,” Rinascimento 1 (1961): 119– 62, quote on 159– 61. 37. See Concetta C. Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250– 1500 (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Press, 1981), 146– 67. 38. Brian Vickers, ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) is a good place to start. 39. See Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 37– 61. 40. On what has survived and what has been lost, see the works of L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson: Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 122– 63. 41. Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 3 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (1975, rpt. New York: Italica Press, 2005), 3:308–50; Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari, 13 vols., ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco (Florence: Sansoni, 1933–42): 4:238– 79.

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42. Bernardo translation, 3:329. Sero ingenium tuum novi: Oratoriarum institutionum liber heu! Discerptus et lacer, venit ad manus meas. Agnovi aetatem vastatricem omnium . . . vidi formosi corporis artus effusos: admiratio animum dolorque concussit; et fortasse nunc apud aliquem totus es, et apud talem forsitan qui suum hospitem habet incognitum. . . . Opto te incolumem videre, et sicubi totus es, oro ne diutius me lateas. (Rossi and Bosco edition, 4:241, 3). 43. A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Hippolytus among the Exiles,” in Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 18, 19. 44. Is vero [Quintilianus] apud nos antea (Italos dico) ita laceratus erat, ita circumcisus culpa, ut opinor, temporum, ut nulla forma, nullus habitus hominis in eo recognosceretur. Tute hominem vidisti hactenus: lacerum crudeliter ora, ora manusque ambas populataque tempora raptis auribus, et truncas inhonesto vulnere naris. Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. Helene Harth (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1984), 2:154. 45. A. C. Dionisotti, “On Fragments in Classical Scholarship,” in Collecting Fragments/Fragmente sammeln, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 22. See the Boccaccio quotation in the introduction. 46. See Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 47. Michael Kiernan, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 4: The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 52–53. 48. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 86. 49. Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 123–44. 50. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. Philip Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 51. Jürgen Leonhardt, Latin: Story of a World Language, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Françoise Waquet calls this the “yearning for the universal,” in Latin: Empire of a Sign (London: Verso, 2002), 257– 70. See also Joseph Farrell, “The Life Cycle of Dead Languages,” in Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84–112. 52. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 260. Though he is primarily concerned with the legacy of the Sanskrit language, Pollock makes illuminating parallels to Latin in two chapters, “A European Countercosmopolis,” 259– 82, and “Europe Vernacularized,” 437– 67. 53. All citations from the Sonnets are from Colin Burrow, ed., Complete Sonnets and Poems, Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 54. Aaron Kunin, “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy,” PMLA 124 (2009): 92–106, quote on 101.

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55. I return to this difference in chapter 2. 56. On the relationship between portraiture and poetry, see Lina Bolzoni, Poesia e Ritratto nel Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 2008). 57. See, for example, Philip Hardie’s Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), on the importance of illusion and the conjuring presence throughout his corpus. 58. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), 2. 59. Burrow, Complete Sonnets and Poems, 526. 60. Tiffany Jo Werth, The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 3. 61. Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 104, and see in general 72–107. 62. Useful collections are Brian Dillon, ed., Ruins, Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Michael S. Roth, Claire L. Lyons, and Charles Merewether, eds., Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1997); special issues on ruins: “Symposium: The Aesthetics of Ruin and Absence,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (2014); “Antiquity and the Ruin: L’Antiquité et les ruines,” European Review of History 18 (2011); Cabinet 20 (2005– 6). Michel Makarius’s Ruins (Paris: Flammarion, 2004) is a great source of visual images; Robert Ginzburg’s The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004) is an omnium gatherum with an extensive annotated bibliography; Christopher Woodward’s In Ruins (London: Chatto, 2006) is a popular treatment; Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker, 1953) is a beautiful classic. 63. On twentieth- century modernism, see Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On British and German romanticism, see Nicholas Halmi, “Ruins without a Past,” Essays in Romanticism 18 (2011): 7– 27; Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 39–58; Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). On eighteenthcentury French, see John Goodman, trans., Diderot on Art: The Salon of 1767 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 2:203, 206; Nina L. Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth- Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty, 2010); Goran Blix, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Jean Starobinski, “Melancholy among the Ruins,” in The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789, trans. Bernard C.

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Swift (Geneva: Skira, 1964), unpaginated. For French literature in general, see Roland Mortier, La poétique des ruines en France: Ses origines, ses variations de la Renaissance à Victor Hugo (Geneva: Droz, 1974). On eighteenth- century Italian, see Sabrina Ferri, The Past in Ruins: Modernity in Italy, 1744–1836 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015); John Pinto, Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects and Antiquity in Eighteenth- Century Rome, Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Michel Onfray, Métaphysique des ruines: La peinture de Monsu Desiderio (Paris: Mollat, 2010); Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775–1850 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On the ancient ruins, see Martin Devecka, “Athens, Rome, Tenochtitlan: A Historical Sociology of Ruins,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2012; James I. Porter, “Sublime Monuments and Sublime Ruins in Ancient Aesthetics,” European Review of History/Revue europeenne d’histoire 18 (2011): 685– 96 and his “Ideals and Ruins: Pausanias, Longinus, and the Second Sophistic,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63– 92. Beyond European literature, see Michael Sells, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 33–44; Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 16– 32. 64. Jan Assmann, “Ancient Egypt and the Materiality of the Sign,” trans. William Whobrey, in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 15– 31. 65. John Lawrence Foster, ed. and trans., Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 226. 66. Tom Hare, ReMembering Osiris: Number, Gender, and the Word in Ancient Egyptian Representational Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 95. 67. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), §144, 63.

2. The Rebirth of Ruins Epigraph: Qu’est- ce que l’antique à Rome, sinon un grand livre dont le temps a détruit ou dispersé les pages, et dont les recherches modernes remplissent chaque jour les vides, et réparent les lacunes? M. Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 205. 1. Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Free Press, 1998), 8. 2. Henry R. Immerwahr, “Ergon: History as a Monument in Herodotus and Thucydides,” American Journal of Philology 81 (1960): 261– 90. Pericles’s Funeral Oration: “For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb [andron gar epiphanon pas gē taphos]; and in lands far from their own,

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where columns with their inscription declare it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten [agraphos mnēne] with no monument to preserve it, except that of the heart,” (2.43.4). 3. See Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). 4. See Mary Jaeger, Livy’s Written Rome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 8– 9. 5. As Jacques Le Goff argues, while a document in an archive might seem to hold more objective value than a “public monument,” which is always ideologically driven, archives are also institutions of power, therefore “every document is a monument.” “Documento/Monumento,” in Enciclopedia Einaudi (Turin: Einaudi, 1977– 84), 3:38–47. For Michel Foucault too monuments are products of normative control: “History, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents . . . . In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.” Foucauldian history, then, “aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument,” since archeology is “a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past.”Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1982), 7. 6. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), trans. S. C. G. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1944), 113. Important source materials are collected in Eugène Müntz, Les Arts à la cour des papes aux XVe et XVIe siècle, 4 vols. (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1898); Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti, eds., Codice Topografico della Città di Roma, 4 vols. (Rome: Tipografia del senato, 1953); Cesare D’Onofrio, ed., Visitiamo Roma nel Quattrocento: La città degli umanisti (Rome: Romano società editrice, 1989). Important secondary works include Salvatore Settis, ed., Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1984– 86), esp. vol. 1, L’uso dei classici; Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Sabine Forero-Mendoza, Le Temps des ruines: Le Goût des ruines et les formes de la conscience historique à la Renaissance (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002); Nicole Dacos, Roma quanta fuit, ou, l’invention du paysage de ruines (Paris: Somogy, 2004) and Voyage à Rome: les artistes européens au XVIe siècle (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2012); Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); David Karmon, The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 7. See Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Vincenzo de Caprio, Poesia e Poetica delle Rovine di Roma: Momenti e Problemi (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1987), esp. Armando Gnisci, “Rome come sistema delle rovine,” 9– 20. For diachronic compendia of the images of

Notes to Pages 53–57

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Rome, see W. Walther Rehm, Europäische Romdichtung (Munich: M. Heuber, 1960); Arnaud Tripet, Ecrivez— moi de Rome . . . le mythe romain au fil du temps (Paris: Champion, 2006). 8. Roma, quondam orbis caput, nunc nudum nomen et fabula. Pier Paolo Vergerio, Epistolario di Pier Paolo Vergerio, ed. Leonard Smith, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1934), 212, translated and discussed in Christian, Empire without End, 1. 9. A complete translation of the letter is in Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics and Eloquence, 1400–1470 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 199– 215, quote on 200. Her analysis is on 150– 70. 10. Alberto degli Alberti, letter “ex urbe delacerata,” 14 March 1443, in A. Fabroni, Magni Cosmi Medici Vita II (Pisa 1788), 165, quoted in Christof Thoenes, “St. Peter’s as Ruins: On Some vedute by Heemskerck,” in Sixteenth Century Italian Art, ed. Michael Cole (London: Blackwell, 2006), 25. 11. Dici solet, et habet certam res ipsa rationem, in ruinosis urbibus, quas aut violenus casus diruit aut vetustas exedit, esse aerem parum salubrem (Vergerio, Epistolario, 215). 12. Quoted in Loren Partridge, The Art of the Renaissance in Rome (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 19. 13. See Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Ferdinand Gregorovius, Rome and Medieval Culture: Selections from History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 14. Cristoforo Landino, “Xandra,” in Carmina Omnia, ed. Alessandro Perosa (Florence: Olschki, 1939), 81–82. Also cited in de Caprio, “Sub Tanta Diruta,” in de Caprio, Poesia e Poetica delle Rovine and Christian, Empire without End, 37.” 15. See Peter Struck, Birth of the Symbol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 16. Citation in epigraph. 17. See Rodolfo Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome (New York: Arno Press, 1980); Salvatore Settis, “Continuità, distanze, conoscenza: Tre usi dell’antico,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3:373–486; Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Eloquence of Appropriation (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2003). See also Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Present (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Dale Kinney, “Spolia: Damnatio and Renovatio Memoriae,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997): 117–48; Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney, eds., Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 18. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II.x1.60, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 75. 19. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo SherleyPrice (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 92. 20. See Tilmann Buddensieg, “Gregory the Great, the Destroyer of Pagan Idols: The History of a Medieval Legend Concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 44– 65.

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21. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315, quote on 289. 22. Francis Morgan Nichols, ed. and trans., The Marvels of Rome: Mirabilia Urbis Romae (New York: Italica Press, 1986). 23. Armando Petrucci, La scrittura: Ideologia e rappresentazione (Milan: Einaudi, 1986); English translation by Linda Lappin as Public Lettering: Script, Power, Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 24. In hac tabula pura legi, set pauca intellexi. Sunt enim afforism, ubi fere omnia verba subaudiuntur. Master Gregorius, The Marvels of Rome, trans. John Osborne (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987). The tabula has not been identified. For authorship, dating, and Latin text, see G. McN. Rushforth, “Magister Gregorius de Mirabilibus Urbis Romae: A New Description of Rome in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Roman Studies 9 (1919): 14–58. 25. Cited in Don Fowler, “The Ruin of Time: Monuments and Survival at Rome,” in Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 198. 26. Ibid. 27. Anon., “The Ruin,” in The Anglo- Saxon World: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5. For the relationship between medieval architecture and poetry, see Lori Ann Garner, Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). 28. James Doubleday, “The Ruin: Structure and Theme,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 71.3 (1972): 369– 81. 29. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 259– 66. 30. This is also vividly displayed in the roots of banyan and fig trees that descend like serpentine magma amid the fallen Ta Prohm temples of Angkor Wat. 31. Peter Sturman sums up the arguments in “The Donkey Rider as Icon: Li Cheng and Early Chinese Landscape Painting,” Artibus Asiae 60 (1995): 43– 97. 32. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Absence and Presence in Chinese Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 36. 33. See Albert Russell Ascoli’s critique in “Petrarch’s Middle Ages,” Stanford Italian Review 10 (1991): 5–44. 34. See James Simpson and Brian Cummings, introduction to Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–12; Margreta de Grazia, “The Modern Divide: From Either Side,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007): 453– 67. 35. See Joseph Polzer, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘War and Peace’ Murals Revisited: Contributions to the Meaning of the ‘Good Government Allegory,’” Artibus et Historiae 23 (2002): 63–105. 36. For an expansion of this argument, see my “Birth of Ruin in Quattrocento Adoration Paintings,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 18 (2015): 319–48.

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37. See Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1966), 69– 98; Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chétien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955–59), 2:2, 213–55. 38. See Rab Hatfield’s Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration”: A Study in Pictorial Content (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. 33– 67. 39. Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood make the connection between Vitruvius and Botticelli in Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 305. 40. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Reading on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:38– 39. 41. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper Icon, 1972), 113. 42. Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, History, trans. John Pierce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 207– 20. 43. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance. 44. The scholarship on Renaissance Rome is obviously vast. See, among others, Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, trans. Daniel Sterer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 23–180; Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Anthony Grafton, ed., Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (Washington: Library of Congress, Yale University Press, 1993); Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); P. A. Ramsey, ed., Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982); Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome 1500–1599: Portrait of a Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). 45. See the reading of Salvatore Settis, “Continuità, distanze, conoscenza: Tre usi dell’antico,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3:375– 78. 46. Leonardo, Notebooks, trans. Irma Richter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 281. 47. See Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13– 33. 48. See Cyriac of Ancona, Later Travels, trans. Edward W. Bodnar, I Tatti Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Phyllis Williams Lehmann and Karl Lehmann, Samothracian Reflections: Aspects of the Revival of the Antique (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 49. Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined, 1. 50. Pirro Ligorio, Delle antichità di Roma, ed. Daniela Negri (Rome: E & A, 1989), 63. Translated by Anthony Grafton in “The Ancient City Restored,” in Rome Reborn, 106. 51. See, for example, Pomponio Leto’s Antichità di Roma (1510), Fabio Calvo’s Antique urbis Romae cum regionibus simulachrum (1527), Andrea

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Fulvio’s Antiquitates Urbis (1527), Pirro Ligorio’s Antichità di Roma (1553), Andrea Palladio’s L’antichità di Roma (1554), Antonio Labacco’s Libro appartenente all’Architecttura (1552). For discussion, see Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 52. See Hermann Egger, Romische Veduten, 2 vols. (Vienna: Schroll, 1931– 32); Anna Grelle, ed., Vestigi delle antichita di Roma et altri luoghi (Rome: Quasar, 1987); Lisa Oehler, Rom in der Graphik des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Mann Verlag, 1997). Recent work includes Rebecca Zorach, The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Christopher P. Heuer, “Hieronymus Cock’s Aesthetic of Collapse,” Oxford Art Journal 32 (2009): 387–408; the database hosted by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Monumenta rarioria, http://mora.sns.it. 53. Anon., Antiquarie prospettiche romane, ed. Giovanni Agosti and Dante Isella (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2004). 54. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 40. 55. Carroll William Westfall, This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1974). 56. Jill E. Blondin, “Power Made Visible: Pope Sixtus IV as Urbis Restaurator in Quattrocento Rome,” Catholic Historical Review 91 (2005): 1– 25. 57. Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome, 207. See also James S. Ackerman, “The Planning of Renaissance Rome, 1450–1580,” in Ramsey, Rome in the Renaissance, 13. 58. Hic urbem Romam multis ac maximis aedificiis mirum in modum exomavit, cuius opera si compleri potuissent, nulli veterum imperatorum magnificentiae cessura videbantur, sed iacent adhuc aedificia sicut ruinae murorum ingentes. Quoted in Ruth Rubenstein, “Pius II and Roman Ruins,” Renaissance 2 (1988): 202. 59. Pius II, Commentaries, 2 vols., trans. Florence Alden Gragg, ed. Margaret Meserve and Marcello Simonetta, I Tatti Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004– 7). 60. Pius II, Opera inedita, vol. 2, ed. Giuseppe Cugnoni (1903, rpt. Farnborough, UK: Gregg, 1968). 61. Müntz, Les Arts à la cour des papes, 1:352. The translation is from Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, trans. Ian Kinnes and Gillian Varndell (New York: Abrams, 1996), 340. 62. This is a repetition of statutes of 1363: “So that the city might not be disfigured by its ruins, and that the ancient buildings might bear public witness to the grace of our city, we forbid any man to destroy or to have destroyed any ancient building within the walls of Rome, on pain of a fine of one hundred livres de Provins” (Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, 337). 63. “The Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione,” in Palladio’s Rome, ed. and trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 180. For authorship and dating, see Francesco P. Di Teodoro, Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera a Leone X (Bologna: Minerva, 1994).

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64. Karmon, The Ruin of the Eternal City. 65. Cesare Segre and Carlo Ossola, eds., Antologia della poesia italiana: Cinquecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 201. 66. Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination, trans. Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 87. 67. On the reception of this influential poem, see H. Gaston Hall, “Castiglione’s ‘Superbi Colli’ in Relation to Raphael, Petrarch, Du Bellay, Spenser, Lope de Vega, and Scarron,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 21 (1974): 159– 81. 68. See Nicole Dacos’s reading in Roma quanta fuit, 5–13. 69. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Gioacchino Paparelli (Milan: BUR, 2006), 2:1199– 200. The English translation is by Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics), 2:331. 70. David Quint, “Astolfo’s Journey to the Moon,” Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 398. 71. Jane M. Jacobs and Stephen Cairns, Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 72. Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 5. 73. Marvin Trachtenberg, Building in Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), xiii. 74. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 320. See also Casper Pearson, Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 75. Leon Battista Alberti, Descriptio urbis romae, ed. and trans. Martine Furno and Mario Carpo (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 119. 76. See Christof Thoenes, “Renaissance St. Peter’s,” in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, ed. William Tronzo (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 64– 92. 77. James Ackerman, “Notes on Bramante’s Bad Reputation,” in Studi Bramanteschi: Atti del Congresso Internazionale (Rome: De Luca, 1974), 339–50. 78. Thoenes, “Renaissance St. Peter’s,” 74. 79. Thoenes, “St. Peter’s as Ruins,” 28. 80. See Nagel and Wood, The Anachronic Renaissance, 313–17. 81. Susan Stewart, “The Ruin Lesson,” presented at the President’s Lecture Series, Princeton University, 3 March 2012. Stewart’s wide-ranging and brilliant lecture, which I listened to online (no longer available) while I was finishing this chapter, inspired some lines of thinking in this section. She helped me clarify some points that were once inchoate. I arrived independently at similar arguments in the earlier section of this chapter. 82. Denise Metral, Blaise de Vigenère (Paris: Droz, 1939), 45. 83. The University of Chicago Library has digitized all the prints: http:// speculum.lib.uchicago.edu.

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84. See Rebecca Zorach, The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 110–12. 85. I have learned from Christopher Kleinbub, “Bramante’s Ruined Temple and the Dialectics of the Image,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 412– 58; Lorenzo Pericolo, “Heterotopia in the Renaissance: Modern Hybrids as Antiques in Bramante, Cima da Conegliano, and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” Getty Research Journal 1 (2009): 1–16; Nagel and Wood’s discussion (Anachronic Renaissance, 309–11). 86. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility and Other Essays in Media, ed. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. 87. Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth (Parts 1– 3), trans. Robert R. Heitner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. 88. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 462. 89. They are now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Prado, Madrid; and Boysmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

3. Petr arch’s

V E S T IGI A

and the Presence of Absence

Epigraph: Viele Werke der Alten sind Fragmente geworden. Viele Werke der Neuern sind es gleich bei der Entstehung. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 21. 1. Aut prius aut multo decuit post tempore nasci; / Nam fuit, et fortassis erit, felicius evum; / In medium sordes, in nostrum turpia tempus / Confluxisse vides, Epistola metrica (3.33.1– 6). Petrarca, Rime, trionfi, e poesie latine, ed. F. Neri (Milan: Ricciardi, 1951), 802. 2. See the classic studies of Ernst Cassirer et al., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 23–145; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), 1– 36; Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 18– 36. For a critical examination of this earlier generation of scholars, see Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 228– 354. 3. See Giuseppe Billanovich, “Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 137– 208; B. L. Ullman, Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1973); Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 230– 91; Teodolinda Barolini and Wayne Storey, eds., Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 4. See, among many others, John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel,” Diacritics 5 (1975): 34–40; Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered

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Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265– 79; Teodolinda Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” Modern Language Notes 104 (1989): 1– 38; Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 58–101. Two helpful collections are Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Albert Russell Ascoli and Unn Falkeid, eds., Cambridge Companion to Petrarch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 5. Sed nec tu michi negabis absentiam quoque suas habere voluptates, nisi totam fortassis amicitie pulcritudinem, que latissime patet, ad oculos solos restringimus et a sede eius, que est in animo, sevocamus. All citations are from Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari , vols. 10–13, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco (Florence: Sansoni, 1933–42) and Aldo S. Bernardo’s English translation, Letters on Familiar Matters, vols. 1– 3 (1975, rpt. New York: Italica Press, 2005). Here, Bernardo translation, 1:90; Rossi and Bosco edition, 1:83. 6. On the many late-antique and medieval senses of presence, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. 86–105. I have also been inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, “The Vestiges of Art,” in The Muses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 81–101. 7. See the discussion of Romantic fragments in Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 39–58. 8. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen Barney et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 316. Vestigia sunt pedum signa primis plantis expressa, vocata quod his viae praecurrentium investigentur, id est agnoscantur. Isidore of Seville, Etimologie o Origini, ed. Angelo Valastro Canale, 2 vols. (Turin: UTET, 2004), 2:300. 9. All citations from this paragraph are from the Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v., “vestigium.” 10. Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, trans. Charles Segal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 11. The apian metaphor is discussed in Greene, The Light in Troy, 73– 76; G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 4–11. 12. Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols. (New York: Italica Press, 2005, 1:59. Frivolum est soli senio fidere, et qui hec invenerunt homines erant. Si virorum vestigiis deterremur, pudeat. Petrarch, Rerum senilium libri, trans. and ed. Ugo Dotti (Turin: Nino Aragno, 2004), 1:222. 13. Cum rerum universitas sit scala ad ascendendum in Deum; et in rebus quaedam sint vestigium, quaedam imago, quaedam corporalia, quaedam

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spiritualia, quaedam temporalia, quaedam aeviterna, ac per hoc quaedam extra nos, quaedam intra nos (1.2). St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, trans. and ed. Philotheus Boehner (1956, rpt. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1998). 14. See John A. Pinto, “Origins and Development of the Ichnographic City Plan,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35 (1976): 35–50. 15. Architectural Theory from the Renaissance to the Present, 2 vols. (Cologne: Taschen, 2011), 1:136. 16. Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 143–44. 17. Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, 20. 18. Vestigia certe rationis verba sunt; itaque vestigia etiam aliquid de corpore indicant. Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 14 vols., ed. James Spedding, M. Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, 1857– 74), 7:283. 19. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 96–128. See also his more recent Treads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 20. In reliquis potius divinasse necesse erat quam alicuius posse imitari vestigium, quod quidem ego non didici. Boccaccio, De montibus, silvis, fontibus, Biblioteca italiana, http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/indice/ visualizza_testo_html/bibit000401. 21. Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 21. 22. Natalino Sapegno, “Tra Dante e il Petrarca,” in Storia letteraria del Trecento: La letteratura italiana. Storia e testi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1963), 169– 96; Giuseppe Billanovich, “Tra Dante e Petrarca,” Italia medioevale e umanistica (1965): 1–44. His Festschrift is appropriately entitled Vestigia: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, ed. Rino Avesani et al. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984). 23. Gianfranco Contini, “Un’intrepretazione di Dante,” in Un’idea di Dante: Saggi danteschi (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 69–111. 24. Paolo Trovato, Dante in Petrarca: Per un inventario dei dantismi nei Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1979). 25. Marco Santagata, “Dante, il maestro negato,” in Per moderne carte: La biblioteca volgare di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 23– 91. 26. Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey Jr., eds., Petrarch and Dante: Anti- Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 27. Vestigio, vestigi, and vestigia occur in Inf. 24.49–51; Purg. 24.106– 8, 30.48; Par. 5.11, 31.81; Rvf 35.4, 125.60, 162.4, 304.3, 306.12, 360.127. 28. Christian Moevs, “Subjectivity and Conversion in Dante and Petrarch” in Barański and Cachey, Petrarch and Dante, 227.

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29. The Italian text is Il Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996). I have also consulted Rosanna Bettarini, ed., Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). 30. All English translations of the Canzoniere are from Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. 31. Dante, Rime 53 (CXVI); Dante, Rime, ed. Gianfranco Contini (1939, rpt., Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 207. Giorgio Orelli lists more echoes in “Solo et pensoso,” Il suono dei sospiri: Sul Petrarca volgare (Turin: Einaudi, 1990), 45–50. See also Wilhelm Pötters, Chi era Laura: Strutture linguistiche e matematiche nel “Canzoniere” di Francesco Petrarca (Bologna: Mulino, 1987). 32. Bernardo translation, 3:204. Hoc unum non dissimulo, quoniam siquid in eo sermone a me dictum illius aut alterius cuiusquam dicto simile, sive idem forte cum aliquo sit inventum, non id furtim aut imitandi proposito, que duo semper in his maxime vulgaribus ut scopulos declinavi, sed vel casu fortuito factum esse, vel similitudine ingeniorum, ut Tullio videtur, iisdem vestigiis ab ignorante concursum (Rossi and Bosco edition, 4:96). 33. See Barański’s reading in “Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti,” in Barański and Cachey, Petrarch and Dante, 50–113. 34. Bernardo translation, 3:212. Hec se michi tam familiariter ingessere et non modo memorie sed medullis affixa sunt unumque cum ingenio facta sunt meo, ut etsi per omnem vitam amplius non legantur, ipsa quidem hereant, actis in intima animi parte radicibus (Rossi and Bosco edition, 4:106). 35. See the Petrarchan imitations in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 106: “O absent presence! Stella is not here; / False-flatt’ring hope, that with so fair a face / bare me in hand, that in this orphan place”; Shakespeare’s Sonnet 45: “The other two, slight air and purging fire, are / both with thee, wherever I abide: / The first my thought, the other my desire, / These present-absent with sweet motion slide.” 36. On Petrarch’s sense of landscape, see Domenico Luciani and Monique Mosser, eds., Petrarca e i suoi luoghi: Spazi reali e paesaggi poetici alle origini del moderno senso della natura (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche Canova, 2009). 37. Quod omnes creaturae istius sensibilis mundi animum contemplantis et sapientis ducunt in Deum aeternum, pro eo quod illius primi principii potentissimi, sapientissimi et optimi, illius aeternae originis, lucis et plenitudinis, illius, inquam, artis efficientis, exemplantis et ordinantis sunt umbrae, resonantiae et picturae, sunt vestigia, simulacra et spectacula nobis ad contuendum Deum proposita et signa divinitus data (St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 2.11). For Bonaventura’s theory of the imagination, see Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 62–120. 38. Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel.” 39. Marco Santagata, I Frammenti dell’anima (Bologna: il Mulino, 1992), 283– 327. 40. Bettarini notes the resonances with Augustine’s commentary to the Psalms 4.7, Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui (En in Ps. IV 8; Conf.

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IX.IV 10), as well as with Ecclesiasticus 50.31, Lux Dei vestigium eius est (2:1589). 41. Simone Marchesi, Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 176. 42. Summa theologiae, trans. Dominican Brothers (New York: McGrawHill, 1964), 1a, q. 93. art. 6. Cum in omnibus creaturis sit aliqualis Dei similitudo, in sola creatura rationali invenitur similitudo Dei per modum imaginis, ut supra dictum est, in aliis autem creaturis per modum vestigii. Id autem in quo creatura rationalis excedit alias creaturas, est intellectus sive mens. Unde relinquitur quod nec in ipsa rationali creatura invenitur Dei imago nisi secundum mentem; in aliis vero partibus, si quas habet rationalis creatura, invenitur similitudo vestigii, sicut et in ceteris rebus, quibus secundum partes hujusmodi assimilatur (612). 43. See Jacques Le Goff, “The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage,” in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 237– 88. 44. Teodolinda Barolini, “Petrarch as the Metaphysical Poet Who Is Not Dante,” in Barański and Cachey, Petrarch and Dante, 195. 45. See Peter Aicher, “Ennius’ Dream of Homer,” American Journal of Philology 110 (1989): 227– 32. 46. The Latin text is from Rebecca Lenoir, Pétrarque: L’Afrique 1338– 1374 (Grenoble: Millon, 2002); the English translation is by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson, Petrarch’s Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 47. Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 479. 48. Bernardo translation, 1:158. Et illud Statii Pampinii poete reverens submissumque testimonium de virgiliana Eneyde, cuius longe sequenda et adora vestigia Thebaydem suam, in publicam exituram, admonet (Rossi and Bosco edition, 1:140). 49. An earlier version of this section appears as “The Textual City: Epic Walks in Virgil, Lucan, and Petrarch,” Classical Receptions Journal 3 (2011): 148– 65. 50. See the opening passage to Civilization and Its Discontents, in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21:70. 51. Some recent studies on the Africa are Simone Marchesi, “Petrarch’s Philological Epic (Africa),” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 113– 30; Gerhard Regn and Bernhard Huss, “Petrarch’s Rome: The History of the Africa and the Renaissance Project,” Modern Language Notes 124 (2009): 86–102; Matthew Leigh, “Petrarch’s Lucan and the Africa,” in Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, ed. S. J. Heyworth et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 242–57; Tobias Gregory, From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 56–101;

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J. Christopher Warner, The Augustinian Epic (Ann Arbor: University Michigan Press, 2005); Kevin Brownlee, “Power Plays: Petrarch’s Genealogical Strategies,” Journal of Medieval and Modern Studies 35 (2005): 467– 88. On Petrarch’s use of Lucan, see Richard T. Bruere, “Lucan and Petrarch’s Africa,” Classical Philology 61 (1961): 83– 99. 52. See the commentary in Lenoir, Pétrarque, 547–555. 53. Quas phantasias Graeci vocant (nos sane visiones appellemus), per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur, has quiquis bene ceperit is erit in adfectibus potentissimus. 54. P. T. Eden, A Commentary on Virgil: Aeneid VIII (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 111–13; K. W. Grandsen, Virgil, Aeneid: Book VIII (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 123– 33. 55. Christine Renaud observes that the sites on the tour both project and recall the triumphs of Aeneas (Ara Maxima and Porta Carmentalis), the founding role of the leader (Asylum and Lupercal), the crimes of betrayal and their punishment (Argiletum and Tarpeian Rock), Jupiter’s primacy as symbol of Rome (Capitoline Hill), Rome’s political and social center (the Forum and Carinae), and the future house of Augustus (Palatine). “Studies in the Eighth Book of the ‘Aeneid,’” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1990, 54– 79. 56. I have benefited from reading Philip Hardie, “Lucan’s Song of the Earth,” in Papers on Ancient Literatures: Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. Ettore Cingano and Lucio Milano (Padova: SARGON, 2008), 305– 30; John Henderson, “Lucan: The Word at War,” in Fighting for Rome: Poets and Caesars, History and Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 165– 210; Shadi Bartsch, Ideology in Cold Blood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 131– 35; Frederick Ahl, Lucan: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 212– 20; W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 117– 20. 57. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 108. 58. Charles S. Singleton, Dante: The Divine Comedy. Translation and Commentary, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 2:257. 59. Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination, trans. Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 221. 60. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 261. 61. Cited in Duncan Kennedy, “A Sense of Place: Rome, History, and Empire Revisited,” in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, ed. Catharine Edwards (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25– 26. Kennedy argues that the meaning of rume also suggests ruin. 62. See Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 133–48.

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63. Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 54–55. 64. Simone Marchesi, “Tra filologica e retorica: Petrarca e Boccaccio di fronte al nuovo Livio,” Annali d’Italianistica 22 (2004): 361– 74. 65. Bernardo translation, 3:350. Quam longe absis intelligo, vereorque ne tam multa in tenebris aegre legas (Rossi and Bosco edition, 4:263). 66. All citations of this letter are from the Bernardo translation, 1:290– 95; Rossi and Bosco edition, 2:55– 60. 67. Billanovich assigns 1337 in “Gli umanisti e le cronache medievali,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 1 (1958): 103– 37. Wilkins assigns 1341 in “On Petrarch’s Ep. Fam. VI 2,” Speculum 38 (1963): 620– 22. 68. Bernardo translation, 3:206. Affectibus . . . quasi quidam animi passus sunt (Rossi and Bosco edition, 4:100). 69. See Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae (Paris, 1723), Aiii 5– 7; Raphael, “The Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione,” in Palladio’s Rome, ed. and trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 180; Antonio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, ed. Howard Saalman, trans. Catherine Enggass (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1970), 74, original 75. 70. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols., ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1994), 3:1062. 71. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1945), 108. 72. Greene, The Light in Troy, 92– 93. 73. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 24. 74. Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 20. 75. See Ronald Witt, “Medieval ‘Ars Dictaminis’ and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem,” Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982): 1– 35. 76. He writes to his friend in Fam. 1.6, “You will enjoy, as you have my other writings, this plain, domestic and friendly style,” hoc mediocre domesticum et familiare dicendi genus amice leges. 77. See Stanley Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986). 78. Bernardo translation, 1:313. Dum enim colloqui videor, epystolam me scribere sum oblitus (Rossi and Bosco edition, 2:77). 79. On Petrarch and the genre of letter writing, see Pier Giorgio Ricci, “Il Petrarca e l’epistolografia,” in Miscellanea Petrarchesca, ed. Monica Berté (Rome: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 1999). 80. Petrarch, Letters on Old Age, Bernardo translation, 1:672. 81. See Kathy Eden, “Petrarchan Hermeneutics and the Rediscovery of Intimacy,” in Barolini and Storey, Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, 231–44; a fuller development in Eden’s chapter “A Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Intimacy in Petrarch’s Familiares,” in Renaissance Discovery of Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 49– 72.

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82. Wai- Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116 (2001): 173– 88. 83. Fuerit tibi forsan de me aliquid auditum; quanquam et hoc dubium sit: an exiguum et obscurum longe nomen seu locorum seu temporum perventurum sit. F. Neri, ed., Rime, trionfi, e poesie latine, 802. 84. In the tenth book of the Confessions he links cogo and cogito, suggesting that “I think” and “I recollect” are related, for what is remembered or gathered is what is thought about (10.10). On the relationship between Petrarch and Augustine, see Carol E. Quillen, Reading the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). On Augustine’s theory of memory, see Andrea Nightingale, Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 61– 64. 85. Bernardo translation, 1: 247. Aderatque per singulos passus quod linguam atque animum excitaret (Rossi and Bosco edition, 2:56). 86. De Certeau, “Walking the City,” 99. 87. Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 30– 39; Angelo Mazzocco, “The Antiquarianism of Francesco Petrarca,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977): 203– 24. 88. See chapter 4. 89. Mundi caput, urbium regina, sedes imperii, arx fidei catholice, fons omnium memorabilium exemplorum. Francesco Petrarca, Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh, I Tatti Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 368. 90. See Theodore E. Mommsen’s influential articulation, “Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages,” Speculum 17 (1942): 226–42; and Albert Russell Ascoli’s response, “Petrarch’s Middle Age,” Stanford Italian Review 10 (1990): 5–44. 91. It is not unimportant that the Bath was erected between 298 and 306 ce by Diocletian, who was the emperor who instigated the last and greatest persecution of Christians in 303 with his Edict against the Christians. But after Petrarch it was transformed by Michelangelo in 1563– 66 into the Church of S. Maria degli Angeli. 92. Petrarch, The Secret, trans. Carol E. Quillen (London: Bedford/St. Martin, 2003), 104; Latin text, Secretum, ed. Ugo Dotti (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), 318. 93. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). 94. Domus animae meae . . . ruinosa est (ibid., 1.5). 95. The breaking and shared consumption of bread typologically anticipate Jesus’s last supper, which further anticipates the breaking of his body on the Cross. 96. This paragraph is indebted to A. C. Dionisotti’s excellent chapter, “On Fragments in Classical Scholarship,” in Collecting Fragments/ Fragmente sammeln, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 1– 33. See also Glenn Most, “On Fragments,” in The Fragment: An Incomplete History, ed. William Tronzo (Los Angeles: Getty, 2009).

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97. Quae sunt autem illa fragmenta, nisi quae populus non potuit manducare? Intelleguntur ergo quaedam secretiora intellegentiae, quae multitudo non potest capere (quoted in Dionisotti, “On Fragments in Classical Scholarship,”15). 98. Fragmenta sunt memoria digna virtutum exempla, de quibus maxima diligentia debet esse praelato, ut aliquibus fratribus literatis illa per scripta colligere praecipiat, ne per oblivionem pereant (quoted in Dionisotti, “On Fragments in Classical Scholarship,”16). 99. Bernardo translation, 2:193. Interim ergo ne inanis rusticatio mea sit, cogitationum consumptarum fragmenta recolligo, ut omnis dies, si fieri possit, aut aliquid maioribus coeptis adiiciat aut minutum aliquid absolvat (Rossi and Bosco edition, 3:72). 100. See Nancy Vickers’s classic “Diana Described.” 101. Marisa Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 102. See Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations in Medieval London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 103. See Marco Santagata, “Il giovane Petrarca e la tradizione poetica romanza: Modelli ideologici e letterari,” Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 1 (1983): 11– 61. 104. On the composition history of Vita nuova, see Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). On the relationship between Petrarch and the Vita Nuova, see Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 93–103. On the senses of fragmenta and libellus, see Francesco Lo Monaco et al., eds., “Liber,” “fragmenta,” “libellus” prima e dopo Petrarca (Florence: Sismel, 2006). 105. On how the vernacular title became Rime Sparse, see Francesco Rico, “Rime Sparse, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta para el titulo y el primer soneto del Canzoniere,” Medioevo Romanzo 3 (1976): 101– 38. 106. Marsilio Ficino, Sopra lo amore, ovvero Convito di Platone, cited in Grande Dizionario Italiano, s.v. 107. See the facsimile edition of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Codice Vat. lat. 3195, ed. Gino Belloni et al. (Rome: Antenore, 2004); also Marco Vattasso, I Codici Petrarcheschi (Rome: Tipografia poliglotta vaticana, 1908). 108. Transcription in Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino, Il Codice degli abbozzi (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1996), 212–13. Translated by Teodolinda Barolini in “The Time of His Life: Petrarch’s Marginalia and Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 23,” Textual Cultures 5 (2010): 5. 109. On Petrarch’s handwriting, see Armando Petrucci, La scrittura di Francesco Petrarca (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1967).

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110. Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, Bernardo translation, 2: 596. Ibi nempe perierant, nec penitus occurrebat tale aliquid me fecisse; tandem, perinditia temporum quibus in talibus uti soleo, cum labore et pulvere reinventi, semilaceri ut erant et squalentes, ad te veniunt. Neque enim in eis aliquid muto, multa cum possim quo scilicet non quid sum sed quid eram videas et cum voluptate quandam adolescentie nostre rudimenta memineris. Rerum senilium / Lettre de la Vieillesse, ed. Elvira Nota (Paris: Belles lettres, 2002), 4:425. 111. See Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nidra Poller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 197– 239. 112. See Irving Lavin, “Divine Grace and the Remedy of the Imperfect: Michelangelo’s Signature on the St. Peter’s Pietà,” Artibus et historiae 68 (2013): 280– 328. 113. Bernardo translation, 3:54. Ad Franciscum Sanctorum Apostolorum, sepe amimo gratiora esse que incultiora sunt (Rossi and Bosco edition, 3:285). 114. Ernest H. Wilkins, “Works That Petrarch Thought of Writing,” Speculum 35 (1960): 563– 71. 115. Secretum, Dotti edition, 206, 192, 74. 116. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel; or The Renunciants, trans. H. M. Waidson (New York: Riverrun, 1981), 121. 117. Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 90. 118. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Vanity,” III: 9, in The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 751. Passannante writes, “Montaigne here adapts the same inductive reasoning to establish yet another kind of void— the void at the heart of his self-portrait” (The Lucretian Renaissance, 92). 119. Petrarchan self-fashioning is given a superb reading in Nicholas Mann, “Life as Work of Art,” in Petrarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 87–104. 120. Anthony Grafton, “Ancient Texts and Their Readers,” in Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 23–46. 121. See Billanovich, “Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy.” See also the facsimile edition of the British Library Harleian 2493 by Billanovich, La Tradizione Del Testo di Livio e le Origini dell’umanesimo: Volume Secondo, Il Livio del Petrarca e del Valla (Padova: Antenore, 1981). On the humanist methods of textual criticism, see Silvia Rizzo, Lessico filologico degli umanisti (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1973). 122. On Petrarch’s idea of didactic history, see Benjamin G. Kohl, “Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus,” History and Theory 13 (1974): 132–44. 123. Ernest Hatch Wilkins, The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Studies (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), 145. 124. Teodolinda Barolini, “Petrarch at the Crossroads of Hermeneutics and Philology,” in Barolini and Storey, Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, 26.

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125. H. Wayne Storey writes, “For Petrarca, at the time of his death, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta was a collection of ten unbound fascicles, or more accurately, 36 bifolia, without the formal closures typical of medieval manuscripts, still open to additions, erasures, and further lyrical and organizational experimentation” (“Doubting Petrarca’s Last Words,” in Barolini and Storey, Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, 71). 126. Bernardo translation, 1:12. 127. See Brian Stock, “Reading, Writing, and the Self: Petrarch and His Forerunners,” New Literary History 26.4 (1995): 717– 30. Gur Zak argues that Petrarch employed writing as a spiritual exercise and thus created a care of the self from his humanist philosophy in Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 128. Bernardo translation, 2:256. Interea equidem hic michi Romam, hic Athenas, hic patriam ipsam mente constituo; hic omnes quos habeo amicos vel quos habui, nec tantum familiari convictu probatos et qui mecum vixerunt, sed qui multis ante me seculis obierunt, solo michi cognitos benificio literarum, quorum sive res gestas atque animum sive mores vitamque sive linguam et ingenium miror, ex omnibus locis atque omni evo in hanc exiguam vallem sepe contraho cupidiusque cum illis versor quam cum his qui sibi vivere videntur, quotiens rancidum nescio quid spirantes, gelido in aere sui halitus videre vestigium (Rossi and Bosco edition, 3:139). 129. Alan Gilbert, trans. and ed., The Letters of Machiavelli (New York, Capricorn Books, 1961), 142. 130. Petrarch uses the phrase humanitatem induere fertatemque in the dedicatory letter to De vita solitaria. Rudolf Pfeiffer thinks that Petrarch combined Cicero’s humanitatem omnem exuimus (Ad Att. 13.2.1) and Ovid’s deposita . . . feritate (Fasti 4.103) to forge the ideal of humanitas as “human feeling, compassionate attitude to one’s fellow men,” History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 15. On the general relationship between solitary lives and scholarly conviviality of sharing ideas, see Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 131. Petrarch, Collatio laureationis, in Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, ed. Antonietta Bufano, 2 vols. (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975), 2:1266; Ernest H. Wilkins, trans., “Petrarch’s Coronation Oration,” PMLA 68 (1953): 1241–50. 132. Movemur enim nescio quo pacto locis ipsis, in quibus eorum quos diligimus aut admiramur adsunt vestigia. Me quidem ipsae illae nostrae Athenae non tam operibus magnificis exquisitisque antiquorum artibus delectant, quam recordatione summorum virorum, ubi quisque habitare, ubi sedere, ubi disputare sit solitus, studioseque eorum etiam sepulcra contemplor (Leg. 2.4).; Cicero, De legibus, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). 133. Met. 15.871– 72; The. 12.811–13; Aen. 9.447–49; Pha. 9.985– 86; Car. 4.9.25– 28. 134. Greene, The Light in Troy, 38. 135. Wilkins, “Petrarch’s Coronation Oration,” 1244.

Notes to Pages 128–132

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136. Pacca and Paolino, Il Codice degli abbozzi, 176. 137. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 608. 138. On accounts of Petrarchism as literary movement, see Leonard Forster, Icy Fire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Roland Greene, Post- Petrarchism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); William J. Kennedy, Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 139. See Hans Baron, Petrarch’s Secretum: Its Making and Its Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1985). 140. Petrarch, The Secret, Quillen translation, 142. 141. See Victoria Kahn, “Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum,” PMLA 100 (1985): 154– 66. 142. Petrarch, The Secret, Quillen translation, 145. Vetusta cernenti menia succurrat in primis: Ubi sunt quorum illa congesserunt manus? Recentia tuenti: Ubi mox futuri sunt? (Secretum, Dotti edition, 312). 143. See Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarque et Humanisme (Paris: Honoré Campion, 1907), 87–121. 144. See Secretum, Dotti edition, 182n146. 145. Here I use the translation of William Draper, Petrarch’s Secret (Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1911), 97. Unum igitur hoc admonuisse sufficiet: si enim non privatarum modo familiarum sed notissimas tibi regnorum ex omnibus seculis recoles ruinas, nonnichil tibi tragediarum lectio profuerit ut non pudeat tuguriolum tuum cum tot regiis edibus conflagrasse. Procede modo: hec enim parcius dicta spatiosius tibi ruminanda servabis (Dotti edition, 182). 146. Ernest H. Wilkins, trans., Petrarch’s Triumphs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 109–10; Petrarca, Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli Abbozzi, ed. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 522.

4. H Y PN E ROT OM AC H I A Fr agments

POL I PH IL I

and the Erotics of

Epigraph: Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 36. 1. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 15. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, “On Classical Studies,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 328. 3. John Webster, Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, ed. René Weis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 191. 4. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). A facsimile of the 1499 Aldine edition with modern Italian translation and notes is in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 2 vols., ed. Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele (Milano: Adelphi, 1998). Godwin follows faithfully the pagination

260

Notes to Pages 133–140

and layout of the Aldine edition; thus the citations in the English and Italian are identical. In my parenthetical citations the first letter and number correspond to the original pagination and the following number corresponds to the modern pagination. For a rich collection of scholarship on the novel, see the special issue of Word and Image edited by M. Leslie and J. Dixon Hunt, 14.1 (1998). 5. The first attempt at an English translation, Hyperotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dreame, is loose and incomplete, conjectured to be by Sir Robert Dallington (1561–1637). See Godwin’s discussion, viii. 6. For the connections between Colonna and Du Bellay, see Alba Ceccarelli-Pellegrino, “Du Bellay e il Poliphilo: Lettura pluri-isotopica del Songe,” Studi di letteratura francese 19 (1992): 65– 95. 7. Giorgio Agamben, “Il sogno della lingua: Per una lettura del Polifilo,” in I linguaggi del sogno, ed. Vittore Branca et al. (Florence: Sansoni, 1984), 417– 30. 8. The gloss in this paragraph is indebted to the explanation of Ariani and Gabriele in the facsimile edition, 2:548–49. 9. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 126. 10. Si gli fragmenti dilla sancta antiquitate et rupture et ruinamento et quodammodo le scobe ne ducono in stupenda admiratione et ad tanto oblectamento di mirarle, quanto farebbe la sua integritate (59). 11. F. J. E. Raby, ed., Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 220. 12. Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 46. 13. See Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 14. Alberto Pérez- Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 43. See also his “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning,” in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart with Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 86–104. 15. John R. Spencer, trans., Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 1:15. 16. Ibid. 17. Stephen Cairnes and Jane M. Jacobs, Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 24– 29. 18. Alberto Pérez- Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 19. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York: Norton, 1973), 104. 20. Denominatio est quae ab rebus propinquis et finitimis trahit orationem qua possit intellegi res quae non suo vocabulo sit appellata (4.32). Harry Caplan, trans., Rhetorica ad Herennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Notes to Pages 141–146

261

University Press, 1954), 334. See discussion in Rosemary Trippe, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Image, Text, and Vernacular Poetics,” Renaissance Quarterly (2002): 1222–58, quotation on 1247. 21. See Richard H. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 183– 200. 22. Wilhelm Jensen and Sigmund Freud, Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy / Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, trans. Helen M. Downey (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2003). 23. Jensen, Gradiva, 25. 24. Ibid., 28. 25. Freud, Delusion and Dream, 203. 26. Sigmund Freud, “The Etiology of Hysteria,” 1896, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 74), 3:189. 27. See Sabine Hake, “Saxa Loquuntur: Freud’s Archaeology of the Text,” boundary 2 20 (1993): 148. 28. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990, rpt. New York: Routledge, 2007), 176– 95. 29. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” 1909, in The Standard Edition, 9:235–42.

5. Du Bellay’s

C E N DR E

and the Formless Signifier

Epigraph: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 95. 1. The French text and English translation is from Joachim Du Bellay, The Regrets; with, the Antiquities of Rome, Three Latin Elegies, and the Defense and Enrichment of the French Language, trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). All subsequent citations and translations of these texts are from this edition. I have also consulted Du Bellay’s Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Olivier Millet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003); Les Regrets et autres œuvres poëtiques suivis des Antiquitez de Rome, ed. J. Joliffe and M. A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1966); Œuvres poétiques, 6 vols., ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1908– 31). 2. Eric MacPhail writes, “Petrarch’s ideal of ‘renovatio,’ or the renewal of Roman grandeur, stands in irreconcilable opposition to the French ambition of ‘translatio’ or the transference of Roman grandeur from its classical home in Italy to its new and rightful abode in France.” The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature, Stanford French and Italian Studies (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1990), 9. 3. Richard Cooper, Roman Antiquities in Renaissance France, 1515– 65 (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013); Hassan Melehy, The Poetics of Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010); Louisa Mackenzie, The Poetry of Place: Lyric, Landscape and Ideology in Renaissance

262

Notes to Pages 146–150

France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Midra Poller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Timothy Hampton, Nation and Literature in Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Margaret McGowan, Vision of Rome in Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); MacPhail, The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature; George H. Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey: Joachim Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Richard Katz, The Ordered Text: The Sonnet Sequences of Du Bellay (New York: Peter Lang, 1985). For an annotated bibliography of Du Bellay up to 1985, see Alexander H. Schutz, ed., A Critical Bibliography of French Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 347– 75. 4. Du Bellay uses cendre and its plural some twenty-seven times in his entire oeuvre ; for example, in Les Antiquitez: Le corps de Rome en cendre est devallé 5.9); Las peu- à- peu cendre vous devenez (7.7); nous voyons les reliques cendreuses (15.4); digne tumbeau d’une si digne cendre (Songe 3.11); comme un vermet renaistre de sa cendre (Songe 7.14). Poudre and its various forms (pouldre, poudreux, poudreuse) are used thirty-two times, for example, in Les Antiquitez: l’honneur poudreux de tant d’ames divines (7.4); pouldreux tumbeaux exercent leur audace (14.13); ces braves monts autrefois mis en pouldre (17.12); vieil honneur pouldreux est le plus honoré (27.14); d’une soudaine cheute estre reduict en pouldre (Songe 4.13); Corps en poudre tout reduit (Songe 8.12). See Keith Cameron, Concordance des œuvres poétiques de Joachim Du Bellay (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1988), 91, 488. 5. Translated and cited in Joseph Cary, Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 175. 6. On cyclic return, see Leo Spitzer, “The Poetic Treatment of a PlatonicChristian Theme,” Comparative Literature 6 (1954): 193– 217. 7. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924); Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 8. See Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 9. Michael C. Putnam observes, “This constancy, as any potential becoming is lost in eternal being, is reflected sonically in the repeated use of the letter s. In the span from nos to sumus, nine words end in that letter, and each of the three lines in question concludes with the syllable us so that unusual rhyming complements persistent sibilance and the impressive alliteration of u in line 16 to create a verbal imitation of the uniform fate of all mortals.” Artifices of Eternity: Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 138. 10. Du Bellay, Œuvres complètes, Millet edition, 2:70.

Notes to Pages 150–154

263

11. On Du Bellay and Horace, see Eduard Stemplinger, “Joachim de Bellay und Horaz,” Archiv 112 (1916): 80– 93. 12. Vrayement je confesse avoir imité Petrarque, & non luy seulement, mais aussi l’Arioste, & d’autres modernes Italiens. Pource qu’en l’Argument que je traicte, je n’en ay point trouvé de meilleurs. Et si les anciens Romains pour l’enrichissement de leur langue, n’ont fait le semblable en l’imitation des Grecz, je suis content n’avoir point d’excuse (Du Bellay, Œuvres complètes, Millet edition, 2:12). 13. In particular verse 1, De l’hyver la triste froydure corresponds to Horace Ode 1.4.1, solvitur acris hiems; verse 3, doulz Zephire amolissant to Horace Ode 4.7.9, frigora mitescunt Zephyris; verse 12, la froide humeur des montz chenuz / enfle dejà le cours des fleuves to Georgics 1.43–44, vere novo gelidus canis cum montibus umor / Liquitur; and verses 21– 24 to Horace 4.4.5– 7. See notes in Du Bellay, Œuvres complètes, Millet edition, 2:349. 14. See Jonathan Brook Haley, “Atomic Poetics: Materialist Rhythms in Lucretius, Du Bellay and Mallarmé,” PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2007; Frank Lestringant, ed., La Renaissance de Lucrèce, Cahiers Centre V. L. Saulnier (Paris: PUPS, 2010); Simone Fraisse, L’Influence de Lucrèce en France au seizième siècle: Une conquête du rationalisme (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1962); Grahame Castor, Pléiade Poetics: A Study in SixteenthCentury Thought and Terminology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 15. Du Bellay, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Daniel Aris and Françoise Joukovsky (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1993), 2:158, 161. 16. Du Bellay, Le Sympose de Platon, ou de l’Amour et de Beauté, traduit de Grec en François, avec trois livres de Commentaires . . . par Loys Le Roy, dit Regius . . . Plusieurs passages des meilleurs Poëtes Grecs & Latins, citez aux Commentaires, mis en vers François par I. du Bellay Angevin (Paris: Jehan Longis & Robert le Mangnyer, 1558), in Œuvres poétiques, Chamard edition, 6:397–444. 17. Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 28– 38. 18. Du Bellay, Œuvres Poétiques, Chamard edition, 6:434– 35. 19. François Villon, Poésies complètes, ed. Claude Thiry (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1991), 311. 20. John Donne, Deaths Duell . . . Delivered in a Sermon at White Hall (London: Thomas Harper, 1632), D3r–v. 21. See Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 154– 84. Also William H. Sherman, “Digging the Dust: Renaissance Archivology,” in The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays in Literature and Culture, ed. Leonard Barkan, Bradin Cormack, and Sean Keilen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 254. 22. Les familles et les fiefs, blasonnés dans leur poussière, réclamaient contre l’oubli. Jules Michelet, “Preface de l’Histoire de France,” 1869, in Œuvres complètes, ed. R. Casanova (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 4:613–14, 727.

264

Notes to Pages 154–158

23. Et à mesure que je soufflais sur leur poussière, je les voyais se soulever (ibid., 613). 24. Ils tiraient du sépulcre qui la main, qui la tête, comme dans le Jugement dernier de Michel-Ange, ou dans la Danse des morts. Cette danse galvanique qu’ils menaient autour de moi, j’ai essayé de la reproduire en ce livre (ibid., 614). Carolyn Steedman interprets Michelet’s vision as an actual brain fever contracted from work in closed spaces with the dust of papers and parchments and from the mold of the animals whose skins made the leather bindings. She half-jokingly calls for a “Dust Studies.” Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 28. See Roland Barthes’s reading, Michelet par lui- même (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1954), also that of Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 149– 62. 25. See Gregory Nagy, “Sêma and Noesis: The Hero’s Tomb and the ‘Reading’ of Symbols in Homer and Hesiod,” in Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 202– 22. 26. Robert Pogue Harrison, Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20. 27. Michel Serres, Statues: Le second livre des fondations (Paris: Editions François Bourin, 1987). 28. J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (London: Camelot Press, 1971). 29. Thomas Laqueur discusses the advent and vicissitudes of modern cremation in his monumental The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 495–548. 30. See Eric MacPhail, “The Roman Tomb or the Image of the Tomb in du Bellay’s Antiquitez,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 48 (1986): 359– 72. 31. See Du Bellay, Œuvres Poétiques, Chamard edition, vols. 4 and 6. 32. See the discussion of this in Melehy, Poetics of Transfer, 33–45. 33. Michel de Montaigne, Travel Journal, trans. Donald M. Frame (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 79. Il disoit “qu’on ne voyoit rien de Rome que le ciel sous lequel elle avoit esté assise et le plan de son giste; que cette science qu’il en avoit estoit une science abstraite et contemplative, de laquelle il n’y avoit rien qui tombast sous les sens; que ceux qui disoient qu’on y voyoit au moins les ruines de Rome en disoient trop; car les ruines d’une si espouvantable machine rapporteroient plus d’honneur et de reverence à sa memoire; ce n’estoit rien que son sepulchre.” Journal de Voyage, ed. François Rigolot (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 100. 34. For David Sedley this epistemological aporia becomes a symptom of the sublime. See his Skepticism and Sublime in Milton and Montaigne (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 18–42. 35. Montaigne, Travel Journal, 80. Les ruines de Rome ne se voient pour la pluspart que par le massif et espois du bastiment. Ils faisoient de grosses murailles de brique, puis ils les encroutoient ou de lames de marbre ou d’autre Pierre blanche, ou de certain siment ou de gros quarreau enduit par

Notes to Pages 158–163

265

dessus. Ceste crouste, quasi partout, a esté ruinée par les ans, sur laquelle estoient les inscriptions; par où nous avons perdu la pluspart de la cognoissance de telles choses. . . . Mais, à la verité, plusieurs conjectures qu’on prend de la peinture de cette ville ancienne n’ont guiere de verisimilitude, son plan mesme estant infiniment changé de forme; aucuns de ces vallons estant comblés, voire dans les lieux les plus bas qui y fussent. . . . Il croyoit qu’un ancient Romain ne sauroit recognoistre l’assiette de sa ville quand il la verroit (Journal de Voyage, 101). 36. Jean-Pierre Adam and Michael Fulford, Roman Building: Materials and Techniques (London: Routledge, 2003), 127– 35. 37. Christopher D. Johnson uses the mathematical concept of computational redundancy to think about how early modern literature “flirts ingeniously with redundancy” as a response to the failure of early modern poetry to adequately describe the world. “N+2, or a Late Renaissance Poetics of Enumeration,” Modern Language Notes 127 (2012): 1096–143. 38. See, above all, Tucker’s seminal The Poet’s Odyssey. I have also benefited from reading Josiane Rieu, L’esthétique de Du Bellay (Paris: Sedes, 1995); Deborah Lesko Baker, “Du Bellay’s Double Eternity: Two Sonnets from the Antiquitez de Rome,” Neophilologus 73 (1989): 350–57; Dorothy Coleman, “Allusiveness in Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome,” Esprit Créateur 19 (1979): 3–11; Gilbert Gadoffre, De Bellay et le Sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Guy Demerson, “Joachim Du Bellay: Le temps de Rome et la structure des recueils de sonnets romains,” in Aiôn: Le temps chez les Romains (Paris: Picard, 1976), 305–15; Ingrid Daemmrich, “The Function of the Ruins Motif in Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome,” Neophilologus 59 (1975): 305–15; Yvonne Bellenger, Du Bellay: Ses “Regrets” qu’il fit dans Rome (Paris: A.- G. Nizet, 1975); Michel Deguy, Tombeau de Du Bellay (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 39. See Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey; G. Hugo Tucker, “Sur les Elogia de Janus Vitalis et les Antiquitez de Rome de Joachim de Bellay,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 47 (1985): 103–12. 40. For Floyd Gray the repetition signifies that the word “peut souffrir d’une perte de signification, tomber sémantiquement en ruine.” La Poétique de Du Bellay (Paris: Nizet, 1978), 46. 41. Meleny uses the notion of simulacrum in Deleuze and Baudrillard in The Poetics of Literary Transfer, 12–14. 42. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7– 24, quote on 7. 43. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 99. See also François Rigolot, Poétique et Onomastique (Geneva: Droz, 1977), 11– 24, 127–54; Michael Riffaterre, “Du Bellay’s Songe, VII,” in Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 112; Roman Jakobson’s analysis of Du Bellay in Questions de la poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 319–55. 44. The phrase is from the title of Charles Freeman’s book, Holy Body, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

266

Notes to Pages 164–169

45. See Martina Bagnoli et al., eds., Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2010). 46. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 126– 28, 131– 39. 47. Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 48. According to Geary, “In order to effect this transmission, something essentially extraneous to the relic itself must be provided: a reliquary with an inscription or iconographic representation of the saint, a document attesting to its authenticity, or a tradition, oral or written, which identified this particular object with [a] specific individual or at least with a specific type of individual” (ibid., 6). 49. Michael Kiernan, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 4: The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 56. 50. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 69– 82. 51. Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and Their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 26. See also Paul Botley, Latin Translations in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Gianozzo Manetti, Erasmus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 52. Cited in Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, trans. Steven Randall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 29. 53. Described in Livy 5.47. 54. See Yelena Baraz’s discussion of the project of translating philosophy into Latin in A Written Republic: Cicero’s Philosophical Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 103–12. 55. See Michel Jeanneret, “The Renaissance and Its Ancients: Dismembering and Devouring,” MLN 110 (1995): 1043–53. 56. Michel de Montaigne, “Defense of Seneca and Plutarch,” II:32, in The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 545. 57. MacPhail, Voyage to Rome, 176. 58. See David Cowling, Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 59. See Jean Balsamo, “Le Poète et l’architecte,” in Du Bellay et ses sonnets romains, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1994), 61– 75. 60. Pierre de Ronsard, Les quatre premiers livres des Odes, ed. Henri Weber and Catherine Weber (Paris: Garnier, 1993), 284. 61. See Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700, 5th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 40– 83. 62. Quoted in Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), French on 454, English translation on 402–4: N’ay- je pas faict d’autres services, quant ce ne seroyt que d’avoir porté en France la façon de bien bastir, osté les façons barbares et grandes commissures, monstré à tous comme l’on doibt observer les mesures de architecture, tant que j’ai faict les meilleurs ouvriers qui sont aujourd’huy,

Notes to Pages 169–177

267

comme ils confessent? Que l’on se souvienne comme l’on faisoyt quand je commençoys Sainct- Mort pour Mons. le cardinal du Belloy! See Anthony Blunt, Philibert de l’Orme (London: A. Zwemmer, 1958): the entire Instruction is reprinted on 146–51. 63. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 4th ed. (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 14. 64. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, 2 vols., ed. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1:116. 65. Robert M. Durling, ed. and trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 124– 26. 66. Leonardo Bruni, Huamistisch- philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe, ed. Hans Baron (1928, rpt. Wiesbaden: Sändig, 1969), 65– 66; Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 94. 67. Erasmus, “The Ciceronian: A Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style / ‘Dialogus Ciceronianus,’” in The Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 6, trans. Betty I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 28:431. 68. Du Bellay, Œuvres Poétiques, Chamard edition, 6:98– 99. 69. Cited in McGowan, Vision of Rome, 261. 70. Cited in Roland Mortier, La Poétique des ruines en France: Ses origines, ses variations de la Renaissance à Victor Hugo (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 52. See esp. chapter 3. 71. Cited in McGowan, Vision of Rome, 263. 72. Cited in Mortier, Poétique des ruines, 54–55. 73. E. Tricotel, “Sonnets inédits de Grévin sur Rome,” Bulletin du Bibliophile (1862), 1044– 61. 74. Malcolm Smith catalogues the genealogy in “Looking for Rome in Rome: Janus Vitalis and His Disciples,” in Renaissance Studies, 1966–1994 (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 110– 27. 75. Francisco de Quevedo, Obra poética, 3 vols., ed. J. M. Bleuca (Madrid: Castalia, 1969– 71), 1:418. For the Spanish appropriations of Du Bellay, see José María Ferri Coll, ed., Ciudades cantadas: El tema de las ruinas en la poesía española del Siglo de Oro (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1995); Stanko B. Vranich, ed., Cantores de las ruinas en el Siglo de Oro (Ferrol: Esquio, 1981); Bruce Wardropper, “The Poetry of Ruins in the Golden Age,” Hispánica Moderna 35 (1969): 295– 305. 76. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 75.

6. Spenser’s

MON I M E N T

and the Allegory of Ruins

Epigraph: Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 178. 1. Meminisse a memoria, cum [in] id quod remansit in mente rursus mouetur; quae a manendo ut Manimoria potest esse dicta. Itaque Salii quod cantant: Mamuri Veturi, significant memoriam veterem. Ab eodem Monere, quod is qui monet, proinde sit ac memoria; sic Monimenta quae in sepulcris,

268

Notes to Pages 177–181

et ideo secundum uiam, quo praetereuntis admoneant et se fuisse et illos esse mortalis. Ab eo cetera quae scripta ac facta memoriae causa Monimenta dicta (6.49). Varro, On the Latin Language, trans. Roland G. Kent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). For a perceptive reading of this passage, and in general the Roman idea of monuments, see Mary Jaeger, Livy’s Written Rome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 1–15. 2. See Robert Kaster, The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 31. 3. See Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); John Philips, Reformation of the Image Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 4. Walter Howard Frere, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 2:126. 5. James Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11. See also his Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 6. Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7. See Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Anne M. Myers, Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 23–49. 8. See the excellent biography by Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 197-230. 9. See in particular Maryclaire Moroney, “Spenser’s Dissolution: Monasticism and Ruins in The Faerie Queene and The View of the Present State of Ireland,” Spenser Studies 12 (1998): 119. Other important works on the View include Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture, Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 10. “Nexte Care in religion is to be builde vpp and repaire all the Ruined churches wheareof the moste parte lie even within the grounde, and some that haue bene latelye repaired are so vnhandomelye patched and thatched that men doe even havn the places of the vncomlines theareof. Therefore I woulde wishe that theare weare order taken to haue them builte in some better forme according to the Churches of Englande.” Edmund Spenser, View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 223. 11. Spenser’s style has received considerable attention. See Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of English in Renaissance Writings

Notes to Pages 182–184

269

(London: Routledge, 1996), 100–125; Hannah Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19– 63; Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in English Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 100–123. Though he does not speak about Spenser, Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) is a good account of the invented archaic origins of literary production in the late sixteenth century. I thought I had coined the phrase “Ruin-naissance,” but I was delighted to discover that Willy Maley has also used it passingly: “The Renaissance was also a Ruinaissance, a sifting through the residue of the classical tradition, and Spenser remains a poet of ruins.” “Spenser’s Languages: Writing in the Ruins of English,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 162– 79, quote on 169. 12. William A. Oram et al., eds., Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 15–16. All the shorter poems cited are from this edition. 13. K. K. Ruthven, “Etymology,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 256. 14. Lawrence Manley, “Spenser and the City: The Minor Poems,” Modern Language Quarterly 43 (1982): 209. See also Carl J. Rasmussen, “‘Quietnesse of Minde’: A Theatre for Worldings as a Protestant Poetics,” Spenser Studies 1 (1980): 3–27; Jenny Walicek, “‘Strange Showes’: Spenser’s Double Vision of Imperial and Papal Vanities,” Studies in Philology 105 (2008): 304–35. 15. Van der Noot’s work itself appears in 1567, when the Flemish Protestant left Antwerp for London, fleeing Spanish repression in the Netherlands along with thousands of his countrymen. In London he published Het Theatre oft Toon- neel in 1568. A French version, Le Theatre, appeared in the same year. Along with Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586) it is usually considered the first English emblem book. 16. Jan Van der Noot, Theatre for Worldlings (London, 1569). 17. John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion 11.8, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:108. 18. Quoted in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 392. 19. See Katharine R. Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds., The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 20. See in general Brian Cummins, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On Spenser, see John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 45– 80, 141– 204.

270

Notes to Pages 184–192

21. Trübners Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2 (Berlin: Walter de Grunter, 1940), 42; see also Helmut Schart, Kleine Kunstgeschichte des Deutschen Denkmals (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984). 22. See Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Brian Curran, Obelisks: A Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 23. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin,” 1903, trans. K. W. Forster and D. Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (1982): 20–51. 24. Leonard Barkan observes, “The image, which is located on the righthand page, realizes, in every sense of the term, the visionary language of the poem that is facing it on the left. It also contrasts with the text, supplants it, short- circuits it, supplements it—in short, all those effects that images have upon words.” “Ruins and Visions: Spenser, Pictures, Rome,” in Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory, ed. J. K. Morrison and Matthew Greenfield (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 27. 25. Geoffrey Whitney, Whitney’s Choice of Emblems: A Facsimile Reprint, ed. Henry Green (London: Lovell Reeve, 1864), 131. 26. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 127. 27. Roland Greene suggests that by evoking “the intrinsic property of poeticity” in its movement from “physical codex to the visible page to the prosodic body of the poem,” the sonnets delicately balance their existence in a self- enclosed world with the lived emotional history to which they are the referents. “Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595),” in Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 259. 28. See Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970); A. Kent Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers of Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). 29. See the explanation in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., vol. 2: The Minor Poems, ed. Charles Grosvenor Osgood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), 287– 90. 30. Rebeca Helfer, Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Recollection (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 45–56. 31. Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Stan A. E. Mendyk, “Speculum Britanniae”: Regional Study, Antiquarianism, and Science in Britain to 1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 32. Quoted in Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25.

Notes to Pages 193–200

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33. Michael Kiernan, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 4: The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 65. 34. See Jean R. Brink, “Materialist History of the Publication of Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Review of English Studies 54.213 (2003): 1– 26. 35. Gordon Teskey, “Night Thoughts on Mutabilitie,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 24. 36. See Christopher Burlinson, Allegory, Space, and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 157. 37. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, XV.xi.1, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 313. Monumentum ideo nuncupatur eo quod mentem moneat ad defuncti memoriam. Cum enim non videris monumentum, illud est quod scriptum est: “Excidi tamquam mortuus a corde.” Cum autem videris, monet mentem et ad memoriam te reducit ut mortuum recorderis. Isidore of Seville, Monumenta itaque et memoriae pro mentis admonitione dictae, ed. Angelo Valastro Canale, 2 vols. (Turin: UTET, 2004), 2:286– 88. 38. Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliotae (London, 1548). 39. Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae (London, 1565). 40. John Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments (London, 1605), 1. 41. John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. 42. All citations from A. C. Hamilton with Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki, eds., The Faerie Queene, Longman Annotated English Poets, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson Education, 2001). 43. William N. West, “‘No Endlesse Moniment’: Artificial Memory and Memorial Artifact in Early Modern England,” in Regimes of Memory, ed. Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (London: Routledge, 2003), 66. 44. John Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1994), 251–52. 45. John Milton, “Of Education,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2, ed. Douglas Bush et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 366– 67. Similarly Thomas Browne: “But now our understanding eclipsed, as well as out tempers infirmed, we must betake our selves to wayes of reparation, and depend upon the illumination of our endeavors; for thus we may in some measure repariees our primarie ruins, and build our selves men againe.” Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1:30. 46. See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 286– 89. 47. See Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of the Museum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 147–59, discussed in Daniel Shore, “Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast,” PMLA 127 (2012): 30. 48. Charles Grosvenor Osgood, ed., A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1915), s.v.

272

Notes to Pages 201–207

49. See Judith H. Anderson, “‘Myn Auctor’: Spenser’s Enabling Fiction and Eumestes’ ‘Immortal Scrine,’” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1989), 16– 31; Bart Van Es, Spenser’s Sense of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37–48; Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 45– 80; Helfer, Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Recollection, 168– 230. 50. Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 121– 35. 51. John Speed, History of Great Britaine (London, 1611), 17–18. 52. John Bruce, ed., Correspondence of Matthew Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), 327. 53. British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius C. vii, fols. 310r– 311v, cited in Summit, Memory’s Library, 107. 54. British Library, Cotton MS Faustina E. v, fol. 89r, cited in Summit, Memory’s Library, 107. 55. See Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Phillip Lindley, Tomb Destruction and Scholarship (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2007); Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2008). For the intersection of tombs and poetry, see Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 1– 28. 56. See Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (New York: Abrams, 1967); Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After- life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 57. David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 187. 58. See Andrew Ford, Homer: Poetry of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 50–51. 59. Van Es, Spenser’s Sense of History, 47. 60. William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610), 253. Other historians too, like Raphael Holinshed in his Chronicles, repeat the tale but doubt its credibility; Michael Drayton in the Polyalbion offers no explanation as to who built it but uses the occasion to lament the paucity of historical records. See Vine, In Defiance of Time, 109– 38. 61. Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 15– 26. 62. See Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 63. Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 25; see also A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 64. See Michael Putnam’s reading in Virgil’s Epic Designs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 189– 206.

Notes to Pages 208–213

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65. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self- Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 188. 66. In Shakespeare’s first tragedy a Goth says, “From our troops I strayed / To gaze upon a ruinous monastery, / And as I earnestly did fix mine eye / Upon the wasted building, suddenly / I heard a child cry underneath a wall.” Titus Andronicus 5.1.21– 24. The Webster passage is discussed in the opening of chapter 4. 67. These examples are from Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, figures 131–41. 68. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 28– 29. 69. Howard Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Allegory,” in Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter Struck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 241–53. 70. Benjamin, Origins, 177– 78. His historical ambit here is puzzling. He quotes Karl Borinski’s Die Antike in Poetik und Kunst-Theorie (Leipzig, 1914), in which Borinski mentions Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Nativity as a prime expression of the aesthetics of ruins (1:194, n304–5). But Ghirlandaio’s work dates from 1498, clearly prior to the baroque style. In any case what is clear is the emergence of ruins as an aesthetic and theological discourse in the Renaissance. 71. See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11– 78. 72. Benjamin, Origins,178. 73. Northrop Frye, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 153–54. 74. Angus Fletcher, in his 1964 Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (more Freudian than Benjaminian), claims that there is a tendency in Spenser’s allegorical narrative to depict objects in isolated and fragmentary detail: “An allegorical world gives us objects all lined up, as it were, on the frontal plane of a mosaic.” The poem’s centrifugal energy displaces a particular passage’s immediate meanings for the promise of a later fulfillment; hence you have an allegory that is suspended or fragmented. Fletcher’s category of “daemonic agency” destroys the will to structure. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 104. 75. On how medieval allegory is no longer sufficient in the early modern world, see Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). The conclusion, “The Track Divine: Protestant Ethics, Skeptical Rationalism and Ruined Allegory” (323–42), is especially rewarding. 76. Walter Raleigh, History of the World, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Macmillan, 1971), 144. 77. See the chapter “Disintegration of Providentialist Belief” in Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 83–108.

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Notes to Pages 214–220

78. The OED cites 1521 as the first occurrence of “revolution” as “overthrow of an established government or social order,” s.v. 79. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 2, 3. 80. Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). 81. Michel de Montaigne, “Various Outcomes of the Same Plan,” 1.24, in The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 127. 82. These are, to be sure, major discussions in literary theory. See, for example, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 83. See the Fowre Hymnes, printed in 1596, the same year as the second installment of the Faerie Queene. 84. Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 85. Chaucer, House of Fame (lines 1466-1512), in The Riverside Chaucer, 365– 66. 86. In Spenser, Faerie Queene, Hamilton et al. edition, 721. 87. “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.” T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1928), 50. 88. Ben Jonson, “To my beloved master Mr. William Shakespeare,” in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), 2. 89. John Milton, “On Shakespeare,” in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies . . . the second impression (London, 1632). For historical background on its composition, see Gordon Campbell, “Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton,” Milton Quarterly 33 (1999): 95–105. 90. See Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and Education (London: Routledge, 2006). 91. All quotations of Milton are from Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Prentice Hall, 1957). 92. In The Ruins of Allegory, Martin argues that in Paradise Lost Milton is positioned in the epochal transition from the mystical system of correspondence governing medieval and Renaissance cosmology to seventeenth- century science, rationalist philosophy, Puritan theology, and even chaos theory. 93. Shore, “Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast,” 33. 94. See David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Notes to Pages 220–227

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95. See Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed,” Historical Journal 51 (2008): 497–528. 96. Andrew Marvell, “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’” in The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth- Century Verse, ed. Alastair Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 611–12.

Epilogue: Fallen Castles and Summer Gr ass Epigraph: Carl Sandburg, The Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 136. 1. Wada Atsumu, “The Origins of Ise Shrine,” Acta Asiatica 69 (1995): 63– 83. 2. See the fascinating discussion in Arata Isozaki, Japan- ness in Architecture, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 117– 60. 3. Translated in Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 235. 4. Ibid., 238. 5. Ibid., 239. 6. See Edward Kamens, Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 7. Stephen Owen, ed. and trans., Norton Anthology of Chinese Literature (New York: Norton, 1996), 420, slightly modified. 8. I owe most of the references in this paragraph to Wu Hung’s A Story of Ruins: Absence and Presence in Chinese Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 30– 31. 9. Cao Zhi, “Sending Off Mr. Ying,” in Owen, Norton Anthology, 262. 10. Cited in Wu, Story of Ruins, 30. 11. Li Hua, “Eulogy on the Ancient Battlefield,” in Owen, Norton Anthology, 475. 12. Cited in Wu, Story of Ruins, 31. 13. Quoted in Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 183. 14. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 63. 15. Shirane, Traces of Dreams, 239. 16. Italo Calvino, “The Obverse of the Sublime,” in Collection of Sand: Essays, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 160.

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index

absence, 90, 91, 95, 98, 102, 136– 37, 159, 196 afterlife. See Nachleben Agamben, Giorgio, 136 Alberti, Leon Battista, 67, 76–77, 136, 139 Albertini, Francesco, 67, 69, 138 Alberto degli Alberti, 53–54 allegory, 22, 40, 64– 65, 75, 212–14; Benjamin on, 211–12; in Spenser, 177– 79, 185, 187, 191, 196, 202, 211–15, 273n74 Anderson, Judith H., 178, 201 antiquarianism, 74– 75, 79, 115, 133, 141, 157, 190– 93, 202, 205 Antiquarie prospettiche romane (anon.), 69, 70, 157 Aquinas, Thomas, 100–101 architecture, 52, 75–77, 167 Ariosto, Ludovico, 74– 75, 150 Aristotle, 33– 34, 42, 47, 50, 51 Assmann, Jan, 49–50 Athens, 52, 125 atoms, 35, 43, 127–28, 148–49, 151, 162, 165 Auerbach, Erich, 14, 17, 212 Augustine, 56, 57, 100, 114, 118, 128– 29, 255n84 Ausonius, 58– 61 Bacon, Francis, 4, 42–43, 93, 164– 65, 192 Baïf, Jean Antoine de, 175 Bao Zhao, 225 Barkan, Leonard, 21, 71, 112, 115, 235n52, 270n24 Barolini, Teodolinda, 101, 124 Barthes, Roland, 131 Bashō, 223– 24, 226– 27 Beaumont, Francis, 218 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 83– 84, 165, 175– 76, 177, 211–12, 213, 273n70

Berger, Harry, Jr., 178 Bernard of Clairvaux, 118 Bible, 24, 27–29, 84–85, 147–48 Billanovich, Giuseppe, 95 biological reproduction, 33–34, 47, 50, 138–39 Biondo, Flavio, 67 Blake, William, 69 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 12 – 13, 40, 57, 94, 119 – 20; Petrarch and, 92, 97 body: human, 96, 127–28, 138–39, 153, 154–56, 196, 210; as corpus, 22, 23, 41–42; resurrection of, 11 Boeckh, August, 14 Bonaventure, 92, 98– 99, 123 Botticelli, Sandro, 63– 64, plate 5 Bracciolini, Poggio, 41, 92, 111, 138 Bramante, Donato, 77– 78; and Bernardo Prevedari, 79– 80, 82 Browne, Thomas, 271n45 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 84– 85, plate 7 Bruni, Leonardo, 170 Bufalini, Leonardo, 67, 69 Burckhardt, Jacob, 53, 112, 143 Burrow, Colin, 48 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 164 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 118 Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs, 75, 139 Calvin, John, 183 Calvino, Italo, 227 Camden, William, 190, 192, 205 Cao Zhi, 225 Carpo, Mario, 76– 77 Carson, Anne, 30, 32 Cassin, Barbara, 17 Castiglione, Baldassare, 72– 74, 112 Catullus, 37– 38 Caygill, Howard, 211

278 cendre and poudre topos, 17, 19, 145– 65 passim, 168, 176, 179, 262n4 Certeau, Michel de, 106, 115 Chateaubriand, François René, 49, 174 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 216–17, 218 Chénedollé, Charles-Julien Lioult de, 174 Christianity, 10–11, 56–57, 64– 65, 81, 112, 114–16, 118, 194– 97, 207; in Spenser, 178, 194; spolia and, 56–57 Chrysoloras, Manuel, 53 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 4, 28– 30, 40, 151, 166– 67, 170– 71, 182; Petrarch and, 90, 91, 97, 103, 112, 115, 125, 126 Claudian, 217 Colie, Rosalie, 199 collection genre, 79, 119– 20 Colonna, Francesco, 18–19, 132–43 (134– 35), 159 Colonna, Giacomo, 127– 28 Colonna, Giovanni, 111, 113–14, 116– 17 Comito, Terry, 206 Conte, Gian Biagio, 92 Contini, Gianfranco, 95 Cooper, Thomas, 195 Cotton, Robert, 42, 100, 221 Crawforth, Hannah, 234n46 Cyriac of Ancona, 67, 138 Dante Alighieri, 61, 119– 20, 125, 200, 212–13, 217; Petrarch and, 89, 90, 94– 97, 100, 110–11 Dee, John, 201 Deleuze, Gilles, 17 de l’Orme, Philibert, 169 Derrida, Jacques, 20 Descartes, René, 169– 70 Diane de Poitiers, 168 Diderot, Denis, 27 Didi- Huberman, Georges, 23 Dimock, Wai- Chee, 113 Dionisotti, Carlotta, 42, 118 Donne, John, 147, 153, 196– 97, 214 Doublet, Jean, 175 Drayton, Michael, 272n60 Du Bellay, Joachim, 3, 4– 6, 17, 18– 20, 133, 144– 76, 227 WORKS: Les Antiquitez de Rome, 4, 6, 19– 20, 74, 144–46, 155– 63, 168– 69, 172, 173– 75; La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, 6, 151, 163, 165– 66, 169, 171, 172; Divers jeux rustiques, 151; L’Olive, 150; Les

Index Regrets, 5, 168; Romae descriptio, 157; Songes, 19, 159, 183. See also Spenser, Edmund: Ruines of Rome Duccio di Buoninsegna, 63, 65 Du Fu, 224– 27 Du Pérac, Étienne, 93 Durling, Robert M., 95 dust and ashes. See cendre and poudre topos Eden, Kathy, 113 Eliot, T. S., 218, 274n87 Elyot, Thomas, 195 Empson, William, 48 Ennius, 13, 36, 92, 102– 3, 110–11 epigraphy. See inscriptions epistle genre, 112–13 Erasmus, Desiderius, 7, 18, 170– 71 Escobedo, Andrew, 178, 201 etymology, 5, 9, 14–15, 17, 91–93, 116, 177, 196, 200, 226 Feeney, Denis, 38 Fellini, Federico, Roma, 132, plate 8 Ferguson, Margaret W., 21, 151 Ferretti, Silvia, 66 Ficino, Marsilio, 120 Filarete, Il (Antonio di Pietro Averlino), 138– 39 Fletcher, Angus, 178, 273n74 Flower, Harriet I., 38 Folgore da San Gimignano, 119 Fontenelle, Bernard, 166 Foucault, Michel, 242n5 Fowler, Alastair, 189 Fowler, Don, 59 Foxe, John, 195– 96, 204 fragments/fragmentation, 4, 11–15, 117–20 Francesco da Fiano, 39–40 Freccero, John, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 93, 103, 141–43 Frye, Northrop, 178, 212 Galvez, Marisa, 119 Geary, Patrick, 164, 266n48 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 217 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 57 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 41 Gibbon, Edward, 112 Ginzburg, Carlo, 93 Giovanni de’ Medici, 54 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 83, 122 Grafton, Anthony, 124 Greek influence on Latin culture, 38, 166– 67, 173 Greenblatt, Stephen, 208

Index Greene, Roland, 17, 270n27 Greene, Thomas M., 20, 92, 112, 127 Gregorius, 58– 61 Gregory I, 56–57 Grévin, Jacques, 174– 75 Gross, Kenneth, 178, 206 Guarini, Guarino, 92– 93 Guarino Veronese, 41 Guittone d’Arezzo, 119 Güthenke, Constanz, 14 Hadfield, Andrew, 178 Hamacher, Walter, 12, 13–14, 17 Hansen, Maria Fabricius, 56 Hardie, Philip, 102– 3 Hare, Tom, 50 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 21, 235n52 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 23, 154 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 107, 131 Helfer, Rebeca, 21, 178, 191, 201 Heemskerck, Maarten van, 49, 69, 78, 80– 81, plate 1 Hennequin, Jêrome, 174, 175 Henry VIII, 5, 42, 180– 81 hermeneutics, 11, 14–15, 58–61, 94, 118, 123–24, 198, 204, 215, 218 Herodotus, 32, 36, 52 Heywood, Thomas, 175 Hieatt, A. Kent, 189 Hildebert of Lavardin, 137, 140 Holinshed, Raphael, 202, 272n60 Homer, 2, 15, 16, 31, 42–43, 151, 217, 236n10; Petrarch and, 92, 102, 111 Horace, 6, 10, 13, 35–40, 44, 108– 9, 113, 149–50, 151, 225, 226; immortality claim, 2– 3, 30– 31, 35– 36, 127, 173, 190 humanism, 124– 26, 129, 143; weight of classical tradition on, 165– 66 iconoclasm, 178– 80, 183, 206, 208, 210, 220– 21 idolatry, 183, 188, 200, 220 imitation, 11, 19, 20, 21– 22, 92, 94, 97, 121, 150– 52, 164; as spolia, 45, 56 immortality, 2– 3, 5, 10–11, 18, 30– 39, 46–51, 126– 30, 146, 152; absence in East Asian literature, 227; in Du Bellay, 172– 73; in Egyptian literature, 49–51; in Genesis, 28; in Horace, 2– 3, 30– 31, 35– 36, 127, 173, 190; in Lucan, 3; in Ovid, 2, 35, 38– 39, 208, 218; in Petrarch, 2– 3, 126– 30; in Shakespeare, 10, 43–44, 46–49, 190; in Spenser,

279 3, 20, 187– 91, 193– 94, 215; in Statius, 3; in Virgil, 2, 36– 37 “Immortality of Writers, The” (ancient Egyptian poem), 50–51 inscriptions, 2, 32, 36, 38, 52, 57–59 Ise Shrine, 223 Isidore of Seville, 91, 136, 194– 95 Jensen, Wilhelm, 141 Johnson, Christopher D., 265n37 Jonson, Ben, 218 Julius II, 77 Juvenal, 128, 151 Karmon, David, 73 Kunin, Aaron, 46 Kurke, Leslie, 29 Lafréry, Antoine, 69, 79 La Jessée, Jean de, 174, 175 Lanciani, Rodolfo, 56 Landino, Cristoforo, 54–55 Lapo di Castiglionchio, 40 Latin, growth and revival of, 44, 163, 170 Laureti, Tommaso, 57, plate 2 Lefaivre, Liano, 137 Le Goff, Jacques, 242n5 Leland, John, 42, 192, 202, 221 Leo X, 72 Leonardo da Vinci, 23, 67 Le Roy, Louis, 151 Lescot, Pierre, 168 Li Cheng, Reading the Stele, 60– 61, plate 3 Ligorio, Pirro, 69, 157 Li Hua, 225 Livy, 4, 52, 103, 104, 124 Lombardo, Giovanni Paglia, 71 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 61, 63, plate 4 Loschi, Antonio, 111 love/eros, 45–49, 94–102, 138–40, 187–88 Lucan, 3, 19, 58, 90, 102–4, 106–10, 127, 151, 205– 6, 217 Lucretius, 34– 35, 43, 51, 122– 23, 148– 49, 151, 165 Ludwig van Kempen, 113 Luther, Martin, 184 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 125 MacPhail, Eric, 21, 167, 261n2 Maley, Willy, 178, 269n11 Manley, Lawrence, 182 Marcanova, Giovanni, 138 Marchesi, Simone, 100, 110–11 Marin, Louis, 93

280 Marliani, Bartolomeo, 157 Martial, 37 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 274n92 Martin V, 54 Marvell, Andrew, 221 Maso di Banco, 61, 62 materiality, 37–38, 58–60, 157 Mauro, Lucio, 157 Mazzocco, Angelo, 115 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 93, 112 McGowan, Margaret M., 21 medieval/Renaissance divide, 61 Melehy, Hassan, 21 Meltzer, Françoise, 109–10 memory, 28– 30, 38– 39, 43, 45, 84, 177, 194– 96 Meng Haoran, 225– 26 Michelangelo, 7, 122, 154 Michelet, Jules, 154, 264n24 Miller, David Lee, 202 Milton, John, 197, 218, 219– 21, 274n92 Moevs, Christian, 96 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 57 moniments (Spenser’s usage), 17, 20, 177– 210 passim, 216–17 Montaigne, Michel de, 7, 122– 23, 157– 58, 167, 214, 257n118 monuments: etymology and usages, 177, 184, 194– 96, 200, 203, 207, 209; funerary, 31– 32, 50, 155–56, 200– 201; historical documents as, 194– 96, 201; history vs., 52–53, 242n5; intentional vs. unintentional, 185; poetry as, 2– 3, 6, 10–11, 30– 37, 39, 44–45, 146, 188, 218; Protestant view of, 179, 184, 195, 204; remoteness of, 83; superiority of poetry over, 39–40, 42–46, 50, 53. See also immortality; memory; moniments Mostavi, Mohsen, and David Leatherbarrow, 75– 76 Mussato, Albertino, 40 Nachleben, 22–23, 44–45, 49–51, 174–76, 226–27 Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood, 21, 66, 78– 79, 235n52 Nicholas V., 71, 77 Nicholson, Catherine, 234n46 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 144 Nohrnberg, James, 178 Noot, Jan van der, 180, 182– 83, 269n15 Nora, Pierre, 161 Norton, Glyn P., 165 obelisks, 184, 184– 85

Index Orlando, Francesco, 74, 107 Ovid, 2, 35, 37– 39, 43, 53, 74, 120, 127, 132, 190, 207– 8, 209, 217, 218 palimpsest topos, 80– 81 Palladio, Andrea, 67, 139, 157 Pannonius, Janus, 160 Panofsky, Erwin, 66, 201 Parker, Matthew, 42, 201, 221 Passannante, Gerard, 43, 122– 23, 149, 257n118 Patterson, Annabel, 234n46 Paul III, 78 Pausanias, 1 Pérac, Étienne du, 69, 157 Pérez- Gómez, Alberto, 138, 139 Pericles, 241n2 Peruzzi, Baldassare, 67 Petrarch, 2– 3, 4, 6, 11, 17–19, 21– 22, 40–42, 83, 89–130, 133, 172, 218, 227, 229; Cicero and, 90, 91; Dante and, 89, 90, 94– 97, 100; Laura and, 19, 22, 90, 94–102, 119, 130; Quintilian and, 40–41, 121, 172; Roman walks, 111–17; Spenser translation, 183; Virgil and, 89, 90, 92, 100–106, 110–11, 112, 115 WORKS: Africa, 6, 19, 90, 102–5, 110–11, 115, 117, 128, 130; Epistola posteritati, 113– 14; Invectives, 115; Rerum familiarium libri, 4, 40–42, 90, 91, 103, 111–17, 122, 125, 130; Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rime Sparse/Il Canzoniere), 6, 18, 90, 94, 95–101, 119– 21, 130, 170, 171, 258n125; Secretum, 91, 117, 120, 122, 128– 30; Triumphus Eternitatus, 129– 30; Vaticano Latino 3195– 96 (“Il Codice degli Abbozzi”), 120– 21, 124, 127 Petrarchism, 89, 128, 146, 150 Petrucci, Armando, 58 Philippe de Cabassoles, 121 philology, 11–17, 41–42, 93–94, 122–24 Pindar, 2, 32– 33, 36 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 1, 83, 93 Pius II, 71– 72 Platina, Bartolomeo, 54 Plato, 34, 42, 47, 151, 237n22 Pliny the Elder, 6– 7, 136, 214 Pollock, Sheldon, 13–14, 17, 44, 239n52 Porter, James I., 32 printing and mechanical reproduction, 81, 83– 84 printmaking, 79, 84 Posthumus, Herman, 74, 75, plate 6

Index Propertius, Sextus, 151, 173, 238n28 Putnam, Michael C., 262n9 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostome, 52, 55 Quevedo, Francisco de, 175 Quint, David, 75 Quintilian, 29– 30, 45, 91, 123, 136, 151; Petrarch and, 40–41, 121, 172; on verbal art, 105 Qu Yuan, 225 Raleigh, Walter, 213, 217–18 Raphael, 72– 73, 111 Reformation, 10–11, 42, 48, 178–80, 182–84, 200, 201, 204, 219–21 relics, 57, 72, 73, 142, 163– 65, 180, 266n48 repetition, 159–63 representation, 47, 83–84, 156–63 Riegl, Alois, 185 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 221 Robert, Hubert, 1 Romanticism, 49 Rome, 1– 2, 4–5, 18–19, 40, 44, 52– 85, 137, 206, 253n55, 255n91; Augustan age uncertainty about, 36– 38; Colosseum, 49, 71, 79, 83, plates 1, 7; Du Bellay on, 145– 46, 154– 63, 166; French poets on, 174– 75; Gibbon’s inspiration, 112; guidebooks and memorabilia, 57–58, 79, 85, 157; in Latin epics, 103– 6; Montaigne on, 157–58; nadir of, 54–55; Petrarch’s walks in, 111–17, 145; rebuilding of, 66– 67, 71; Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet dictum, 53, 67, 68; Spenser and, 191; St. Peter’s Basilica, 71, 77– 78, 80– 81, plates 8– 9, 220 Ronsard, Pierre de, 6, 168 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 188 “Ruin, The” (Anglo- Saxon poem), 1, 59– 61 ruins: in Adoration and Nativity paintings, 63– 66, 219; allegory and, 211–13; in antiquity, 5, 36, 52, 105– 6; as ashes for new works, 145; beauty of, 53–54; Benjamin on, 22, 211–12; Chateaubriand on, 49; definition, 23–24; Diderot on, 27; Egyptian, 49–50; English, 5, 48, 179– 80, 202, 221; etymology, 5, 9, 23, 108, 197; human body and, 102, 138– 39, 197– 98; inevitability of, 75– 76; “invention” of, 66; Japanese and Chinese, 223– 27;

281 language as, 169– 71, 181– 82; Mazzotta on, 93; medieval view of, 66, 220; in Milton, 197, 219– 20; in the Old Testament, 24, 27– 28, 63, 64; Petrarch on, 4; as poetic topos, 5, 73– 75, 85, 102, 130, 159, 217– 27; ruīna, 23, 9; the self as, 48–49; in Shakespeare, 8, 48–49; Simmel on, 60; in Spenser, 178, 180– 82, 190– 94, 196– 200, 209; universal appeal of, 49–51; as vestigia, 93; Vico on, 15. See also Rome; unfinished and fragmentary works Ruthven, K. K., 182 Rykwert, Joseph, 64 Salutati, Coluccio, 40 Sandburg, Carl, 223 Santagata, Marco, 95, 99 Sapegno, Natalino, 95 Schlegel, Friedrich, 89, 91, 131 Schleimann, Heinrich, 141 Schwyzer, Philip, 21, 49 Sebald, W. G., 1 sêma, 31, 154–56, 157–58 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 92 Serlio, Sebastiano, 67, 68 Serres, Michel, 154 Settis, Salvatore, 56 Shakespeare, William, 5, 7– 9, 34, 147, 218, 226 WORKS: Antony and Cleopatra, 9; Coriolanus, 9; Hamlet, 153; Julius Caesar, 43–44, 46; King Lear, 9, 49; Sonnets, 5, 8–11, 15, 45–49, 51, 84, 179, 190, 200, 203, 233n31, 251n35; Titus Andronicus, 209, 273n66 Shirane, Haruo, 224 Shore, Daniel, 220 Sidney, Philip, 6, 251n35 Simmel, Georg, 60, 61, 107 Simonides, 2, 28– 30, 32, 45, 51, 107 Sumpson, James, 179 Sixtus IV, 71 Speed, John, 201 Spenser, Edmund, 17, 18– 20, 34, 133, 177– 221, 227; archaic style, 181– 82 WORKS: Amoretti, 187– 89, 190; Complaints, 19, 180, 209; Epithalamion, 189, 203; The Faerie Queene, 5, 6, 178, 180, 194, 196– 217, 217, 220– 21; The Ruines of Rome, 175, 178, 180; The Ruines of Time, 178, 180, 190– 94, 209; The Shepheards Calendar, 3, 181– 82, 189– 90; A Theatre for

Index

282 Voluptuous Worldlings, 178, 180, 182– 86 (184), 188, 190; A View of the Present State of Ireland, 181; The Visions of Bellay, 180, 185; The Visions of Petrarch, 180, 183; Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, 180 Speroni, Sperone, 151 Spitzer, Leo, 14–15 spolia, 21, 45, 56–58, 73; literary, 166– 67, 175 Statius, 2, 3, 92, 102– 3 Steedman, Carolyn, 264n24 Stewart, Susan, 79, 84, 136– 37, 247n81 Stonehenge, 202, 205– 6 Storey, H. Wayne, 124 Stow, John, 192, 202 Summit, Jennifer, 201 survival. See Nachleben Svenbro, Jesper, 31 Targoff, Ramie, 10–11 Teskey, Gordon, 178, 194, 214 Thoenes, Christof, 77 Thucydides, 52 tombs: tombeau genre, 31–32, 50, 154–56, 177 Tower of Babel, 1, 24, 27– 30, 51, 84– 85, plate 7 Trachtenberg, Marvin, 76 translatio, 164– 66, 173– 76, 261n2 Trippe, Rosemary, 140 Trovato, Paolo, 95 Troy, 20, 31, 37, 103, 106–10, 141, 187, 200, 206 Tucker, G. Hugo, 160 unfinished and fragmentary works, 6– 7, 13–14, 22, 76, 91, 214; Benjamin on, 211; in Christian tradition, 118–

19; Colonna and, 137; Petrarch and, 89– 90, 117–22; Spenser and, 194 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 147, 175 Van Es, Bart, 201, 204–5 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 57, 115, 177, 194– 95, 221 Vasari, Giorgio, 7, 57, 77, 78 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 53, 54 vestigia, 17, 89–101, 121, 122– 26, 130, 179, 210, 226 Vico, Giambattista, 15, 16, 17, 51 Vigenère, Blaise de, 79 Villon, François, 147, 152 Virgil, 2, 19, 36– 37, 38, 41–42, 58, 127, 150–51, 162, 173, 207– 8, 209, 217, 253n55; Petrarch and, 89, 92, 100– 106, 108–11, 112, 115 Vitalis, Janus, 160 Vitruvius, 64, 67, 78, 92, 138 Walsham, Alexandra, 179– 80 Warburg, Aby, 22 Webster, John, 131– 32, 143, 209 Weever, John, 192, 195 Weiss, Roberto, 115 Werth, Tiffany Jo, 48 West, William N., 196 Whitney, Geoffrey, 186, 187 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, 124 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 169 Wordsworth, William, 1 Wu Hung, 61, 226 Yates, Frances, 30 Yeats, William Butler, 20 Yuan Zhen, 226 Zumthor, Paul, 44

v er ba l a rts : : st udies i n poet ics series editors

::

Lazar Fleishman & Haun Saussy

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace Jacob Edmond, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, CrossCultural Encounter, Comparative Literature Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry Marc Shell, Talking the Walk & Walking the Talk: A Rhetoric of Rhythm Ryan Netzley, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (eds.), Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics. Foreword by Eric Hayot Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies. Foreword by Olga Solovieva Andrew Hui, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature