Ekphrastic Image-Making in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700

Intersections
Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture

General Editor

Karl A.E. Enenkel (Chair of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
e-mail: kenen_01@uni_muenster.de)

Editorial Board

W. van Anrooij (University of Leiden)

W. de Boer (Miami University)
Chr. Göttler (University of Bern)
J.L. de Jong (University of Groningen)
W.S. Melion (Emory University)
R. Seidel (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main)
P.J. Smith (University of Leiden)
J. Thompson (Queen’s University Belfast)
A. Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin)
C. Zittel (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice / University of Stuttgart)
C. Zwierlein (Freie Universität Berlin)

volume 79 – 2022

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/inte

Ekphrastic Image-Making
in Early Modern Europe,
1500–1700
Edited by

Arthur J. DiFuria
Walter S. Melion

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustrations: (central image) “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 47: “Sol”. Public domain;
(background image) detail from Hendrick Goltzius, Landscape with Venus and Adonis, 1596
[or 1598]. Albertina, Vienna.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: DiFuria, Arthur J., editor. | Melion, Walter S., editor. |

Lovis Corinth Colloquium (10th : 2019 : Emory University)
Title: Ekphrastic image-making in early modern Europe, 1500‒1700 /
edited by Arthur J. DiFuria, Walter S. Melion.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Intersections :
interdisciplinary studies in early modern culture, 1568-1181 ;
volume 79 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021046485 (print) | LCCN 2021046486 (ebook) |
ISBN 9789004109971 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004462069 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art, European—Philosophy—Congresses. |
Ekphrasis—Congresses. | Image (Philosophy)—Congresses.
Classification: LCC N6750 .E39 2022 (print) | LCC N6750 (ebook)
| DDC 709.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046485
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046486

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ISSN 1568-1181
ISBN 978-90-04-10997-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-46206-9 (e-book)

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∵
Contents

Acknowledgements xi
List of Illustrations xii
Notes on the Editors xxxii
Notes on the Contributors xxxiv

Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 1

Arthur J. DiFuria and Walter S. Melion

part 1
Humanism, Print, Ekphrasis

1 ‘The Reader Seems to Have Seen Rather Than Read’: Ekphrasis as an

Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus of Rotterdam 69
Barbara A. Kaminska

2 The Artist’s Frame of Reference in Antoine Sucquet’s Via Vita

Aeternae 93
Carol Barbour

3 ‘No Less Difficult to Paint … Than to Describe’: Chaos in Michel de

Marolles’s Tableaux du Temple des Muses 120
James Clifton

4 The Edge of Ekphrasis: Bellori and Reproductive Printmaking 159

Annie Maloney

part 2
Poem, Image, Ekphrasis

5 Mythography as Ekphrasis: Ludovico Lazzarelli’s De gentilium deorum

imaginibus, and the Poetics of Humanism 201
Karl Enenkel

6 Antithesis, Ekphrasis, and Antiphrasis in Joachim du Bellay’s Ruinscape,

Les Antiquités de Rome 239
Arthur J. DiFuria
viii Contents

7 Through a Poet’s Eyes: Jan van der Noot’s Poem on the Capital Sins 278
Caecilie Weissert
With a translation of the poem by Anna Dlabacova

8 Virtual Reality of the Early Modern Anatomical Poem in Denmark and

England 314
Ivana Bičak

part 3
Sacred Ekphrasis

9 Robert Campin and Jan van Ruusbroec: Spiritual Conflagrations and

Ekphrastic Mysticism 335
Elliott D. Wise

10 Transfiguring Raphael, Reforming Christ: Ekphrastic Image-Making in

Nicolas Poussin’s The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier 370
Steffen Zierholz

11 Levels to Ekphrasis in the Tableaux de la Pénitence 410

Lars Cyril Nørgaard

part 4
Ekphrastic Images

12 Art between Fact and Fantasy: Tracing the Afterlife of Ekphrastic

Architecture in Renaissance Italy 483
Femke Speelberg

13 Ekphrasis and Ovidian Poetics in Hendrick Goltzius’s Landscape with

Venus and Adonis of ca. 1598 520
Walter S. Melion

14 Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Silver of 1629: Visual and Literary

Associations 622
Amy Golahny
Contents ix

15 ‘By This Blood Most Chaste […]’ (Livy, The History of Rome, Book 1.59):
Passion and Politics in Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1666 650
Shelley Perlove

16 Finding, Stealing, Translating: The Subject(s) of Tintoretto’s Brera Scuola

Grande di San Marco Istoria 685
Letha C. Ch’ien

part 5
Nature, Art, Ekphrasis

17 Reveries of the Source 707

Christopher P. Heuer

18 Ekphrasis and the Romance of Botany in the Age of Pietro Andrea

Mattioli 741
April Oettinger

part 6
Global Ekphrasis

19 Seeing ‘de flandes’ 767

Stephanie Porras

20 ‘Escribieron en mi memoria’: Ekphrasis in the Pastoral Fiction

of New Spain 789
Teresa Clifton

21 Ekphrasis and the Global Eighteenth Century: A.E. van Braam

Houckgeest’s Collection of Chinese Art 808
Dawn Odell

Index Nominum 837

Acknowledgements

The Corinth Endowment, gifted to the Emory Art History Department by Kay
Corinth in honour of her father-in-law, the painter Lovis Corinth, made pos-
sible the colloquium at which many of the first versions of the essays in this
volume were delivered. In 2016, her sister Mary Sargent substantially increased
this endowment. The annual colloquia provide an interdisciplinary forum for
the study of early modern northern art. Some of this book’s essays were also
presented at sessions on visual ekphrasis co-organized by us at the annual
meetings of the College Art Association of America, the Sixteenth Century
Society, and the Renaissance Society of America. A further session on ekphra-
sis took place at the 2018 conference of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, in
Ghent. The editors are grateful to Claire Sterk, President of Emory University,
Michael Elliott, Dean of Emory College, Carla Freeman, Senior Associate Dean
of Faculty, Lisa Tedesco, Dean of the Laney Graduate School, and Sarah McPhee,
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History and Departmental Chair, for
their lively interest in and support of the Corinth Colloquia. Richard (Bo) Manly
Adams, Jr., Director of Pitts Theology Library and Margaret A. Pitts Assistant
Professor in the Practice of Theological Bibliography, made his fine collections
available to the participants. Kim Collins, Humanities Librarian, did the same
at the Rose Library of Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books, where Jennifer
Gunter King, Director, and Beth Shoemaker, Rare Books Librarian, warmly
welcomed us. Linnea Harwell, Academic Degree Programs Coordinator in
Graduate Studies, facilitated the colloquium with incredible grace and effi-
ciency, and assisted our visitors in ways too numerous to count. Blanche
Barnett, Academic Department Administrator, provided essential adminis-
trative support during the planning and implementation of the colloquium.
Christopher Sawula, Visual Resources Librarian, and Becky Baldwin, Assistant
Librarian, supplied both images and technical expertise. Last but not least, the
editors owe a great debt of thanks to Alexandra Zigomalas and Annie Maloney,
without whose assistance this volume could not have seen the light of day.

Walter Melion and Art DiFuria

Illustrations

1 Cornelis Cort after Frans Floris, Hercules and the Pygmies, 1562. Engraving, 325 ×
465 mm. By permission of the Trustees, British Museum 13
2 Giorgio Ghisi after Luca Penni, Calumny of Apelles, 1560. Engraving, 368 ×
317 mm. By permission of the Trustees, British Museum 15
3 Mercure Jollat, Hercules and the Pygmies, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height
162 mm. Emblematic pictura, “In eos qui supra vires quicquam audent”, in
Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534). Newberry
Library, Chicago 20
4a Mercure Jollat, Hope, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height 162 mm. Emblematic
pictura, “In simulachrum Spei”, in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris,
Chrestien Wechel: 1534). Newberry Library, Chicago 25
4b Emblematic epigram, “In simulachrum Spei”, in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum
libellus (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534). Newberry Library, Chicago 26
5 Mercure Jollat, Bacchus, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height 162 mm. Emblematic
pictura, “In statuam Bacchi”, in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris,
Chrestien Wechel: 1534). Newberry Library, Chicago 27
6 Mercure Jollat, Faith, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height 162 mm. Emblematic
pictura, “Fidei symbolum”, in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris,
Chrestien Wechel: 1534). Newberry Library, Chicago 28
7 Cornelis Cort after Frans Floris, Hercules Prevents the Centaurs from Abducting
Hippodamia, from the Labours of Hercules, 1563. Engraving, 223 × 285 mm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 30
8 Mercure Jollat, Hercules of the Franks, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height 162 mm.
Emblematic pictura, “Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior”, in Andrea Alciato,
Emblematum libellus (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534). Newberry Library,
Chicago 33
9 Johannes Wierix, Portrait of Frans Floris, ca. 1572. Engraving, 208 × 123 mm. Plate
from Hieronymus Cock – Domenicus Lampsonius, Pictorum aliquot celebrium
Germaniae Inferiors effigies (Antwerp, Hieronymus Cock: 1572). By permission
of the Trustees, British Museum 34
10 Hans Bol, Landscape with Fall of Icarus, ca. 1585. Watercolour on paper, 133 ×
206 mm. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp 47
11 Palma Il Vecchio, Barrasca di mare (Storm at Sea), bef. 1528. Oil on canvas, 362 ×
408 cm. Accademia, Venice 50
12 Theodoor Galle, Aspicientes in Auctorem fidei, ca. 1601. Engraving, 172 × 121 mm.
Frontispiece of Jan David, S.J., Orbita probitatis ad Christi imitationem Veridico
Christiano subserviens (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). The Newberry
Library, Chicago: Case W1025.22 53
Illustrations xiii

13 Theodoor Galle, Hominis vere Christiani description, ca. 1601. Engraving, 172
× 121 mm. Emblem 15 of Jan David, S.J., Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex
officina Plantiniana: 1601). The Newberry Library, Chicago: Case W1025.22 57
1.1 Quentin Massys, Portrait Medal of Erasmus (1519). Bronze, diameter 10.5 cm.
London, Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. no. 4613 – 1858). Image © Victoria
and Albert Museum, London 69
1.2 Dirck Bouts, Christ in the House of Simon (ca. 1464). Oil on oak panel, 40.5
× 61 cm. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie (inv. no. 533A). Image © Gemäldegalerie
der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz Fotograf/in:
Christoph Schmidt 72
1.3 Ambrosius Holbein, “Frontispiece”, in Desiderius Erasmus, Novum Testamentum
Omne (Basil, Johannes Froben: 1519). Image © The Trustees of the British
Museum 87
1.4 Pieter Aertsen, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1553). Oil on panel, 126
× 200 cm. Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (inv. no 1108 (OK))
Image © Studio Tromp, Rotterdam 89
2.1 Boëtius à Bolswert, The way to meditate. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.8 cm. From:
Via vitæ aeternæ iconibus illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp, Henricus
Aertssius: 1630). Private collection. Photo: the author with assistance by
Allan Cameron 95
2.1a Detail: Boëtius à Bolswert, The way to meditate. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.8 cm.
From: Via vitæ aeternæ iconibus illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp, Henricus
Aertssius: 1630). Private collection. Photo: the author with assistance by
Allan Cameron 97
2.2 Boëtius à Bolswert, The path of Virtue. Engraving, 13.9 × 9.6 cm. From: Via vitæ
aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1630). Private
collection. Photo: the author with assistance by Allan Cameron 102
2.3 Boëtius à Bolswert, Imitation of the Saints. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.7 cm. From: Via
vitæ aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1630).
Private collection. Photo: the author with assistance by Allan Cameron 103
2.4 Boëtius à Bolswert, Imitation of Christ. Engraving, 13.5 × 9.5 cm. From: Via vitæ
aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1630). Private
collection. Photo: the author with assistance by Allan Cameron 105
2.5 Boëtius à Bolswert, Be prepared for adversity. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.8 cm. From: Via
vitæ aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1630).
Private collection. Photo: the author with assistance by Allan Cameron 108
2.6 Theodore Galle, Orbita Probitatis. Engraving, 15.5 × 11.8 cm. From: Veridicus
Christianus, Editio Altera. (Antwerp, Plantin: [1601], 1651) 109
2.7 Romeyn de Hooghe, The Tabula Cebetis. Engraving, 18.2 × 34.1 cm. From: Epicteti
Enchiridium, una cum Cebetis Thebani Tabula. Graece & Latine […]. (Abraham
Berkelii, Leiden and Amsterdam: 1670) 112
xiv Illustrations

3.1 After Abraham van Diepenbeeck, Chaos. Engraving from Michel de Marolles,
Tableavx du Temple des Muses (Paris, Nicolas L’Anglois: 1655), opp. p. 1. Sarah
Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston 122
3.2 Johannes Wierix, The Four Elements. Engraving, 28.8 × 20.5 cm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 134
3.3 Louis Finson, The Four Elements (1611). Oil on canvas, 179 × 170 cm. Sarah
Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston 135
3.4 Virgil Solis, Elementorum distributio. Woodcut in Spreng Johan, Metamorphoses
Ovidii, argumentis quidem soluta oratione, Enarrationibus autem & Allegorijs
Elegiaco uersu accuratissimè expositae, summaq[ue]; diligentia ac studio
illustratae […] Unà cum uiuis singularum transformationum Iconibus, à
Vergilio Solis eximio pictore, delineatis (Frankfurt, Apud Georgium Corvinum,
Sigismundum Feyerabent & haeredes Wygandi Galli: 1563) fol. 1r. Newberry
Library, Chicago 136
3.5 After Hendrick Goltzius, The Untangling of Chaos, or the Creation of the Four
Elements (1589). Engraving, 17.78 × 25.4 cm. Los Angeles County Museum
of Art 137
3.6 Sine iustitia, confusio. Woodcut in Aneau, Picta poesis (Lyon, Apud Mathiam
Bonhomme: 1552). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 138
3.7 Il Caos. Woodcut in Symeoni Gabriello, La Vita et metamorfoseo d’Ouidio,
figurato & abbreuiato in forma d’Epigrammi (Lyon, Jean de Tournes: 1559) 12.
Newberry Library, Chicago 139
3.8 Richard Gaywood, Frontispiece. Engraving in John Baptist Porta, Natural
Magick: in xx Bookes (London, Thomas Young and Samuel Speed: 1658). British
Library, London 150
3.9 Bernard Picart after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, Chaos. Engraving in Le Temple
des Muses, orné de LX. tableaux où sont représentés les Evenemens les plus
remarquables de l’antiquité fabuleuse (Amsterdam, Zacharie Chatelain: 1733),
n.p. Newberry Library, Chicago 152
4.1 Annibale Carracci, Farnese Gallery, (ca. 1596–1601), Approximately
20.7 × 6.4 meters, Fresco painting, Rome, Farnese Palace. Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Volta_della_Galleria_
Farnese_dopo_il_restauro_del_2015.jpg 166
4.2 Raphael, Loggia of Psyche, (ca. 1516–1517), Fresco Painting, Rome, Villa
Farnesina. Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Loggia_of_
Psyche_%28Villa_Farnesina%2C_Rome%29.jpg 167
4.3 Pietro Santi Bartoli, “Discovery of the Tomb of the Nasonii,” in Pietro Santi
Bartoli, Michelangelo de la Chausse and Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le pitture
antiche delle grotte di Roma, e del sepolcro de’ Nasonj […] (Rome, Nella
Illustrations xv

nuova stamparia di Gaetano degli Zenobj: 1706). Etching, 36 × 48 cm. Emory

University, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library 170
4.4 Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Mercury bringing the golden apple
to Paris,” in Carlo Cesi and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo
Farnese in Roma […] (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657). Etching,
35.8 × 24.8 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.915. Image
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 175
4.5 Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Mercury bringing the golden apple
to Paris,” in Carlo Cesi and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo
Farnese in Roma […] (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657). Etching, 26.0 ×
53.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.903. Image
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 176
4.6a Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Supreme Love and Earthly Love; Celestial
and Vulgar Love,” in Carlo Cesi and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo
Farnese in Roma […] (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657). Etching, 20.4 × 15.3 cm
(plate). Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.908. Image
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 179
4.6b Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Anteros and Eros; Divine Love and
Impure Love,” in Carlo Cesi and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo
Farnese in Roma […] (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657). Etching, 19 × 15.9 cm
(plate). Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.909. Image
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 179
4.7 Pietro Aquila, “Title Page,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […]
(Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 45.9 × 71.3 cm. Melbourne,
National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P123-1991. Image © National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne 182
4.8 Carlo Maratti, etched by Pietro Aquila, “Annibale Carracci Introduces Painting
to Apollo and Minerva,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […]
(Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 46 × 64.1 cm, trimmed. New
York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 51.501.2593. Image © Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York 183
4.9 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Polyphemus and Galatea; Apollo’s
abduction of Hyacinth,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […]
(Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 45.8 × 71.3 cm. Melbourne,
National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P126-1991. Image © National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne 185
4.10 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne,” in
Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi:
1674). Etching, 45.9 × 71.2 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no.
P137-1991. Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 186
xvi Illustrations

4.11 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Hero and Leander; Hercules and Iole;
Pan and Syrinx,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome,
Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 45.9 × 71.2 cm. Melbourne, National
Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P135-1991. Image © National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne 188
4.12 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Detail of one of the walls in the
Farnese Gallery,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome,
Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 71.4 × 45.9 cm. Melbourne, National
Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P144-1991. Image © National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne 189
4.13 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Panels and sculptures from the
Farnese Gallery,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome,
Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 71.2 × 46.0 cm. Melbourne, National
Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P146-1991. Image © National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne 190
4.14 Pietro Santi Bartoli, “Funerary vessels of clay and glass found in the tombs of
Villa Corsina outside of the Porta of S. Pancratio,” in Pietro Santi Bartoli, Gli
antichi sepolcri, overo, Mausolei Romani, et Etruschi, trouati in Roma & in altri
luoghi celebri: nelli quali si contengono molte erudite memorie (Rome, Antonio
de’ Rossi: 1697). Etching. Wikimedia Commons 191
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gli_antichi_sepolcri,_ovvero,_
Mausolei_romani_ed_etruschi_trovati_in_Roma_ed_in_altri_luoghi_celebri_-_
nelli_quali_si_contengono_molte_erudite_memorie_(1767)_(14598162817).jpg
4.15 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, “Virgin with
the unicorn and surrounding wall decoration,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae
Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 71.4
× 46.0 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P143-1991. Image
© National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 192
4.16 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Four corner-pieces showing Eros and
Anteros fighting,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome,
Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 45.9 × 71.2 cm. Melbourne, National
Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P139-1991. Image © National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne 193
4.17 Nicolas Dorigny, After Raphael, “Venus irâ incensa adversus Psyche,” in Nicolas
Dorigny, Psyches Et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula a Raphaele Sanctio Vrbinate Romae
in Farnesianis hortis transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem ac laudem colorum
luminibus expressa (Rome, Domenico de’ Rossi: 1693). Etching, 50 × 76 cm.
London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. DYCE.253. Image © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London 195
Illustrations xvii

4.18 Nicolas Dorigny, After Raphael, “Cupidinis Ee Psyches nuptialis caena,” in

Nicolas Dorigny, Psyches Et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula a Raphaele Sanctio
Vrbinate Romae in Farnesianis hortis transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem ac
laudem colorum luminibus expressa (Rome, Domenico de’ Rossi: 1693). Etching,
50 × 76 cm. London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. DYCE.2540. Image
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London 195
4.19 Nicolas Dorigny, After Raphael, “Deorum Concilium,” in Nicolas Dorigny,
Psyches Et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula a Raphaele Sanctio Vrbinate Romae in
Farnesianis hortis transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem ac laudem colorum
luminibus expressa (Rome, Domenico de’ Rossi: 1693). Etching, 50 × 76 cm.
London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. DYCE.2539. Image © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London 196
5.1 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 47: “Sol”. Public domain 203
5.2 Ludovico Lazzarelli, with the help of the muse Thalia, presents his work Fasti
Christianae religionis to Ferdinand I of Aragon (Ferrante), king of Naples.
Illumination of the dedication scene in the manuscript Yale, Beinecke 391 206
5.3a “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 5: “Zintilomo”. Engraving, 18.5 × 10.6 cm. London,
National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.9510. Public domain 207
5.3b “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 19: “Clio”. Engraving, 17.8 × 10 cm. London,
National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald Collection, 1969.6.10. Public domain 208
5.4 Roman altar with image of Saturnus, ca. 50 AD. inconnu - User:Jean-Pol
GRANDMONT (2011), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.
php?curid=26196274 217
5.5 Elliptic orbits of the planets around the sun 218
5.6 Saturnus in its natural colour, as photographed by orbiter Cassini in July 2008.
CC BY 2.0, Image Editor, https://www.flickr.com/photos/11304375
@N07/2818891443 219
5.7 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 47: “Saturno”. Engraving, 17.8 × 10 cm. London,
National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald Collection, 1969.6.20. Public domain 221
5.8 Perugia, Collegio del Cambio, Sala d’audienze. Frescos by Pietro Perugino.
Ceiling: the pagan gods as planets (1496–1500) (wikimedia commons) 223
5.9 Pietro Perugino. The planet Saturnus in anthropomorphic appearance on his
chariot. Perugia, Collegio di Cambio, Sala d’audienze, ceiling (1496–1500).
wikimedia commons 224
5.10 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 37 “Mars”. London, National Gallery of Art.
Public domain 226
5.11 Marble statue of Mars (Mars Ultor), 2nd century AD, Musei Capitolini.
Public domain 228
xviii Illustrations

5.12 Pietro Perugino. The planet Mars in its anthropomorphic appearance on his
chariot. Perugia, Collegio di Cambio, Sala d’audienze, ceiling (1496–1500).
wikimedia commons 229
5.13 Pietro Perugino. The planet Venus in its anthropomorphic appearance. Perugia,
Collegio di Cambio, Sala delle audienze, ceiling (1496–1500). wikimedia
commons 229
5.14 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 43: “Venus”. Engraving, 18.4 × 10.6 cm. London,
National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald Collection, 1964.8.32. Public domain 230
6.1 Albrecht Dürer, Imagines coeli Septentrionales cum duodecim imaginibus
zodiaci, 1515, ink on paper, 45.5 × 43 cm, British Museum 252
6.2 Maarten van Heemskerck, Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the
Wonders of the World, 1535–1536, oil on canvas, 147.3 × 383.5 cm, Walters Art
Museum, Baltimore MD 254
6.3 Maarten van Heemskerck, Panorama Looking East from Janiculum,
1532–ca. 1537, ink on paper, 13.2 × 20.9 cm (left), 13.4 × 20.9 cm (right),
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin 255
6.4 Maarten van Heemskerck, Panoramic View of the Ripa Grande Looking North
from Aventine, 1532–ca. 1537, ink on paper, 12.3 × 20.4 cm (left), 13.5 × 20.8 cm
(right), Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin 256
6.5 Copy After Maarten van Heemskerck (by ‘Anonymous A’ /Hermannus
Posthumus?) Northern Side of the Palatine Hill, 1532–ca. 1537, ink on paper, 19.8
× 30.8 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin 257
6.6 Jean Cousin the Younger, Putti Playing in a Landscape with Classical Ruins,
ca. 1550, ink on paper, 15.9 × 23.4 cm, British Museum 260
6.7 Virgil Solis after Léonard Thiry, “Artists Drawing a Ruin Fantasy”, The Little
book of Architectural Ruins, 1550–62, ink on paper, 15 × 10.2 cm, Victoria and
Albert Museum 261
7.1 Isaac Duchemius after Adriaen de Weert, Portrait of Jan van der Noot, between
1579 and 1595. Engraving, 40.5 × 33.4 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
Image © Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen 279
7.2 Jan van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden poëtixe wercken (London:
1570 or 1571?), title page. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library. Image
© Folger Shakespeare Library 280
7.3 Peter de Witte (Peter Candid), Allegory of the Deadly Sins. Oil on panel, 102 ×
146 cm. Private collection. Image © RKD 285
7.4 Jan and Hubert van Eyck, Ghenter Altarpiece (inside), 1432. Wood, tempera, and
oil, 3,5 m × 4,6 m. Ghent, St. Bavo. Image © Public domain 287
7.5 Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, after Adriaan de Weerdt, Huichelarij neemt de
plaats in van vroomheid, 1604. Etching – engraving, 20.6 × 12.1 cm. Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum. Image © Rijksmuseum 289
Illustrations xix

7.6 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Oil on
panel, 118 × 164.5 cm (detail). Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Image
© Kunsthistorisches Museum 294
7.7 Epigramme after Petrarch, by Jan van der Noot (poem) and Marcus Gheeraerts
(etching), in Jan van der Noot, Het theatre oft toon-neel (London: 1568). This
copy is combined with Jan Van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden
poëtixe wercken (London: 1570 or 1571?). Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare
Library. Image © Folger Shakespeare Library 296
7.8 Sonnet after Joachim du Bellay, by Jan van der Noot (poem) and Marcus
Gheeraerts (etching), in Jan Van der Noot, Het theatre oft toon-neel (London:
1568). This copy is combined with Jan Van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende
verscheyden poëtixe wercken (London: 1570 or 1571?). Washington, DC, Folger
Shakespeare Library. Image © Folger Shakespeare Library 298
7.9 Pierre Eskrich (Pierre Vase), Fainct Religion, in Andrea Alciato’s Emblemes
(Lyons: 1549), fol. 24. Woodcut. The French translation is by Barthélemy Aneau.
Glasgow University Library: SM33. Image © Glasgow University Library 299
7.10 The Whore of Babylon, by Jan van der Noot (poem) and Marcus Gheeraerts
(etching), in Jan van der Noot, Het theatre oft toon-neel (London: 1568). This
copy is combined with Jan Van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden
poëtixe wercken (London: 1570 or 1571?). Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare
Library. Image © Folger Shakespeare Library 300
8.1 Jean Germain, ‘La Paletta.’ Illustration in Germain, Breve e sustantiale trattato
intorno alle figure anathomiche delli più principali animali terestri, aquatili, et
volatili (1625). Engraving. Image © Wellcome Collection 322
8.2 Johannes Walaeus, Dissection of dog from W. Harvey, 1647. Woodcut. Image
© Wellcome Collection 328
9.1 Robert Campin, St. John the Baptist and the Franciscan Heinrich von Werl
(left panel in a triptych with the Prado St. Barbara) (1438). Oil on oak panel,
101 × 47 cm. Madrid, The Prado Museum (inv. no. P001513). Image © Erich
Lessing / Art Resource, NY 337
9.2 Robert Campin, St. Barbara (right panel in a triptych with the Prado St. John
the Baptist with the Franciscan Heinrich von Werl) (1438). Oil on oak panel,
101 × 47 cm. Madrid, The Prado Museum (inv. no. P001514). Image © Erich
Lessing / Art Resource, NY 338
9.3 Robert Campin, Trinity (left wing of a diptych with the Hermitage Virgin and
Child by a Fireplace) (1430s). Oil on panel, 34.3 × 24.5 cm. Saint Petersburg, The
State Hermitage Museum (inv. no. GÉ-443). Photograph © The State Hermitage
Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin 339
9.4 Robert Campin, Virgin and Child by a Fireplace (right wing of a diptych with the
Hermitage Trinity) (1430s). Oil on panel, 34.3 × 24.5 cm. Saint Petersburg, The
xx Illustrations

State Hermitage Museum (inv. no. GÉ-442). Photograph © The State Hermitage
Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin 340
9.5 Robert Campin or follower, Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen (ca. 1440). Oil
with egg tempera on oak with walnut additions, 63.4 × 48.5 cm. London, The
National Gallery (inv. no. NG2609). Image © National Gallery, London / Art
Resource, NY 341
9.6 Workshop of Robert Campin (Jacques Daret?), Portrait of a Franciscan (?)
(left wing of a diptych with the London Virgin and Child in an Interior) (before
1432). Oil on oak, 18.7 × 11.7 cm. London, The National Gallery (inv. no. NG6377).
Image © National Gallery, London /Art Resource, NY 342
9.7 Workshop of Robert Campin (Jacques Daret?), Virgin and Child in an Interior
(right wing of a diptych with the London Portrait of a Franciscan) (before 1432).
Oil on oak, 18.7 × 11.6 cm. London, The National Gallery (inv. no. NG6514). Image
© National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY 343
9.8 Robert Campin, Mérode Triptych (central panel) (ca. 1427–1432). Oil on oak,
64.1 × 63.2 cm. New York City, The Cloisters Collection (inv. no. 56.70a–c). By
Courtesy of The Cloisters Collection, NY 344
10.1 Nicolas Poussin, The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier (1641). Oil on canvas, 444 ×
234 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv. no. 7289). Image © RMN-Grand Palais
(musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle 371
10.2 Jacques Stella, Child Jesus in the Temple found by his parents (1640). Oil on
canvas, 323 × 200 cm. Les Andelys, Notre-Dame des Andelys. Image © Peter
Horree / Alamy Stock Photo 372
10.3 Michel Dorigny after Simon Vouet, Madonna taking young Jesuits under her
protection (1642). Etching, 52.4 × 30 cm. London, The British Museum (inv.
no. 1841,1211.39.38). Image © Trustees of the British Museum 373
10.4 Raphael, Transfiguration (1516–1520). Tempera on wood, 405 × 278 cm. Vatican
City, Pinacotheca Vaticana (inv. no. 40333). Image © Governatorato dello SCV –
Direzione dei Musei 376
10.5 Cornelis Cort after Raphael, Transfiguration (1573). Engraving, 61.8 × 39.5 cm.
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-P-OB-7146). Image © Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam 379
10.6 Theodoor Galle, Speculum exemplare, in David Jan, Duodecim specula
(Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus: 1610) X. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (inv. no.
RP-P-OB-6761). Image © Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 387
10.7 Nicolas Poussin, The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier (1641). Oil on canvas, 444 ×
234 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv. no. 7289). Detail of Fig. 10.1: Francis Xavier
and Juan Fernández 397
10.8 Raphael, Transfiguration (1516–1520). Tempera on wood, 410 × 279 cm. Vatican
City, Pinacotheca Vaticana (inv. no. 40333). Detail of Fig. 10.4: The martyred
patron saints 398
Illustrations xxi

10.9 Annibale Carracci, The Dead Christ Mourned (The Three Maries) (ca. 1604). Oil
on canvas, 92.8 × 103.2 cm. London, The National Gallery (inv. no. NG2923).
Image © 399
10.10 Nicolas Poussin, The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier (1641). Oil on canvas, 444 ×
234 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv. no. 7289). Detail of Fig. 10.1: The mother
bending over her daughter 401
10.11 Raphael, Transfiguration (1516–1520). Tempera on wood, 405 × 278 cm. Vatican
City, Pinacotheca Vaticana (inv. no. 40333). Detail of Fig. 10.4: The Apostle
dressed in red 402
11.1 Peter and David in front of a funeral momument. Frontispiece to Les Tableaux
de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Réne
Lochon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. © Bibliothèque
nationale de France 411
11.2 The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving, Anonymous, 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [2]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France 412
11.3 The Deluge. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François
Chauveau (designer) and Jean Couvay (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms.
D-7910 Unpag. [28] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 413
11.4 The Crossing of the Red Sea. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Gabriel Le Brun (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [52] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 414
11.5 The Penitent King David. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Gabriel Le Brun (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [78] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 415
11.6 Manasseh in Chains. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François
Chauveau (designer) and Réne Lochon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms.
D-7910 Unpag. [106] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 416
11.7 Jonah Preaching to the People of Nineveh. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Réne Lochon (engraver)
21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [134] © Bibliothèque nationale de
France 417
11.8 King Nebuchadnezzar. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Gabriel Le Brun (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [162] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 418
11.9 The Babylonian Exile. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Jacques Grignon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [192] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 419
11.10 Antiochus on his deathbed. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Boulanger (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [230] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 420
xxii Illustrations

11.11 Saint John the Baptist. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Jacques Grignon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [258] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 421
11.12 The Temptation of Christ in the Desert. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving by Georges Tournier (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910
Unpag. [276] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 422
11.13 The Raising of Lazarus. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Boulanger (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [308] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 423
11.14 The Salvation of Zacchaeus. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Jacques Grignon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [334] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 424
11.15 The Adulterous Woman. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Georges Tournier (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [358] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 425
11.16 The Good Samaritan. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
Jean Couvay (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [386]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France 426
11.17 The Prodigal Son. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François
Chauveau (designer) and Georges Tournier (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF
Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [408] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 427
11.18 The Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Réne Lochon (engraver)
21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [432] © Bibliothèque nationale
de France 428
11.19 Saint Peter Crying. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François
Chauveau (designer) and Jean Couvay (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms.
D-7910 Unpag. [458] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 429
11.20 The Penitent Thief. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving, Anonymous,
21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [483] © Bibliothèque nationale
de France 430
11.21 Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Couvay (engraver)
21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [508] © Bibliothèque nationale
de France 431
11.22 Saint Magdalene in her Cave. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving
by François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Boulanger (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [532] © Bibliothèque nationale de France 432
11.23 Theodosius I kneeling at the feet of Saint Ambrose. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence
(1656). Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jacques Grignon
Illustrations xxiii

(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [566] © Bibliothèque
nationale de France 433
11.24 Visualization of Saint John the Baptist’s words. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence
(1656). Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910, 268 © Bibliothèque nationale de France 451
12.1 After Filippo Pigafetta, “Dem Thier [sic] Zebra”, in Regnum Congo hoc est
warhaffte und eigentliche Beschreibung des Königreichs Congo in Africa, und
deren angrenzenden Länder. Frankfurt-am-Main 1609. University Library
Heidelberg. A 6022-2 Folio RES 484
12.2 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Aerarii Publici Rome (ca. 1535–1540). Engraving,
10 × 13.4 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(120b)). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York 486
12.3 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Pantheon Rome (ca. 1535–1540). Engraving,
11.4 × 15.8 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(115a)). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York 487
12.4 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Mercurii Templum (ca. 1535–1540). Engraving,
13.8 × 9.4 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(117a)). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York 489
12.5 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Templum Mercurii (1550). Etching (bound in
miscellany). Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA)
(Num 4 Res 85). Open License Image 490
12.6 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Templa Pacis (1550). Etching (bound in
miscellany). Paris, Bibliothèque de l’INHA (Num 4 Res 85). Open License
Image 493
12.7 Attributed to Francesco Rosselli, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba
(ca. 1470–1490). Engraving, 29.3 × 43.4 cm. London, The British Museum
(1845,0825.477). Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, London 494
12.8 Lambert Suavius after an unidentified Italian printmaker, Ruin of a Round
Temple [Templum Idor(um). Egito] (1554). Etching, 17.2 × 12.4 cm. New
York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 48.13.4(65)). Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 500
12.9 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Teatrum Bordeos (ca. 1535–1540). Engraving,
13.6 × 9.9 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(116a)). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York 501
12.10 Master of Story of Cadmus after Giulio Romano, The Contest of Marsyas
and Apollo (ca. 1542–1545). Etching, 32.4 cm (diameter). London, The
British Museum (1835,0711.16) Image © The Trustees of the British
Museum, London 501
xxiv Illustrations

12.11 Attributed to Agostino Veneziano, The Arch of Constantine (ca. 1535–1540).

Engraving 28.7 × 22.6 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(acc. no. 41.72(1.82)). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 507
12.12 After Giovanni Battista Montano, “Ancient Temple with a Centralized Plan”,
in Scielta di Varii Tempietti Antichi (Rome, Giovanni Battista Soria: 1624).
Engraving (bound in miscellany). Rome, Biblioteca Herziana (Ca-MON 820–
2910 gr raro) 513
13.1 Hendrick Goltzius, Landscape with Venus and Adonis, 1596 [or 1598]. Pen and
brown ink on brown-tinted paper, 635 × 484 mm. Albertina, Vienna 521
13.2 Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Frederick de Vries, 1597. Engraving, 361 × 267 mm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 523
13.3a Title-Page of Nikolaus Reusner, Picta poesis Ovidiana. Thesaurus propemodum
omnium fabularum poeticarum, Fausti Sabaei Brixiani, aliorumque clarorum
virorum (quorum nomenclatura Dedicationem proxime sequitur) tam
Veterum, quam Recentium, Epigrammatis expositarum. Opus sane lepidum, et
argutum, lectuque in primis utile, ac iucundum. Ex recensione Nicolai Reusneri,
Iurisconsulti, & Poëtae Laureati (Frankfurt am Main, I. Spies [impensis
S. Feyerabent]: 1580) 536
13.3b Virgil Solis, Venus and Adonis, 1563, from Nikolaus Reusner, Picta poesis
Ovidiana (Frankfurt am Main, I. Spies [impensis S. Feyerabent]: 1580), fol. 103r.
Woodcut and letterpress, octavo 537
13.4 Title-Page of Sprengius Johannes, Metamorphoses Ovidii, argumentis quidem
soluta oratione, Enarrationibus autem et Allegorijs Elegiaco versu accuratissime
expositae, summaque diligentia ac studio illustratae (Frankfurt am Main,
Sigmund Feyerabent – Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus
[Weigand Han] (haeredes): 1563) 540
13.5 Title-Page of Johannes Posthius, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt
am Main, Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus [Weigand Han]
(haeredes): 1563) 541
13.6 Hendrick Goltzius, The Age of Iron from the Metamorphoses, 1589. Engraving,
176 × 253 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 548
13.7 Hendrick Goltzius, Gigantomachy from Metamorphoses, 1589. Engraving,
176 × 253 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 548
13.8 Hendrick Goltzius, Jupiter Convenes the Gods to Discuss the Destruction of the
World, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 255 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 549
13.9 Hendrick Goltzius, Jupiter Transforms Lycaon into a Wolf, 1589. Engraving,
176 × 255 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 549
13.10 Hendrick Goltzius, Neptune Calls Forth the Waters, 1589. Engraving, 176 ×
252 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 550
13.11 Hendrick Goltzius, The Destruction of the World by Flood, 1589. Engraving, 177 ×
255 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 550
Illustrations xxv

13.12 Hendrick Goltzius, Deucalion and Pyrrha Seeding the Earth with Stones, 1589.
Engraving, 176 × 253 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 551
13.13 Hendrick Goltzius, Apollo Slays Python, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 252 mm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 551
13.14 Hendrick Goltzius, Apollo Slays Python, and Apollo and Seizing Daphne as
she Transforms into a Laurel, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 252 mm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 552
13.15 Hendrick Goltzius, The Rivers Come to Visit the Bereaved Peneus, 1589.
Engraving, 176 × 253 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 552
13.16 Hendrick Goltzius, Jupiter and Io, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 252 mm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 553
13.17 Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury and Argus, 177 × 255 mm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 553
13.18 Hendrick Goltzius, Pan and Syrinx, 177 × 254 mm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 554
13.19 Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury Slays Argus, 176 × 252 mm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 554
13.20 Hendrick Gotlzius, Clymene Avows to Phaëthon that the Sun Is his Father, 1589.
Engraving, 176 × 252 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 555
13.21 Virgil Solis, Deucalion and Pyrrha, 1563, from Johannes Posthius von
Gersmersheim, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt am Main,
Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus [Weigand Han] (haeredes):
1563) 11. Woodcut and letterpress, oblong octavo. Universiteitsbibliotheek
Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties 569
13.22 Virgil Solis, Apollo Triumphant over the Slain Python, 1563, from Johannes
Posthius von Gersmersheim, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt
am Main, Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus [Weigand
Han] (haeredes): 1563) 12. Woodcut and letterpress, oblong octavo.
Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties 570
13.23 Virgil Solis, Apollo, Struck by Cupid’s Arrow, Pursues Daphne, 1563, from
Johannes Posthius von Gersmersheim, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV
(Frankfurt am Main, Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus
[Weigand Han] (haeredes): 1563) 13. Woodcut and letterpress, oblong octavo.
Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties 571
13.24 Virgil Solis, Daphne, Struck by Cupid’s Arrow, Eschews Apollo and Is Transformed
into the Laurel, 1564, from Johannes Posthius von Gersmersheim, Tetrasticha
in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt am Main, Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] –
Wigandus Gallus [Weigand Han] (haeredes): 1563) 14. Woodcut and letterpress,
oblong octavo. Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties 572
13.25 Hendrick Goltzius, The Daughters of Cecrops Uncover the Infant Erichthonius,
1590. Engraving, 177 × 255 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 577
xxvi Illustrations

13.26 Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury Visits the Bedchamber of Herse, Having Turned
Envious Aglauros into a Stone, 1590. Engraving, 176 × 255 mm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 578
13.27 Title-Page of Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, waer in voor eerst de
leerlustighe Iueght den grondt der Edel Vry Schilderconst in verscheyden
deelen wort voorghedraghen (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604).
Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties 580
13.28 Hendrick Goltzius, Landscape with Mercury in Flight, 1596. Pen and brown ink,
308 × 433 mm. Musée des Beaux-Arts et de Archéologie, Besançon 592
13.29 Johannes and / or Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Alpine
Landscape with a River Valley Cut through by a Stream, 1553–1558. Engraving and
etching, 324 × 428 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 609
13.30 Anonymous after Titian, Landscape with Nobleman and Groom by a River,
ca. 1525. Woodcut, 335 × 450 mm. British Museum, London 609
13.31 Giovanni Britto after Titian, Landscape with Milkmaid, Goatherd, and an Eagle,
ca. 1530–1550. Woodcut, 374 × 526 mm. British Museum, London 610
13.32 Cornelis Cort after Titian, St. Jerome Reading in the Wilderness, 1565. Engraving,
312 × 280 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 611
13.33 Cornelis Cort after Girolamo Muziano, St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness,
ca. 1573. Engraving, 537 × 381 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 612
13.34 Cornelis Cort after Girolamo Muziano, Landscape with the Vision of
St. Eustachius, 1573. Engraving, 520 × 390 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 613
13.35 Hendrick Goltzius, Mountain Landscape with Travelers, 1594. Pen and brown
ink, 440 × 356 mm. Teylers Museum, Haarlem 616
14.1 Rembrandt, Judas Returning the 30 Pieces of Silver (1629), Oil/oak, 79 × 102.3 cm.
© Private Collection 623
14.2 Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg (engraver) after Abraham Bloemaert,
Penitent Saint Peter (1609–1611). Engraving, 26.8 × 17.1 cm. Amsterdam,
Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-P-1904-60). Image © Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 628
14.3 Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg (engraver) after Abraham Bloemaert, Judas
Iscariot (1611), Engraving, 26.8 × 17.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv.
no. RP-P-OB-103.684). Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 629
14.4 Albrecht Dürer, The Despairing Man (ca. 1515). Etching, 18.6 ×
13.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-P-OB-1233). Image
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 630
14.5 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Christ Mocked and Judas Returning the
Silver”, in [Hiël], Figures de toutes les plus remarquables histoires et aultres
événements du Vieil et Nouveau Testament ; Avec une brieve exposition
allégorique, ou spirituelle de chascune d’icelles histoires, très utile à toutes sortes
de gents (Amsterdam, Michel Colijn: 1613), plate 8. Etching, plate 10.4 × 22.7 cm.
Illustrations xxvii

First published Leiden, Frans van Raphelingen: ca. 1592. Amsterdam University
Library Onderzoekzaal Bijzondere Collecties (Shelfmark OTM: O 62-2061).
Photo: Author 631
14.6 Jan Lievens, Jacob Anointing the Stone (1625–1626). Etching, 20 ×
16 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-P-OB-4227). Image
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 633
14.7 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Landscape with Jacob Anointing the Stone
and God Naming him Israel”, in Bernardus Sellius, Emblemata Sacra […]
(Amsterdam, Michel Colijn: 1613), plate 46. Etching, 18.7 × 24.1 cm. First
published Leiden, Frans van Raphelingen: 1592. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (inv.
no. Bl-1919-77-47). Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 634
14.8 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Judas taking the Silver”, in Frans Vervoort,
t’ghulden ghebedeboecxken (Antwerp, Jan van Ghelen: 1574), unnumbered
pages. Woodcut, 10 × 6.5 cm. London, The British Library (Shelfmark 3455.
ccc.51). Image © The British Library 636
14.9 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Judas returning the Silver”, in Frans Vervoort,
t’ghulden ghebedeboecxken (Antwerp, Jan van Ghelen: 1574), unnumbered
pages. Woodcut, 10 × 6.5 cm. London, The British Library (Shelfmark 3455.
ccc.51). Image © The British Library 637
14.10 Hans Collaert (engraver) after Crispijn van den Broecke (attributed), Hope and
Judas (1576). Engraving, 18.8 × 25.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv.
no. RP-P-2003-36). Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 638
14.11 Bernard Picart (engraver) after Samuel van Hoogstraten (attributed), Judas
Receiving the Silver (1734). Etching, 1734, 14.5 × 21.7 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet (inv.
no. RP-P-OB-51.811). Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 640
14.12 Robert Dunkarton (engraver) after Salomon Koninck, Judas Returning the
Silver (1791). Mezzotint, 46.8 × 59 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no.
RP-P-1918-2094). Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 642
14.13 Arnoud van Halen after Rembrandt, Jeremias de Decker (ca. 1720). Oil on
copper, 11 × 8.5 cm. oval. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (inv. SK-A-1504). Image
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 645
14.14 Arnoud van Halen, Jeremias de Decker (ca. 1720). Mezzotint, 16.5 ×
14 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. RP-P-1906-3334). Image © Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam 646
15.1 Rembrandt, Lucretia, 1664, oil on canvas, 120 × 101 cm., Washington, D.C.,
National Gallery of Art. Andrew W. Mellon Collection 651
15.2 Rembrandt, Lucretia, 1666, oil on canvas, 110.2 × 92.3 cm, Minneapolis,
Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The William Hood Dunwoody Fund 652
15.3 Rembrandt, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1629, oil on panel,
79 × 102.3 cm., Mulgrave Castle 654
xxviii Illustrations

15.4 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait Wide-Eyed and Open-Mouthed, 1630, etching,

5.1 × 4.6 cm., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum 655
15.5 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Laughing, 1630, etching, 5.2 × 4.5 cm.,
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum 656
15.6 Rembrandt, Entombment of Christ, 1639, oil on canvas, 92.5 × 68.9 cm., Munich,
Alte Pinakothek 658
15.7 Rembrandt, Blinding of Samson, 1636, oil on canvas, 236 × 302 cm., Frankfurt,
Städel Museum 659
15.8 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, The Suicide of Lucretia, 1509–1514,
engraving, 21.2 × 13 cm., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum 662
15.9 Albrecht Dürer, The Suicide of Lucretia, 1518, oil on panel, 168 × 75 cm., Munich,
Alte Pinakothek 663
15.10 Lucas van Leyden, Lucretia, c. 1515, engraving, 11.7 × 7.9 cm., New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, the Elisha
Whittelsey Fund, 2018 664
15.11 Joos van Cleve, The Death of Lucretia, 1520/ 1525, 76 × 54 cm., Vienna,
Kunsthistorische Museum 666
15.12 Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Suicide of Lucretia, 1529, oil on panel,
74.9 × 54 cm., Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Sarah Campbell Blaffer
Foundation 667
15.13 Aegidius Sadeler, after Hans von Aachen, Death of Lucretia, 1580–1629,
engraving, 19.5 × 14.2 cm., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum 668
15.14 Crispin de Passe the Elder, Lucretia, from a series of Nine Female Worthies, 1601,
engraving with etching, 26.5 × 19 cm., London, British Museum. The Trustees of
the British Museum 669
15.15 Paulus Moreelse, Death of Lucretia, 1612, chiaroscuro woodcut,
25.7 × 32.9 cm., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art. Gift of
Jean Paul Slusser 672
15.16 Tobias Stimmer, The Death of Lucretia, 1574, woodcut, 10.6 × 12.7 cm.,
reproduced from Golahny A., Rembrandt’s Reading: The Artist’s Bookshelf of
Ancient Poetry and History (Amsterdam: 2003) 153, Fig. 40 673
15.17 Rembrandt, Death of the Virgin, 1639, etching and drypoint, 41 × 315 cm.,
London, British Museum. The Trustees of the British Museum 679
15.18 Rembrandt, Sheet of Studies with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed, etc., 1641/ 1642,
etching, 13.6 × 15.2 cm., London, British Museum, The Trustees of the
British Museum 680
16.1 Tintoretto, “Stealing of the Body,” (1552–1556). Oil on canvas. 397 × 315 cm.
Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia. Image © Alamy 686
16.2 Tintoretto, “Rescue of a Saracen at Sea” (1552–1556). Oil on canvas. 396 ×
334 cm. Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia. Image © Alamy 687
Illustrations xxix

16.3 Tintoretto, “Miracles of St. Mark” (1552–1556). Oil on canvas. 396 × 400 cm.
Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. Image © Pinacoteca di Brera 688
16.4 Tintoretto, “Miracle of the Slave” (1548). Oil on canvas. 416 × 544 cm. Venice,
Gallerie dell’Accademia. Image © Alamy 693
17.1 Albrecht Dürer, Deluge, 1525. Wash, pigment, and ink on paper. Vienna:
Kunsthistorisches Museum 708
17.2 Mortiz von Thausing, Albrecht Dürers Briefe (1872), title page 710
17.3 Augustin Anton Pfaundler, Traumgesicht, (after Dürer), 1811. Bamberg:
Staatsbibliothek 711
17.4 Albrecht Dürer, colophon from The Large Passion, 1511. Chicago:
Art Institute 714
17.5 Hans Virdung, Practica deutsch Meister Hansen Virdung von Haßfurt (Speyer,
1523), title page. Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek 718
17.6 Albrecht Dürer, The Syphilitic, in Theodoricus Ulsenius, Vaticinium in
epidemicam scabiem (1496). Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek 719
17.7 Albrecht Dürer, The Despairing Ones, 1515, etching. Kiel: Kunsthalle 722
17.8 Albrecht Dürer, Pond in the Woods, ca. 1497. Watercolor. London: British
Museum 727
17.9 Albrecht Dürer, Unterweyssung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1525), fol. H3r 729
17.10 Albrecht Dürer, Vier Bücher der menschlicher Proportion (Nuremberg, 1528),
fols. V1v–V2r 730
17.11 Albrecht Dürer, Vier Bücher der menschlicher Proportion (Nuremberg, 1528),
fol. B4r 731
17.12 Albrecht Dürer, Job and His Wife on the Dunghill, c. 1504. Oil on panel.
Frankfurt/Main: Städel 733
17.13 Jörg Glockendon, Die newen wunderbarlichen zeichen […] (Nuremberg, 1501).
Heidelberg: Universitatsbibliothek 735
18.1 “Stellaria”, in Pietro Andrea Mattioli, De I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Mattioli,
Sanese, Nelli Sei Libri. (Venezia, Felice Valgrisio: 1585): 1236–1237. Dried plant
inserted into Mattioli’s Discorsi. ca. 5 × 5 cm. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale
Marciana (inv. no. D075 D027). Image © Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana 742
18.2 Pietro Andrea Mattioli, New Kreüterbuch : mit den allerschönsten und artlichsten
Figuren aller Gewechss, dergleichen vormals in keiner Sprach nie an Tag kommen.
Prague, Durch Georgen Melantrich von Auentin, auff sein vnd Vincenti Valgriss
Buchdruckers zu Venedig uncosten, 1563. Leather bound text block. Image
© George Peabody Library, The Johns Hopkins University 745
18.3 Dosso and Battista Dossi (1531). Stua della Famea. Fragmented Statues and
Aesop’s Fables (ca. 1618–1621). Fresco, Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio 752
xxx Illustrations

18.4 Anon., “Poliphilo in a Field of Ruins”, in Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili […] (Venice, Aldus Manutius: 1499). Woodcut, 9 × 7 cm. Baltimore,
George Peabody Library (inv. no. Incun. 1499 C699). Image © George Peabody
Library, The Johns Hopkins University 755
18.5 Anon., “Monumental Portal”, in Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili:
ubi humana omnia non nisi somnium esse docet, atque obiter plurima scitu sane
quam digna commemorate. (Venice, Aldus Manutius: 1499). Woodcut, 15 × 9 cm.
Baltimore, George Peabody Library (inv. no. Incun. 1499 C699). Image © George
Peabody Library, The Johns Hopkins University 756
18.6 Gherardo Cibo, Asplenium hemonites with Ruins in a Landscape (ca. 1564–1584).
Extracts from an edition of Dioscorides’ “De re medica”, fol. 51. Watercolour and
gouache, 315 × 210 mm. London, British Library (inv. no. BL MS Add. 22333).
Image © British Library, London 759
18.7 Albrecht Dürer, The Virgin Crowned By Two Angels Above a Landscape (ca. 1515).
Woodcut, 10.1 × 55.2 cm. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (inv.
no. 1943.3.3679). Image © National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 760
19.1 Anon., Christ Child (ca. 1600–1675). Ivory with polychromy, ca. 36 cm.
Monterrey, Museo de Historia Mexicana. Image © author. (color) 768
19.2 Anon., Christ Child (ca. 1510). Walnut with polychromy. Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum. Image © Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam. (color) 769
19.3 Anon., Santo Niño de Cebú (ca. 1520). Wood with polychromy. Cebu City,
Basílica Minore del Santo Niño de Cebú. Image © Cofradiabsn at Wikipedia.
org, Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0). (color) 770
19.4 Anon., Virgen Conquistadora (ca. 1520). Wood with polychromy. Puebla, San
Francisco. Image © author 772
19.5 Anon., Cuff of linen with Flemish bobbin lace (ca. 1635–50). Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum. Image © Rijksmuseum. (color) 774
19.6 Ship registry for the ‘San Diego’ (1622). Seville, Archivo General de Indias,
Contratación 1172, N.2, R.11, fol. 74r. Image © Archivo General de Indias 776
19.7 Jacob Jordaens, The Betrayal of Christ (ca. 1650). Oil on canvas, 225.5 × 246.3 cm.
Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art (Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund 1970.32).
Image © Cleveland Museum of Art, Creative Commons license (CC0-1.0).
(color) 780
19.8 Ship registry for the ‘San Francisco de Paula’ (1607/8). Seville, Archivo General
de Indias, Contratación 1151C, N.4 Image © Archivo General de Indias 785
20.1 Balbuena, Bernardo de, Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erífile (Madrid, Alonso
Martín: 1608). Book, octavo. Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona. Title page.
Image taken by the author with permission of the Rare Book and Manuscript
CRAI Library 791
Illustrations xxxi

20.2 Bramón, Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, (Mexico City,
Juan de Alcázar: 1620). Book, octavo. Providence, RI, John Carter Brown Library.
Title page. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library 792
20.3 Congregatio Beatae Mariae Virginis Annuntiatae, Poeticarum institutionum
liber, variis ethnicorum, christianorumque exemplis illustratus, ad vsum studiosae
iuuentutis (Mexico City, Enrique Martínez: 1605). Book, octavo. Providence,
RI, John Carter Brown Library. Title page. Courtesy of the John Carter
Brown Library 796
20.4 Congregatio Beatae Mariae Virginis Annuntiatae, Poeticarum institutionum
liber, variis ethnicorum, christianorumque exemplis illustratus, ad vsum studiosae
iuuentutis (Mexico City, Enrique Martínez: 1605). Book, octavo. Providence, RI,
John Carter Brown Library. Pages 502–503, visual Marian wordplay. Courtesy of
the John Carter Brown Library 797
20.5 Bramón, Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, (Mexico City,
Juan de Alcázar: 1620). Book, octavo. Providence, RI, John Carter Brown Library.
Fols. 54v–55r, example of Anfriso’s devices. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown
Library 798
20.6 Bramón, Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, (Mexico City,
Juan de Alcázar: 1620). Book, octavo. Providence, RI, John Carter Brown Library.
Fols. 104v–05r, partial description of Marcilda’s arch. Courtesy of the John
Carter Brown Library 801
21.1 William Birch, China Retreat. Engraving, 24 × 30 cm, from The Country Seats of
the United States (Bristol, W. Birch: 1808–1809) 815
21.2 Artists in Guangzhou, China, Jiao Shan (焦山), No. 4, 1790–1796, commissioned
by Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest. Watercolor and ink on
paper, 31.5 × 45 cm. Salem: Peabody Essex Museum. Museum Purchase 1943
(AE86344-29) 817
21.3 Detail of Figure 21.2 825
21.4 Wang, Hui, The Colors of Mount Taihang, 1669. Handscroll, ink and color on silk,
handscroll with mounting 29.8 × 883.9 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Detail 825
21.5 Detail of Figure 21.4 826
Notes on the Editors

Arthur J. DiFuria
is Chair and Professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design,
Savannah, GA, specializing in early modern northern European art. While at
Savannah, he has been a been a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Teaching
Excellence (2015) and a University Presidential Fellow (2011). The Historians
of Netherlandish Art and the Kress foundation have also funded his research.
Since completing his dissertation on Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing
of ruins (2008), he has published essays in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch
Jaarboek, Brill’s Intersections series, and the Intellectual History Review. He is
the editor of Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives
(2016), and his book, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and
the Netherlandish Cult of Ruins, appeared in 2019.

Walter Melion
is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta,
where he has taught since 2004 and currently directs the Fox Center for
Humanistic Inquiry. He chaired the Art History Department in 2011–2014 and
2015–2017. He was previously Professor and Chair of Art History at The Johns
Hopkins University. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and
art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation
between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist
Hendrick Goltzius. In addition to a four-part monograph on Jerónimo Nadal’s
Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (2003, 2005, 2007, 2014), and exhi-
bition catalogues on scriptural illustration and on religious allegory in Dutch
and Flemish prints of the 16th and 17th centuries (2009 & 2019), his books
include Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’
(1991) and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–
1625 (2009). He is co-editor of more than twenty volumes, including Image
and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(2008), Early Modern Eyes (2010), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self: Theory and
Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (2010), The
Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–
1700 (2011), Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–
1700 (2012), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700
(2014), The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism, and
Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts (2014), Image and Incarnation
(2015), Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (2016), Jesuit Image
Notes on the Editors xxxiii

Theory (2016), Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory
and Practice, 1400–1700 (2018), Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation
of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700 (2019), Quid est secre-
tum? Visual Representation of Secrets and Mysteries in Early Modern Europe,
1500–1700, and Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Landscape, 1500–1700.
His articles number more than seventy. He was elected Foreign Member of
the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Between 2014
and 2015, he was Chaire Francqui at the Université Catholique de Louvain and
the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Melion has been the recipient of the 2016
Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Catholic Historical Association,
and the 2019 Baker Award of the Michael C. Carlos Museum, and has been
Scholar in Residence at The Newberry Library since 2017. He is series editor
of Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Three books
in progress are approaching completion: a translation with commentary of
Karel van Mander’s Den grondt der edel vry schilderconst, Imago veridica: The
Form, Function, and Argument of Joannes David, S.J.’s Four Latin Emblem Books
and Cubiculum cordis: Printed Images as Meditative Schemata in Customized
Dutch and Flemish Manuscript Prayerbooks, 1550–1650. Former President of
the Sixteenth Century Society, Melion was recently elected President of the
Historians of Netherlandish Art.
Notes on the Contributors

Carol Elaine Barbour

is a graduate of the University of Toronto (MA, Art History) and the Ontario
College of Art; she is a practising artist and published poet. Currently an MPhil/
PhD student at the Warburg Institute, her research examines the transmission
and reception of the Tabula Cebetis, c. 1500‒1600.

Ivana Bičak
holds a PhD in English and works on the literary reception of anatomical and
medical experiments in early modern Europe. She is especially interested in
the Neo-Latin critique of human and animal experimentation in seventeenth-
century England and Denmark. She is currently a teaching fellow at the
Department of English Studies at Durham University.

Letha C. Ch’ien
is an assistant professor in art history at Sonoma State University. She earned
a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation titled
Making Miracles at the Scuola Grande di San Marco From Bellini to Tintoretto. Her
research interests include Venetian art, civic identity, and cultural transmission.

James Clifton
is Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and Curator in Renais-
sance and Baroque Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has pub-
lished extensively on early-modern European art and culture, most recently
on Johannes Stradanus’s Nova Reperta, Nicolas Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul,
and Louis Finson’s Allegory of the Four Elements. His curated and co-curated
exhibitions include The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain,
1150–1800 (1997); A Portrait of the Artist, 1525–1825 (2005); The Plains of Mars:
European War Prints, 1500–1825 (2009); Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration
in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century (2009); Elegance and Refine-
ment: The Still-Life Paintings of Willem van Aelst (2012); Pleasure and Piety: The
Art of Joachim Wtewael (2015); and Through a Glass Darkly: Allegory and Faith
in Netherlandish Prints from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt (2019).

Teresa Clifton
is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Lecturer in the Department of
Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh and was
the 2017–2018 J.M. Stuart Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. She received
Notes on the Contributors xxxv

her PhD in Hispanic Studies from Brown University with a dissertation entitled
Mexican Arcadias: The Mannerist Pastoral Fiction of New Spain on the pastoral
mode in colonial Mexican fiction.

Karl Enenkel
is Professor of Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin at the University of Münster
(Germany). Previously he was Professor of Neo-Latin at Leiden University
(Netherlands). He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and
Sciences. Among his major book publications are Die Erfindung des Menschen.
Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius
(2008); Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur (ca. 1350–
ca. 1650) (2015); The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of
Knowledge, ca. 1510–1610 (2019), and Ambitious Antiquities, Famous Forebears
(with Koen Ottenheym, 2019). He has (co)edited and co-authored some 35
volumes on a variety of topics; some key topics are Recreating Ancient History
(2001), Mundus Emblematicus. Studies in Neo-Latin Emblem Books (2003),
Cognition and the Book (2004), Petrarch and his Readers (2006), Early Modern
Zoology (2007), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self. Theory and Practice in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (2011), Portuguese Humanism
(2011), Discourses of Power. Ideology and Politics in Neo-Latin Literature
(2012), The Reception of Erasmus (2013), Transformation of the Classics (2013),
Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge (2013), Zoology
in Early Modern Culture (2014), Jesuit Image Theory (2016), Emblems and the
Natural World (2017), The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture (2018),
and The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture
(2018). He has founded the international series Intersections. Studies in Early
Modern Culture (Brill); Proteus. Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation;
Speculum Sanitatis: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medical Culture
(500–1800) (both Brepols), and Scientia universalis. Studien und Texteditionen
zur Wissensgeschichte der Vormoderne (LIT-Münster).

Amy Golahny
is Logan A. Richmond Professor of Art History Emerita at Lycoming College,
Williamsport (PA). She has served as president of the Historians of Netherland-
ish Art and the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. Her articles on
Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Italian neoclassical sculpture and other
topics have appeared in the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, Mas-
ter Drawings, The Art Bulletin, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, Oud Hol-
land, 19th Century and other foremost journals. Her books include Rembrandt’s
Reading (2003) and Rembrandt: Studies in his Varied Approaches to Italian Art
xxxvi Notes on the Contributors

(2020). Forthcoming is a monograph on Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print.

Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humani-
ties, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and other agencies.

Christopher P. Heuer
is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Rochester, New York. A
founding member of the media collaborative Our Literal Speed, Heuer is a for-
mer Clark, Fulbright, Getty, Kress, and CASVA fellow, and in 2019 was awarded
Harvard University’s Bernard Berenson Fellowship at I Tatti in Florence. His
most recent books include Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End
of the Image, and Andrea Büttner: Libri Vargatorum. A new book engages Dürer
and catastrophe.

Barbara A. Kaminska
Ph.D. (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014) is Assistant Professor of
Art History at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX. Her research
focuses on the transformation of religious art and its functions in the sixteenth-
century Netherlands; her current projects investigate approaches to disability,
healing, and charity in Northern Renaissance culture. Her publications include
Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Religious Art for Urban Community (2019), and essays
in Explorations in Renaissance Culture, Journal of Early Modern Christianity,
Renaissance and Reformation, and Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art.

Annie Maloney
is a Ph.D. Candidate at Emory University and a Visiting Lecturer at Oxford
College of Emory University. She received her B.A. in art history from Boston
College in 2014. Her research interests include seventeenth-century painting,
drawing, and print culture, antiquarianism, Jesuit patronage, image theory,
and emblematics. In her dissertation, supervised by Sarah McPhee, she inves-
tigates how seventeenth-century artists responded to the discovery of ancient
frescoes in Rome through a study of the drawings and publications of Pietro
Santi Bartoli (1635–1700). Annie Maloney has worked as an editorial assistant
on the Brill Intersections volumes Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation
of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700, Quid est secretum? Visual
Representation of Secrets in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, and Landscape and
the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard

received his PhD from the University of Copenhagen: he was awarded an inter-
national postdoctoral fellowship from the Independent Research Foundation
Notes on the Contributors xxxvii

Denmark and has been Directeur d’études invité at EPHE, Section des Sciences
Historiques. Currently, he is assistant professor at the Centre for Privacy
Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests include the
tension between religious seclusion and societal engagement, the relation-
ship between manuscript text, print, paratext and image, and the ambiguous
nature of pre-modern privacy.

Dawn Odell
is Associate Professor of Art History at Lewis & Clark College in Portland,
Oregon where she teaches classes on early modern European and East Asian
art. Her research focuses on the exchange of objects and artistic practices
between China, Europe, and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Her recent essays discuss the domestication of Chinese porcelain in
the Netherlands, Dutch book arts and poetic painting traditions in East Asia,
and a “Chinese” screen in Jakarta, Indonesia. Dr. Odell is writing a book about
the subject of the present volume’s essay, A.E. van Braam Houckgeest and the
collection of Chinese art he displayed at his Pennsylvania estate.

April Oettinger
is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Goucher College in Baltimore,
Maryland. Her research interests include Lorenzo Lotto and the history
of landscape, the sublime in Italian 16th-century art and literature, the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and the shared languages of natural science and
discourses on painting. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the
Warburg Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the
National Gallery of Art (CASVA). With Karen Hope Goodchild and Leopoldine
Hogendoorp Prosperetti, she co-edited Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy. Art
and the Verdant Earth (2019). She is completing a monograph titled, Animating
Nature. Lorenzo Lotto and the Sublime Turn in 16th-Century Venetian Landscape
Art, 1500–1550.

Shelley Perlove
is Professor Emerita in History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
since 2012 when she retired from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She
specializes in the religious and political culture of Netherlandish and Italian
early modern art, with emphasis upon Rembrandt, Bernini, Heemskerk, and
Guercino. Her most recent research focuses upon the Enochic myth of the
Fallen Angels, and the religious works of the followers of Rembrandt. She has
published the following volumes, the first two of which were honoured by four
prestigious book awards: Bernini and the Idealization of Death (1990); and with
xxxviii Notes on the Contributors

Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age
(2009); others include Pursuit of Faith. Etchings by Rembrandt in the Thrivent
Financial Collection of Religious Art (2010); co-edited with George Keyes,
Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections (2015); and
co-edited with Dagmar Eichberger, Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe
(2019).

Stephanie Porras
is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University. She is the author of
Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (2016), Art of the Northern Renaissance:
Courts, Commerce and Devotion (2018) and co-editor of The Young Dürer:
Drawing the Figure (2013). Her current research focus is on the role artworks
played in early modern globalization; she is currently completing a manuscript
on an Antwerp painting, engraving, and illustrated book that circled the globe
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Femke Speelberg
is Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she oversees the drawings, prints, and
illustrated books related to the history of ornament, design, and architecture.
During her tenure at the Met she has curated various exhibitions, including
Fashion & Virtue. Textile Patterns and the Print Revolution, 1520–1620 (2015–16),
and Chippendale’s “Director”. The Designs and Legacy of a Furniture Maker (2018–
19). Past publications include Scraps of inspiration. Photographs and graphics
in a designer’s album (c. 1870–1905). Rijksmuseum Studies in Photography, 10
(2011). She is currently working on a monograph dedicated to the emergence
of the ornament print in the early-modern print market.

Caecilie Weissert
is professor for Early Modern Art History at the Christian-Albrechts-University
of Kiel. Her focus is on the art and culture of the Netherlands and France. She
is editor of the book Netherlands and France: Exchange of the Visual Arts in the
Sixteenth Century (2020) and co-editor of the forthcoming book Biblia Docet.
Word, Image and Education in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Art and Theatre.

Elliott D. Wise
is Assistant professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Brigham Young
University. His research and publications focus on the devotional function of
late medieval and early modern art. In particular, he is interested in art and
Notes on the Contributors xxxix

liturgy, representations of the Eucharistic Christ and the Virgin Mary, and the
visual culture of the great mendicant and monastic orders. He received a Ph.D.
in Art History from Emory University.

Steffen Zierholz
is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.
He obtained his PhD in 2016 at the University of Bern and received postdoc-
toral fellowships from the Getty Foundation/ACLS, the Bibliotheca Hertziana,
and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. In spring 2021, he was Visiting
Professor at the Ruhr University Bochum. He is particularly interested in issues
of sacred art, the art of living, and the materiality of works of art. His publica-
tions include Räume der Reform: Kunst und Lebenskunst der Jesuiten in Rom,
1580–1700 (2019).
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making
Arthur J. DiFuria and Walter S. Melion

Ekphrasis – the rhetorical term for vivid description of a person, thing, or expe-
rience, or, in a more particular sense, for the eloquent description of a work of
visual art – was integral to the production and reception of early modern art
and poetry. Amongst theoreticians and historians of art, Antonio di Tuccio di
Manetti, Giorgio Vasari, Karel van Mander, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, and Arnold
Houbraken, to name but a few, deployed ekphrastic image-making to richly
varied effects. Moreover, one might plausibly argue that many early modern
pictures operate in an ekphrastic mode: they claim to reconstitute works of
art that solely survived in the textual form of an ekphrasis; or they invite the
beholder to respond to a picture in the way s/he responds to a stirring verbal
image; or they call attention to their status as an image, in the way that ekphra-
sis, as a rhetorical figure, makes one conscious of the process of image-making;
or finally, they foreground the artist’s or the viewer’s agency, in the way that the
rhetor or auditor is adduced as agent of the image being verbally produced.
As will already be evident, these modalities, in their mutual relation, are a bit
slippery, and one purpose of this book is to examine the slippages that occur in
thinking about ekphrasis as a jointly verbal and/or visual, textual and/or pic-
torial phenomenon. What licences us to speak about pictorial description as
ekphrastic in manner and mode? When and why is it appropriate to designate
certain images ekphrastic? Are such images evocative of text-based processes
of image-making, in the way that verbal ekphrases perforce evoke visual ones?

1 Verbal and Visual Ekphrasis

In epideictic oratory, ekphrasis is typically identified as an advanced rhetorical

exercise that verbally reproduces the experience of viewing a person, place, or
thing.1 Ekphrasis describes the object of sight with vividness or enargeia, using

1 The Oxford English Dictionary, https://0-www-oed-com.library.scad.edu/view/Entry/59412?r

edirectedFrom=ekphrasis&, distinguishes an ‘original’ use, ‘an explanation or description of
something, esp. as a rhetorical device’, from its use ‘now’ as ‘spec. a literary device in which
a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described in detail’. The present volume
accepts both senses. For concise overviews of the rhetorical figure, see Hollander J., “The
Poetics of Ekphrasis”, Word and Image 4 (1988) 209–219; and Zeitlin F., “Figure: Ekphrasis”,
Greece & Rome 60 (2013) 17–31.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

2 DIFURIA AND MELION

imaginative, even hyperbolic terms to body forth something that having once
been viewed, is now viewable or, better, visualisable, in the form of an image.2
More specifically, ekphrasis often purports to replicate the experience of view-
ing a work of art. Not only what was seen, but also how it was beheld and
the emotions attendant upon viewing it, are construed as either recoverable
and reproducible, or as the basis for an evocation that extends or amplifies
the object beheld or the action of beholding.3 In rhetorical parlance, the term
ekphrasis, as Michael Baxandall explains in Giotto and the Orators, refers to
detailed description as both a figure of speech and of thought. Codified in the
Progymnasmata of Hermogenes of Tarsus, and popularized through Priscian’s
Praeexercitamenta, this descriptive exercise was considered one of the most
advanced, in that it conjures for the eyes a wide range of visible things, gener-
ally comprised by a single place, and brings them to sight with mimetic clarity,
lifelikeness, and expressiveness.4 More often than not, a work of art – fictive
or actual – constitutes the locus wherein an expressive variety of persons and
things is gathered.
Thanks to Guarino of Verona, the most famous student of Manuel
Chrysoloras, ekphrasis came to be associated with the locus amoenus and the
Virgilian description of pastoral places – green and flowering meadows, bosky
hills, well-watered springs, and locales fragrant with springtime scents and per-
meated by melodious sounds. Within these loci, as Baxandall puts it, attention
is customarily paid to vultus viventes (living faces) and signa spirantia (breath-
ing signs of life). Painters responded to beholders’ expectation that their view-
ing of images should be couched in ekphrastic terms, and that ekphrastic
visual metaphor should be brought to bear on pictorial varietas. With regard
to the early Renaissance painter Pisanello, the recipient of many rapturous
ekphrastic encomia, Baxandall makes the crucial observation: ‘For whether he
was aware of it or not, Pisanello’s work sometimes has the character of contriv-
ing a series of cues for standard humanist responses – Mongols and birds for

2 On enargeia, see Krieger M., Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: 1992)
66–90, 92–112; Manieri A. L’immagine poetica nella teoria degli antichi: phantasia ed enargeia
(Pisa: 1998) 123–148; Elsner J., Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the
Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge: 2002) 1, who equates the term with ‘visibility’; and
Plett H.F., Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age (Leiden: 2012).
3 On ekphrasis as the description of a work of art, see Heffernan J., “Ekphrasis and
Representation”, New Literary History 22 (1991) 307; and idem, Museum of Words: The Poetics
of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: 1993) 191.
4 On ekphrasis as a structural device transferable to the visual arts, see Baxandall M., Giotto and
the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition,
1350–1450. Oxford Warburg Studies (London et al.: 1971) 85–87, 90–96.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 3

variety, whole menageries for decorative itemizing, flashy foreshortenings for

ars, snakes and gibbets for the principle of pleasurable recognition’.5 The same
could be said of many other masters, not least Rembrandt, as we shall soon see.
Apropos of this widely accepted notion of ekphrasis as the elaborate textual
description of something visually various, and of the experience of viewing that
something, the vast body of literature that has analysed the relation between
image and text is notable for its occasional attempts to map ekphrasis’s limits.6
Scholars have scrutinized the terms whereby writers of descriptive imagery
have approached, illuminated, or challenged those limits. How have descrip-
tions of works of art or other kinds of located visual phenomena, either natu-
ral or cultural, operated within the discursive space generated in/through the
friction, cohesion, slippages, elisions, or other engagements between image
and text? Amongst expansive interpretations of ekphrasis, Murray Krieger’s
work has served as an important point of departure. Consider, for example,
his argument, first published in 1967, that Andrew Marvell’s poem, To His
Coy Mistress, embeds an example of ekphrasis despite the poem’s lack of any
attempt to describe an object’s visual aspect.7 According to the poem’s speaker,
the imagined ‘ball’ of the poem’s closing lines possesses ‘all of the strength and
[…] sweetness’ that he and his mistress possess together. For Krieger, the ball’s
encompassment of the speaker’s ‘mastery over time’ cements its status as an
ekphrastic object.8 This interpretation follows from Krieger’s overall notion
that anywhere language’s metaphoric capacity allows it to assume spatiality or
the plasticity of objects, it possesses ‘ekphrastic completeness’.9
Twenty years later, James Heffernan countered that Krieger expanded ek-
phrasis’s limits to ‘the breaking point’, where the rhetorical device ‘no longer
serves to contain any particular kind of literature and merely becomes a new
name for formalism’.10 Heffernan himself also defined ekphrasis on notably
expansive terms, however. Elaborating a paragone of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s

5 Ibid. 96.
6 On the limits of ekphrasis, in addition to the works cited in notes 2 and 3 above, see
Robillard V. – Jongeneel E. (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive
Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: 1998). On its pervasiveness in art historical dis-
course, see Elsner J., “Art History as Ekphrasis”, Art History 33 (2010) 10–27; Elsner ‒
Bartsch S., “Eight Ways of Looking at an Ekphrasis”, Classical Philology 102 (2007) i–vi.
7 Krieger M. (1967). “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or, Laokoön Revisited”, in
McDowell F.P.W. (ed.), The Poet as Critic (Evanston: 1967) 3–26. The essay also appears in
idem, Ekphrasis: Illusion of the Natural Sign 263‒288.
8 Krieger, “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry” 20.
9 Ibid.
10 Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation” 298.
4 DIFURIA AND MELION

“Ozymandias” and John Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, two Romantic poems
widely regarded as exemplary ekphrases, Heffernan concluded that via differ-
ent means – ‘graphic stasis’ and ‘verbal narrative’, respectively – each poem
‘stages a struggle for power between rival modes of representation and makes
us see that neither gains absolute victory over the other’.11 Heffernan’s sugges-
tion that ekphrasis arises where the intrinsic representational capacities of
neither text nor image are definitive, echoes Ernst Gombrich’s canny obser-
vation of some forty years prior, that ‘images apparently occupy a curious
position somewhere between the statements of language, which are intended
to convey a meaning, and the things of nature, to which we can only give a
meaning’.12 Gombrich issued this statement as a critique of the perceived
authority of Erwin Panofsky’s iconological approach, which interprets symbols
in early modern prints and paintings, purporting to discern or confer on them
a kind of hermeneutic closure. Gombrich instead suggests the image’s capac-
ity to refract a range of meanings for its beholders, its resistance to language’s
attempts to ascribe a single or definitive meaning.
Heffernan’s location of ekphrastic potential in the image-text gap presages
by only a few years W.J.T. Mitchell’s elaboration of ekphrasis, expounded in
1994’s Picture Theory.13 Mitchell addresses a broad variety of examples of
ek­phra­sis, including its universally acknowledged fountainhead, Homer’s
description of Achilles’ shield, Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön (1766), Wallace
Stevens’ Anecdote of the Jar (1919), and the wry, bumbling comedy of The Bob
and Ray Show, a post-war American radio show in which the hosts exploited
the perceptual friction arising from their deliberately – and hilariously – inade-
quate descriptions of pictures for listeners who cannot see them in their exclu-
sively aural broadcast medium. For Mitchell, each of these examples evinces
the fluidity of the hermeneutical zone – the zone of ekphrasis – between the
verbal and the visual, wherein a range of discursive modes inevitably manifest
in order to account for the medial other, that which they are not.14

11 Ibid. 312.
12 Gombrich E. “Aims and Limits of Iconology”, in Icones 2.
13 Mitchell W.J.T., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: 1994)
151–182.
14 See ibid., 180, where Mitchell finds it difficult to ‘draw and circle around ekphrasis, to draw
any finite conclusions about its nature, scope, or place in the literary universe’, and 181,
where he notes that ‘the alien visual object of verbal representation can reveal its differ-
ence from the speaker (and the reader) in all sorts of ways: the historical distance between
archaic and modern (Keats’s Urn); the alienation between the human and its own com-
modities (Stevens’s Jar); the conflict between a moribund social order and the monstrous
revolutionary “others” that threaten it (Shelley’s Medusa); the gap between a historical
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 5

This volume posits ekphrastic properties not only in text, but also in images
generated during the early modern period (ca. 1400–1800), foregrounding
the textual, visual, referential, and refractive capacities in both.15 Just as an
ekphrastic text could represent images made in various media, so, conversely,
the artisanal processes of drawing, painting, sculpting, or building could
inspire an ekphrasis. Textual modes of ekphrastic discourse, when they gener-
ate images of works of art or other seen things, profess to recover or restage the
affective experience of the viewer who beheld these images. The ekphrastic
text thus operates complexly in the registers of mimesis, affect, and especially
time: the presentness of the figure of ekphrasis, its translation of a viewed
image into an image being viewed now, into an extended present of beholding,
challenges conventional temporal and spatial distinctions of past from present
or proximate from distant, rendering such relations elastic in contradistinc-
tion to the conventional hermeneutic relation between the seeing subject and
the seen object. This is one of many ways in which ekphrasis challenges the
standard metaphorics of the image-text relation, prompting the reader-viewer
to ask how words and images engage or account for one another. Moreover,
as products of a textual rhetorical device, ekphrastic descriptions, even when
they profess to describe medially specific images and processes, inevitably
depart from their visual sources. These deviations are often deliberate, vivid,
and provocative, and are sometimes designed to call attention to the complex
relation between the texts and the objects of sight they ostensibly record.
The ekphrastic work of art, that is to say, the pictorial image made in
response to a verbal ekphrasis, can be seen to function in analogy to its tex-
tual referent. Such images might portray the process of their own making in a
way comparable with textual examples of ekphrasis that self-consciously call
attention to their apparatus and affordances; both the ekphrastic text and the
ekphrastic image serve to make audiences aware of their agentive, inventive,
originating relation to the objects they see or read, or describe visually or ver-
bally. Ekphrastic images often foreground their maker’s agency, layering the
viewer onto that maker, in the way that the rhetor, and through him the audi-
tor, are adduced as co-agents of the image being verbally produced. In short,
the makers of ekphrastic images, either textual or pictorial, exploit the analogic
imaginary between viewing subject and viewed object for rhetorical purposes.

epic obsessed with war and a vision of the everyday, nonhistorical order of human life
that provides a framework for a critique of that historical struggle (Homer’s Shield)’.
15 E.g., see ibid. 197, which interprets the visual representation on Achilles’ shield as an epit-
ome of the ekphrastic figure’s ‘dominance over the epic of which it is supposed to be a
mere ornament’, and more forcefully, of its status as ‘an emblem of the entire structure of
the Iliad’.
6 DIFURIA AND MELION

In early modernity, textual and visual ekphrases were integral to the pro-
duction, reception, and discourse of art, architecture, and poetry. Major art
theoreticians and biographers deployed the ekphrastic mode to craft their
treatises and histories. The broadly traced lineage of early modern art writers,
Antonio Manetti, Giorgio Vasari, Karel van Mander, and many others working
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Giovanni Pietro Bellori
and Arnold Houbraken, crafted various kinds and degrees of ekphrastic text.16
The varied range of historical descriptions in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite de’ più
eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects) comprises a seminal source of early modern ekphras-
tic art writing. We owe our consciousness of the Vite’s status as a repository of
ekphrases to Svetlana Alpers, whose article on Vasari’s use of ekphrasis stands
with Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris’s Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the
Artist, as a landmark in the development of scholarly thought on the rhetorical
forms and functions of early modern descriptions of works of art.17
Alpers comments on Vasari’s magnum opus that one can turn to almost any
page and find ekphrastic descriptions of works of art.18 Her analysis lays stress
on Vasari’s acute awareness of artworks as dynamic objects whose presence
to the beholder requires to be made equivalently and properly present, by
rhetorical means, to the Vite’s readers. Alpers’s foundational observations on
ekphrastic text in the Vite make apparent how his descriptions of art and archi-
tecture convert them into discursive loci of making and viewing. Consider, for
example, Vasari’s celebrated description of Raphael’s Entombment:

In composing this work Raphael imagined the sadness of the closest and
most loving relations in carrying to burial the body of their dearest, the
one on whom all the welfare, honor, and usefulness of the entire family
truly depended. Our Lady is fainting, and the heads of all the figures in

16 Manetti A., The Life of Brunelleschi, by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, trans. C. Engass,
Saalman H. ‒ ed. C. Engass (University Park, PA: 1970); Ibid., The Fat Woodworker, trans. –
intro. R.L. Martone – V. Martone (New York: 2008); Vasari G., Le vite de’ più eccellenti pit-
tori, scultori ed Architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: 1879); Miedema H. (ed.),
Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 6 vols.
(Doornspijk: 1994); Bellori G.P., Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed. E. Borea
(Turin: 1976); Houbraken Arnold, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders
en schilderessen, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, Weduwe des Autheurs: 1718–17 21).
17 Alpers S. “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives”, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institute 23 (1960) 190–215; and Kurz O. – Kris E., Legend, Myth, and Magic in the
Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven, CT: 1981).
18 Alpers “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes” 191.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 7

weeping are very graceful, particularly that of St. John who, clasping his
hands, hangs his head in a manner that would move the hardest to pity.
And truly, those who consider the diligence, love, art, and grace of this
painting has great reason to marvel; for it excites astonishment by the
expressions of the figures, the beauty of the draperies, and the extreme
excellence in all of its parts.19

For Alpers, Vasari’s evocation of Raphael imagining the grief of any family that
has lost its patriarch, performatively stages The Entombment’s concetto, and
thereby privileges the painting’s ‘human rather than theological quality’.20 His
ekphrastic vivification of the painting heightens its intensely emotive quali-
ties. However, the ekphrastic machina and its descriptive affordances do not
end there. Vasari’s verbal framing of the Entombment from within the artist’s
vividly visual formulation of a scene that issues from an emotional memory,
exploits ekphrasis’ refractive capacity. He has framed his description of the
painting’s figures – the textual mapping of a figural arrangement expressive of
heightened emotion – within a double imagining: of Raphael as ‘the one who
imagines’ a scene of mourning, and of Raphael as the painter who devises the
historical figures that re-enact it as a scene from the life of Christ.21 Within this
descriptive apparatus, Vasari’s readers experience the Entombment through a
sequenced matrix of textually conjured images that ostensibly derive from an
already extant picture, even as they licence its expressive effects; before visual-
izing Raphael’s painting, readers envision the grief felt by a family carrying its
patriarch to rest, urging them to anticipate such grief if they have not already
experienced it in their own lives. Vasari then invites his readers to imagine
Raphael imagining such grief on his own terms; to imagine Raphael trans-
lating from imagination to painting; and to imagine the painting’s appear-
ance according to Vasari’s description. Readers may also measure the mental

19 Vasari G., Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed Architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols.
(Florence: 1879) IV 327: ‘Immaginossi Raffaello nel componimento di questa opera il
dolore che hanno i piu stretti ed amorevoli parenti nel riporre il corpo d’alcuna piu cara
persona, nella quale veramente consista il bene, l’onore e l’utile di tutta una famiglia. Vi si
vede la Nostra Donna venuta meno, e le teste di tutte le figure molto graziose nel pianto, e
quella particolarmente di San Giovanni; il quale, incrocicchiate le mani, china la testa con
una maniera da far commuovere qual e piu duro animo a pieta. E di vero, chi considera
la diligenza, l’amore, l’arte e la grazia di quest’ opera, ha gran ragione di maravigliarsi;
perche ella fa stupire chiunque la mira, per l’aria delle figure, per la bellezza de’ panni, ed
insomma per una estrema bonta ch’ ell’ ha in tutte le parti’.
20 Alpers, “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attidues” 195–196.
21 Ibid. 195.
8 DIFURIA AND MELION

image fashioned from his words against their prior visualization[s] of the
Entombment. Given the status of the scriptural descriptions of Christ’s burial
as the universal source for all further images of that event, Vasari’s description
is tantamount to an invitation to readers to consider his ekphrasis against its
pithy textual sources, described in all four gospels, as also against other pic-
torial precedents that readers might have seen. Raphael’s Entombment nests
within this rich discursive nexus.22
Accordingly, the true ekphrastic reach of Vasari’s description of the
Entombment extends past the textual to highlight the image’s visual referential-
ity, its status as a compendium of artistic practices. Vasari’s concluding remark
on Raphael’s diligenza in devising the painting is pointed, signaling a further
ekphrastic framework for its genesis. By describing the Entombment as a prod-
uct of Raphael’s diligence, Vasari reminds readers of events leading to the
painting’s making. Though Vasari describes the painting’s genesis as a pictorial
event that results from Raphael’s first-hand and/or imaginative experience of
the emotions such a scene would evoke, he precedes this description by taking
note of Raphael’s immersion in the works and practices of other artists.

This excellent artist studied the old works of Masaccio in the city of
Florence, and what he saw in the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo
made him tend more to his studies, and consequently brought about an
extraordinary improvement in his art and manner. While Raphael was
in Florence, he became very friendly with Frà Bartolommeo of S. Marco,
whose colouring pleased him greatly, and this he tried to imitate. On his
part he taught the good father the methods of perspective, which he had
previously neglected. At the height of this practice, Raphael was recalled
to Perugia, where he began by finishing the aforementioned Madonna
for Atalanta Baglioni, for which he had prepared the cartoon at Florence,
as I have said. In this divine painting a dead Christ is carried to burial, so
finely done that it seems freshly executed.23

22 Biblia Sacra: vulgatæ editionis Sixti V et Clementis VIII Pontt. Maxx (Paris: 1861), Evange-
lium secundum Matthaeum, “Caput XXVII”, vers. 59–61, fol. 1247; Evangelium secundum
Marcum, “Caput XV”, vers. 46–47, fol. 1274; Evangelium secundum Lucam, “Caput XXIII”,
vers. 53–56, fol. 1318; Evangelium secundum Joannem, “Caput XIX”, 39–42, fol. 1352.
23 Vasari, Le Vite IV 326–327: ‘Studiò questo eccellentissimo pittore nella città di Firenze
le cose vecchie di Masaccio; e quelle che vide nei lavori di Lionardo e di Michelagnolo
lo feciono attendere maggiormente agli studi, e per conseguenza acquistarne migliora-
mento straordinario all’arte e alla sua maniera. Ebbe oltre gli altri, mentre stette Raffaello
in Fiorenza, stretta dimestichezza con Fra Bartolomeo di San Marco, piacendogli molto
e cercando assai d’imitare il suo colorire: ed, all’incontro, insegnò a quell buon Padre
i modi della prospecttiva, alla quale non aveva il Frate atteso insino a quell tempo. Ma in
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 9

As we now see, before Vasari presents his ekphrasis of the Entombment, he

recites a veritable checklist of Raphael’s best practices in painting: study of the
works and methods of older established masters, assimilation of their manners
or styles, aptitude for collaboration, and enthusiasm for the exchange of picto-
rial knowledge. In forming a mental image of the Entombment out of Vasari’s
text, readers are primed to consider other masters in a line of Tuscan patri-
mony, their arrangement and disposition of figures in particular. More than a
mere index of Raphael’s empathetic power of imagination, the Entombment
also speaks to his consumption and exchange of art. In its ekphrastic context,
the painting is the product of a network of social relations, mediated by the art
of painting.
Constantijn Huygens’s famous description of Rembrandt’s Judas Repentant,
Returning the Pieces of Silver, a painting that Amy Golahny analyses in this vol-
ume, similarly embeds the image within an intertextual web of allusion that
amplifies and intensifies its piteous and harrowing effect upon the beholder.
Huygens describes a ‘despairing Judas’,

[…] begging for forgiveness, but devoid of hope, all traces of which are
erased from his face; his gaze wild, his hair torn out by the roots, his gar-
ments rent, his arms contorted, his hands clenched until they bleed; a
blind impulse has brought him to his knees, his whole body writhing in
pitiful hideousness.24

A detailed examination of Rembrandt’s Judas figure reveals that far from being
a precise counterpart to Huygens’s words, it was a point of departure for them,
their discursive prompt. On his knees, in a torn shirt, Judas does indeed beg
or pray for mercy with tightly clenched hands. However, there is little to sup-
port the assertion that he howls hopelessly while clenching his hands so hard
that they bleed. Rembrandt has rendered his hands with the same earth-toned

sulla maggior frequenza di questa pratica fu richiamato Raffaello a Perugia, dove primi-
eramente in San Francesco finì l’opera della già detta Madonna Atalanta Baglioni; della
quale aveva fatto, come si è detto, il cartone in Fiorenza. È in questa divinissima pittura
un Cristo morto portrato sotterrare, condotto con tanta frescheza e sì fatto amore, che a
vederlo pare fatto pur ora’.
24 Translated in Rumberg P. – Bevers H., Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece, exh. cat., (New
York: 2016) 1. See Worp J.A., “Constantyn Huygens over de schilder van zijn tijd”, Oud
Holland 9 (1891) 126: ‘[…] deprecantis veniam, nec sperantis tamen aut spem vulti seruan-
tis, faciem horridam, laniatos, crines, scissam vestem, intorta brachia, manus ad sangui-
nem compressas, genu temero impetus prostratum, corpus omne miseranda atrocitate
conuolutum’.
10 DIFURIA AND MELION

pallor as the rest of his flesh. Moreover, his pose, perhaps a variation on a figure
by Abraham Bloemaert, is contorted, but pace Huygens, Judas certainly does
not writhe.
It is not enough to take note of the ekphrastic nature of the text’s lively
versions of its visual referent. When Huygens drifts away from the painting’s
constituent elements into adventitious affective assessments of Judas as fright-
ening, wretched, and hideous, he utilizes description to exert rhetorical lever-
age over his subject, reading Judas’s pose as a sure sign of his lack of self-control,
his blind impulse, traces of character that cannot explicitly be pictured. The
dynamic connection (or tension) between text and image, between the ampli-
fications that the one begets in the other, is a sometimes unacknowledged
hallmark of ekphrasis; this is where the relation between description and the
described becomes the most dialogic. But are such pictorial images evocative
of text-based processes of image-making in the way that verbal ekphrases
perforce evoke visual ones? Huygens’s description suggests that Rembrandt’s
Judas is evocative and stirring in precisely this fashion: it invites beholders
to see more than has been depicted in paint, and was perhaps painted, like
Pisanello’s variety-rich pictures, to engender the process of ekphrastic ampli-
ficatio. Rembrandt prompts the viewer to construe Judas’s significance in the
manner of Huygens, who was himself prompted to see more than meets the
eye. Huygens’s amplifications are of course decorous, in that they comport
with the biblical text and what it implies. Luke 22:3 and John 13:27 both suggest
that after betraying Christ, Judas went mad and was even possessed by Satan.
As such, like Vasari’s multiple framings of the Entombment, Huygens’s compact
description of Judas suggests that the image itself functions in an ekphrastic
relation to its biblical subject.
Although Vasari’s and Huygens’s ekphrases are richly suggestive of how early
modern pictures were thought to operate in an ekphrastic mode, they provide a
mere glimpse of the many possible ways in which images could do so. For now,
let it suffice to say that a great abundance of ekphrastic imagery was produced
between 1500 and 1700. Consider, for example, amongst the many images call-
ing attention to their status as ekphrastic images (described by Mitchell and
Victor Stoichita as ‘metapictures’), the many paintings, drawings, and prints of
St. Luke painting the Virgin.25 The artists who portrayed this subject conceived

25 On the reflexive properties of St. Luke pictures, particularly Rogier van der Weyden’s
Boston St. Luke, see Acres A., “Rogier van der Weyden’s Painted Texts”, Artibus et Historiæ 21
(2000) 98–101. On the ‘metapicture’, see Mitchell Picture Theory; and Stoichita V., The
Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (New York: 1997).
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 11

their works as aligned with or analogous to St. Luke’s attempt to record his
vision of Mary, which such paintings portray in medias res. The reciprocal dou-
bling at work in such paintings thus alludes to the capacity of sacred images
to describe their subjects with the potency and specificity, the enargeian pres-
ence, of the Lucan icon. One might in fact argue that the relation between the
icon and the picture that ‘reproduces’ it is like that between an ekphrastic text
and the pictorial image that actualizes it.
Other categories of ekphrastic image foreground pictorial technique to
call attention to the miraculous transformation of visual media into mimeti-
cally persuasive images: here it is not that the relation between medium and
image is ekphrastic, but rather, that the conversion of pigment into picture
brings a key ekphrastic device – namely, enargeia – to the fore as a specifi-
cally mimetic effect. For example, the dazzlingly precise rendering, the vir-
tually haptic surface textures of paintings by Jan van Eyck and his followers
heighten the tension between paint and that which it describes, even while
seeming to elide this polarity by converting art into a mirror of nature. The
drolleries of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel rhetorically amplify and
vivify commonplace human activities evocative of a range of texts, images,
and social conditions. Proverbial texts and commentaries function as their
pseudo-ekphrastic source. The anthropomorphic devices embedded in land-
scapes by Herri met de Bles confront their viewers with visual experiences that
call quotidian regimes of perception and cognition into question, inviting an
ekphrastic response that initiates the hermeneutic process of their unfolding.
The ‘moving’ concavities and convexities of Francesco Borromini’s San Carlo
alle Quattro Fontane embody a Trinitarian belief in the ephemerality of the
earthly life, a meaning that can likewise best be accessed through ekphrastic
elaboration of what is seen on site. Ekphrasis provides a crucial first step in
articulating the church fabric’s affective and transcendental order. These visual
and spatial productions were surely expected to call forth various kinds and
degrees of ekphrastic response, and were conceived and executed to elicit such
a response. They would have encouraged thoughtful audiences to apply the
ordering conventions of ekphrasis as a method of coming to grips with novel,
uncomfortable, or even disorientating experiences. In this specific sense,
ekphrasis can function as a normalizing instrument, a means of accounting
for extraordinary images keyed to an ekphrastic method of reception.
12 DIFURIA AND MELION

2 Excursus One: Ekphrastic Invention in Frans Floris’s

Hercules and the Pygmies

The three excurses that now follow explore further types of ekphrastic usage,
textual and pictorial, as well as jointly verbal and visual, focusing on the Low
Countries. The first, on Frans Floris’s Hercules and the Pygmies, engraved by
Cornelis Cort and published by Hieronymus Cock, exemplifies the emulous
relation between ekphrastic pictures and the canonical specimens of ancient
ekphrases these pictures bring to sight [Fig. 1]. The aim of such pictorial images
is to produce a literalized effect of enargeia or hypotyposis, defined in Cyprian
Soarez’s De arte rhetorica libri tres (Three Books on the Art of Rhetoric), as the
vivid ‘verbal expression of the visual form of things’, which enables them more
to be seen, i.e., discerned by the eyes, than heard.26 On enargeia/hypotypo-
sis, Soarez adapts Quintilian, Institutio oratoria IX.2.41, which in turn distills
Cicero, Pro T. Annio Milone XXIX.79: ‘These things which you see not with your
eyes, you can discern by thought’.27 Ekphrastic pictures demonstrate the power
of art to convert what has been ‘discerned by thought’ or, better, ‘by an intel-
lectual effort of vision’, into an actual, not merely virtual, image perceptible
optically and cognizable on that basis. The conversion of a verbal effect into a
visual one, far from erasing one medium to promote another, places the two
media – verbal and visual – into a competitive relation of analogy whereby
the capacity of the visual artist to produce a result equivalent or superior to
the text-image is made apparent. It is thus incumbent upon the reader-viewer
to recognize and evaluate the translative shift from text to picture, verbal to
visual image-making, and to acknowledge both the artist’s acute reading of the
source text and his transformation of it.

26 On hypotyposis, another term for enargeia, see Soarez Cyprian, S.J., De arte rhetorica libri
tres, ex Aristotele, Cicerone, et Quintiliano praecipue deprompti (Antwerp, Jacobus Meursius:
1680) 130: ‘Hypotyposis, quam illustrem explanationem a Cicero appellat, est praeposita
quaedam forma rerum, ita expressa verbis, ut cerni potius videatur, quam audiri’. Soarez’s
treatise, one of the most widely disseminated rhetorical handbooks of the later sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, incorporates numerous citations from Aristotle’s Rhetoric,
Cicero’s De oratore, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, and the Pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad
Herennium.
27 Ibid.: ‘Ut Cicero: Hae, quae non vidistis oculis, animis cernere potestis’. Another way of
translating ‘animis cernere’ would be ‘discern by an intellectual effort of vision’, on which
reading of cernere in combination with animis, see M. Tulli Ciceronis Pro T, Annio Milone
ad iudices oratio, ed. A.C. Clark (Oxford: 1895) 70 n. 1. Also see ibid. for the full passage
from Cicero condensed by Quintilian and cited by Soarez: ‘Fingite animis (liberae enim
sunt nostrae cogitations et quae volunt sic intuentur, ut ea cernamus, quae non videmus),
fingite igitur cogitatione imaginem huius condicionis meae, si possim efficere, Milonam
ut absolvatis’.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 13

figure 1 Cornelis Cort after Frans Floris, Hercules and the Pygmies, 1562. Engraving,
325 × 465 mm
By permission of the Trustees, British Museum

By the later sixteenth century, after the publication of Benedetto Varchi’s Due
lezzioni and the re-publication of Vasari’s Vite (1568) under the joint auspices
of the Accademia Fiorentina and the newly founded Accademia del Disegno,
this practice of comparison across media – both by the artist and by the reader-
viewer – had come to be codified as a philosophical exercise. Within humanist
circles and academic societies, this procedure, based as it was on examining
a topic in utramque partem (from this side and that, from all sides), came to
be known as the disputatio artium or, in Italian, the disputa delle arti.28 The

28 The term paragone, which is often used to designate the collation of medial forms and
functions, dates only from the early nineteenth century, as Charles Dempsey argues
in “Disegno and Logos, Paragone and Academy”, in Lukehart P. (ed.), The Accademia
Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590‒1635 (Washington, D.C.: 2010)
43–53, esp. 47. As Dempsey points out, the disputà delle arti was licenced by the analogy
presumed to exist, on theological grounds, between the ‘relation of words to things and
ideas’ and the ‘relation of visual forms to things and concepts represented’. Moreover,
when the ekphrastic text disputes with its pictorial counterpart, or the ekphrastic picture
with its textual source, the process of disputation can be seen to express the doctrine that
various media achieve mutual perfection through this rational, logos-based process of
analytical investigation and comparative scrutiny. They are contentatione perfecta (per-
fected through contestation).
14 DIFURIA AND MELION

notion that reciprocal contestation is a crucible in which the arts are tested
and tempered had a broad spectrum of applications – not only to painting and
rhetoric/poetics, but also to painting and sculpture, painting and printmaking,
as also, venturing farther afield, to rhetoric/poetics and philosophy, law and
medicine, law and theology, medicine and architecture, or, circling back to the
visual arts, to governing principles such as graphice/disegno and colorito.29
Ekphrasis, one of the key figures of speech and thought, was appreciated
as a powerful instrument of affect and argumentation; both functions were
treated as criteria when comparing the respective merits of verbal and visual
methods of description. In the Pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium
(formerly attributed to Cicero himself), these two functions – affective and
argumentative – are construed as the figure’s most important tasks. The
Pseudo-Cicero treats ekphrasis under two heads – demonstratio (ocular dem-
onstration) and descriptio (vivid description) – consistently attaching it to the
arousal of strong emotion and the exposition of consequences:

It is Ocular Demonstration when an event is so described in words that

the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass vividly before
the eyes. This we can effect by including what has preceded, followed, and
accompanied the event itself, or by keeping steadily to its consequences
or the attendant circumstances…. Through this kind of narrative, Ocular
Demonstration is very useful in amplifying a matter and basing on it an
appeal to pity, for it sets forth the whole incident and virtually brings it
before our eyes.30

So, too, Vivid Description elucidates the outcomes, often adverse, of an action,
making them clearly visible, for the purpose of stirring indignation, pity, or
some other emotion.31 Here the focus falls not only on figural action, but also
encompasses attendant circumstances (‘rebus circumstantibus’), i.e., all that
which surrounds or circumscribes the action, adjacencies such as the specif-
ics of place and time. Ekphrastic disputatio variously attends to some or all of
these factors in a heightened way when the textual descriptio/demonstratio/
hypotyposis purports to describe a work of art, either pictorial or sculptural,
that the visual artist transforms into an actual work of art. The relation between
picture and text usually redounds upon other pairings of media – that between
an engraved image and the sculpture or painting, ancient or contemporary, to
which it adverts, for instance. This is to say that one kind of disputatio often

29 On these topical pairs, which were treated dialogically, see ibid. 48.
30 Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. H. Caplan (Cambridge, MA: 1954) 404–409.
31 Ibid. 356–359.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 15

figure 2 Giorgio Ghisi after Luca Penni, Calumny of Apelles, 1560. Engraving, 368 × 317 mm
By permission of the Trustees, British Museum

begets another, in a process constitutive of a disputatious chain of compara-

tive analogy: Giorgio Ghisi’s Calumny of Apelles after Luca Penni begs to be seen
vis-à-vis Lucian’s ekphrasis of the famous lost painting by Apelles, described
in the essay “Slander”, a condensed version of which appears in Leon Battista
Alberti’s De pictura [Fig. 2].32 In turn, the print bears witness to the drawing or

32 See Lucian, “Slander”, in Works, trans. A.M. Harmon (Cambridge, MA: 1913) 1:359–393; and
Alberti L.B., De pictura: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. – trans. R. Sinisgalli
(Cambridge: 2011) 76–77. On Ghisi’s print, see Boorsch S. – Lewis M. – Lewis R.E., The
Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: 1985)
110–113.
16 DIFURIA AND MELION

painting by Luca Penni, upon which it was based.33 The chain of disputatio-
nes becomes particularly complex (one is tempted to say ‘copious’), when the
work of art being converted from ekphrastic text to ekphrastic picture takes
the form of an emblem, comprising a pictura and an epigrammatic titulus that
require to be read against each other. The emblem is by definition disputatious
in that its constituent elements are visual and verbal, and its meanings medi-
ally contingent: if the words are the filter through which the image is sifted,
so the image is the lens through which the words are read. The conversion of
an ekphrastic text into an emblematic work of art thus leads from one kind
of disputatio, consisting of a dialogue between a word-based image and the
pictorial image that flows from it, to another kind of disputatio, consisting of
the emblematic dialogue between the emblem’s constituent parts, its pictura
and verba.
Let us turn now to Floris’s Hercules and the Pygmies, likely designed to pub-
licize his erudite artistry by reference to the disputatio artium [Fig. 1].34 Cock
published it in 1562, having chosen Cort to engrave the plate. The shelf at the
base of the image, over which the head of Antaeus projects and casts a shadow,
calls attention to the fact that this is the image of an image, or alternatively,
the image of a sculpted relief: it is either the image of a picture rendered so

33 On the painted series of judgment scenes – of Apelles, Solomon, and Otto – to which
the Judgment of Apelles belongs, see Béguin S., “Un tableau de Luca Penni”, Revue du
Louvre 5–6 (1975) 359–366; and Boorsch, Giorgio Ghisi 112–113.
34 On this print, see Wouk E.H., “Cornelis Cort, after Frans Floris, Hercules and the Pygmies”,
in Van Grieken J. – Luijten G. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance
in Print, exh. cat., M, Museum Leuven; Institut néerlandais, Paris (Brussels: 2013) 184–185.
Also see Bierens de Haan J.C., L’oeuvre gravé de Cornelis Cort, graveur hollandais 1533–1578
(The Hague: 1948), no. 182; Paux-de Veen L. de, Hieronymus Cock: prentenuitgever en
graveur, 1507(?)–1570, exh. cat., Royal Library of Belgium (Brussels: 1970), no. 77; Velde C.
van de, Frans Floris (1519/20–1570). Leven en werken, Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke
Academie van Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten, Klasse der Schone
Kunsten 37, 2 vols. (Brussels: 1975) II: no. P56; Riggs T.A., Hieronymus Cock: Printmaker and
Publisher (New York – London: 1977) 330, no. 79; Sellink M., Cornelis Cort. Constich plaedt-
snijder van Horne in Hollandt / Accomplished plate-cutter from Hoorn in Holland, exh. cat.,
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam – Ghent: 1994), no. 22; Sellink M. (comp.) –
Leeflang H. (ed.), The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts
1450–1700: Cornelis Cort, 3 vols. (Rotterdam – Amsterdam: 2000) II: no. 182; Wouk E.H.,
“‘Uno stupore ed una maraviglia’: The Prints of Frans Floris de Vriendt (1519/20–70)”, in
Wouk (comp.) – Luijten G. (ed.), The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings,
and Woodcuts 1450–1700: Frans Floris, 2 vols. (Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel: 2011) I:lx–lxi and II:
no. 78; and Weissert C., “Zwischen Herrscher- und Bürgertugend: Der Herkuleszyklus von
Frans Floris in der Villa des Nicolaes Jongelinck”, in Weissert – Poseschel S. – Büttner N.
(eds.), Zwischen Lust und Frust: Die Kunst in den Niederlanden und am Hof Philipps II. von
Spanien (1527–1598) (Vienna: 2013) 17–47, esp. 26–27.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 17

skillfully that it appears sculptural, or the image of a relief carved so expertly

that it appears pictorial. This ambiguity in the status of the image qua image
derives from Floris’s source text, Philostratus the Elder’s Icones (Imagines), a
collection of ekphrastic exercises describing sixty-five paintings ostensibly dis-
played in a grand portico gallery near Naples.35 He must have consulted a Latin
translation, perhaps Stephanus Nigrus’s Monimenta, nempe translationes:
Iconum Philostrati, published by Henricus Petrus of Basil in 1532. Philostratus’s
introduction supplies the frame of reference for Floris’s ingenious invention:
his discourses, which he characterizes as epideictic (‘ipsam picturam laudare
constituebam’) and interrogative (‘si quid non plane dixerim, [vos] percunc-
tantes’), are mainly intended to pay homage to the art of imitation (‘imitatio
utique est’).36 Pictura (painting) and plastice (sculpture), states Philostratus,
are the two chief imitative species, and he therefore devotes much of his
proem to distinguishing between their respective merits:

Imitation is a most ancient invention, closely related to nature. Men of

practical wisdom (‘sapientes […] viri’) devised the art of imitation, calling
one part of it painting, the other part sculpture, which indeed has many
species. For to model, to imitate in bronze, to carve Lygdian or Parian
marble and to polish ivory, and, by Jove, to carve in relief are forms of
plastice. But painting, on the other hand, consists in colours; nor does
it utilize them for one thing only, but instead, from this one means it
brings much more to pass than that other art from many means. For it
describes shadows, makes known the face of him who raves, sorrows, or
rejoices, and the qualities of shining eyes, which no sculptor can reveal.
[…] Chambers, too, and houses, and groves, mountains, and springs, and
the airy substance that contains them.37

35 On the Icones, see Fairbanks A., “Introduction”, in Philostratus, “Imagines,” Callistratus,

“Descriptions”, trans. Fairbanks (London – New York: 1931) xv–xxvi; and Land N., The
Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park, PA: 1994) 27–36.
36 Philostratus the Elder, Stephani Nigri quae quidem praestare sui nominis ac studiosis utilia
noverimus monimenta, nempe translationes: Iconum Philostrati […], trans. S. Nigrus (Basil,
Henricus Petrus: 1532) 5–6: ‘Perscrutanti autem ipsius artis ortum, imitatio utique est […].
Ego autem, & per me, ipsam picturam laudare constituebam […]. Vos vero sequimini, non
modo consentientes, verum, & si quid non plane dixerim, percunctantes’.
37 Ibid.: ‘[Imitatio:] vetustissimum inventum, naturaeque cognatum. Ipsam autem sapien-
tes excogitarunt viri, partim picturam, partim placticen appelantes: & plactices quidem
multae species. Nam & fingere, & quae in aere fit imitatio, & lygdinen, pariumve lapidem,
atque ebur polire, & per Iovem, sculptura ipsa, plactice est. At pictura coloribus quidem
constat: sed non hoc solum efficit, iterum ab hoc sane uno existente, longe plura, quam
ars alia ex multis molitur. Umbram enim demonstrat, & alium furentis, alium moerentis
18 DIFURIA AND MELION

Hercules and the Pygmies, in alluding both to pictura and plastice, responds
to Philostratus’s conception of painting’s emulative relation to its mimetic sis-
ter art sculpture. His chosen medium, engraving, is expressly sculptural, for in
the terminology of Philostratus, it conforms to two species of plastice: it imi-
tates nature in copper (‘quae in aere fit imitatio’, aes being the term for copper,
bronze, or brass), and it does so by incising with a graver (‘sculptura ipsa’, sculp-
tura being the term for the action of carving or engraving). Floris manipulates
this medium pictorially, ‘describ[ing] shadows’, ‘making known the face[s]’ of
his protagonists, the oblivious Hercules, the smug Somnus, and the Pygmies,
who grieve for their dead brother Antaeus and rage against his killer Hercules,
and he delineates the landscape within which the encounter between Hercules
and the Pygmies transpires, showing its groves and mountains, and the airy fir-
mament. In all these senses, Hercules and the Pygmies serves double duty as an
image that is no less emphatically pictorial than sculptural.
Philostratus’s proem also furnishes a theoretical context for Floris’s conver-
sation piece, helping to explain why he invested time and energy in turning
an ekphrastic showpiece into an actual picture. First, he thereby implicitly
subscribed to the rhetor’s doctrine of the pictorial image, which Philostratus
compares to the art of poetry (‘quae ad poëtas pertinet’). Like poetry, paint-
ing endeavours to record the likenesses of heroes, along with their deeds
(‘ad Heroum, tam species, quam gesta, intentio’). Just as poetry expresses
the ‘practical wisdom’ (‘sapientia’) of the poet, so too does painting express
the painter’s wisdom.38 On that account, Floris, like Philostratus, was claim-
ing the sapiential nature of the art of painting. And again, by closely follow-
ing Philostratus, Floris declares in no uncertain terms that he aims to teach
youthful students of painting how to ‘interpret pictures and appreciate what
is esteemed and required in them’ (‘unde & interpretabantur, & quidem exac-
tum, ac probatum est, curabant’).39 Last but not least, he alludes to his judi-
cious powers of discernment, since Philostratus states that every one of the
pictures he describes was chosen by their owner with the ‘utmost industry and
attention’ (‘non sine maximo labore quispiam collegerat’) to exemplify the

aut gaudentis aspectum novit, oculorumque fulgores qualescunque fuerint: quod plasti-
cus quispiam minime praestaret. […] Thalamos praeterea, ac domos, nemoraque, & mon-
teis, ac fonteis, & in quo haec sunt, aetherem’.
38 Ibid. 5: ‘Quicunque picturam minime amplectitur, non modo veritatem, verum & eam,
quae ad poëtas pertinet, iniuria afficit sapientiam. Eadem ennim est utrisque ad Heroum,
tam species, quam gesta, intentio’.
39 Ibid. 6.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 19

various species of painter and painterly wisdom (‘plurimorum enim pictorum

in ipsis indicabatur sapientia’).40
But in addition, Floris clearly wished jointly to foreground his powers of
precise imitation and creative invention. On the one hand, Hercules and the
Pygmies cleaves punctiliously to Philostratus: Floris takes care to incorporate
the figure of Somnus, for example, whom Philostratus describes as appearing
in the form of an embodied image (‘somnus sumpta specie’); his imperious ges-
ture of touching Hercules, whose head he taps with his sleep-inducing sceptre,
nicely corresponds to the rhetor’s conceit that Somnus ‘makes much of the
fact that he has vanquished Hercules’.41 Seen in this light, his bat wings per-
haps advert to Somnus’s Luciferan pride. Moreover, Floris follows Philostratus
in distributing the various phalanxes of Pygmies: the group at the top, in the
presence of their king, attacks Hercules’s head and hand; the larger group at
right lays siege to his right arm; the group below, stands amazed at the size of
his feet (‘magnitudinem admirantes’). They emerge from subterranean caverns
because the Pygmies are ‘born of the earth’ (‘terrigenae’), ‘inhabit it like ants’
(‘aeque ac formicae terram habitant’), and ‘rise out of the ground’ (‘e terra exe-
untibus’), seizing the opportunity to avenge their earthborn brother.42 The jux-
taposition of sleeping Hercules and dead Antaeus, whose mouldering corpse is
likened to the broken tree stump beside him, answers to Philostratus’s praise of
the ancient painter’s masterful antithesis: ‘And Antaeus lies prostrate. On the
contrary, art (ars) paints Hercules truly breathing, warm with life, but Antaeus,
lifeless and sere, he abandons to the earth’.43 The distant figure striding to the
left, Pygmies wrapped in his mantle, is Hercules who, once ‘he is wakened,
laughs at the danger, and sweeps all his adversaries into the lion’s pelt’.44
In fact, the conversion of the Philostratean ekphrasis into a picture had pre-
viously been effected in illustrated editions of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum
liber of 1531 and later, where it accompanies the titular inscription, “On those
who dare to attempt something beyond their powers” and the epigrammatic
subscription [Fig. 3]:

40 Ibid. 7.
41 Philostratus, “Hercules inter Pygmaeos”, in ibid., 100: ‘Totis autem viribus anhelitum tra-
hit, somno affatim repletus. Ipse quoque [S]omnus sumpta specie adstat, magni (puto)
faciens, quad Herculem vicerit’. Note the transition from ‘somnus’ as the condition of
sleep to ‘Somnus’ as the god of sleep.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.: ‘Iacet & Antaeus. Caeterum ars Herculem quidem spirantem, ac tepidum: Antaeum
vero exanimum, atque aridum pingit, terraeque ipsum relinquit’.
44 Ibid., 100–101: ‘Ecce autem ut erigitur, utque in discrimine ridet, hosteisque universos col-
ligens, in leonis pellem congerit’.
20 DIFURIA AND MELION

figure 3 Mercure Jollat, Hercules and the Pygmies, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page
height 162 mm. Emblematic pictura, “In eos qui supra vires quicquam
audent”, in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris, Chrestien
Wechel: 1534)
Newberry Library, Chicago
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 21

While he sleeps beneath a pine, renewing his limbs in sweet slumber,

He holds his club and other arms.
The Pygmy band, ignorant of his strength,
Thinks itself capable of killing Alcides.
Awakened he treads the enemy under foot, as if they were fleas,
And enfolds them in the fierce lion’s skin.45

Alciato adhered to Philostratus, as would Floris, inserting a few stray details –

the pine, the club, and the satirical reference to the Pygmies as fleas. Floris
adopted the tree and the club, but in every other respect, he diverged from
the emblematic pictorial tradition, which generally portrays Hercules seated
and asleep, or alternatively, shows him twice, asleep in the background, awake
and seated in the foreground. His principal interest lay in picturing what
Philostratus had described verbally.
And yet, he openly diverged from both Alciato and Philostratus by inter-
jecting into the picture an assembly of Olympian gods who watch the pro-
ceedings below from their vantage point high in the clouds at upper left. This
supplement, as we shall see, serves to foreground his inventive prowess and to
enhance the exemplifying function of the image, its status as an epitome of
his art. The Olympians derive neither from Alciato nor Philostratus but from
one of the most famous digressions in Homer, Odyssey VIII 256–366, the min-
strel’s song about the marriage bed of Hephaestus, sung before Odysseus in
the palace of King Alcinous. The lyre-player Domodocus narrates the tale of
cuckolded Hephaestos’s revenge upon his unfaithful wife Aphrodite and her
lover Ares. With consummate art, the god fashions gossamer chains, as fine as
they are strong, to entrap the paramours:

45 Alciato Andrea, Andreae Alciati emblematum libellus (Paris, Christianus Wechselus: 1536),
24: “In eos qui supra vires quicquam audent”.
‘Dum dormit, dulci recreat dum corpora somno.
Sub picea, & clavam caeteraque arma tenet,
Alciden pygmaea manus prosternere laetho
Posse putat, vires non bene docta suas.
Excitus ipse, velut pulices, sic proterit hostem,
Et saevi implicitum pelle leonis agit’.
On Alciato’s Philostratean emblem, see Hasselt-von Ronnen C.J. van, “Hercules en de
Pygmeeën bij Alciati, Dosssi en Cranach”, Simiolus 4 (1970) 155–172; and Manning J., “Alciati
and Philostratus’s Icones”, Emblematica 1 (1986) 207–210, esp. 207. Floris was undoubtedly
also emulating Jan van Scorel’s painted version of this subject, on which see Guépin J.P.,
“Hercules belegerd door de Pygmeeën, schilderijen van Jan van Scorel en Frans Floris naar
een Icon van Philostratus”, Oud Holland 102 (1988) 155–173.
22 DIFURIA AND MELION

When Hephaestus had heard the dismal tale he hastened to his forge,
elaborating evil for them in the depths of his breast. He set the great
anvil in its stock and wrought chains which could be neither broken nor
loosed, that the guilty pair might be gyved in them for ever and ever. Out
of this bitter rage against Ares was born this device. He went then into his
marriage chamber, where stood the bed he had cherished, and about its
posts he interlaced his toils. Others, many of them, hung down from aloft,
from the main roof-tree over the hearth; gossamer chains so fine that no
man could see them, not even a blessed God, with such subtlety of craft
had they been forged.46

Pretending to set forth for Lemnos, Hephaestos waits until Aphrodite and
Ares are caught in his trap, and then summons ‘Father Zeus and every other
Blessed Immortal’ to bear witness to their crime. Decrying it as a ‘jest which
is unpardonable’, he calls upon his fellow immortals to laugh them to scorn:
‘His mouthing gathered the gods to the house of the brazen floor. Poseidon the
Earth-girdler, beneficent Hermes and royal Apollo the far-darting, came […].
In Hephaestus’ forecourt collected the Givers of Weal: and unquenchable was
the laughter that arose from the blessed Gods as they studied the tricky device
of Hephaestus’.47 Why did Floris interpolate this episode into Hercules and the
Pygmies [Fig. 1]?
The reference to Odyssey VIII fulfills three purposes. First, by interpolat-
ing the gathering of gods into the Philostratean scene, Floris emphasises that
his image, too, is comic, jocular, and satirical. He makes fun of his subject –
Pygmies foolishly trying to ensnare Hercules, vanquisher of the giant Antaeus –
and recalls that just as the gods laughed at the ‘jest’ laid bare by Hephaestus,
so Hercules laughed at the Pygmies and the slight danger they posed. Second,
he accentuates his primary theme – the sovereign strength of invincibile
Hercules – implicitly contrasting the unbreakable bonds forged by Hephaestus
with the Pygmies’ futile attempts to immobilise Hercules. Upon rising, he sim-
ply sweeps away their ‘engines of war’ (machinas), as Philostratus puts it.48
By contrast, the chains binding Aphrodite and Ares, his engines of war, so to
speak, brook no escape.49 Third, he amplifies a correlative theme – the nature

46 Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, Newly Translated into English Prose, trans. T.E. Shaw
(New York: 1932) 111.
47 Ibid. 112–113.
48 Philostratus, Icones, trans. Nigrus, 100.
49 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Shaw, 112: ‘They went to their bed and snuggled deep into it, where-
upon the springes of artful Hephaestus closed about them and tightened till they were
not able to lift a limb nor move it. At last they understood there was no escape’.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 23

of his image-making – by introducing a reference to the ‘device’ forged ‘with

such subtlety of craft’ by Hephaestus. The gods operate as proxies for the
viewer of Hercules and the Pygmies. The thing they observe, the ‘tricky device
of Hephaestus’, is layered onto the scene we are given to see. It is as if Floris’s
‘device’, the subtle image he has wrought, were coalescing with the ‘subtlety
of craft’ discernible in the god’s ‘gossamer chains’. Or again, as if the god’s art
were being viewed in and through Floris’s, and conversely, Floris’s art in and
through the god’s. The fact that Floris’s invention appears in the form of an
engraving, an image worked in metal, enforces the implied relation between
the two epitomes of artifice.
Floris, presumably in collaboration with Cock and Cort, appropriated the full
text of Alciato’s subscriptio, inscribing it on the podium that identifies Hercules
and the Pygmies as the image of an image [Fig. 1]. His interest in grafting the
emblem to the Philostratean ekphrasis must have something to do with its
applicability to artistic practice. The pithy moral can easily be read as an apo-
thegm addressed to the aspiring artist. In Alciato, as we have seen, the emblem
as a whole warns against daring to do something beyond one’s competence:
it counsels self-knowledge.50 The message is twofold: unlike the Pygmies, we
must refuse to attempt what we can never achieve; instead, like Hercules, who
laboured to achieve all that he could, we should strive to fulfill our potential.
The sleep of Hercules, hard-won after his struggle with Antaeus, drives home
the point that even the most strenuous labour is admissible, when harnessed
to doable tasks. The Alciatan argument attaches to the image qua image, since
Hercules and the Pygmies is first and foremost a consummate example of Floris’s
art; it attests that he is an Hercules of art, capable of reviving a Greek master-
work, formerly lost or entirely fictional, and now fully realized on the basis
of ancient and Italian models. The emblematic apparatus, in other words,
insists that Hercules and the Pygmies be read as an allegory of art. It affirms
that Floris, rather than labouring supra vires, has expertly applied his hand to
the task before him, bringing to fruition what no ‘Pygmean hand’ could mus-
ter (‘Pygmaea manus’, to quote Alciato, manus being the term for both ‘band’
and ‘hand’).
There is, of course, another reason why Floris would have found Alciato’s
emblemata pertinent: a large number of them, perhaps even the majority,

50 Cf. Claude Mignault’s extensive commentary on the emblem’s moral meaning, in Omnia
Andreae Alciati V. C. emblemata: Cum commentariis, quibus Emblematum omnium aperta
origine, mens auctoris explicatur, & obscura omnia dubiaque illustrantur (Antwerp,
Christopherus Plantinus: 1567) 235‒236. Paraphrasing Pindar, Mignault states: ‘Apologus
hic admonet, nihil praeter vires aggrediendum nec ullum suscipiendum negotium, ad
quod perficiendum vires non suppetant’.
24 DIFURIA AND MELION

consist of verbal and pictorial images about images. They visualise ancient
works of art and, in the course of bringing them to life, they obscure the
threshold between art and nature, enlivening art and elevating nature. Indeed,
Alciato was following Philostratus’s lead: in Icones I 15, for example, “Ariadne”,
the speaker describes an exquisite painting of Dionysus struck by love for
Ariadne:

Nor yet is it enough to praise the painter for things for which someone
else too might be praised; for it is easy for anyone to paint Ariadne as
beautiful and Theseus as beautiful; and there are countless characteris-
tics of Dionysus for those who wish to represent him in painting or sculp-
ture, by depicting which even approximately the artist has captured the
god. For instance, the ivy clusters forming a crown are the clear mark
of Dionysus, even if the workmanship is poor; and a horn just springing
from the temples reveals Dionysus, and a leopard, though but just visible,
is a symbol of the god; but this Dionysus the painter has characterized by
love alone.51

So convincing is the painter’s depiction of the lovestruck god, that he seems

to come alive, causing the speaker to apostrophize him; Philostratus urges
Dionysus to approach Ariadne: ‘How fair a sight, Dionysus, and how sweet her
breath! Whether its fragrance is of apples or of grapes, you can tell after you
have kissed her!’52 Floris, in designing a lifelike image of Hercules, that concur-
rently reveals itself to be a work of art, emulates this Philostratean maneuver,
as mediated by Alciato.
Three examples from the Emblematum liber will suffice to demonstrate
how variously Alciato cultivates the trope of the living image [Figs. 4–6]. The
emblem “On an Image of Hope” incorporates the pictorial image of three stat-
ues: personified Hope, seated on a barrel and holding a bow and broken arrow;
Bacchus with a sheaf of wheat and tazza of wine; and blindfolded Cupid hold-
ing aloft a fistful of arrows [Figs. 4a–4b].53 The subscription opens by posing

51 Philostratus, Imagines, trans. Fairbanks, 62–63.

52 Ibid. 64–65.
53 Alciato, Emblematum libellus, 83: “In simulachrum Spei”.
‘Quae Dea tam laeto suspectans sydera vultu?
Cuius peniculis reddita imago fuit?
Elpidij fecere manus. Ego nominor illa,
Quae miseris promptam Spes bona praestat opem.
Cur viridis tibi palla? Quae omnia me duce vernent.
Quid manibus mortis tela refracta geris?
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 25

figure 4a Mercure Jollat, Hope, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height 162 mm. Emblematic
pictura, “In simulachrum Spei”, in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus
(Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534)
Newberry Library, Chicago
26 DIFURIA AND MELION

figure 4b Emblematic epigram, “In simulachrum Spei”, in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum

libellus (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534)
Newberry Library, Chicago
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 27

figure 5 Mercure Jollat, Bacchus, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height 162 mm.
Emblematic pictura, “In statuam Bacchi”, in Andrea Alciato,
Emblematum libellus (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534)
Newberry Library, Chicago
28 DIFURIA AND MELION

figure 6 Mercure Jollat, Faith, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height

162 mm. Emblematic pictura, “Fidei symbolum”, in Andrea Alciato,
Emblematum libellus (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534)
Newberry Library, Chicago
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 29

a question about the goddess, as if she were alive, newly encountered by the
poet: ‘What goddess is this, gazing at the stars with so happy a face?’ The sec-
ond line then identifies the goddess as a statue: ‘By whose brushes / pencils
was this image rendered?’ And the third line responds, now in the voice of the
living statue: ‘The hands of Elpidius made me’. What follows complicates this
oscillation amongst goddess, statue, and living statue, for it belongs either to
the goddess who speaks about her imago, or to this imago that has come alive
to speak for herself: ‘I am called Good Hope, she who furnishes ready aid to
the desperate’. The phrase ‘promptam […] opem’ can also be rendered ‘assis-
tance made readily visible’, which is to say that Hope, in this reading, is pre-
senting herself as an artist who dispenses images of her good offices. Moreover,
since Elpidius is an invented name transliterated from the Greek for ‘hope’, the
source of the imago Spei, as it turns out, is Hope herself, more specifically her
hands (‘Elpidij fecere manus’).
The distinction between Dea and imago has thus been thoroughly elided.
The rest of the subscriptio consists of a dialogue between the poet, who poses
questions about Hope’s attributes, and Hope, who responds by describing and
expounding them, both as appendages to herself and as constituent parts of
the effigy of Hope that the poet scrutinizes: ‘Why do your hands hold death’s
broken arrows? What I rightfully give the living to hope, I cut off from the dead’.
To complicate all this, the emblematic picture represents a statuary image of
Hope, an image of an effigy that stands beside two other such effigies [Fig. 7]:
Hope reveals that Cupid and Bacchus respectively personify ‘Eager Desire’ and
‘Good Outcome’, the cause and the effect of hope. Finally, she identifies other
companions whom the poet sees, though they are not shown in the picture. It
is up to the reader to imagine them either as prosopoeic beings or as imagines
of such divinities: ‘Who go before you? They call them the idle dreams of the
wakeful. Who stands close by you? Rhamnusia, avenger of crimes, to ensure
that you hope for nothing illicit’.
The emblem “On a Statue of Bacchus” includes the pictorial image of the
god reclining in an arbor, a drum in one hand, a vessel of wine in the other

Quod vivos sperare decet, praecido sepultis.

Cur in dolioli tegmine pigra sedes?
Sola domi mansi volitantibus undique noxis,
Ascraei ut docuit musa verenda senis.
Quae tibi adest volucris? Cornis fidissimus oscen,
Est bene cum nequeat dicere: dicit, Erit.
Qui comites? Vigilum somnia vana vocant.
Quae tibi iuncta astat? Scelerum Rhamnusia vindex,
Scilicet ut speres nil nisi quod liceat’.
30 DIFURIA AND MELION

figure 7 Cornelis Cort after Frans Floris, Hercules Prevents the Centaurs from Abducting
Hippodamia, from the Labours of Hercules, 1563. Engraving, 223 × 285 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

[Fig. 5].54 The dialogic subscription opens by addressing Bacchus, ‘Father

Bacchus, who set mortal eyes upon you?’, but it soon becomes ambiguous who

54 Ibid., 71–72: “In statuam Bacchi”.

‘Bacche pater: quis te mortali lumine novit?
Et docta effinxit quis tua membra manu ?
Praxiteles, qui me rapientem Gnos[s]ida vidit.
Atque illo pinxit tempore qualis eram.
Cur iuvenis, teneraque etiam lanugine vernat
Barba, queas Pylium cum superare senem.
Muneribus quandoque meis si parcere disces,
Iunior, & forti pectore semper eris.
Tympana non manibus, capiti non cornua desunt.
Quos (nisi dementeis) talia signa decent?
Hoc doceo, nostro quod abusus munere sumit
Cornua: & insanus mollia sistra quatit.
Quid vult ille color membris pene igneus? (omen
Absit) an humanis ureris ipse focis?
Cum Semeles de ventre parens me fulmine traxit
Ignivomo: infectum pulvere mersit aquis.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 31

is responding. Is Bacchus describing the statue that Praxiteles made of him,

or is the statue itself answering the inquisitive poet. The poet superadds the
conceit of a living statue made after the life: ‘And who fashioned your limbs,
with learned hand? Praxiteles, who saw me ravish the Gnossidan girl. He who
portrayed me as I then was’. The epigram is temporally ambiguous. If Bacchus
is speaking of the Praxitelean statue, then by enumerating its features, he rem-
inisces about his younger self; but if the statue is speaking, then it describes
itself from the vantage point of the present: ‘Why are you young, and why does
your beard bloom with tender down, you who can vanquish the old man of
Pylos? […] Drums are not absent from your hands, nor horns from your head.
[…] I teach that whoever abuses our gift grows horns and dementedly shakes
the pliant sistra’. The picture hedges bets: although Bacchus holds the attributes
given him by Praxiteles, his wrinkles make him appear old rather than young.
The emblem “Symbol of Faith” consists of a short subscription that calls
forth an image of Chaste Love, in the guise of Cupid garlanded with roses and
carrying a bow, along with images of Truth and Honor, respectively nude and
robed [Fig. 6]:

Let Honor stand depicted, veiled in a Tyrian mantle,

And let naked Truth clasp his right hand.
And may Chaste Love stand between them:
More beautiful than Cupid, Dione’s boy,
his brow encircled with roses.
These images are constitutive of faith, which the reverence due to Honor
Fosters, Love nourishes, and Truth brings to birth.55

Hinc sapit hic, liquidis qui nos bene diluit undis:

Qui non[,] ardenti torret ab igne iecur.
Sed nunc me doceas[,] qui vis miscerier? & qua
Te sanus tutum prendere lege queat?
Quadrantem addat aquae, calicem sumpsisse falerni
Qui cupit, hoc sumi pocula more iuvat.
Stes intra heminas: nam qui procedere tendit
Utra: alacer, sed mox ebrius inde furit.
Res dura haec nimium. Sunt pendula guttura, dulce
Tu fluis. Heu facile commoda nulla cadunt’.
55 Ibid., 100: “Fidei symbolum”.
‘Stet depictus Honos Tyrio velatus amictu,
Eiusque iungat nuda dextram Veritas.
Sitque Amor in medio castus: cui tempora circum
Rosa it, Diones pulchrior Cupidine.
Constituunt haec signa fidem, reverentia honoris
Quam fovet, alit Amor, parturitque Veritas’.
32 DIFURIA AND MELION

The picture responds to these poetic images, as if born from them, in analogy
to the way that the imaging of Truth, Honor, and Love gives birth to faith – not
in the form of an image of personified Faith, but as a virtue activated by the
mutual presence of these prosopoeic virtues. Because faith ostensibly operates
in the realm of fact, its presence is evoked by the conjunction of these virtu-
ous personifications, but not represented pictorially with them. The epigram
asserts that she is made present by these prior images (‘constituunt haec signa
fidem’) that the emblematic picture, in response to the epigrammatic com-
mand, ‘Stet depictus’ (‘Let it stand depicted’), converts into explicitly pictorial
images. The implication is that the activity of visualizing and picturing vir-
tues such as Truth, Honor, and Love has the power to bring forth the virtue of
faith, not virtually but actually, as the generative relation between faith and
these three personifications indicates. Here the explicitly pictorial status of
the emblematic image and its instrumental capacity to beget faith, bringing
it experientially to life, inflects the trope of the living image explored in the
emblems “On an Image of Hope” and “On a Statue of Bacchus” [Figs. 7–9].
These three emblems suggest some of the ways in which illustrated edi-
tions of Alciato’s Emblematum liber purport to represent ancient works of
art, both pictorial and sculptural, infusing them with the illusion of life, even
while insisting on their status as representational images. Floris’s appropria-
tion of Alciato’s emblem, “On those who dare to attempt something beyond
their powers”, not only proclaims allegorically the Herculean power of his art
to breath new life into a Philostratean image, but also attaches Hercules and the
Pygmies to a thematic of emblematic image-making that turns on the relation
between art and nature, between the image qua image and the living image
[Fig. 1]. In addition, Floris embedded within his allegory of art a reference to
a second Alciatan emblem on Hercules, “Eloquence Superior to Fortitude”.56
Floris’s Hercules appears not just weary but veritably aged, his face lined and
careworn, especially by comparison with his more youthful appearance in such
plates from Floris’s Labours of Hercules as Hercules Prevents the Centaurs from
Abducting Hippodamia [Fig. 7]. This is how he is shown in “Eloquence Superior
to Fortitude”, which focuses on a specific avatar of the demi-god – the Northern
or, more particularly, the Frankish Hercules [Fig. 8]. The subscriptio explains:

His left hand holds the bow, his right the unyielding bludgeon.
The Nemean lion covers his nude limbs.
What then, is this the face of Hercules?
That he is old, his temples hoary with age – it doesn’t fit.

56 Ibid., 97: “Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior”.

Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 33

figure 8 Mercure Jollat, Hercules of the Franks, ca. 1534. Woodcut, page height
162 mm. Emblematic pictura, “Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior”, in
Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1534)
Newberry Library, Chicago
34 DIFURIA AND MELION

figure 9 Johannes Wierix, Portrait of Frans Floris, ca. 1572. Engraving, 208 ×
123 mm. Plate from Hieronymus Cock – Domenicus Lampsonius,
Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae Inferiors effigies (Antwerp,
Hieronymus Cock: 1572)
By permission of the Trustees, British Museum
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 35

[…]
Can it really be true, what the Franks assert, that Alcides, superior in
speech not strength, gave laws to the people?
Arms yield to the arts of peace, and by eloquence prevailing,
[Hercules] compels even the hardest hearts to do his bidding.57

By markedly aging Hercules, Floris implanted a subtle allusion to that other

Herculean persona – Hercules Gallicus – made famous by Alciato as a byword
for eloquence and the propagation of art. The reference strengthens the allu-
sive power of his allegory, its advertence to the Herculean art Floris himself
propagates by means of this print. The reference is also witty and jocular, for it
operates even while Hercules sleeps, when speech falls silent.
There is yet another way in which Hercules would have been seen by a
humanist viewer as a fitting, if ironical, allegory of Floris. This has to do with
his reputation for facileness, memorialized by Lampsonius in the verses he
composed for Cock’s Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies
(Portraits of Famous Painters of the Low Countries), published posthumously
in 1572.58 The verses pertaining to Floris appear on Johannes Wierix’s portrait
engraving, the twenty-second effigies in the series [Fig. 9]. He is character-
ised as a painter who, though immensely gifted by nature, would surely have
become greater still, had it pleased him more to labour vigorously at one thing
than to accomplish many things easily:

Floris, if you had augmented your great natural ability with as great a
quantity of technical skill,
You whom it pleases less to paint much than to paint many things,

57 Ibid.: ‘Arcum laeva tenet: rigidam fert dextera clavam,

Contegit & Nemees corpora nuda leo.
Herculis haec igitur facies. Non convenit illud
Quod vetus & senio tempora cana gerit.
[…]
Anne quod Alciden lingua non robore Galli
Praestantem, populis iura dedisse ferunt?
Cedunt arma togae, & quamvis durissima corda
Eloquio pollens ad sua vota trahit’.
58 On the Effigies, see Becker J., “Zur niederländischen Kunstliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts:
Domenicus Lampsonius”, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 24 (1973) 45–61; Riggs,
Hieronymus Cock 204–205; Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van
Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’ (Chicago – London: 1991) 143; and Grieken J. van, “Cornelis Cort,
Johannes Wierix, and an Anonymous Engraver, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae
Inferioris effigies”, in Van Grieken – Luijten – Stock (eds.), Hieronymus Cock 272–273.
36 DIFURIA AND MELION

Whom neither the just delay of the file, nor toilsome labour gratifies;
Then I would exclaim, ‘Yield, painters of all lands,
Begotten by our fathers and forefathers’.59

The allegorical image of Hercules at ease, powerful yet slumbering, accom-

modates this characterization of Floris as a painter gifted with superabundant
ingenium, who eschews pingere multum, tolerates no delay, and prefers facility
to assiduity.

3 Excursus Two: Ekphrastic Usage in Karel van Mander’s

Schilder-Boeck

The second excursus on ekphrastic usage in the Low Countries concerns the
painter, draughtsman, print designer, poet, and art theoretician Karel van
Mander and his distinctive take on the relation between ekphrastic text and
image or, more precisely, on the poetics of ekphrastic image-making, both in
word and image. Van Mander’s ruling impulse throughout the Schilder-Boeck
(Book on Picturing) of 1604, his great treatise on the visual arts, painting in
particular, is to treat the artes (liberal arts) and the pictorial arts of painting,
glass-engraving, and engraving, as sister-arts, and to defend the art of pictur-
ing as fundamental, indeed as the crucial source that inspires and instrumen-
talises every art and science that traffics in images. In this widest sense, the
term schilderconst can be defined as the art of image-making, the principles of
which underlie both the literary and the visual arts, rhetorica/poësis and pic-
tura; but schilderconst, defined more narrowly, also refers to the art of painting,
which is practised by the mind, eye, and hand in concert, and expressed in and
through a wide array of handelinghen (manners of hand). As we shall see, Van
Mander moves away from the neo-scholastic, neo-sceptical paradigm of the
disputatio artium, substituting for it a kind of harmonia artium that embraces
all image-based consten (arts), and places them tout court under the sign of

59 ‘Si pictor quantum natura, Flore, valebas,

Tantum adiunxisses artis & ipse tibi,
Dum tibi multa libet potius, quam pingere multum,
Nec mora te limae iusta, laborque iuvat;
Cedite, clamarem, pictores, omnibus oris
Quos vel avi, nostri vel genuere patres’.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 37

schilderconst.60 The Schilder-Boeck’s first Preface sets the stage for the book’s
treatment of the consonance of the arts.

The very restorative, inspiriting noble art of Painting, the natural nurse-
maid of all virtuous Arts and sciences (as Scholars well-versed in letters
amply know) was once held in high honor and estate by the greatest
Lords and men of the highest learning: indeed, so much esteemed by the
ancient wise Greeks that in the time of the artful Painter Pamphilus they
placed her in the same degree and on a par with the other liberal Arts.
But whether in or through this association our exceptional art of Painting
now bestows by dint of her worthy presence or company a greater honor
upon the other Arts than she formerly received from association with
them, what I feel about this I shall gladly keep quiet, that I not be chided
by reproving eyes, or badly thanked, and in order not to foment many a
dispute. However, it is not to be gainsaid that she is well worthy of the
place from which no one has ever cast her out, and that by rights she may
indeed be called liberal.61

60 On the origins of the disputatio artium in Cicero’s Academica and its method of argu-
mentation in utramque partem as applied to the canonical philosophical schools, see
Dempsey, “Disegno and Logos” 49; Schmitt C.B., Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence
of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague: 1972); and Lévy C., Cicero Academicus:
Recherches sur les Académiques et sur la philosophie Cicéronienne, Collection de l’École
française de Rome 162 (Rome: 1992).
61 Mander Karel van, Het Schilder-Boeck, waer in voor eerst de leerlustighe Iueght den grondt
der Edel Vry schilderconst in verscheyden deelen wort voorghedraghen. Daer nae in dry
deelen t’leven der vermaerde doorluchtighe Schilders des ouden, en nieuwen tyds. Eyntlyck
d’wtlegghinghe op den Metamorphoseon Pub. Ovidij Nasonis. Ooc daerbeneffens wtbeeld-
inghe der figueren. Alles dienstich en nut den schilders, Constbeminders, en dichters, oock
allen staten van menschen. (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604), fol. iiij recto: ‘De
seer vermaecklijcke vernuft-barende edel Schilder-const, natuerlijcke Voedster van alle
deughtsaem Consten en wetenschappen (ghelijck den letter-condigen Gheleerden ghe-
noegh kenlijck is) was by den meesten Heeren, en hoogh-gheleerden, oyt in seer hoogher
eeren en weerden: Jae by den ouden wijsen Griecken in sulcken aensien, dat syse ten
tijde van den constighen Schilder Pamphilus, by den anderen vrye consten in ghelijcken
graet oft plaetse der eeren stelden. Maer of nu in oft door dit t’saemvoeghen onse uytne-
mende Schilder-const, door haer weerdighe tegenwoordicheyt oft bycomst den anderen
Consten niet meerder eere heeft toegelangt, dan sy van henlieder gheselschaps weerdi-
cheyt weghen heeft ontfanghen, wat ick daer van ghevoele wil ick geeren verswijghen,
om niet met dweersen ooghen te worden berispt, qualijck ghedanckt, oft veel tistenissen
te veroorsaken. T’is niet te wederspreken doch, oft sy en is by de ander haer plaetse wel
weerdigh, van waer sy noyt van yemandt is uytghestooten gheworden, des sy te rechten
wel vry mach gheheeten worden’.
38 DIFURIA AND MELION

Ekphrases play a major role throughout the Schilder-Boeck: the text or,
better, intertext consists of an opening poem on the pictorial arts, known as
the Grondt der edel-vry schilderconst (Foundation of the Noble Free Art of
Painting), followed by a sequence of three sets of painters’ lives – first, ancient
Greek and Roman masters, then Italian masters of the fourteenth through
early seventeenth centuries, and finally, Netherlandish and German mas-
ters of the fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries. The Lives primarily
concern painting, although the Northern lives also contain numerous digres-
sions on glass-engraving and printmaking. Two further books close out the
Schilder-Boeck: a commentary, titled Wtlegghingh, on the fifteen books of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, for the use of visual artists, and an iconography of allegorical
figures, in three parts – the first on the pagan gods, the second on animals and
things, the third on abstractions such as Peace, Concord, Fidelity, Friendship,
Hazard, Occasion, Favor, and Poetry (personified by the Poet). Although Van
Mander often elaborates upon critical categories by referring the reader to
works of art he has seen, either at first hand or by way of reproductive prints,
he prefers to rely on ekphrasis to make these works vividly present to his read-
ers; through ekphrasis he not only indicates what these pictures show and how
they show it, i.e., their handelingh (medium and manner of rendering), but also
endeavours to communicate their affective charge – the pleasure, pain, joy or
fear they instill by virtue of the act of beholding. For Van Mander, the threshold
between the originating image and the ekphrastic description of said image is
exceptionally porous. Constituted by the picture it ostensibly describes, the
ekphrasis appears constitutive of the picture it renders, as if the two media –
visual and verbal – were somehow fully complementary. On this account, there
is no rhetorical effect that the pictorial image cannot produce, just as there is
no image worthy of note that cannot be reproduced figuratively, by poetic-
rhetorical means. Even though Van Mander, who was keenly aware of the prop-
erties specific to various media, never entirely collapses image into word, or
word into image, his poetics of the image is expansive: even as it encompasses
every pictorial effect, it also acknowledges that there is no poetic effect beyond
the scope of schilderconst (the art of picturing, or, in its more particular sense,
of painting). Van Mander’s ekphrastic usage, thus understood, can be seen as
less paragonal or, to use Dempsey’s apt terminology, disputatious than Floris’s:
whereas Hercules and the Pygmies is emblematic, in that it plays upon a dia-
logic relation between text and image, Van Mander construes the mutuality
of the sister arts, painting and poetry, as entirely consonant with the Horatian
doctrine ut pictura poësis [Fig. 1].
The degree to which picturing/painting and poetry are mutually con-
stitutive in quite a literal sense, becomes evident when one considers Van
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 39

Mander’s conception of the origins of schilderconst, set out in Book II of the

Schilder-Boeck, “Lives of the Ancient Illustrious Painters, Egyptian, Greek,
and Roman”. The Preface incorporates two sustained ekphrastic showpieces,
the first a lengthy paraphrase of Homer’s famous description of the shield
fashioned by Hephaestus for Achilles, at the behest of Thetys, the second a
somewhat compressed paraphrase of Virgil’s description of the frieze deco-
rating the temple of Juno in Carthage, which showed scenes from the Trojan
war (an aemulatio of the Homeric showpiece). Van Mander’s ekphrasis after
Homer serves implicitly to place an Homeric stamp of approval on the vari-
ous subjects and effects of art designated, defined, and demarcated in the
Grondt’s chapters on history, landscape, animals, drapery, reflection, et al. In
the Preface to the Grondt, Van Mander dubs these subjects and effects the ver-
scheydenheden (varieties), urging would-be schilders to take command of all
of them, but allowing that in practice some will be better at one thing, some
at another.62 It is worth quoting the ekphrasis in extenso, since it enables him
to claim that Homer’s diction, his power of verbal image-making, like Virgil’s,
arises from prior experience of pictures that subsume every kind and degree of
image the poet could possibly devise.

So it is indisputable, in view of what the same Homer writes in his

Eighteenth Book, that the art of painting was sufficiently well known dur-
ing the time of the Trojans, for he says that Vulcan had made for Thetis
in the shield of Achilles a thousandfold devices/ornaments of Invention,
namely, the Heavens, Earth and Sea, the circuit of the Sun, Moon, and
Stars, and the various Celestial signs, the Bear, Pleiades, Hyades, and
suchlike; then, too, he had fashioned two Cities, with weddings in one of
them, and thereby Brides guided by [the light of] burning torches, and
people dancing in public, and Matrons looking on, seated at their thresh-
olds, showing admiration in their eyes. Elsewhere People had gathered to
hear [lawyers] pleading opposite sides of a death penalty case before the
Bench, in which goings-on (‘twere too long to retail here), [Homer] says,
were such marvelous affects and actions, that in portraying such things

62 See “Voor-reden, op den grondt der edel vry Schilder-const”, in Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck,
Book I, fol. *vi recto: ‘De selve verscheydenheden salmen oock vinden by den dees-
tijdtsche Italianen en Nederlanders te zijn geweest, hier te lang te verhalen: waer by
de Jeught gheleert sal wesen, om in de Const volherden, te grijpen nae t’ghene Natuere
meest aenbiedt. Ist niet de volcomenheyt in beelden en Historien, soo mach het wesen
Beesten, Keuckenen, Fruyten, Bloemen, Landtschappen, Metselrijen, Prospectiven,
Compartimenten, Grotissen, Nachten, branden, Conterfeytselen nae t’leven, Zeen, en
Schepen, oft soo yet anders te schilderen’.
40 DIFURIA AND MELION

the world’s best Painter would have his hands full. In the other City, he
speaks of many episodes of War, the city besieged, and many [cityfolk]
taking counsel, making a raid, setting a trap, while Wives and Children,
accompanied by old men, defended the city. The ones setting the trap
had Mars and Minerva as their Leaders; they lay [in wait] by a river,
where they expected to seize the cattle that came there to drink: there
came two Herdsmen playing on their Reeden Pipes, giving joyful plea-
sure to their bleating Flocks, oblivious to the snare set by their enemies
who sprang upon them, swords raised, and took hold of the fat Oxen and
white Sheep, killing the Peasant Herdsmen. The besiegers, gathered in
Counsel, left their meeting and came hither on horseback, where a great
battle was fought, and at play amongst them, Tumult, Discord, and Death:
here to be seen were great streams of blood, a varied array of actions and
apparel. And still did Vulcan (so [Homer] says) fashion a sandy field,
thrice ploughed, with earth uncommonly soft and rich, on which many
farmers steered their plough-yoked oxen back and forth: to the field’s end
there came a Man who refreshed their labour with a cannister of Wine.
One saw, too, where they ploughed, how the fresh-furrowed earth was
browner than [the earth] turned earlier; this was work[manship] (says
he) wholly worth the viewing. Elsewhere [Vulcan] fashioned a fertile
field full of yellow-eared corn being mown by Harvesters, the heaps and
bundles lying thickly piled amidst the peasants: there some bound the
sheaves, and youths laid them up in heaps. Therein the Lord of the field,
his hand holding a Scepter or staff, doth seem to revel. In another place,
beneath acorned oaks, were others who, having been given the task of
preparing a meal, had slaughtered the fattest ox and were making it
ready: the Women of the household were bringing the workmen their
noontime meal and bread, overstrewn with fine grain. And yet did Vulcan
fashion in his Godly work a Vineyard filled full with vines, the black of
which was made from blue; he encircled the Vineyard with a ditch, and
for entry, there was but a single path, upon which the vignerons came
and went. There one saw Maidens and Youths bearing the happy vin-
tage in little baskets woven from twigs. Amongst them was a young man
sweetly playing a peasant’s ditty on a harp, and there were others, too,
who kept time, clapping their hands joyfully, and dancing to it. Further
along, he had fashioned a herd of fat oxen, their foreheads horned, which
came lowing, from out their stalls, into a meadow by a fast-flowing river,
its banks reedy; four herders brought up the rear, guarding [the herd],
and with them nine dogs, fleet of foot. Two Lions had taken from the
edge of the bellowing herd a steer that with louder voice brayed for help,
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 41

and though the herders gave chase and cheered on their hounds, [the
dogs], for fear of being bitten, dared not snap at the lions (which went
on eating the steer’s innards, and refused to let go); instead, they merely
barked, running to and fro. Furthermore, this lame Artifex had fashioned
a dale full of white Sheep, also stalls, huts, and other things of this sort.
And as Daedalus had formerly done in Crete, in the same manner did
[Homer] paint round the beautiful Ariadne a gathering of fresh-faced
Youths and fine-haired Maidens, well worth a hundred Oxen, who hand
in hand danced a round or a circlet, the youths’ garments finely woven,
the weave lustrous as if smeared with oil, the Maidens in long-pleated
robes, bearing parti-coloured floral wreaths upon their brows.63 Wearing
golden daggers at their sides, the Youths, with winged, well-practised feet,
scampered still and anon, like a potter who every now and then lightly
turns his wheel. Sometimes paired, straightway they leapt outward, danc-
ing round the others, and sometimes joined together with them: a great
concourse of people stood fast, full amused to see who jumped the finest;
amongst them were two others who, to the sound of their fine, consum-
mate song, did somersaults. Now may well be surmised from this Shield
that painting was properly known in Trojan times: for what Painter is
there who should be able to devise all this or bring it to pass in our time?
If one were to say that a work such as this was not painted but graven or
enamelled, whatever it may be, ‘twere impossible to have brought all the
things just related into the work if the art of Drawing had not reached a
great state of perfection: if its perfection was great, then is it not likely
that the art of Painting, already engendered, did exist, as can well be
assumed. On the other hand, one reads in the first Book of the Aeneid
that Trojan Aeneas, coming upon a Temple built in honor of Juno in
Carthage, saw there a painting of the siege of Troy, wherein he observed
Priam, Achilles, and many others, portrayed after the life, or rather, done
in such a way as to be recognizable to him. Amongst various battles and
retreats he saw how Troilus unluckily strode forth against Achilles; else-
where how this same Achilles, having dragged Hector’s dead body round
the walls of Troy, ransomed it for a parcel of gold; and many other par-
ticulars, done so well and so artfully that they did much move the heart of
Aeneas, causing a great flow of tears to moisten his cheeks. Now may one
avow: ‘Taken as a whole, this is Poetic devising and no History whereby
to offer certain proof, being in nowise more sufficient than the previous

63 A marginal gloss reads: ‘Nota: already before the time of Homer, Daedalus was exception-
ally skilled at Schilder-const’.
42 DIFURIA AND MELION

tale’. This I allow, according to the worthiness of Virgil’s poetry. Yet, even
though he did devise, such exceptional Poets, attentive to all things,
would have considered as well whether in Trojan times, when Troy fell,
painting had already been discovered – else might they be censured for
thoughtlessness: the same is to be said about Homer. Having weighed this
matter, I think that Homer could have written neither so forcefully nor
definitively about the arts of Drawing and of Painting, had they not been
known publicly in his time or earlier, and nor could he have [written] so
widely about them had they not been highly in fashion and in use, at the
very least in his lifetime.64

64 Van Mander, “Voor-reden, op het Leven der oude Antijcke Doorluchtighe Schilders, soo
wel Griecken als Romeynen”, in Schilder-Boeck, Book II, fols. 60v–61r: ‘So ist onweder-
sprekelick, na des selven Homeri schrijven in zijn 18e. Boeck, of de Schilder-const en
was genoech ten tijde der Troyanen bekent, want hy seght, dat Vulcanus had gemaect in
Achilles schilt voor Thetys, duysentderley versieringen van Inventien, te weten, Hemel,
aerde en Zee, den loop van Son, maen, en sterren, en die Hemel teyckens onderschey-
den den Beyr, de Pleiaden, Hyaden, en dergelijcken: dan had hy gemaect twee Steden,
in d’eene Bruyloften, daer men de Bruyden met brandende toortsen geleyde, en daer
men openbaer danssen maecte, en de Vrouwen saten op hen drempels toe en sagen,
schijnende aen haer oogen verwondert te wesen: elders waren Lieden vergaert om te
hooren eenige die tegen malcanderen pleyteden, om eenen dootslag voor t’Recht, in
welke Historien (hier te lang te verhalen) segt hy van wonder affecten en actien, dat den
besten Schilder van de weerelt nu genoech te doen hadde die dingen al uyt te beelden.
In d’ander Stadt segt hy van veel geschiedenissen van Oorlogen, de Stadt was belegert,
en hielden veel raedt van binnen, deden uytval lagen leggende, terwijle dat Wijfs en
Kinderen met den ouden Mannen de Stadt beschermden: die de lage leyden, hadden
Mars en Minerva voor Leytlieden, en lagen so by een Riviere, alwaer sy verwachten te
nemen Vee, dat daer quam drincken: daer quamen twee Herders, welcke spelende op
hun Ruyschpijpen, gaven hun blatende Kudden een vrolijc vermaeck, niet merckende op
die lagen der vyanden, de welcke met hun sweerden uytsprongen, en namen dese vette
Ossen en witte Schapen, doodende de Boersche Herderen: die van t’Leger in den raedt
vergadert wesende, verlieten hun vergaderinge, en quamen derwaert te Peerde, waer een
groot gevecht is geschiet, daer tusschen beyden hun spel hadden oproer, tweedracht en
de doot: hier waren groote bloetstortingen, verscheyden actien en cleedingen te sien.
Noch hadder (segt hy) Vulcanus gemaect eenen dreftschen acker, die driemael geploegt
was, en was sonder gelijcke sacht en het van aerd-gront, hier op waren veel Bouwers,
die hun gekockte Ossen met de ploegen heen en weder stierden: aen t’eynde van den
Acker quam een Man, die hun den arbeyt ververschte met een kanne Wijns. Men sagh
ooc also sy ploegden, de versch geroerde aerde bruynder te wesen, dan die voor henen
geploegt was, dit alles (segt hy) was een werck weerdich te sien. Ter ander plaetsen was
gemaect een vruchtbaer veldt, dat vol geel-arige vruchten wesende, worde van den maey-
ers gesneden, de hoopen oft bossen lagen dicht op malcander midden de voren: daer
waren die de schooven bonden, en knechten die de hoopen in leyden: daer was den Heere
van’t velt, houdende in zijn hant eenen Scepter oft staf, den welcken hen scheen te ver-
blijden. Eenige die sulc last hadden, waren elder doende onder geeyckelde Eycken de
maeltijt toe te maken, daer sy een van den vetsten Ossen hadden ten Offer geslachtet,
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 43

Remarkable is the way Van Mander appears almost to elide the functions of
painting with words and painting with pigments, as in the sudden interpolation

daer sy al aen doende waren: de Vrouwen des huysgesins brochten den wercklieden te
noenmalen spijse en broot, met wit fijn meel overstroyt. Noch hadde Vulcanus in zijn
Godlijck werck ghemaect eenen Wijngaert vol druyven, welcke swart waren van blaeu-
wicheit, en had den Wijngaert omvangen met een graft, en om daer in te comen wasser
maer eenen wegh, daer de Wijnsnijders door uyt en in gingen, daer saghmen maegden en
knechten de vrolijcke vruchten in gevlochten wisse korfkens dragen. Midden onder dese
was een jong knecht, die spelende op een Herp, soetelijc een Boerigh liedeken song, daer
d’ander mate houdende, vrolijc met den handen dappende, op dansten. Voorts had hy
gemaect een vette kudde Ossen met gehoornde voorhoofden, welcke quamen al loeyende
uyt den stal in de weyde, by een snel loopende Rivier, met rietige oevers, vier Herders vol-
gden om hun te bewaren, met negen snel-voetige Honden, en twee grouwelijcke Leewen
hadden aen het eynde genomen uyt t’brullende kudde eenen Stier, die met luyder stem
om hulpe riep, en hoewel de Herders toeloopende hun Honden aenhissen, en dorsten sy
niet toebijten, vreesende van den Leewen (die den Stier niet verlatende t’bloet en inge-
want aten) gesnout te wesen, maer basten slechs wat by, en liepen dan so heen. Noch had
desen mancken Constenaer gemaect een dal vol witte Schapen, ooc stallen, keeten, en
dergelijcke dingen. Noch had hy geschildert op de selve wijse, dat Dedalus voormaels had
gedaen in Creta om de schoon Ariadne een vergaderinge van nieu-crachtige Jongelingen
en schoon-hayrige Dochters, die wel waren weerdigh 100. Ossen, dese t’samen hant aen
hant danssende, maecten eenen ronden ring oft crans: der Knechten cleedinge was van
fijn geweef, en blincte oft met oly had geweest besmeert, de maegden hadden lang-
ployige keurssen, en hadden op de hoofden verf-bloemige kranssen geladen: de knech-
ten hadden aen vergulde daggen, somtijts met veerdigen wel geleerden voet seer licht
loopende, gelijck eenen Potbacker zijn radt somtijts licht om schuyft: somtijts liepen sy
gepaert t’samen recht uyt, en maecten den eenen dans op den anderen, en somtijts al
onder een vermengt: eenen grooten omstant volcx sagh vast toe met groot vermaeck,
wie de fraeyste sprongen dede: daer onder ander twee op hun gesang fraey en volcomen
tuymelsprongen deden. Nu is uyt desen Schilt wel te oordeelen, datmen ten tijde der
Troyanen van schilderen genoech heeft gheweten: want wat Schilder isser, die dit alles
soude connen versieren, oft te wege brengen in desen onsen tijt? Of men nu seggen wil,
dat dit werc niet en was geschildert, maer gegraven, oft metter hitten geamailleert, het
mocht zijn so het mocht, ten was niet mogelijc alle de verhaelde dingen int werc te bren-
gen, of de Teycken-const en most doe al in seer groote perfectie wesen: was sy in groote
perfectie, so ist niet mogelijc of de Schilder-const most mede al gebaert en in wesen zijn,
en ooc niet onvolcomen, als wel te ramen is. Ten anderen, leestmen in’t 1e. Boeck der
Aeneidos, dat den Troyaen Aeneas, comende te Carthago in eenen Tempel, die ter eeren
van Iuno gebout was, en sagh daer een schilderije van de belegeringe van Troyen, daer hy
Priamus, Achilles, en veel andere na t’leven gedaen sagh, oft so gedaen dat hyse kende.
Onder ander strijden en vluchten sagh hy, hoe Troilus ongeluckich tegen Achillem hadde
gestreden: elders hoe desen Achilles, Hectors doot lichaem om de mueren van Troyen
gesleept hebbende, dat vercoopt voor een deel gouts, en veel meer ander omstandicheyts,
het welc so constich en we gedaen was, dat het Aeneas zijn gemoet so beweegde, dat een
groote vloet van tranen zijn wangen bevochtigden. Nu magh men seggen, dit is t’samen al
Poeetsche versieringe, en geen Historie, om yet sekers mede te bewijsen, tot het voorige
verhael niet genoechsaem wesende: dit laet ick so wesen Virgilij gedichten in zijn weerde:
44 DIFURIA AND MELION

of the phrase ‘the black of which was made from blue’ (‘welcke swart waren van
blaeuwicheyt’) to describe the blue-black soil, as ‘limned’ by Homer, but also to
describe Vulcan’s use of blue to render the rich blackness of fertile soil. Equally
noteworthy is the clause ‘as Daedalus had formerly done in Crete’, which can
be read as a reference to that which Vulcan has portrayed – a round dance
performed in Ariadne’s honour – and how he has portrayed it, namely, with
a painterly skill as great as that of the painter Daedalus: hence the marginal
gloss stating that Daedalus was an excellent painter who pre-dated Homer.65
In this same clause, the shield is suddenly construed as a painted image, the
implication being that Homer’s ekphrasis describes a metal object fashioned
so like a painting that it can be designated as such. The conclusion Van Mander
draws ascribes to Homer’s ekphrasis an efficacy that wholly derives from paint-
ing, even while paradoxically exceeding it, to such an extent that no modern
painting imaginable can be thought capable of reproducing Homer’s effects:
‘For what Painter is there who should be able to devise all this or bring it to
pass in our time?’ But far from invoking the conventional divide between text
and image, Van Mander elides these paired terms: in asking who could ‘devise
all this’, he leaves open the status of ‘this’, the object of imitation; does he mean
Homer’s painterly ekphrasis, or is he referring to the kind of painting upon
which Homer’s ekphrastic display is premised, and without which it could not
exist? ‘This’ would seem to denote the nexus of ekphrastic text and image: Van
Mander inquires whether modern painters are competent to concretise an
ekphrasis-like painting, a painterly ekphrasis, like the one traceable from the
Shield of Achilles. (And in fact, his answer, as his account of Jan and Hubert
van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece at the start of Book IV makes clear, is a resound-
ing yes, given that this epitome of schilderconst is replete with the full range
of verscheydenheden.66) Van Mander’s version of Homer’s Shield of Achilles
makes the synergy of text and image, or more precisely, of painterly text
and ekphrastic painting, evident in another respect: if the copia of Homer’s

nochtans al versierde hy, so waren sulcke uytnemende Poeten aendachtigh op alle din-
gen, overleggende of men ooc in den tijt van den Troyanen, doe Troyen onder gegaen
was, alree schilderije gevonden heeft, anders waer hy te straffen van groote onbedach-
theyt: desgelijcx waer ooc te seggen van Homero. Nu dit overgeslagen, is te bedencken,
dat Homerus niet en conde schrijven so heel werckelijck en bescheydelijc van de Teycken
oft Schilder-const, haddese te zijnen tijde, oft te vooren niet openbaer en in kennisse
geweest, jae ooc niet so heel breet daer van, haddese niet rijckelijc en hooglijck in swang
en gebruyc geweest, ten alderminsten in zijnen tijt’.
65 Van Mander identifies the Greek painter Pyrrhus as a nephew of Daedalus; see “Van
Pyrrhus, de Neef van Dedalo, d’eerste Griecksche Schilder”, in ibid., fols. 62v–63r.
66 See “Het leven van Jan en Hubrecht van Eyck, ghebroeders, en Schilders van Maeseyck”, in
ibid., fols. 200v–201r.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 45

ekphrasis, its amplitude and extraordinary richness of detail, are ascribed

to the poet’s attentive relation to Teycken- and Schilder-const, so, conversely,
Homer’s ekphrastic power proves indexical to the presence of the linked arts
of Drawing and Painting, both at the time he wrote the Iliad and before then:
‘Nor could he have [written] so widely about them had they not been highly
in fashion and in use, at the very least in his lifetime’. Underlying everything is
Teycken-const, the art of Drawing, which, on Van Mander’s account, sponsors
the relation between the medium of ekphrasis and the visual media – graving,
enamel, painting – that function jointly as ekphrastic subject and source.
Moreover, if picturing and poeticizing are appreciated as mutually contin-
gent, this reciprocal relation is echoed by the implied connection between the
ekphrastic trope – the schild (shield) – and the process of schild-eren (pictur-
ing, painting) figured by that trope. The etymology of schilderen, its supposed
derivation from schild, speaks to the way in which the shield-trope, though
empowered by what Van Mander imagines as the anterior viewing of pictorial
images, tacitly testifies to the actual origins of schilderconst in shield-painting.
The preliminary poem that initiates Book II, “Etymology, or Exposition,
wherein the Word Painter, or Painting, Has its Source”, written in the form of
a dialogue between Karel van Mander and his brother Adam, makes this case:

See, Adam, worthy brother, I surmise that this word

Schilder (painter), or Schildry (painting), comes forth from Schilden (shields):
For the brave noble heroes in the battle for Troy
Did cause their shields to be embellished with fine figural work,
Likewise the Romans, did indeed hang here and there
Their forefathers’ shields, in public places,
In the town hall, their own halls, or the temples of their gods,
In order to memorialize their ancestors’ pious deeds:
For they themselves stood there aplenty, done after the life.
This Schilde schildren (painting of shields), see, has never ceased to be,
Whereby it followed, came ever more to pass,
To say schildery, and to call us Schilders.

Read in light of this poem, Van Mander’s paraphrase of Achilles’s shield

describes the ur-shield whence painting originates (or the meta-shield whereby
the origins of painting are discerned), while also providing the evidentiary basis
for Van Mander’s assertion that painting underwrites the pictorial effects of
Homer’s ekphrastic tour de force. The Shield of Achilles stands for the origins
of painting, without which there could be no ekphrastic shield, but the ekph-
rasis also licences or notionally engenders, like a fountainhead, the varieties of
46 DIFURIA AND MELION

schilderconst to be discussed in Books II–IV of the Schilder-Boeck (the Ancient,

Italian, and Northern “Lives”), and especially the vescheydenheden analogously
practiced by the Ancients and brought to a second perfection by the Dutch,
Flemish, and German masters. Painting and ekphrasis prove jointly enabling,
the one capacitating the other.
The reciprocally vivifying effects of pictura and poësis must operate in tan-
dem, in the form of a painterly poetry or a poetic painting. Van Mander was
of course aware that in practical terms, the poet cannot paint a picture, nor
the painter write a poem, with the possible exception of poet-painters such as
the Poetelijcken Schilder Cornelis Ketel, whom he characterizes as sui generis.67
Indeed, in chapter 1 of the Grondt, Van Mander offers the following advice to
aspiring young painters:

Strive to flee Rhetorica, the sweet-featured art of poetry,68

Howsoever merry and diverting [she may be];
Yet I myself have never entirely abandoned her,
Although I fear she has freely diverted me
From the Painter’s path.
She is a beautiful flower: were she to bear fruit,
Or bring wheaten flour into the Kitchen,
Then might one rejoice to practice her.69

67 See “Life of Cornelis Ketel, Excellent Painter of Gouda,” in Schilder-Boeck, Book IV,
fol. 274v.
68 Van Mander equates poetry and rhetoric in the manner typical of the rederijkers, the rhetor-
poets of his time, as witness Matthijs de Castelein’s theoretical poem De const van rhetor-
iken (The Art of Rhetoric) of 1555, which is in fact a treatise on poetics. On De Castelein’s
poem, see Stuiveling G., “Schaken met De Castelein,” Spiegel der Letteren 7 (1963–1964)
161–184; Iansen S.A.P.J.H., “Speurtocht naar het leven van Matthijs Castelein. Archivalia
en onzekerheden”, Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal-
en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1970) 321–446; Coigneau D., “Matthijs de Castelein (1485?–
1550),” Jaarboek De Fonteine (1985–86) 7–13; and Spies M., Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and
Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics, ed. H. Duits – T. van Strien (Amsterdam:
1999) 40–44. Rhetorica in this context refers to the so-called arts de seconde rhétorique –
not the formal and structural principles of argumentation, but rather, the techniques of
prosody, especially rhyme, rhythm, equisonance, and, of course, colorful elocution.
69 Stanzas 45–47, in focusing on the business of art, recall P.C. Ketel’s emphasis on the
commercial profit to be gained from the practice schilderconst, in his “Workshop-Song
for Young Picturers, after the wise: ‘The Lovely May, etc.’”, supra, stanza 1 of which ends
by asserting, ‘Our wish, our desire and hope is to sell’. Also see Advantage’s promise ‘to
increase your pounds-weight of coin all round’, in Ketel’s “New Year’s Song, to be Sung
by Six Personages – Order, Art, Time, Advantage, Pictura, and Reason, after the wise:
‘Rejoice / in Virtue / you Rhetorical Youth’”, supra. Ketel was responding to the practical
strain that runs through Van Mander’s poem.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 47

figure 10 Hans Bol, Landscape with Fall of Icarus, ca. 1585. Watercolour on paper, 133 ×
206 mm
Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp

The poetic impulse must be curbed if, exercised apart from painting, it threat-
ens to impede the would-be painter’s training or the master’s ability to earn a
living. But key to Van Mander’s cautionary remarks is the alternative possibil-
ity he imagines of poetry bearing fruit for the painter whose poetic practice
of schilderconst – not of painting and poetry as parallel tracks, but of the two
together as the ‘painter’s path’ – secures both prosperity and joy.
In truth, the Schilder-Boeck demonstrates some of the forms that the har-
monisation of painting and poetry might take. For example, the “Life of Hans
Bol, Painter of Mechelen”, features an extended ekphrasis of Bol’s Daedalus
and Icarus, painted in water-colour on canvas, which Van Mander had seen in
the collection of his cousin Jan [Fig. 10].70 Remarkable is the degree to which
Van Mander, taking his cue from Homer’s and Virgil’s many references to work-
manship, insistently foregrounds the picture’s ‘precision and able handling’
(‘suyverheyt, en een goede handelinghe’), its ‘firm and sure manner’ (‘vaste
en ghewisse manier’), the ‘setting out and working up’ of its constituent parts

70 The term doek (canvas) can also refer specifically to linen; see Maldoets André ‒
Kiliaan Cornelis ‒ Steenhart Q. ‒ Hasselt A. van, Thesaurus Theutonicae linguae. Schat der
Neder-duytscher spraken (Antwerp, Christopher Plantin: 1573) 90.
48 DIFURIA AND MELION

(‘aen te legghen, en op te maken’). Here and elsewhere in the “Lives”, ekphra-

sis does more than describe a pictorial subject and the experience of behold-
ing it: Van Mander also conveys how Bol manipulates his media, moving from
handelinghe to schildery, pictorial means to pictorial image, and more than
this, he indicates how the making of the image, its made qualities, become
legible in and through the act of beholding. And as Ovid, in Book VIII of the
Metamorphoses, draws a parallel between the reader of the poem and the audi-
ence within it, so Van Mander asks us to consider how our astonished viewing
of Bol’s brilliantly rendered picture, in particular its figures and landscape, is
analogous to the wonder shown by the shepherd and ploughman who, from
within the image, observe the father’s soaring flight and the son’s sudden fall.
More than simply avowing Bol’s ability to translate from poetic text to image,
Van Mander makes known, by means of ekphrasis, how such a pictorial image
comes to be made in close proximity to the poem that inspired it:

I have seen in the possession of my cousin Mr. Jan van der Mander, now
Pensionary of Ghent, a large watercolour on canvas, the history or fable
of Daedalus and Icarus, wherein they fly through the open sky, having
escaped their prison. There in the water lay a steep rock, overtopped by
a castle, done in a way not to be bettered, so subtle and precise was the
rock, moss-covered, washed over, so confident the handling of its many
little colours; likewise the castle, its fabric ancient, strange, as if grown
from [living] rock: it was all wondrously conceived/contrived (versierigh).
Very well handled, too, was the distant landscape, and the water wherein
the rock was mirrored, in whose brown shadows one saw the feathers
from Icarus’s wings, fallen through the melting of the wax and floating on
the water, very naturally. There as well, some beautiful foregrounds, and
additional landscape: round about, in front, sat a shepherd with his flock,
and a bit farther on, a peasant at his plough, looking up, astonished at this
flight, as comprised by the text.71

71 Van Mander, “Het leven van Hans Bol, Schilder van Mechelen”, in Schilder-Boeck,
Book IV, fol. 260r–v: ‘Ick heb van hem ghesien tot mijn Cosijn Mr. Jan van der Mander, nu
Pensionnaris te Ghent, eenen grooten Water-verwen doeck, wesende d’Historie oft Fabel
van Dedalus en Icarus, daer sy door d’open locht hun ghevanghnis ontvloghen. Daer was
een Roots ligghende in’t water, die een Casteel gheladen hadde, die soo ghedaen was, dat
het niet wel te verbeteren was, soo aerdigh en net was die Rootse bemoscht, bewassen, en
met haer veel coleurkens, op een vaste manier gehandelt: desghelijcx dat oudt vreemd-
sche gebouw van dat Casteel, als uyt de Roots gewassen: was wonder versierlijck. Voort was
seer wel ghehandelt het verre Lantschap, en het water daer dese Roots haer in spiegelde,
en in die bruynicheyt saghmen de pluymen, die uyt Icari vloghelen door het was-smilten
ghevallen waren, en dreven op t’water seer natuerlijck. Oock warender eenighe schoon
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 49

Typical is Van Mander’s use of bewassen (washed over) to refer jointly to

the waves lapping at the cliffsides and the washes of watercolour applied to
canvas, and his use of the term versierigh (conceived/contrived) to describe
both the rock and its painterly handling. By the same token, these many refer-
ences to handelingh remind the reader, repeatedly, that the ekphrasis responds
to a pictorial image and to the traces of pictorial execution legible in its sur-
face. Conversely, the ekphrastic account conjures up this image or, rather, the
process that [re]produces it, after the fact, so to speak. The temporal relation
between picture and ekphrastic picture is complex, moving from the anterior
picture to its rhetorical double, or from the rhetorical picture to the pictorial
image, now become posterior to the text. This temporal chiasmus reminds us
once again that Van Mander, in his distinctive use of ekphrases, construes text
and image as mutually constitutive.
Based in small on the lengthy ekphrastic paraphrases after Homer and Virgil
that populate the Preface to Book II, this method of description largely differs
from that utilized in Book III, the Italian “Lives”, where Van Mander assimilates
Vasari’s more conventional rhetorical technique. Vasari emulates the ekphras-
tic paradigm codified by Leon Battista Alberti in De pictura, in his description
of Apelles’s lost Calumny of Apelles.72 Like Alberti’s, Vasari’s ekphrases focus
on composition, figural attitudes, gestures, decorum, and transmission of the
affetti, rather than on the relation between making and viewing, rendering
and representation.73 Even when Vasari, diverging from the norm, attempts to
describe Venetian colore and attends to contingencies of setting and circum-
stance, his emphasis falls on embodied action and affect. Take Vasari’s ekphra-
sis of Palma Vecchio’s Transportation of the Body of St. Mark to Venice (formerly
displayed in the Scuola Grande di San Marco), an abbreviated paraphrase of
which Van Mander incorporated into his “Life of Jacopo Palma il Giovane”: the

voor-gronden, en ander Landtschap: ontrent voor aen sat eenen Schaep-wachter met zijn
Schapen, en wat verder eenen Acker-man aen den Ploegh, die om hoogh dit vlieghen als
verwondert aensaghen, ghelijck den Text mede brengt’. On Bol’s lost Daedalus and Icarus,
see Miedema H., Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German
Painters, trans D. Cook-Radmore, 6 vols. (Doornspijk: 1997) 4:210–212. Illustrated here as
a comparandum is the version in water-color on paper in the Museum van den Bergh,
Antwerp.
72 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. R. Sinisgalli
(Cambridge et al.: 2011) 75–76.
73 On the form and function of Vasari’s ekphrases in the Vite, see Alpers S.L., “Ekphrasis and
Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’ Lives”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23
(1960) 190–215.
50 DIFURIA AND MELION

figure 11 Palma Il Vecchio, Barrasca di mare (Storm at Sea), bef. 1528. Oil on canvas, 362 ×
408 cm
Accademia, Venice

winds are treated like personified Winds, the waves like malign antagonists,
and the picture as a whole judders no less violently than the men on ship-
board [Fig. 11].

There was also an elder Jacopo Palma of Venice, who painted in oil a
splendid rare work in the chamber where the Scuola di San Marco gath-
ers, a picture wherein the dead body of Saint Mark is brought by ship
to Venice. On one side is subtly portrayed a terrifying storm at sea; on
the other, very well done, with the utmost care, ships and barques are
assaulted by fell winds: likewise, a group of figures in the sky, the var-
ied forms of evil spirits that blow like Winds round the ship, hindering
it and its oars rowed strenuously against the raging waves. Here one sees
the diligence and dexterity of the sailors, the violence of the winds, the
motion of the nude figures, and the lightning falling from the sky, the
water broken by the oars, and the force of the rowers bending the poles,
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 51

something not to be improved or brought closer to nature: for it appears,

in the beholding, that the whole picture shakes and shudders, as if every-
thing painted therein were alive, taking place naturally.74

In this passage, references to mimetic subtlety and precision combine with

affirmations of verisimilitude, but terms such as ‘diligence and dexterity’ apply
not to the process of painting per se, but to the figures enacting the istoria.
Throughout Book III of the Schilder-Boeck, Van Mander operates in a Vasarian
mode, adopting his Italian forebear’s ekphrastic usage, with its clear emphasis
on narrative action and affect. By contrast, the ekphrases in Books II and IV,
the Ancient and Northern “Lives”, pay far more attention to the pictorial sub-
jects and elements discussed in Book I, the Grondt, which includes chapters on
landscape, animals, drapery, the optics of reflection, and wel verwen (colour-
ing in the sense of Venetian and Lombard colorito). Above all, Van Mander
attempts to relay ‘spirited’ (geestigh) displays of descriptive skill, paying hom-
age to painters’ ability to capture fugitive effects, especially the movement of
hair, drapery, foliage, and sky.75 The term geestigh signifies liveliness, spirited-
ness of both the mind and the hand: with reference to acumen and lively wit,
Cornelis Kiliaan, in Etymologicum Theutonicae linguae, translates g[h]eestigh
into Latin as ingeniosus (ingenious) and argutus (lively, keen-witted); with ref-
erence to manual dexterity, as scitus and solers (skillful, adroit).76 Geestigh has

74 Van Mander, “Het leven van Jacob Palma, Schilder van Venetien”, in Schilder-Boeck,
Book III, fol. 187r–v: ‘Daer is ooc geweest den ouden Jacob Palma van Venetien, desen
schilderde van Olyverwe een heerlijck besonderste werck in de Camer, daer die van de
Schole van S. Marc vergaderen, een stuck, daer t’doot lichaem van S. Marc wort ghebracht
nae Venetien in een Schip. Hier is seer aerdich uytghebeeldt een grouwelijck Zee-onweder,
daer oock noch ander Schepen en Schuyten van de felle winden worden bevochten, seer
wel en met grooter aendacht ghedaen: ghelijck oock is eenen groep beelden in de locht,
in verscheyden ghedaenten van quade gheesten, die als Winden blasen, om t’Schip, dat
door de rasende golven met riemen crachtlijck wort geroeyt, te beletten. Hier sietmen
den vlijt en behendicheyt der Schippers, t’gheweldt der Winden, t’roeren der baren, en de
blixemen uyt den Hemel vallen, t’water gebroken van den riemen, en t’vouwen der rie-
men van de cracht der Roeyers, een dinghen wesende dat niet te verbeteren is, de Natuer
naerder te comen: Want het schijn in’t aensien, dat het heele stuck roert en schudt, gelijck
of t’gene daer in geschildert is al leefde, en natuerlijck geschiedde’.
75 On geestigh handling as the sine qua non for the lively portrayal of leaves, hair, sky, and
drapery, see Van Mander, “Van het Landschap”, in Schilder-Boeck, Book I, stanza 37,
fol. 37r–v; and Miedema H., Karel van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const,
2 vols. (Utrecht: 1973) 2: 556.
76 See Kiliaan C., Etymologicum Theutonicae linguae, ed. F. Claes, S.J. (The Hague: 1972) 148.
The Etymologicum (Antwerp, Jan Moretus: 1599) is the retitled third edition of Kiliaan’s
Dictionarium Teutonicum Latinum (Antwerp, Christopher Plantin: 1574), on which, see
Claes F., De bronnen van drie woordenboeken uit de drukkerij van Plantin: het Dictionarium
52 DIFURIA AND MELION

as its corollary meanings bellus and venustas (fine, graceful, beautiful). Bol’s
mossy rock, washed by waves, washed by watercolours, is one such epitome
of geestigh handling, ingenious in contrivance, subtle and precise in manufac-
ture; so, too, his clifftop castle is curious, strange, and wondrously conceived/
contrived, so lively, so [in]spirited that it appears to have grown from stone.
Steeped in handelingh, the ekphrasis articulates, indeed operates at the thresh-
old where verbal description and descriptive painting meet, where the bound-
ary between verbal and pictorial image-making blurs.

4 Excursus Three: Ekphrasis as Spiritual Exercise in Jan David, S.J.’s

Veridicus Christianus

The third excursus circles back to the topic of the relation between emblematic
and ekphrastic images. It centers on the question of text-based processes of
image-making, asking how the emblematist’s verbal ekphrases perforce evoke
ekphrastic images? Theodoor Galle’s Aspicientes in Auctorem Fidei (Looking
on the Author of Faith) provides an allegorical summa of the emblem book
it supplements – Jan David, S.J.’s emblematic treatise on the foundations of
the Christian faith, the Veridicus Christianus (True Christian) of 1601 (reprint
ed., 1606) [Fig. 12]. It distills the book’s primary functions, which were to
explore the doctrina Christi (doctrine, teaching of Christ) and to highlight the
ways in which the votary, by taking this doctrine to heart, could engage more
fully in the imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ), transforming herself/him-
self into a living image of the Lord. The print also functions as a frontispiece
to this emblem book’s appendix, the Orbita probitatis ad Christi imitationem
Veridico Christiano subserviens (Wheel of Probity, Serving [to Facilitate] the
True Christian’s Imitation of Christ). The Orbita centers on a volvelle (a paper
wheel) with three apertures that open onto a disk printed with 100 numbers:
these numbers correspond to the Veridicus’s 100 emblems; when the wheel is
turned, different configurations of numbers appear, and the reader-viewer is
invited to consult the correspondent emblems, respectively comparing and
contrasting them.77 As David states in chapter 2 of the Orbita, the chief aim

tetraglotton (1562), de Thesaurus Theutonicae linguae (1573), en Kiliaans eerste Dictionarium

Teutonico-Latinum (1574) (Ghent: 1970).
77 The verses from Ezechiel quoted on the verso of Galle’s frontispiece speak to the prophetic
authority of the volvelle and its power of revealing unexpected connections amongst the
Veridicus’s emblems.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 53

figure 12 Theodoor Galle, Aspicientes in Auctorem fidei, ca. 1601. Engraving, 172 × 121 mm.
Frontispiece of Jan David, S.J., Orbita probitatis ad Christi imitationem Veridico
Christiano subserviens (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601)
The Newberry Library, Chicago: Case W1025.22
54 DIFURIA AND MELION

of this appendix was to provide the reader-viewer with an alternative method

of reading the Veridicus’s complex, demanding emblems. By likening her/his
reading to a game of chance, the Orbita licences a more playful, recreational
mode of perusing the otherwise deadly earnest emblem book:

The purpose of this well-considered device is to provide persons wearied

by serious reading and [their] graver occupations, and whose appetite
[for further reading] has been suppressed, with something more like the
dessert they crave, than with more solid fare. In this pleasing way, and
by means of [supplying] sure delight, as if by permission of chance, they
are drawn to read this or that chapter, and are handed a certain method
whereby, through recreation, and useful, honest pleasure, they may cher-
ish the occasion of progressing in betterment.78

David then explains what it is that Galle’s frontispiece actually illustrates: it

shows how the true reader-viewer of the Veridicus will take its emblems to
heart, internally imprinting them, seeing through them to the vivid images of
Christ they put forward; such a reader-viewer will appear to be painting the
Lord’s image afresh within her-/himself, as if portraying Christ after the life
(ad vivum), rather than merely visualizing rote formulae or tiredly aping bibli-
cal exempla codified in familiar pericopes:

For thus will it occur that they are drawn as if by a sweet cord towards
the true and requisite imitation of Christ: thereby, as far as is granted to
human frailty, they may portray after the life and express in themselves
and by their conduct that most absolute example of every virtue and of the
utmost perfection. For it is unseemly, unworthy of the name of art, when
that which is made by one’s art is not known by direct experience: when
for a portrait of Christ the Saviour, a painter on panel, and a Christian in
life, instead makes ready and portrays I know not what monstrosity.79

The monstrum (monstrosity) to which David refers is any image not based on
the living presence of Christ that the Veridicus Christianus brings to life for its

78 David Jan, S.J., Orbita probitatis ad Christi imitationem Veridico Christiano subserviens, in
idem, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1606) 354. On the Orbita
probitatis as it relates to the production of the Veridicus Christianus, see Imhof D., Jan
Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press: A Bibliography of the Works Published and
Printed by Jan Moretus I in Antwerp (1589–1610), Bibliotheca Bibliographica Neerlandica,
Series Major 3, 2 vols. (Leiden: 2014) I:229–234.
79 Ibid.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 55

committed reader-viewers. Accordingly, Galle’s frontispiece depicts ten paint-

ers, only one of whom – the man seated directly across from Christ bearing the
Cross – portrays him after the life, precisely as he appears. The majority paint
what they distractedly see in their mind’s eye: joyful, glorious events from the
Infancy and ministry of Christ – the adoration of the Magi, Jesus amongst the
doctors, Jesus at the wedding feast in Cana, the miracle of the loaves and fishes,
the transfiguration on Mount Thabor, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem –
more pleasing to imagine than the Passion of Christ. Others are waylaid by sin-
ful things: prone to envy and greed, they paint Judas holding the money-bag,
or portray Satan himself; another wayward painter puts the finishing touches
on the symbols of heresy – a seductive woman dressed vaingloriously and two
barking dogs (since meretricious heretics are beautiful on the outside but hid-
eous within, and, driven by pride, bark falsehoods instead of preaching gos-
pel truths).
The preface to the Orbita decodes Galle’s allegory by reading it in terms of
Galatians 4:19: ‘My little children, of whom I am in labour again, until Christ be
formed in you’. Equating the ‘true Christian’ (‘veridicus Christianus’) with the
faithful reader of the Veridicus Christianus, David declares that it is incumbent
upon her/him to imitate Christ as if painting him after the life; painting him
ad vivum is seen as the fulfilment of the Pauline injunction to fashion Christ
within ourselves:

Just as any excellent painter endeavours with all industry to express after
the life whatever s/he undertakes to imitate by art; so the Christian per-
son is charged with imitating Christ our Saviour as he lived and sacredly
conversed, and with exhibiting him within herself/himself as if he were
delineated after the life, as his holy name and given vocation require. This
is to be striven for until Christ be formed within us, as the apostle says
[Galatians 4:19]: and as we ourselves have portrayed [the true Christian]
in our exposition of the fifteenth question and answer of our Veridicus.80
Whatsoever assists a Christian person to live well and blessedly, serving
in the place of a stimulus, helps her/him most skillfully to achieve the
imitation of Christ; wherefore at length one grows in every kind of virtue,
as if portraying Christ the prototype on a tablet within oneself.81

80 David is referring to the Latin question and answer inscribed on every plate of the
Veridicus and repeated as an epigraph at the start of every chapter.
81 Ibid. 353.
56 DIFURIA AND MELION

In chapter 15 of the Veridicus, as this passage recalls, David recounts the

events described in Galle’s frontispiece. In an ekphrastic tour de force, he nar-
rates the various kinds and degrees of imitatio Christi that Christians daily
practice as they strive, for the most part unsuccessfully, to imitate Christ. The
story David tells takes the form of an elaborate parabolic allegory designed
to explicate Emblem 15, “Hominis vere Christiani descriptio” (Description of
a Truly Christian Man), by reference to the complex tableau that the reader-
viewer later re-encounters at the start of the Orbita [Fig. 13].82 Emblems 15’s
personified True Christian, whose action of gazing intently at the book of
Scripture epitomizes the Christian vocation, is amplified by association with
a multi-figural ekphrastic image about the manner and meaning of producing
an image of Christ. Enacted, parabolic allegory is thus marshaled to provide an
elaborate gloss on stilled, personified allegory. The marginal gloss, ‘Christians,
as painters, imitators of Christ’ (‘Christiani, ut pictores, Christi imitatores’),
encapsulates the argument of the ekphrasis:83

Imagine that we are painters, let this be more than something merely
said: for we are called Christians, and so we are; imitators of Christ, [yet]
not properly. And so, represent [to yourself] very many painters sitting
at their panels, casting their eyes at Christ, in order to shadow him forth
in the proper colours: whether dwelling in holiness on earth, or praying
in the garden, or again, scourged, bearing the cross, or indeed affixed to
the cross: and meanwhile, in place of the things just said, other painters
paint Christ adored by the Magi, changing water into wine, multiplying
the loaves, or having entered Jerusalem in triumph, or radiant on Mount
Thabor in the splendour of glory, and [otherwise] splendid, graceful,
pleasing in this way; in which things many are more pleased to imitate
him, than in contempt, poverty, the disgrace of the Passion, and patience;
still others, which is worse, delineate the betrayer Judas, portraying him
in place of Christ; others (I shudder to write it) do not blush when they
depict on the tablet of the heart an evil spirit instead of Christ, even while
contemplating his example, in the manner of painters who preparing to
portray someone are wont to inspect the living prototype. But among
them, he who portrays Christ the best, is he who must be judged the best
painter in this wise. Otherwise, he would be worthy of being chastised by

82 On Emblem 15, see the section on “Stilled Allegory” in the introductory essay “Allegorical
Forms and Functions”, in Melion W.S. – Clifton J., Through a Glass, Darkly: Allegory and
Faith in Netherlandish Prints from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt van Rijn, exh. cat.,
Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University (Atlanta: 2019) 26–27.
83 Ibid. 45.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 57

figure 13 Theodoor Galle, Hominis vere Christiani description, ca. 1601. Engraving,
172 × 121 mm. Emblem 15 of Jan David, S.J., Veridicus Christianus
(Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601)
The Newberry Library, Chicago: Case W1025.22
58 DIFURIA AND MELION

the harsh censure of Saint Augustine, when he says: ‘Christian, may you
be caught, Christian, faithful in name, [yet] in deed showing something
else. And so, let us be faithful imitators, according the to apostle’s admo-
nition: “Looking at Jesus, the author and furnisher of faith”’.84

The True Christian, on this account, if s/he is properly to imitate Christ, must
first faithfully picture him as he is there to be seen in Scripture, not substi-
tuting joyful events for sorrowful ones, or promoting the image of the arch-
enemy, Satan, or of the apostate Judas. The reference to devilry and apostasy
reveals that heresy, co-embodied by Satan (cacodaemon) and Judas, is being
juxtaposed to its antidote – the image of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, afflicted
by the whole of the Passion. More than simply using a true image of Christ
to combat heretical distortions of the Gospel, David insists that the process
of painting this true image, of imitating it, must be parabolically visualized.
This is to say that he construes anti-heretical image-making, whose relation
to scriptural persons, things, and events is fundamentally mimetic and alle-
gorical, as the essential means of combatting the sinful distortion of religious
truth. In its relation to the emblematic pictura that accompanies chapter 15
of the Veridicus, Aspicientes in Auctorem fidei might best be designated meta-
ekphrastic [Figs. 12 & 13]. Whereas the pictorial image of the True Christian
holding the attributes of his faith personifies, in the sense of bodying forth in
a descriptive image, the argument of chapter 15, Aspicientes in Auctorem fidei
pictures this same argument differently – in the form of a parabolic image
about image-making, that originates in David’s ekphrastic parable, and expli­
citly responds to his use of the trope of direct address – ‘Imagine that we are
painters’. One might argue that pictura 15 is modally ekphrastic, in that it con-
verts a discursive argument into a descriptive figure, whereas Aspicientes is
technically ekphrastic in that it illustrates a prior verbal image, rendered by
verbal means in chapter 15. What makes the two versions of the True Christian
especially complex, as instances of ekphrastic image-making, is that the one,
Aspicientes, also functions as a reformulated image of its counterpart, pic-
tura 15, which portrays the personified True Christian Man; reversing polari-
ties, however, the same might be construed as a reformulated prolepsis of
Aspicientes. Or is it that the two pictorial images, along with their associated
texts, are mutually constitutive rather than temporally proleptic or consecu-
tive? After all, the Veridicus and the Orbita are intertextual: they can be read
recursively in multiple directions, back to front, front to back, or from a place

84 Ibid.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 59

betwixt and between. The emblematic genre sponsors this dialogue between
pictorial (and textual) figurations, in which the word reads the image, and the
image, more than merely responding to the word, appears to elicit or produce
it, while also interacting with its sister picturae. This is a tangled web, to be
sure, and the fourteen papers of which this volume consists are designed to
assist the reader-viewer better to discern and understand the richly spun fabric
of ekphrastic image-making.

5 Themes and Essays

This volume presents essays in six parts, each concerned with a discrete aspect
of the fundamental but not always explicitly or self-consciously acknowledged
paragone of word and image that pervades ekphrastic expressions. Essays in
Part 1, “Humanism, Print, Ekphrasis”, address heretofore understudied exam-
ples of the rhetorical device’s use by writers in the early modern humanist
tradition as the printed word and image became intertwined with greater
complexity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Barbara Kaminska dis-
tinguishes four types of ekphrasis in writings by Erasmus of Rotterdam. She
argues that the seminal Netherlandish humanist uses enargeian description to
express his awareness that for some viewers, images can function more power-
fully than words. The relation of image to text was crucially important for the
seventeenth-century Jesuit emblematist Antoine Sucquet, author of the Via
vitae aeternae (The Road to Eternal Life). Carol Barbour expounds Sucquet’s
use of the ekphrastic trope of the artist painting a picture, which she com-
pares to the deictic speaker of the ekphrastic allegory in the ancient Greek
dialogue commonly known as the Tabula Cebetis. Barbour considers the book’s
sequence of images of the artist at work, arguing for his function as interlocu-
tor in the interplay of vision, memory, and text, and thus, as a facilitator of
salvation. James Clifton’s paper also addresses an early modern publication
that imitates an ancient source, Michel de Marolles’s Temple des Muses, based
on Philostratus the Elder’s Imagines (Eikones). Marolles’s text comments on
engraved scenes from various ancient fables: his condemnation of Abraham
van Diepenbeeck’s illustration of Chaos as described in Ovid’s Metapmorphses,
invites the reader-viewer to explore the fraught relation between image and
text and the ekphrastic possibilities arising in these observed inadequacies.
Annie Maloney’s essay explores Giovan Pietro Bellori’s awareness of the
shortcomings of language for describing his Idea of painting. Citing Bellori’s
interest in print as a mediator of image and text, she argues that printed repro-
ductions of Annibale Caracci’s paintings in the Galleria Farnese functioned
60 DIFURIA AND MELION

indispensably as ekphrastic tools that bridge the gap between his text and the
paintings it describes.
Our anthology’s Part 2, “Poem, Image, Ekphrasis”, groups essays address-
ing examples of early modern ekphrastic verse. Karl Enenkel’s analsysis of
Ludovico Lazzarelli’s De gentilium deorum imaginibus argues for ekphrasis’s
importance as an instrument of knowledge transmission in fifteenth-century
Italy. Lazarelli’s poem is a compendium of devices from a range of sources and
poetic traditions, compressed into a didactic ekphrasis of Andrea Mantegna’s
so-called tarocchi. Art DiFuria finds a similarly rich blend of poetic and picto-
rial devices in Joachim du Bellay’s celebrated 32-sonnet poem, Les Antiquités
de Rome. He argues for the sixteenth-century poem’s status as more than an
ekphrastic description of Rome’s ruins. For DiFuria, Les Antiquités exploits
the Roman ruin’s partially present, partially absent state as an embodiment of
ekphrastic richness, an opportunity to invest the image of the ruinscape with
a poeticized history redolent not only of Rome’s grandeur, but also of its ruin-
ation, for which du Bellay deploys ekphrasis’s reductive complement, antiph-
rasis. Caecilie Weissert’s essay on Jan van der Noot’s poem, “Beschrijvinghe van
de hooft sonden, inden eersten van Houerdye” (Description of the Capital Sins,
First of Pride), turns on an exceptionally copious ekphrasis; Van der Noot’s
word-pictures of nine female personifications of vices (sinnekens) play upon
their status as figures comprised by a painting, to heighten the reader-viewer’s
affective response to a supposedly pictorial effect of energeia. Ivana Bičak
addresses the neglected genre of ‘anatomical poems’, verses describing animal
experimental subjects. In Bičak’s view, these poems attempt to achieve ‘virtual
reality’, that is, a description of the experiment with such enargeia that the
reader is able to ‘witness’ it in striking detail.
Direct address of the sacred via ekphrasis is the subject of the essays in
Part 3, “Sacred Ekphrasis”. Elliott Wise parses the ekphrastic relation between
a selection of Robert Campin’s paintings and the meditative treatises of the
Augustinian Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec, whose textual images aspire to
the condition of lively, expressive pictures. Steffen Zierholz offers a new read-
ing of Nicolas Poussin’s Miracle of St. Francis of Xavier in its Jesuit patronal con-
text. Via its adoption of the devotional program in Raphael’s Transfiguration,
Poussin’s painting brings into view the interior images of a reformed soul well
exercised in the imitatio Christi. The uses of ekphrasis in seventeenth-century
French devotional manuals form the subject of Lars Cyril Nørgaard’s essay. In
Les Tableaux de la Pénitence by Antoine Godeau, ekphrastic readings of the
book’s twenty-two engravings opens up a compunctive space of temporal and
affective self-reflection.
Introduction: Ekphrastic Image-Making 61

While the essays in the first three parts of Ekphrastic Image-Making situate
images within a variety of ekphrastic discursive environments, Part 4, “Ekphras-
tic Images”, groups essays together that mount arguments for the ekphrastic
capacities of images themselves. Femke Speelberg argues for the presence of
‘ekphrastic architecture’ in a series of 25 Italian engravings of unknown author-
ship, bearing images of ancient Roman buildings; some are fantastic, akin to
the impossible architecture of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Speelberg argues
that the vital afterlife of these early Cinquecento images, which continued to
be [re]produced well into the sixteenth century, signals the value their ekphras-
tic character held for antiquarian audiences. Walter Melion elucidates Hen-
drick Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and Adonis, showing how it emulates
the integral, intertextual fabric of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, wherein the Venus
and Adonis myth is nested within a plenitude of analogous ekphrastic tales.
The Ovidian visual analogies between the twisting forms of the landscape and
the serpentine figures of Venus, Adonis, and Cupid convey landscape’s capac-
ity to generate meaning in a manner as compelling as – and complementary
to – the image’s human protagonists. Amy Golahny’s aforementioned essay on
Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Silver situates the painting within the uni-
verse of Judas imagery preceding it – especially Biblical illustrations – and
after it – variants of the image by Rembrandt’s followers. In Golahny’s essay,
this famous early picture emerges at the center of an ekphrastic universe, as
a painting responsive to earlier and later images and textual descriptions of
Judas, all striving to make him visually present and intensely alive. Shelley Per-
love’s essay examines a later ekphrastic painting by Rembrandt – the Lucretia –
which visualises that heroine’s death by suicide, as described by Livy and Ovid,
to commemorate the tragic and untimely deaths of Rembrandt’s wife Saskia
and, more recently, of his companion Hendrickje.
The essays in Parts 5 and 6 unfold onto the broader world, focusing on
landscape and nature in Part 5 and on global networks of exchange in
Part 6. Christopher Heuer’s essay, in Part 5, “Nature, Art, Ekphrasis”, expounds
Albrecht Dürer’s astonishing Deluge watercolour, which attempts to describe
his dream vision of an apocalyptic storm. Dürer’s response to this incompre-
hensible natural phenomenon makes full use of the jointly evidentiary and
fictional, verbal and visual affordances of ekphrasis and enargeia, to record an
image by turns recursive and prophetic. April Oettinger discerns an ekphras-
tic response to nature in works by the renowned sixteenth-century botanist
Pietro Andrea Mattiolo, namely, his Commentary on Dioscurides and his nar-
rative poem, Magno palazzo. Mattioli’s private copy of the former contains a
leaf pressed into a page opposite a page illustrating and describing the Stellaria
plant. This insertion of a natural object into a book describing it presents an
62 DIFURIA AND MELION

opportunity to explore the functions of ekphrasis in respect of the printed

botanical’s intended triangulation of nature, art, and text.
Part 6, “Global Ekphrasis”, features three essays bringing the ekphrastic lens
to bear on the growth of an expansive, global consciousness as it developed
during the early modern period. Stephanie Porras argues that written uses of
the phrase ‘hazen de Flandes’ (made in Flanders) in epistolary correspondence
and inventories from colonial Latin America operated ekphrastically. She
shows that the type of object such uses of the phrase describe invoked a specific
form of image in the minds of its speakers, writers, and readers. Teresa Clifton’s
essay on New Spanish fiction by Bernardo de Balbuena and Francisco Bramón
locates a pastoral ekphrastic mode in their uses of objects and emblems to
interrogate theories of nature and artifice in literature. Finally, Dawn O’Dell
takes us to eighteenth-century Philadelphia, where the Dutch-born Andreas
Everardus van Braam Houckgeest owned and displayed a set of Chinese land-
scape paintings, which he acquired while living and working in Beijing for
the Dutch East India Company embassy to the Qing dynasty. Descriptions of
the paintings appear in Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s illustrated
account of Houckgeest’s time in China. O’Dell argues that the descriptions
constitute an ekphrasis, reflecting Van Braam’s collecting habits, his peripa-
tetic life, and the regions through which he travelled.

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 part 1
Humanism, Print, Ekphrasis

∵
 chapter 1

‘The Reader Seems to Have Seen Rather Than Read’:

Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion
in Erasmus of Rotterdam
Barbara A. Kaminska

The 1519 portrait medal of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) designed by Quentin

Massys bears a famous inscription: ‘A Better Image Will My Writings Show’
[Fig. 1.1]. The phrase provides a handy summary of Erasmus’s unquestion-
able belief in the superiority of the word over image, and mind over material
representation. And yet, throughout his writings Erasmus gives considerable
attention to visual arts, and, more broadly speaking, the potential of visuality.
Erasmus’s ekphrastic descriptions of real and imaginary works of art, enargeic
evocations of places, and metaphors derived from image-making can be con-
sidered essential to many aspects of his theological, polemical, and moralistic
reflections. Ekphrasis could, as a matter of fact, be identified as an instrument
that allowed Erasmus to reconcile his devotion to the word with the under-
standing that a visual image has a stronger effect on a reader/viewer. Following
this premise, we can distinguish four ways in which Erasmus uses ekphrasis

figure 1.1 Quentin Massys, Portrait Medal of Erasmus (1519). Bronze, diameter 10.5 cm.
London, Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. no. 4613 – 1858)
Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

70 Kaminska

in his writings. First, he introduces descriptions of works of art with the aim
of putting the picture in front of readers’ eyes for their religious and moral
edification by narrating actions in the picture, as is the case with his poems
In Honour of St Mary Magdalen and On a Picture of the Rape of Europa, as
well as fragments of The Godly Feast. Second, in the poems Under a Picture of
Christ’s Face and An Image of the Boy Jesus in the Elementary School Recently
Established by Colet Erasmus sets out to describe works of art, but in fact
encourages the reader/viewer to discard any material representations. Third,
some of his descriptions of images erase their status as material objects and
blur the boundaries between the pictorial and the real space, as in the descrip-
tion of Johann von Botzheim’s residence in Constance in a famous letter to
Marcus Laurinus and, although less emphatically, in religious imagery in The
Godly Feast. And finally, in narrating his Paraphrases Erasmus relies on enar-
geic descriptions of places and events to produce a visual image in the readers’
imagination. While the proposed classification might at first seem arbitrary,
the combination of these four categories allows us to ask a fundamental ques-
tion that pertains to Erasmus’s use of ekphrasis: how can images – material
and mental – enhance readers’ spiritual experience? Guided by this question,
I omit in my essay some of Erasmus’s best-known reflections on visual arts,
such as the eulogy of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) in The Right Way of Speaking
and his criticism of the veneration of images in The Praise of Folly; this is not, in
other words, an essay on Erasmus and visual arts, but rather, an attempt to rei-
magine the importance of visuality and vividness in the humanist’s writings.
The four ways in which I have proposed we can think of ekphrasis in Erasmus
do not align with specific literary genres or types of ekphrasis as defined in
rhetoric. Thus, considering first and foremost the functions of ekphrasis, this
essay will switch between different types of texts. To begin with descriptions
of works of art that aim at moral and religious edification, we need to look
at what is perhaps the least known part of Erasmus’s extraordinarily copious
oeuvre: his poems. There are only nine extant epigrams dedicated to paint-
ings, some of them likely written as literary exercises that were not meant for
broader circulation, while others were composed at the request of Erasmus’s
acquaintances. Such was the case of the poem In Honour of St Mary Magdalen,
written for the otherwise enigmatic Augustinian monk at the Sint Maartensdal
monastery in Leuven, Jan van Merleberghe of Diest (Johannes Merliberch
Diest). The epigram reads:

Impotenti amoris oestrO / Haec beata percitA

Nardicum profudit vngueN, / Eluit lacrymis pedeS,
Mox capillis tersit; eccE / Rex Olympi, qui semeL
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 71

Illecebras spreuit ac suB- / Egit, istis ampliteR

Capitur oblectaculis. ProcH, / Daemonis technis malI
Eua capta est; ista lacrymiS / Tincta culpas diluit.1

In the driving urge of love, IO / Here the blessed MagdalenA

Nard the precious ointment pours oN, / Eye his feet with weeping washeS,
Makes dry with her tresses, look yE./ Ruler of the sky eternaL,
Instant once to spurn and to snuB / Every trick, accepts her offeR
Charmed by her devotion, her faitH. / As the devil Eve defeateD
In his first and fatal malicE / She with tears has paid for the forfeiT.2

The poem was included in Erasmus’s letter from around 1518–20, which is
now known only from two early copies, both prepared by the same copyist,
whom Allen identified as Martinus Lypsius (1492–1555). Lypsius was the great
uncle of Justus Lipsius and an inmate in the same Augustinian convent as van
Merleberghe.3 If one wished to recreate the painting described by Erasmus,
it would be a narrative scene of the feast at the house of Simon the Pharisee,
with Mary Magdalene as its focal point. This was not a common subject in
fifteenth- or early-sixteenth-century painting, which preferred an isolated
representation of Mary Magdalene, relying on the juxtaposition of opulent
clothing symbolizing her sinful life with a jar of ointment signalling her con-
version. Nonetheless, a painting such as the one described by Erasmus can
be found at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, attributed to Dirck Bouts and dated
ca. 1440 [Fig. 1.2]. To my knowledge, the panel has never been associated with
Erasmus’s epigram. Such an identification might have been inhibited by the
belief that the painting described by Erasmus showed not Saint John, but
Jan van Merleberghe himself, in which case Bouts’s painting would be a few
decades too old. However, none of the extant early documents suggests that
the John in the painting that was in the possession of van Merleberghe would
be the owner himself – a cursory description of the painting in Lypsius’s man-
uscript from the Royal Library in Brussels describes it simply as ‘tabulae, in
qua Magdalena depicta erat et effictus Ioannes’ – ‘a panel in which depicted
is Magdalene and fashioned Johannes’.4 And while the Carthusian monk in
Bouts’s painting remains unidentified and we know next to nothing about the

1 Reedijk C., The Poems of Desiderius Erasmus (Leiden: 1956) 331–332.

2 Erasmus D., Letters 1122–1251 (1520–1521). The Correspondence of Erasmus, annot. Bie-
­tenholz, P.G. – trans. Mynors R.A.B., in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. McConica J.K. et al.
(Toronto: 1988) 7:26.
3 Reedijk, Poems of Desiderius Erasmus 331.
4 Reedijk, Poems of Desiderius Erasmus 331.
72 Kaminska

figure 1.2 Dirck Bouts, Christ in the House of Simon (ca. 1464). Oil on oak panel, 40.5 × 61 cm.
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie (inv. no. 533A)
Image © bpk Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen
Museen zu Berlin – Preussischer Kultur / Christoph Schmidt /
Art Resource, NY

panel’s provenance, Erasmus’s poem vividly places before our eyes the very
scene composed by Bouts, giving voice to the silent gestures of depicted fig-
ures. John the Evangelist looks at the monk and points at Magdalene, intro-
ducing her as an example of devotion to Christ. The three external signs of
this devotion are present in the panel: the jar of ointment stands by the table
as Magdalene is washing Christ’s right foot with her hair, while her red and
swollen eyes testify to the tears she must have shed. Christ’s gesture of blessing
shows that Magdalene’s repentance has been accepted; the gesture thus stands
for the second part of the poem. To be sure, the epigram does not describe the
entire composition created by Bouts; rather, it highlights those aspects of it
that guide a reader toward conversion.
The structure of Erasmus’s poem serves yet another purpose, which is
explained in the opening lines of his letter:

The verse is trochaic tetrameter catalectic. In each line take the first letter,
and the last letter before the caesura (which is marked with a stroke), and
similarly the first and last in the second half of the line, and so on with all
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 73

of them, and you will have what you want: IOHANNES MERLIBERCH
DIEST.5

The addressee’s name becomes a part of the ekphrasis, so even if his figure is
not included in the pictorial composition, it is added in its verbal account. The
use of this specific meter might have also been inspired by a polemical stance
Erasmus wished to subtly take against Jan van Merleberghe. The epigram
alludes to three New Testament fragments: first, Luke 7:36–50, which describes
the feast at the house of Simon the Pharisee and mentions a nameless woman,
‘a sinner,’ who washes Christ’s feet with her tears and anoints them with the
ointment; second, the exorcism account in Luke 8:2 of ‘Mary who is called
Magdalen, out of whom seven devils were gone forth’; and third, John 12:1–8, in
which Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, anoints Christ’s feet (but does not
wash them with her tears). The ageing monk (in)famously believed that these
women were in fact one person, represented in the painting in his possession.6
Erasmus did not share van Merleberghe’s conviction, and likely wished to
correct it, as he ends his letter with a confirmation that it is accompanied by
the gift of ‘the three Magdalens as they are represented by Jacques Lefèvre
d’Étaples.’7 This would be the polemical treatise rejecting the conflation of the
three women, De tribus et unica Magdalena disceptatio.8 The combination of
ekphrasis with the trochaic tetrameter catalectic allowed Erasmus to respond
to van Merleberghe’s request for a poem on his prized painting and recon-
cile it with the monk’s controversial belief without compromising his own
position; the epigram truly gives us Iohannes Merliberch Diest rather than
Erasmus himself.
In contrast to In Honour of St Mary Magdalen, Erasmus appears to have writ-
ten one of his most captivating epigrams seemingly dedicated to a painting,
On a Picture of the Rape of Europa, as a poetic exercise for himself. The poem
is dated January 8, 1507, and was first published as part of Varia Epigrammata
by Jean Petit and Josse Bade in Paris, and reprinted in 1518 by Johann Froben in
Basel in the Epigrammata.9 The first collection was prepared either around the

5 Erasmus D., Poems, ed. Vredeveld H. – trans. Miller C., 2 vols., in Collected Works of Erasmus,
McConica J.K. et al. (Toronto: 2016) 85:26.
6 Erasmus, Poems 85:25.
7 Erasmus, Poems 85:26.
8 Erasmus, Poems 85:361.
9 Erasmus, Poems li.
74 Kaminska

time when Erasmus left for Italy or once he was already in Italy, which is not
without significance.10 The epigram reads:

Hic qui a monte boues ad proxima littora vertit,

Aurea te quis sit virga monere potest.
Tum testes alae neque non talaria, testis
In flauo bicolor crine galerus erit.
Si rogitas quid agat: patrio subseruit amori,
Inscius, obsequio furta dolosa tegens.
Raptor enim niuei latitat sub imagine tauri
Improbus, ac praedam per freat longa vehet.
Vt Cretam attigerit mox Taurus desinet esse

10 According to Erwin Panofsky, the epigram is a purely literary exercise, as no painting of

the Rape of Europa like the one described by Erasmus, with Mercury turning the cattle
from the mountain toward the sea, has ever been created; thus, Panofsky concludes,
Erasmus must be paraphrasing two episodes from Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
rather than describing a painting. Panofsky E., “Erasmus and the Visual Arts”, Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969) 203. In contrast, Cornelis Reedijk argues
that In Picturam Europae Stupratae was among the ‘epigrams [which] actually served as
explanatory notices for some paintings’, adding that ‘for the rest we are in the dark as to
the date of composition of the epigrams and as to the identity of the pictures.’ Reedijk
further suggests that Erasmus might have written epigrams dedicated to mythological
paintings between 1502 and 1504 when, as a resident of Leuven, he frequented the court
in Brussels. Reedijk, Poems of Desiderius Erasmus 265–266. In the earlier version of this
paper presented at the Emory Colloquium in December 2019, I optimistically proposed
that it might be possible to associate Erasmus’s epigram with Baldassare Peruzzi’s fresco
at the Villa Farnesina, which was being decorated around the time when Erasmus vis-
ited Italy. The affinity between Erasmus’s ekphrasis and Peruzzi’s painting is indeed great,
however, since the poem was not only written ca. 1507, but also published then for the
first time, it cannot possibly refer to Sala del Fregio. Any further attempt to associate the
poem with the decoration of any palace which Erasmus might have visited early during
his travel to Italy remains pure speculation. Although Erasmus spent two and a half years
in Italy between Fall 1506 and June 1509, there are only fourteen letters written by and to
him in this period; none of these letters includes a single mention of visual arts. Moreover,
there are no known letters from between June 1509 and November 1511, leaving us without
any reminiscences of the Italian journey in its immediate aftermath. Thus, even though a
painting like the one described by Erasmus exists, Panofsky may as well be right that the
epigram is an example of a notional ekphrasis. This is even more probable because on the
same day Erasmus wrote three other poems based on the Metamorphoses: On a Picture
Based on the Story of the Giants, On the Same Giants, Cast Down by Lightning, and On a
Picture of the Slaughtered Pentheus. On Erasmus’s journey to Italy see most importantly:
Bainton R.H., Erasmus of Christendom (New York: 1969), Kristeller O.P., “Erasmus from an
Italian Perspective”, Renaissance Quarterly 23, 1 (1970) 1–14, and Renaudet A., Erasme et
l’Italie (Geneva: 1998).
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 75

Iuppiter, et virgo non erit ista diu.

Quid non caecus amor mortalia pectora cogat,
Si taurum aethereum non piget esse Iouem?
Aut quae formosis satis est cautela puellis
Hic quoque stuprator si metuendus erat?11

Who this person is that is making the oxen

veer from the mountain toward the nearby
shore, you can tell by his golden wand. Other
marks of his identity are the wings on his
sandals, and also the two-coloured hat on his
blond hair. If you ask what he is doing, he is
accommodating himself to his father’s amorous
passion, though he is unaware of this, even as
he obediently conceals the treacherous theft.
For the outrageous ravisher is hiding under the
appearance of a snow-white bull, and he will
carry his prey far across the sea. As soon as he
reaches Crete, Jupiter will cease to be a bull,
and she no longer be a virgin. To what
lengths does blind passion goad the hearts of
mortals, if even heavenly Jupiter was not
ashamed to be a bull? Or what precautions can
be sufficient to protect beautiful girls, if even
such a god as this must be feared as a
ravisher?12

The epigram provides a very detailed description of a painting – likely an imag-

inary one – revealing Erasmus’s acute understanding of how pictorial compo-
sition works. Mercury is described with all his identifying attributes in colour,
and there is the suggestion of a simultaneous narration, which allows the artist
to portray movements and transformations happening in the poem. But there
is also a hint of the necessity for an oral commentary, as the reason behind
Mercury’s actions cannot be conveyed in paint. The reader/viewer is implic-
itly warned that what he sees may be deceitful: the snow-white bull is in fact
Jupiter, and Mercury is concealing his actions even though he is not aware of
it. The deceit of Jupiter becomes a metaphor for the possible deceitfulness of

11 Reedijk, Poems of Desiderius Erasmus 267–268.

12 Erasmus, Poems 85:69.
76 Kaminska

human passions and a warning against licentiousness. The epigram’s message

is not dissimilar to Erasmus’s remarks in the Institution of Christian Matrimony
(1526), in which Erasmus admonishes parents that they should keep out of the
house ‘all loose-living, idle, and pampered young people, together with drunken
servants, gossiping women, dancing-girls, mountebanks, actors, actresses, and
indecent pictures – in short, anyone or anything that could poison the minds
of the young through their eyes of ears, or in any other way’.13
On a Picture of the Rape of Europa illustrates an important aspect of Erasmus’s
moral reflection in his thinking about visual arts. Although in the De Amabili
Ecclesiae Concordia (1533) he renounces mythological topics by stating that ‘If
one wants to play the fool let him take his subjects from Philostratus,’ the epi-
gram proves that a non-biblical subject matter can be a source of edification.14
Ekphrasis facilitates a similar function for descriptions of plants and animals –
real and painted – in The Godly Feast. As Eusebius shows the south loggia to
his guests, in front of readers’ eyes unfolds a ‘painted grove, covering the entire
wall, [which] presents a varied spectacle.’15 Adopting the periegesis model of
Philostratus, Erasmus guides us through this and other rooms of an imaginary
suburban villa, introducing vivid descriptions of works of art in the form of a
dialogue. The model of a colloquium gives Erasmus’s ekphraseis a more natu-
ral tone than the monologues in the Imagines: the luncheon guests decipher
the meanings of paintings in front of their eyes, which become visible to the
audience through their conversation. And even though Eusebius at times
rushes his visitors and suggests that so far they have only seen the images ‘as
if through a lattice,’ and will have the opportunity to return to them later, still
the conversation provides a detailed and vivid description.16 To return to the
south loggia as an example of using landscape painting for moral edification,
we encounter ‘speaking’ plants and animals in the interlocutors’ dialogue:

Eusebius: Over here is every kind of remarkable plant accurately painted,

which you may justly admire. Here are poisonous plants, but however
poisonous, they may not only be viewed safely but even touched.
Timothy: Here’s a scorpion, a rare pest in these parts but common in Italy.
Though to me his colour in the picture doesn’t seem convincing.

13 Erasmus D., Institution of Christian Matrimony. Spiritualia and Pastoralia, ed. O’Malley,
J.W. and Perraud L., in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. McConica J.K. et al. (Toronto: 1999)
69:430.
14 Panofsky, “Erasmus and the Visual Arts” 212.
15 Erasmus D., The Godly Feast. Colloquies, trans. and annot. C. Thompson, in Collected Works
of Erasmus, ed. McConica J.K. et al. (Toronto: 1997) 39:180.
16 Erasmus, Godly Feast 39:180.
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 77

Eusebius: How so?

Timothy: Because the Italian ones are darker: this one’s rather light.
Eusebius: But don’t you recognize the plant on whose leaf he’s fallen?
Timothy: Not well enough.
Eusebius: No wonder, for it doesn’t grow in our gardens. It’s wolfsbane, so
poisonous that when a scorpion comes in contact with it he’s stunned,
turns pale, and surrenders. But, injured by poison, he seeks a remedy
in poison. You see nearby both varieties of hellebore, he’ll recover his
old strength; the touch of different poison cures his numbness.
Timothy: Then this scorpion’s done for, because he’ll never free himself
from the wolfsbane leaf. – Do even scorpions talk here?
Eusebius: Yes, and in Greek, too.
Timothy: What does he say?
Eusebius: ‘God hath found out the guilty.’17

While the exchange is specific enough to allow us to reconstruct the ficti-

tious wall painting, it requires from the readers an interpretative effort which
gradually unfolds the composition. This process of filling in the details of the
image mimics the transformation of the scorpion implied in the dialogue.
The concluding moral comes from Theocritus, and was included in Adages,
where Erasmus explains it as fitting a situation ‘when retribution at last over-
takes the wicked, as though sent from on high’.18 The painting and its ekph-
rasis strengthen the adage’s message: the scorpion has been transformed by
the poisonous plant and has turned numb, and the art of painting has now
trapped it, away from its potential rescue. It is, in other words, the pictorial arti-
fice which becomes the instrument of divine punishment. That punishment,
suggests Erasmus, may not be inflicted immediately, but once God’s judgment
comes upon the sinners (that is, the guilty), it is too late to amend one’s ways.
The seemingly secular decoration of Eusebius’s villa thus gains an ominous,
eschatological meaning.
It is in this description of painted gardens, and of the real garden which
precedes it, that ekphrasis is at its most elaborate in The Godly Feast, pre-
sented as a concerted effort of Eusebius and his guests. However significant
the colloquium is for the understanding of religious art in secular spaces, once
Erasmus moves the interlocutors to the summer room, library, and galleries,

17 Erasmus, Godly Feast 39:181.

18 Erasmus, Godly Feast 39:213n65 and Erasmus D., Adages, annot. Mann Phillips M. – trans.
Mynors R.A.B., in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. McConica J.K. et al. (Toronto: 1982)
32:295.
78 Kaminska

their conversation takes a different turn. These rooms are decorated with bibli-
cal and mythological scenes, but more is implied about them than described:
‘Here Christ keeps the Last Supper with is chosen disciples. Here Herod cel-
ebrates his birthday with a fatal feast. Here Dives of the Gospel story, shortly
to go down to hell, dines sumptuously; Lazarus, soon to be received into
Abraham’s bosom, is driven from the gates’.19 For the well-known iconographic
scenes, there seems to be no need for ekphrasis, especially as they are deco-
rously placed in the dining hall, which in itself helps them to be understood as
‘examples [which] warn us to be temperate at feasts and deter us from drunk-
enness and extravagance’.20
Not dissimilarly, two poems by Erasmus whose titles hold the promise of
ekphrasis leave readers disappointed. Under a Picture of Christ’s Face and An
Image of the Boy Jesus in the Elementary School Recently Established by Colet use
language which describes the viewing process and metaphors derived from
the visual arts, but in the end promote piety that discards material and men-
tal images. The first poem was included both in the 1507 and 1518 collections,
while the second was first published in 1511 in Paris.21 Under a Picture reads:

Hic intuetur et intimos mentis sinus.

Fac tota niteant pectoris penetralia.22

This man looks into the innermost recesses of

the mind. See to it that the secret places
of your heart are all bright and shining.23

Instead of describing for us the image of the Holy Face, Erasmus discourages
us from looking, as the relationship between the representation of Christ and
the spectator, the viewing object and the viewing subject, is reversed. Christ
becomes the active party, inspecting the viewer’s soul; this, in turn, encourages
the viewer to focus on themselves rather than the image in front of their eyes.
The act of looking is dismantled. And yet, this anti-ekphrastic epigram could
only have been written on an image of the Holy Face, with Christ’s ubiquitous
gaze intently focused on the implied viewer; in refusing to vividly describe the
picture for us, Erasmus in fact evokes this specific iconography. The ultimate
rejection of ekphrasis corresponds with Erasmus’s criticism of the Holy Face

19 Erasmus, Godly Feast 39:205.

20 Erasmus, Godly Feast 39:205.
21 Erasmus, Poems 85:lii.
22 Erasmus, Poems 85:74.
23 Erasmus, Poems 85:75.
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 79

in the Enchiridion Militis Christiani: ‘You give homage to an image of Christ’s

countenance represented in stone or wood or depicted in colour. With how
much more religious feeling should you render homage to the image of his
mind, which has been reproduced in the Gospels through the artistry of the
Holy Spirit’.24
An Image of the Boy Jesus similarly privileges inner piety over material
representation:

Discite me primum, pueri, atque effingite puris

Moribus, inde pias addite literulas.25

Learn me first of all, boys, and make an image

of me by your pure conduct. Then add to that
the rudiments of holy reading and writing.26

The epigram accompanied a sculpture placed in one of the classrooms of John

Colet’s school, which Erasmus described in his letter to Justus Jonas on June 13,
1521: ‘Above the high master’s desk sits a remarkable representation of the boy
Jesus in the attitude of a teacher, which is greeted by the whole body with a
hymn when they enter or leave school. Above is the Father’s face, saying “Hear
ye him”; for he added these words at my suggestion’.27 The epigram epitomizes
Colet’s vision for his school – with ‘the boy Jesus’ as its head.28 As students greet
the statue at the beginning and at the end of each school day, Jesus as their

24 Erasmus D., Enchiridion Militis Christiani. Spiritualia, ed. O’Malley, J.W., in Collected Works
of Erasmus, ed. McConica J.K. et al. (Toronto: 1988) 66:72.
25 Erasmus, Poems 85:90.
26 Erasmus, Poems 85:91.
27 Erasmus, Letters 1122–1251 (1520–1521) 7:236. That this image of Christ was a sculpture and
not a painting is confirmed by the school’s registers, which refer to it as ‘The picture of
Jesus set up agayne,’ and mention a payment ‘For payenting and gilding the same pic-
ture.’ Erasmus, Poems 86:503, and Reedijk, Poems of Desiderius Erasmus 297. Lucy Schlüter
has suggested that the painting which poem 46 accompanied shows Christ among the
Doctors. Schlüter L., Niet alleen: Een kunsthistorisch-ethische plaatsbepaling van tuin en
woning in het Convivium Religiosum van Erasmus (Amsterdam: 1995) 242. As intriguing
as the implications of such an identification would be, there is unfortunately nothing in
Erasmus that could corroborate it. The confusion likely comes from Erasmus’s description
of the painting: ‘Supra cathedram praeceptoris sedet puer Iesus.’ If we understand ‘supra
cathedram praeceptoris’ as part of the description of the pictorial scene, then we may in
fact draw a hasty conclusion that the image showed the story from Luke 3:46–50, an error
perhaps easily forgivable if we remember that Erasmus repeatedly blurs the boundaries
between the pictorial and the real space in his ekphraseis.
28 Erasmus, Letters 1122–1251 7:423.
80 Kaminska

teacher comes to life, and ‘pure conduct’ in the command ‘effingite puris mori-
bus’ becomes akin to an artist’s tools. While artists make images using paints
and other materials, the true image of Christ can only be created with one’s
actions. And while this belief is perfectly in line with Erasmus’s philosophy,
the text of the epigram is actually quite striking when we consider the precise
location of the sculpture of Jesus and the poem in Colet’s school. In his letter to
Junius, Erasmus clarifies that they were placed ‘above the high master’s desk’,
while in the previous paragraph he describes that the ‘high master’ teaches ‘the
third’ – the most advanced – tier of students. Thus, as students reach the end of
their studies at Colet’s school, when they would have already been introduced
‘to the rudiments of holy reading and writing,’ they are reminded that the core
of their Christian education should be the active imitation of Christ through
their behaviour.
Erasmus’s rejection of ekphrasis in these two poems composed to accom-
pany images can be seen as a deliberate attempt to remind his Christian read-
ers about the redundancy of material devotion. Images of the Holy Face and
sculptures of Christ and saints had very often been the focus of Catholic piety,
while Erasmus, an avid student of the Devotio Moderna movement in his early
years, developed a preference for a more discursive type of religious imagery.
Erasmus’s descriptions of narrative paintings – often of narrative paintings
showing Christ and the Apostles teaching – offered in one his letters to Marcus
Laurinus and in The Godly Feast exemplify a very different way in which ekph-
rasis can operate. The letter to Laurinus, written in Basel on February 1, 1523,
has always been one of the better-known pieces of Erasmus’s correspondence,
because it is in this letter that Erasmus explained his attitude toward Martin
Luther. But before Erasmus takes on this matter of the utmost doctrinal (and
reputational) importance, he invites his readers on a journey to Constance and
the villa of its canon, Johann von Botzheim (Abstemius).29 By and large, the
description of the villa’s decoration denies it the status of pictorial artifice:

29 According to P.S. Allen, the published letter combines two letters to Laurinus – the addi-
tion of a vivid account of his travels was intended to make it more attractive for the audi-
ence, who would be more likely to read Erasmus’s explanation of his attitude toward
Luther. Allen’s suggestion is generally accepted by modern scholars. Erasmus D., Letters
1252–1355 (1522–1523). The Correspondence of Erasmus, annot. Bietenholz, P.G. – trans.
Mynors R.A.B., in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. McConica J.K. et al. (Toronto: 1989)
9:365. It aligns with how we understand functions of Erasmus’s correspondence – see,
for instance, Jan Papy: ‘His [Erasmus’s] collections of humanist letters were artistic enti-
ties and constituted a fundamental part of Erasmus’s literary oeuvre and autobiographi-
cal self-presentation, both for his contemporaries and for posteriority.’ Papy J., “Erasmus,
Europe and Cosmopolitanism: the Humanist Image and Message in His Letters”, in
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 81

In his [Botzheim’s] summer hall … nearest the table stood Paul teach-
ing the people; on the other wall was Christ seated on the mount and
teaching his disciples, then the apostles setting off over the hills to preach
the gospel. Next to the fireplace stood the priests, Scribes, and Pharisees,
conspiring with the elders against the gospel, which was then raising
its head.30

The description operates on two levels: on the one hand, a reader gets the
sense of where exactly in the summer hall the paintings are located, but on the
other, Erasmus’s language suggests that it is Christ, his disciples, and priests
themselves – and not their painted simulacra – who are in the physical space
of the summer hall. The room is transformed into a place where the Gospel is
preached, contested, and defended, with Botzheim, Erasmus, and other guests
partaking in this process together with the biblical characters. The original
addressee of the letter – and all of its later audience, including ourselves – are
transformed not only into viewers, but even listeners; according to the text,
the residence ‘speaks in paintings that attract and retain the attention’.31 The
subject matter of the biblical images extends this auditory metaphor, as they
all depict scenes of religious instruction and conversation. They invite us to
imagine specific words spoken by Christ, his followers, and his opponents, and
thus encourage us to partake in their implied conversations. In the end, by
blurring the boundaries between the real and the pictorial space, merging the
living and painted inhabitants of the summer hall, and invoking the sense of
hearing by blending the words suggested in the painted scenes and those spo-
ken by Botzheim’s guests, Erasmus truly transports us to Botzheim’s villa. The
vivid description of the house puts its decoration in front of our eyes in order
to make us a part of its space. Erasmus uses a similar strategy in selected parts
of The Godly Feast: as Eusebius’s guests arrive at the villa, they are welcomed
by Saint Peter, who points toward Christ. Both of them greet the visitors in
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and visitors return their greetings with a prayer so
that they do not ‘seem rude’.32 The boundaries between the real, living and
breathing, guests at the villa and its painted decoration are also occasionally
blurred in the descriptions of religious paintings: in the library, Eusebius points
toward ‘pictures of famous authors’, but then mentions ‘Christ, seated on the

Rossi P.B. (ed.), Erasmo de Roterodam e la cultura europea. Atti dell’Incontro di Studi nel V
cententario della laurea di Erasmo all’Università di Torino (Florence: 2008) 30.
30 Erasmus, Letters 1252–1355 9:378.
31 Erasmus, Letters 1252–1355 9:378.
32 Erasmus, Godly Feast 177.
82 Kaminska

mountain with his hand outstretched … The Father appears above his head,
saying “Hear ye him.” With wings outspread the Holy Spirit enfolds him in daz-
zling light’.33 This is a very different strategy than the description of painted
gardens discussed earlier, in which wall paintings do not cease to be paintings;
they become the subject of ekphrastic description, but their pictorial artifice is
not denied. The moments of the illusion that Christ and the holy figures share
the space of the villa with Eusebius and his guests are introduced at the very
beginning and end of the colloquium, framing a luncheon which, focused on
biblical exegesis, is conspicuously modelled after the biblical meals of Christ
and his disciples. As readers, we are thus persuaded that the colloquium’s par-
ticipants may, at times, be sharing their conversation with Christ.
To return to the letter to Laurinus, the illusion of becoming guests in
Botzheim’s villa ourselves is strengthened by the section of the letter which
immediately follows the villa’s praise, namely, an epideictic description of the
city of Constance. We are now stepping out of the villa to admire the city and
landscape around us, as Erasmus delights in painting a picture of ‘a wonderful
great lake, which stretches both far and wide for many miles’, ‘the forest-clad
hills’, the Rhine, and the monuments and customs of Constance.34 The letter
reads like an exercise in the application of ekphrasis (descriptio) and enargeia
(evidentia), which Erasmus introduces as one of the methods of enrichment in
De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum.35 He lists four types of such descriptions:
of things, persons, places, and times. Works of art fall into the first category,
which further includes events, animals, their nature and habits, and people (or,
to be precise, their types, e.g., ‘a soldier, philosopher, courtier, countryman’, as
well as ‘Scythians, cannibals, Indians, troglodytes’). With a minor exception for
the first category of description, Erasmus’s list corresponds with the subjects of
ekphrasis recommended in the late ancient Progymnasmata: events, persons,
places, and times.36 ‘We employ this [method] whenever’, Erasmus explains,
‘for the sake of amplifying or decorating our passage, or giving pleasure to our
readers, instead of setting out subject in bare simplicity, we fill in the colours
and set it up like a picture to look at, so that we seem to have painted the scene

33 Erasmus, Godly Feast 205.

34 Erasmus, Letters 1252–1355 9:378.
35 For a brief discussion of Erasmus’s remarks see: Plett H., Enargeia in Classical Antiquity
and the Early Modern Age: the Aesthetics of Evidence (Leiden: 2012) 23.
36 Progymnasmata are four rhetorical handbooks for schoolchildren from the late Antiquity.
See, for example, Koopman N., Ancient Greek Ekphrasis: Between Description and
Narration, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Amsterdam: 2014) 4.
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 83

rather than described it, and the reader seems to have seen rather than read’.37
The same visual analogy – but presented even more specifically as an exer-
cise in image-making – is introduced under the Description of Things: ‘instead
of presenting it [an action] in bare and insubstantial outline, bring it before
the eyes with all the colours filled in’.38 The description of Constance and
Abstemius’s villa in particular is an excellent example of the ‘very common
method of introducing a narrative, used by poets and historians, and by orators
too on occasion. In this the whole appearance of a place is described so that we
can see it’, which lends the text which follows a greater power of persuasion.39
The ekphrasis of the villa can also be understood as Erasmus’s attempt at rec-
reating classical ekphraseis which he lists in De Copia: ‘Virgil’s description of
Carthage and its harbour, Pliny’s accounts in his Letters of his Laurentine villa,
and Statius’ account of Pollio’s villa at Sorrento and Manilius’ villa at Tivoli’.40
While it is possible to identify specific parallels between examples quoted in
De Copia and the letter to Laurinus, a less conspicuous application of the guide-
lines on copiousness informs Erasmus’s Paraphrases, especially in his retelling
of the parables and episodes of healing. In the fragment of the Enchiridion
quoted above, Erasmus admonished his readers to ‘render homage to the image
of his [Christ’s] mind, which has been reproduced in the Gospels through the
artistry of the Holy Spirit’. It could be argued that in the Paraphrases Erasmus
follows this very recommendation, elaborating on the ‘artistry of the Holy
Spirit’ by proposing a more vivid rendering of the Gospels. To illustrate how
ekphrasis and evidentia operate in the Paraphrases, I focus on two fragments
of the Paraphrase on Mark: the parable of the sower in Mark 4:1–25 and the
healing of the paralytic in Mark 2:1–4. It is in the Paraphrase on Mark, the last
one written by Erasmus and published in early 1524, that, as Reinier Leushuis
has noted, the narrator’s ‘speaking voice most directly, actively, and relentlessly
engages and exhorts the reader, addressing the latter as a “Christian soldier” …
as an audience member in a theatrical performance or as one of the disciples’.41
The parable of the sower is the first parable in Mark, and Erasmus’s paraphrase
on it is thus preceded by a long explanation of the character and functions of
parables that largely relies on visual and auditory metaphors, and provides a

37 Erasmus D., Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. Literary and Educational Writings,
ed. Thompson C., in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. McConica J.K. et al. (Toronto: 1978)
24:577.
38 Erasmus, Copia 24:577.
39 Erasmus, Copia 24:587.
40 Erasmus, Copia 587.
41 Leushuis R., “Speaking the Gospel. The Voice of the Evangelist in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on
the New Testament”, Erasmus Studies 36 (2016) 173.
84 Kaminska

good insight into his strategic use of ekphrasis in the text that immediately
follows thereafter. It is also a self-reflexive text, which serves to illustrate – as
Christ would subsequently explain to his disciples – how one should preach
the Word of God, and when it would bear fruit. In the story of the paralytic in
Mark 2, Erasmus not only produces a vivid performative account of the heal-
ing, but also uses the metaphor of looking at images to deepen the meaning
of the paraphrase, and to guide the reader/viewer in his understanding of the
scripture. As such, the paraphrase of Mark 2 offers a unique glimpse of visual
thinking in Erasmus’s oeuvre.
Erasmus claims that parables were meant to be the ‘simplest kind of teach-
ing, which is a stranger to theatrical display’, but at the same time compares the
crowds listening to Christ preaching from a boat to an audience gathered in an
amphitheatre.42 To illustrate how one should listen to the Word of God – which
is the very theme of the parable – Erasmus further introduces the metaphor of
it being ‘engraved on everyone’s mind’.43 The paraphrase of the parable is filled
with minute details that are absent in the New Testament story, producing a
rather striking effect. The parable of the sower is a particularly mundane one,
and the persuasiveness of its message relies on providing mundane, unglam-
orous, or one could even say dull, information, which nonetheless consists of
things ‘very familiar to everyone’.44 And so, Erasmus painstakingly describes
the soil and the weather, helping his readers to understand why only a few
seeds ‘ripened into maturity’.45 Providing all these details is essential for what
follows the parable – Christ’s explanation of its meaning, in which he refers
repeatedly to and elaborates on its metaphors. In the words of Mark Vessey, the
chapter’s paraphrase becomes an ‘evangelical oration’, which could be used at
the pulpit or heard ‘in the reader’s oral-aural imagination’.46
In the paraphrase of Mark 2, the story of the paralytic is introduced like a
metaphorical tableau, in which the ekphrastic mental image should be scruti-
nized similarly to a work of art:

42 Erasmus D., Paraphrase on Mark, annot. and trans. Rummel E., in Collected Works of
Erasmus, ed. Sider R.D. (Toronto: 1988) 49:55–56. Erasmus uses this theatrical metaphor
in other passages of the Paraphrase – see, e.g., the conclusion of the story of healing of the
paralytic: ‘I shall dismiss you from this scene after first pointing out to you the persons of
the drama.’ Erasmus, Paraphrase on Mark 49:38.
43 Erasmus, Paraphrase on Mark 49:56.
44 Erasmus, Paraphrase on Mark 49:56.
45 Erasmus, Paraphrase on Mark 49:56.
46 Vessey M., “Introduction”, in Pabel H. – Vessey M. (eds.) Holy Scripture Speaks: The Produc-
tion and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto: 2002) 3–4.
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 85

Now sometimes, when we step back from the works of sculptors and
painters, contemplating the several parts of their works, we keep noticing
new points that escaped our eyes before; thus I think that it will certainly
be appropriate to pause a while at this remarkable sight, examining
its individual aspects with pious curiosity. Indeed, everything the Lord
wrought on earth he did so that we might meditate upon it and choose
for ourselves whatever is conducive to a pious life. This will be done with
even greater benefit if we consider first of all what was displayed exter-
nally before the corporeal eyes, then what this image indicates must hap-
pen in our hearts.47

Erasmus introduces this recommendation at a significant moment of the

paraphrase, between the retelling of the story of the miracle and its painstak-
ing explanation. As Leshuis has noted, the humanist ‘engages the reader as
an active audience member among those who “watched intently what [Jesus]
would do”’.48 Such an identification is fostered by the attention paid by the
author to the setting of the miracle, the actions – and the thoughts – of the
crowd, and the movements of Christ, both in the sense of his actual physi-
cal movements in the house at Capernaum and his decision to heal the para-
lytic. Thus, the image is first set in front of our eyes, and we become a part of
it, in a manner akin to us becoming part of the conversation that takes place
at Abstemius’s villa. In the detailed explanation that follows, Erasmus eagerly
uses cues that activate readers’ engagement with the story, such as ‘let us first
consider’, ‘behold’, and, most remarkably, ‘apply your spiritual eyes’.49 We are
at the intersection of different types of images and vision: the ekphrastic
description Erasmus creates in his Paraphrase, the mental image we create
in our mind, and the physical image introduced as a metaphor for scriptural
exegesis, which we are, ultimately, to discard, in order to apply our inner/spiri-
tual insight instead of our external/physical vision to the understanding of the
miracle. Christ’s miracles cannot be fully comprehended – they are signs and
mysteries – and observing him performing those miracles leaves us, just like
their original audience, ‘astounded’. The application of ekphrasis to parables
and stories of healing miracles is a strategy which reflects the very nature
of those narratives: ekphrasis and enargeia produce a vivid mental image of
these stories, but not their actual physical image. An image that can be scruti-
nized with physical vision would not be sufficient to understand the meaning

47 Erasmus, Paraphrase on Mark 49:34.

48 Leushuis, “Speaking the Gospel” 179.
49 Erasmus, Paraphrase on Mark 49:35–37.
86 Kaminska

of Christ’s words and deeds, which can happen only with the ‘spiritual eyes’.
This becomes the focus of Erasmus’s paraphrase of Mark 10, the healing of the
blind beggar, Bartimeus, whose spiritual recognition of Christ as the Messiah
is contrasted with the inner blindness of the Pharisees. Ekphrasis and enargeia
become an exegetical instrument in the Paraphrases, with all the details of
the parables and episodes of healing considered necessary to produce a men-
tal image of the evangelical stories.50 The copiousness of detail improves the
reader’s/viewer’s understanding of the narrative, although Erasmus is careful
to still leave some aspects to our imagination. A comparison of this strategy
to his ekphraseis of actual religious pictures indicates that in the case of the
latter, an overt focus on details can lead to the risk of prioritizing pictorial
artifice over religious edification. In the Paraphrases, as Leushuis has convinc-
ingly argued, the bodily and spiritual sight are connected in a mimetic sensory
experience, which means that ‘what we see with our eyes must also happen in
our hearts’.51 The persuasiveness of the Paraphrases thus relies on the experi-
ence of Christ’s healing miracles and the spiritual absorption of the message
of his parables.
I began this essay by citing the famous motto ‘A Better Image Will My
Writings Show,’ first used by Massys in 1519, and repeated in 1526 by Albrecht
Dürer in his engraved portrait of Erasmus. Thus, it seems fitting to offer, by way
of conclusion, a comparison of two visual applications of ekphrasis related to
Erasmus’s textual oeuvre. The 1519 Basel edition of his Novum Testamentum – a
significantly expanded edition of the 1516 Novum Instrumentum – opens with
a frontispiece likely designed by Ambrosius Holbein, with the Calumny of
Apelles at the bottom of the page [Fig. 1.3]. This ur-ekphrasis is combined with
cardinal and theological virtues which one can learn through the study of the
Scripture. To the left, Iustitia and Temperantia overcome Ignorantia shown as
part of the Calumny, and to the right, Fortitudo and Caritas join Veritas who ulti-
mately saved Apelles in the false accusation before Ptolemy IV Philopator. Lucy
Schlüter has suggested that Holbein used the Calumny of Apelles in response
to Nicolaas Baechem (Egmondanus), the prior of the Leuven Carmelites,
who criticized Erasmus’s 1516 Novum Instrumentum.52 Considering Erasmus’s

50 Leushuis singles out the vividness of remarkable details – such as the lowering of the
paralytic through the roof – as a particular characteristic of Erasmus of the use of enar-
geia in the Paraphrases.
51 Leushuis, “Speaking the Gospel” 180.
52 Schlüter, Niet Alleen 90, 157. On the criticism of Erasmus by Leuven theologians see:
Gielis M., “Leuven Theologians as Opponents of Erasmus and of Humanistic Theology”,
in Rummel E. (ed.), Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden:
2008).
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 87

figure 1.3 Ambrosius Holbein, “Frontispiece”, in Desiderius Erasmus, Novum Testamentum

Omne (Basil, Johannes Froben: 1519). Woodcut, 25.2 × 17.2 cm
Image © The Trustees of the British Museum
88 Kaminska

methods of textual analysis inadequate for the Scripture, Egmondanus and

other theologians and members of mendicant orders in Leuven feared that the
Novum Instrumentum would lead to heresy, and continued to criticize the text
in their sermons.53 At first, Erasmus seemed to have been rather amicably pre-
disposed toward them, and inquired about their criticism of his work in order
to make changes in the second edition. But Leuven theologians did not have
any comments, and Baechem admitted that he had not, in fact, read Novum
Instrumentum.54 The scholars’ slander of Erasmus was born out of ignorance,
a vice prominently featured in Lucian’s ekphrasis and on the 1519 title page:
Ignorantia is contrasted with Iustitia, suggesting that Erasmus’s work cannot
be judged fairly if those who judge it are guided by ignorance.55 The frontis-
piece creates a visual narrative in which pictures become a persuasive instru-
ment in the polemics between Erasmus and the Leuven theologians, revealing
the shortcomings of the latter. The Calumny is combined with a scene of
the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest and the adage associated with that event:
Tandem vipera sibilare desisti (‘At last you viper have ceased to hiss’), which
proved, however, to be a vain hope, as Nicholas Baechem not only continued to
pester church authorities with complaints against Erasmus, but also famously
began his lectures with a prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and Luther.56
If the 1519 frontispiece used images to polemically engage with Erasmus’s
critics in defending his writings, a reverse relationship between text and image
could be proposed for what is one of Erasmus’s best-known passages about the
visual arts and Pieter Aertsen’s paintings [Fig. 1.4], created more than twenty
years later:

Some artists introduce their own evil thoughts into even the most uplift-
ing subjects. When depicting an episode from the Gospels, they will

53 Gielis, “Leuven Theologians” 197.

54 Gielis, “Leuven Theologians” 200.
55 Christian Rümelin has noted that underneath the Latin inscription Tandem vipera sibi-
lare desisti the frontispiece bears the date 1517. This led Rümelin to the conclusion that
the cover was originally designed for a volume eventually published by Johannes Froben
only in 1520, P. Vellei Paterculi Historiae Romanae, whose subject explains very well the
depiction of the battle between Arminius and Varus. Rümelin C., “Lending Weight to His
Words: Erasmus and the Use of Print” in Van der Coelen P. (ed.), Images of Erasmus, exh.
cat., Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam: 2008–2009) 264n30. Nevertheless,
even if the frontispiece woodcut was repurposed, the message of the Calumny of Apelles
easily translated onto the conflict between Baechem and Erasmus, while providing a
more general admonishment that vices such as slander, suspicion, fraud, and envy are at
odds with the message of the New Testament.
56 Gielis, “Leuven Theologians” 208.
Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 89

figure 1.4 Pieter Aertsen, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1553). Oil on panel,
126 × 200 cm. Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (inv. no 1108 (OK))
Image © Studio Tromp, Rotterdam

include some stupid and impious detail; for example, in painting the
Lord’s visit to Mary and Martha, they will show the Lord talking to Mary,
but at the same time young John will be in a corner whispering into
Martha’s ear, while Peter drains a tankard. Or again, Martha will be stand-
ing behind John at the table, resting one hand on his shoulder while with
the other she seems to be mocking Christ, who is oblivious to all this; or
else Peter will be bringing a ladle dripping with red wine to his lips.57

According to Keith Moxey, who has taught us to read this passage in connec-
tion to Aertsen, the artist ‘deliberately exploited the sinful character with
which the Apostles had been endowed in the traditional iconography of Christ
in the House of Martha and Mary, to make the foreground of his work refer
to the material world’.58 However, one could suggest a different kind of con-
nection between Erasmus’s criticism and Aertsen’s paintings. Our understand-
ing of his images has changed, and we no longer see them as an unequivocal

57 Erasmus, Institution of Christian Matrimony 385.

58 Moxey K., “Erasmus and the Iconography of Pieter Aertsen’s Christ in the House of Martha
and Mary in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institute 34 (1971) 356.
90 Kaminska

condemnation of material goods in the form of an inverted narrative. Rather,

in the last twenty years we have come to understand them as a discursive
meditation on the relationship between the Gospel and material wealth.59
This more nuanced vision of Aertsen’s oeuvre – especially his paintings cre-
ated in Antwerp – aligns with the well-established understanding of the mid-
sixteenth-century Antwerp art market as a place of innovation. Perhaps it is
then not unthinkable to imagine that Aertsen, in his quest to offer engaging
conversation pieces to his sophisticated clients, deliberately transformed
Erasmus’s exasperated ekphrasis into a painting. The Institution of the Christian
Matrimony, from which the quoted passage comes, had already been published
in Antwerp in 1526, and would have possibly been known to the metropolis’s
collectors with humanistic aspirations.60 As we are all vulnerable to the earthly
temptations portrayed by Aertsen, his Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
could be understood as a polemical response to Erasmus’s ekphrasis, a deco-
rous pictorial reinterpretation of the description of indecorous compositions.
The vividness and, consequently, the persuasiveness of the passage relies on
its evocation of sensory experience, thanks to which we as readers not only see
the scene but also hear it (whispering John, Christ teaching Mary) and taste
it (Peter drinking wine). By amplifying the sensory appeal of his ekphrastic
description, Erasmus implicitly suggested, as in some of his other writings, that
readers are in fact participants in the scene. Alongside the four suggested ways
in which ekphrasis operates in Erasmus, the comparison between the detailed
notional ekphrasis in the Institution and Aertsen’s painting shows not only that
Erasmus’s writings could produce a good image of his mind (as the inscription
on the 1519 medal suggests), but that they could, in fact, lead to persuasive
images in the reader’s imagination and, occasionally, on a painter’s panel.

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Ekphrasis as an Instrument of Religious Persuasion in Erasmus 91

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92 Kaminska

Papy J., “Erasmus, Europe and Cosmopolitanism: the Humanist Image and Message
in His Letters”, in Rossi P.B. (ed.), Erasmo de Roterodam e la cultura europea. Atti
dell’Incontro di Studi nel V cententario della laurea di Erasmo all’Università di Torino
(Florence: 2008) 27–42.
Plett H., Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: the Aesthetics of
Evidence (Leiden: 2012).
Reedijk C., The Poems of Desiderius Erasmus (Leiden: 1956).
Renaudet A. Erasme et l’Italie (Geneva: 1998).
Rümelin C., “Lending Weight to His Words: Erasmus and the Use of Print” in Van der
Coelen P. (ed.), Images of Erasmus, exh. cat., Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
(Rotterdam: 2008–2009) 253–264.
Schlüter L., Niet alleen: Een kunsthistorisch-ethische plaatsbepaling van tuin en woning
in het Convivium Religiosum van Erasmus (Amsterdam: 1995).
Vessey M., “Introduction”, in Pabel H. – Vessey M. (eds.) Holy Scripture Speaks: The
Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto:
2002) 1–26.
 chapter 2

The Artist’s Frame of Reference in Antoine

Sucquet’s Via Vita Aeternae

Carol Barbour

Via vita aeternae, or Road to eternal life, is a Latin emblem book written by
the Jesuit priest Antoine Sucquet (1574–1627), illustrated by Boëtius à Bolswert
(1580–1633), and first published at Antwerp in 1620.1 Four specific emblems
in the book depict an artist in the act of painting.2 Primarily this essay will
show how the emblems functioned as meditative prompts, and secondly it will
examine the influence of the Tabula Cebetis on the Christological narrative of
the Via vita aeternae.3
Sixteenth-century emblem book collections generally followed the tripar-
tite form of motto (titulus), image (pictura) and poem (subscriptio). One could
read the book in a variety of ways: from the beginning to the end as with the
codex; by consulting the index; or in an arbitrary fashion. For the most part,
the sequence of emblems did not reveal an overarching narrative. The format
began to change in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when the
Jesuits Antoine Sucquet, Paolo Aresi, Jan David, and others placed emblems as
headers before chapters featuring sermons and additional texts. Peter Daly and
G. Richard Dimler, S.J. have shown that the Jesuit order published numerous
emblem books, thereby expanding the reception of the genre.4 Jesuit emblem
books often featured lengthy digressions and annotations, which used the
full spectrum of rhetorical figurae – simile, metaphor, prosopopoeia, etc. – to

1 Sucquet A.S.J., Via vitæ aeternæ; iconibus illustrata per Boëtium a Bolswert (Antwerp, Martinus
Nutius: 1620); Sucquet, Den wech des eevwich levens, trans. G. Zoes (Antwerp, Henricus
Aertssius: 1620); Sucquet, Chemin de la vie eternelle, trans. P. Morin (Antwerp, Henricus
Aertssius: 1623).
2 Sucquet, Via vitæ aeternæ (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1630). See also English verse adap-
tation: Williams I., The Baptistery, or the Way of Eternal Life, by the Author of ‘Cathedral’
(Oxford – London: 1842).
3 Cebes, The Tabula of Cebes, trans. J.T. Fitzgerald – L.M. White (Chico, CA: 1983); Cebes,
“Tabula Cebetis” in Censorinus, Grammaticus: De die natali, Beroaldus P. (ed.) (Bologna,
Benedictus Hectoris Faelli: 1497) 132–37.
4 Daly P.M., The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem
(Farnham, U.K. – Burlington, VT.: 2014) 185; Daly – Dimler, R. (eds.) The Corpus Librorum
Emblematum: The Jesuit Series. Parts 1–5. (Montréal – Toronto – Buffalo: 1997–2006).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

94 Barbour

amplify specific emblems and impresae. With a page count of 1140, and bound
in two volumes, Sucquet’s Via vita aeternae (1630) is indicative of the Jesuit
proclivity to turn emblem books into pedagogical reference tools for novices
and priests. Yet, there are only thirty-two emblematic engravings in Via vita
aeternae, a relatively modest amount in comparison with such emblema books
as Alciato’s Emblematum liber, which contains one hundred and thirty-two
woodcuts. Although fewer in number, Bolswert’s copperplate engravings are
finely rendered, and depict both domestic and miraculous scenes within intri-
cate architectural settings and landscapes. The entire collection of emblems
in the Via vita aeternae warrants a comprehensive analysis; however, this
essay focuses on four particular engravings that feature the artist at work. A
sub-group within the collection, this suite is unified by compositional design,
recurring motifs, and the theme of vision. In each, the artist is portrayed with
his back to the beholder, thereby proffering a privileged view of the work in
progress. As Walter Melion has argued, Antoine Sucquet’s Via vita aeternae
proceeds along an overarching spiritual narrative that defines the condition of
the soul as it ‘[…] strives to purge, reform, and finally unite itself with God in
whose likeness it was created’.5 Although each emblem can be interpreted as a
discreet mnemonic device, the narrative that informs the structure of the book
is the journey of the soul toward eternal salvation.
The first engraving of the artist, titled The Way to Meditate, shows him stand-
ing before a sacred heart and gazing at the Nativity. An invitation to participate
is proffered by the annotation on the facing page: ‘Do you want to know the
way to meditate? Look at the mystery of the Nativity’ [Fig. 2.1].6 The artist
resembles a confident performer who stands apart from his work in much the
same way as a theatre impresario might introduce a performance. Brandishing
a paintbrush and palette, his upper body appears to pull away in a gesture that
recalls the drawing of a curtain. By gazing across the artist’s left shoulder, the
viewer is guided to the miraculous scene of the Nativity, located at the ideal
location of the composition known as the golden mean, or rule of three parts.
Yet, the painting held in the arms of Peace is not a depiction of the Nativity, but
rather a sacred heart that has been divided into five sections, which pertain to

5 Melion W.S., The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, Early Modern
Catholicism and the Visual Arts 1 (Philadelphia: 2009) 153.
6 Via vita aeternae (Antwerp: 1630). Book II: Chapter 35, imago 15, 516. Vis modum meditandi
nosse? intuere illum in mysterio Nativitatis. Latin translation by Anthony Antunes. Note on
the titles of the Bolswert’s engravings Figs. 2.1–2.5: due to the fact that images in Via vita aeter­
nae are not explicitly titled, and annotations are lengthy, the titles given for the figures above
are translations by the author based on the attributed titles presented by Ralph Dekoninck
in various publications.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 95

figure 2.1 Boëtius à Bolswert, The way to meditate. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.8 cm
From: Via vitæ aeternæ iconibus illustrata per B. a. Bolswert.
(Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1630). Private collection. Photo: the
author with assistance by Allan Cameron
96 Barbour

the virtuous life of Christ. In this way, the viewer’s expectations are thwarted,
and subsequently piqued by the disruption. In response to the stimuli of the
miraculous heart, the artist turns away as if startled, yet his heel remains on
the demon, and the palette is securely in hand. Vision as personified by the
act of painting is ultimately superseded through the action of the divine artist
who intervenes from above and replaces the mimetic painting with a sacred
heart. The fingers of the artist’s right hand are splayed to signify astonishment,
not only in regard to the miraculous Nativity and sacred heart, but also as a
gesture of awe, a response to the complexity of the resulting composition. By
officiating, so to speak, at the miraculous event, the artist embodies the sense
of vision, and thus demonstrates the importance of utilizing one’s imagina-
tion when practicing meditative prayer. The annotation on the page facing the
image explains that meditation can be learned by observing the mystery of the
Nativity, and by preparing oneself for meditation in much the same way as an
artist sets out to create a pictorial scene.7 Each preparatory step on the road
to eternity is essential to the soul, and similarly the facets and details within
the composition are integral to the meditative itinerary Sucquet purveys.
Positioned as an observant interpreter, the artist in The Way to Meditate is both
witness and creator.
The heart in the arms of Peace resembles a cuirass or shield divided into
five segments [Fig. 2.1: detail].8 Each segment contains an encapsulated image,
alphabetical letter, and short question pertaining to the life of Christ. The ques-
tions are abbreviated, presumably to fit the space, and read as follows: ‘Who?
What/How? Where/When? Why? Which?’ In the upper left segment, the letter
D is printed on the image of the Christ child along with the single word ‘Quis?’.
On the accompanying page, the corresponding text reads: ‘Who is being born?’
The answer is obvious, though the question is a leading one, meant to unleash
a chain of related scenes and metaphors. In the upper register of the engrav-
ing activated rays of light are shown emerging from open clouds, alluding to
the divine source of Christ’s birth. The circular expanse of the open sky is vast,
depicted as an ovoid, for it is drawn from the perspective of the artist on the
ground. The oval form is repeated throughout the composition in a variety of
ways: it provides a template for the portal of the architectural ruin, the upper-
most region of the heart, and the palette held in the artist’s left hand. On the

7 Via 516: ‘Praeparatione praemissa delige tibi meditandi materiam: v g. (A) Nativitatem
Christi: hanc tamquam pictor in (B) corde quod (C) pax sustinet, id est, tranquillum est ac
pacificum, depinge, seu perpende cum omnibus circumstantius’.
8 Sacred heart emblems were often featured in emblem books and particularly Jesuit publi-
cations. See Hugo H., Pia Desideria (Antwerp, Henrik Aertssens: 1624), with engravings by
Boëtius à Bolswert.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 97

figure 2.1a
Detail: Boëtius à Bolswert, The way to
meditate. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.8 cm
From: Via vitæ aeternæ iconibus
illustrata per B. a. Bolswert.
(Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius:
1630). Private collection. Photo:
the author with assistance by
Allan Cameron

soft ledge of the clouds and labelled accordingly are the theological virtues of
Crede (Faith), Dilige (Charity), and Spera (Hope). At the centre of the upper-
most zone is the tetragrammaton, the textual imprint of the divine, which also
appears on the sacred heart above the infant Christ. Visual rhythm is achieved
through the repetition of ovoids, angles, and squares, orchestrated to guide the
viewer’s gaze within the frame.
The artist’s pose embodies a complex response to the miraculous. Similar
to the movement of a helix, the upper body is raised and rotates from the
pivot of the right foot that is firmly placed on the haunches of a squirming
demon. Considering that the artist’s gaze is divided between the Nativity and
the sacred heart, his ability to control the demon underfoot is as remarkable as
it is commendable. Such a task would require great strength and composure,
though the artist seems more than capable of holding his ground. As a personi-
fication of sight, he mediates access to the theological narrative not only as a
witness, but also as an instrument of the Lord. In this way the artist is a con-
duit, a kind of matrix through which multiple directives, themes, and concepts
98 Barbour

are anchored. Therefore, the viewer is able to assimilate the artist’s frame of
reference by entering the scene and discovering all of the relational parts.9
Leon Battista Alberti in his book On Painting wrote that artists defined
light and planes in space by utilizing angles and geometry. His categoriza-
tion of angles for pictorial use included three different types: the extreme,
the medium, and the centric.10 Such tools were deployed to create the illusion
of depth and movement. Artist’s manuals and treatises incorporating such
devices were published, circulated, and copied for use at academies, studios,
and monasteries. In Vasari’s Vite, for example (first edition, 1550, second edi-
tion, 1568), a continuity of artistic practice was derived from the historiography
of the lives of artists dating from antiquity. Alberti recounted the story of the
artist Zeuxis who began to donate his paintings once he became convinced
that no compensation was adequate to his art, considering that he was a ‘sec-
ond god among mortals’.11 The divine creator had produced a vibrant world
populated with sentient beings, and the task of the artist was to invent a viable
translation, a mimetic version as a kind of symbolic offering. Following on the
Council of Trent’s decree that advised bishops to use both words and visual
media to teach the articles of faith, Federico Borromeo of Milan, in his book
Sacred Painting, had argued that images were endowed with the capacity to
stimulate both the emotional and rational faculties of the soul.12 The visual
expression of the divine could operate by way of artistic technique rationally
applied for the purpose of theological argument. In parallel, the beholder’s
perception of an object in space, or of the image of such an object, could oper-
ate at the intersection of haptic bodily sense experience, initially aroused by
the sense of sight, and of the intellect. On this account, vision serves at the sen-
sory medium by means of which the object, having been observed, is cognized
by viewer’s mind and subjected to operations that render it, as an image, con-
gruent and intelligible. Within the domain of meditative spiritual exercises,
the object, in this form, is seen and thereby known by the viewing subject who
engages with it in such a way as to test, know, and reform her/his faculties of
body and soul. For Melion, for example, Bolswert’s image of the artist is seen to
produce an effect of doubling, whereby ‘[…] picturing oneself painting makes

9 Cousinié F., “The Mental Image in Representation: Jean Aumont, L’Ouverture intérieure
du royaume de l’Agneau occis dans nos coeurs (1660)” in Melion W.S. – Dekoninck R. –
Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Ut Pictura Meditatio 213–217.
10 Alberti L.B., On Painting: a new translation and critical edition, trans. R. Sinisgalli
(Cambridge: 2011) 27.
11 Ibid. 45.
12 Borromeo F., Sacred Painting; Museum, trans. Rothwell K.S. Introduction by Jones P.M.
(Cambridge, USA – London, UK: 2010) 3–5.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 99

us cognizant of the image-making faculties by which the imago Dei enters

the soul’.13
Movement within the pictorial space is informed by an abstract armature,
a geometric structure on which various visual components are aesthetically
arranged in order to activate the viewer’s interest and engagement. Andrea
Catellani has written on Bolswert’s aim to produce a ‘topological articulation
of the image’ that organizes the composition in such a way as to illuminate a
‘fifth space (non-visible space where the image gets animated in the viewer’s
mind)’.14 By following the path of angular movement in The Way to Meditate
[Fig. 2.1], one can see how the structure of the engraving is informed by an
integrated design of geometric parts. Both the angle of the artist’s posture and
the two outer rays of light from above are approximately forty-five degrees
from the edge of the image frame. The divine gaze from above shines on the
infant Christ, and subsequently is amplified by the three Virtues. In turning
to take in the scene, the artist’s deportment implies emphatic transmission,
and refraction. The emission of light is depicted as both naturally occurring
and also charged with divine intention. As shown by the tetragrammaton in
the heavens, and on the heart shield, the miraculous is recognized as beyond
visual representation, and thus remains a mystery.
Jesuit emblem books often included references to optics, natural phenom-
ena, and the life sciences, most of which were transmitted by theological
metaphors.15 Artists were keen to make use of scientific instruments and dis-
coveries pertaining to light and vision since such innovations were especially
relevant to their practice. Painters and engravers utilized geometric figures and
angular planes in order to replicate the effects of natural and spiritual phenom-
ena. As Evonne Levy has shown, Ignatius of Loyola’s identity as the founder
of the Jesuits was represented by the motif of a flame activated, implicitly or
explicitly by the divine light of Christ shining onto a concave mirror.16 The
metaphor of lightning and divine inspiration was also cited in the hagiogra-
phy of St. Carlo Borromeo, and other saints. As we know, fire can be generated
from the action of holding a mirror at a precise angle to a ray of light, thereby
optimizing the transference of heat. Similarly, or so the analogy goes, cognitive
ignition and insight can be achieved when one sustains an intense focus on

13 Melion, The Meditative Art 160.

14 Catellani A., “Before the Preludes: Some semiotic observations on vision, meditation,
and the Fifth Space in Early Jesuit Spiritual Illustrated Literature”, in Melion W.S. –
Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Ut pictura meditatio 178.
15 Aresi P., Delle sacre impresse, libro quarto (Tortona, Calenzano: 1630). Delle Sacre, which
consists of seven books and two hundred emblems, is one of many examples.
16 Levy, E.A., Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: 2004) 160.
100 Barbour

a specific problem. The danger of being burned is palpable, and knowledge

arises from firsthand experience potentially tinged by risk, danger, and diffi-
culty. This is to say that meditative work was appreciated as arduous.
Bolswert’s use of angular geometries has the effect of commanding visual
direction, of creating movement through magnification and distanciation,
not unlike the navigational lens on board seafaring ships. The production and
trade of scientific instruments in early modern Europe benefitted the Jesuits
who were keen to expand their influence in Asia and the Americas. Matteo
Ricci (1552–1610) had studied Euclidean geometry and collected optical lenses
for his museum in China.17 Bolswert’s engravings, produced within a Jesuit
school ambit, show a marked appreciation for the aesthetics of geometry and
metaphorical motifs common to the disciplines of theology, science, and art.
The Jesuit communities of Europe and beyond were greatly enriched by the
transmission and exchange of knowledge in the form of printed books. The
Via vitae aeternae was meant to circulate within such an epistemological net-
work. Numerous editions were published in Latin, Dutch, French, German,
Hungarian, and English, a testament to its reception in Europe and the world-
wide global network of Jesuit missions.
As previously mentioned, the trope of artistic imitation arises from the
intention to analogize the processes of meditation and painting. Christ’s birth
is presented as a divine spectacle, susceptible to imaginative imitation by devo-
tees who strive to replicate it, at least approximately, in their mind’s eye for the
purposes of spiritual nourishment. Bolswert and Sucquet construct visual and
textual metaphors to enhance and amplify this process of fashioning indelible
images that can easily be recalled and meditated. Starting from the impres-
sion produced by the emblematic image, the reader-viewer then imagines the
scene for her-/himself, relocating it within a hermeneutic narrative. In viewing
the engraving of the artist, one is encouraged to roam freely within the image,
so to speak, and to explore the details and characters from the subject posi-
tion of the artist [Fig. 2.1]. Therefore, the representation of the artist at work
provides a frame of reference through which the devotee may contemplate the
image as though it were a work in progress. From the location of the studio, the
viewer is able to conceive the moment of creation as part of a larger narrative
scheme about soul-formation or reformation.

17 Engelfriet P.M., Euclid in China: The Genesis of the First Chinese Translation of Euclid’s
Elements, Books I–VI ( Jihe Yuanben, Beijing, 1607) and Its Reception Up to 1723 (Leiden:
1998).
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 101

In the second engraving, titled The Path of Virtue [Fig. 2.2],18 the painter has
abandoned his palette, though the heart remains in the hands of Peace. His
right ankle is no longer atop the demon, but rather chained to a globus cruciger,
the orb and cross that represent Christ’s dominion over the world. The text on
the adjacent page states that Christ will liberate through Grace and show the
way to Virtue.19 Without Grace, one is made vulnerable like the infant depicted
at the lower left who is unable to stand or ask for help even though snakes and
demons are slithering towards him. It is worth noting that the infant shown
[Fig. 2.2] is similar to the Christ child depicted in the Nativity [Fig. I], though
in the latter case Christ is adored by his family and shepherds. The viewer is
meant to recognize that the abandoned mortal child lacks the security that
faith can offer. David and Goliath are depicted in the background while the
corresponding text indicates that the giant did not fall due to David’s sling, but
rather the Lord’s intervention. Similarly, the painter struggles to become free of
the world, though mortality imposes limits. He has the skill to create effective
representations of life, though the fictive world that he produces is illusory.
Therefore, the viewer is urged to conclude that even though the artist strives to
free himself from the chains of sin and follow the path of Christ, his efforts will
prove futile without the Grace of God, who alone confers the gift of salvation.
The third image, titled Imitation of the Saints, features two artists and their
works in progress [Fig. 2.3]. On the facing page the first sentence of the annota-
tion reads: ‘Heed the example of the saints, and their words about the Nativity
as Virtue proposed to you’.20 One artist, seated at an easel, paints a picture
of a saint, while next to him the book of Scripture sits open. In contrast, the
second artist at the far left is advanced in age and appears rather comical as
he has been knocked off his stool by a mischievous demon with cloven feet.
Even though the elder painter has been thrown to the ground, he still holds his
brush in midair. His ostentatious hat, a symbol of prosperity and vanity, has
fallen on the ground. Seemingly marginal to the main narrative, this humor-
ous vignette is not addressed directly by the text, although Sucquet’s comment
that the philosophers did not exercise or imitate true Virtue, but rather were
well acquainted with the shadow of Virtue, may be an oblique reference to it.21
Sucquet alludes to Plato’s allegory of the cave and the artist who makes mere

18 Via. Book II: Chapter 38, imago 16, 549: ‘Vis virtutem notatam in mysterio N. [Navitatatis]
sequi? Deo soli confide, diffide tibi’.
19 Via, 549: ‘(D) Christus sua te gratia liberabit, et viam ostendet ad (E) virtutem’.
20 Via. Book II: Chapter 44, imago 22, 601. Annotation on facing page: ‘Attende exempla
Sanctorum, et dicta eorum de N. [Nativitatis] virtute tibi proposita’.
21 Via 601: ‘Vide etiam quid (H) Philosophi in umbra (I) virtutis solum versantes, de ea
senserint, ut eam exercuerint. cur hos non imitaris?’.
102 Barbour

figure 2.2 Boëtius à Bolswert, The path of Virtue. Engraving, 13.9 × 9.6 cm
From: Via vitæ aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp,
Henricus Aertssius: 1630). Private collection. Photo: the author
with assistance by Allan Cameron
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 103

figure 2.3 Boëtius à Bolswert, Imitation of the Saints. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.7 cm
From: Via vitæ aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp,
Henricus Aertssius: 1630). Private collection. Photo: the author
with assistance by Allan Cameron
104 Barbour

simulations within it by drawing the outlines of cast shadows; this allegory

was often cited in references to the genesis and fanciful nature of artistic prac-
tice. Alberti quotes Quintilian when he writes that art was born when the first
ancient painters traced their subjects from the silhouettes of reflected shad-
ows cast by the sun.22 The figure of the artist in the act of painting was a useful
motif in the Jesuit context since the artist could personify the sense of sight,
most powerful of the senses, and thus connote the activation of imagination,
an amplification upon the visual sense; in an emblematic context, the artist
can stand for the transmission of allegory and metaphor through the mutual
interaction of words and images. The meditative aim of the image is to spur the
reader-viewer to envision the miraculous birth of Christ within her-/himself,
and then proceed on the path of Virtue by modeling one’s every word, thought,
and deed on Jesus.
The fourth and final image of the artist in Sucquet’s book is titled Imitation
of Christ [Fig. 2.4]. The annotation reads: ‘Look, and imitate the Virtue of the
Nativity that the Lord has shown to you’.23 The engraving depicts the artist
seated at an easel while working on a painting of Christ carrying the cross.
To his right is an angel holding the book of Scripture and indicating a specific
passage. To the left of the artist, Virtue stands with her back to the viewer and
points at Christ as he carries his cross up a mountain, presumably Golgotha.
Next to Christ are the words ‘Venit post me’ (Come after me). Above this scene
and towards the right is a depiction of the Crucifixion along with a line of text
that advises the viewer to observe and proceed according to the example of
Christ. Adjacent to the Crucifixion is a gathering of people seated before Christ
and illuminated by a ray of heavenly light. A line of text printed on the beam
entreats the viewer to listen and be as perfect as the Father.24 Below and to
the left of the composition is a scene of burning, fiery hell; a group of people
strolls about, seemingly unaware of their imminent destruction. Crosses are
assembled in the foreground and also taken up by numerous followers. On
the facing page, the text advises the reader-viewer to carry the cross and pro-
ceed like Christ on the arduous path of Virtue, until death. The directive is to
follow his example, for all are tempted and beguiled by the momentary plea-
sures of Vice, and few can face the arduous challenges that a commitment to
Virtue requires.25

22 Alberti, On Painting 27.

23 Via, imago 22, 601: ‘Inspice, & imitare virtutis N. exemplar, quod tibi a Domino monstra-
tum est’.
24 Via 628: ‘Estote perfecti sicut pater vester’.
25 ‘Unus quis que enim tentatur a concupiscentia sua abstractus et illectus, et ad peccatum
vel horrore asperitatis, quae in virtute est; vel amore voluptatis momentanceae, quae in
vitio reperitur, in vitatur’.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 105

figure 2.4 Boëtius à Bolswert, Imitation of Christ. Engraving, 13.5 × 9.5 cm

From: Via vitæ aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp,
Henricus Aertssius: 1630). Private collection. Photo: the author
with assistance by Allan Cameron
106 Barbour

This final image of the artist working under the supervision of Virtue with
the example of Christ as his model, is one of resolution and obeisance. Unlike
the first image [Fig. 2.1] where the artist’s stance is rather directorial and self-
assured, this depiction, along with the adjacent text, explains that the artist
has managed to overcome temptation and arrogance. In the second image
[Fig. 2.2], the painter had struggled to become free of the chains of sin, while
in the third [Fig. 2.3] an elder, possibly the artist’s alter ego, was shown falling
from his stool. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, which provided Sucquet with
a spiritual template, facilitates an individual’s capacity to form a direct line
of communication with the Lord through meditation; however, the exercitant
must be mindful of corporeal limits, obey the inspirations of divine wisdom,
and accede to the governance of God. In the Via, the vocation of the artist sig-
nifies the evangelical call of the spiritual vocation of the imitatio Christi.
In addition, it is worth noting that the abundance of crosses in the fore-
ground of Fig. 2.4 creates an activated visual pattern. The scene – a cluster of
right angles and animated figures – alerts the reader-viewer to the forked path,
the implied violence of the cross, and the difficulty of choosing and sticking to
the virtuous path of Christ. The repetition of multiple crosses creates the effect
of a congested landscape, ominously full of instruments of suffering. There is,
of course, an exegetical connection amongst these four figures: the cross came
from the trunk of the tree of life, whence came the rod of Aaron, and this tree
predicts the tree of Jesse from which the ancestral lineage of Adam and Mary
can be traced.26 The birth of Christ, the Crucifixion, and the mystery of the
Resurrection can be thought to ensue from the initial bud of an allegorical
branch of this tree. The visual motifs associated with these hermeneutical
events all contain the element of wood, and thus refer to the cycle of life, the
paradox of strength and fragility, of survival and death.
Apart from the obvious use of the cross for theological purposes, the formal
repetition of the easel, cross, and panel shares the formal element of the right-
angle square. As each of these rectilinear structures is created by the cross-
ing of linear vectors, specifically at right angles, the field of vision within the
composition is similarly broken down into its constitutive parts, segments, and
fractals. The magnification and reduction of angles in space produce an over-
all effect of visual congruency. Similarly, the analytical process of meditation,
with its incremental steps and multiple levels, is inferred by the picture’s geo-
metric figures and relational parts. Just as the artist corrects his work by imple-
menting the set square, the devotee envisions the ideal life of Christ, squares
her-/himself to it, in order to become more virtuous. To answer the questions
posed by the heart, the viewer recalls various scenes from the life of Christ,

26 Luke 3:23–38.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 107

meditates them accordingly, and then integrates these single components into
a narrative sequence that maps an itinerary for her/his own life.
In terms of visual metaphor, the cluster of multiple crosses suggests a col-
lective body, united by the burden of the original sin. Another engraving of
multiple crosses from Via vitae aeternae appears in Book I, with the annota-
tion ‘Consider that adversity can happen to you and be prepared in spirt’.27
The image portrays a crowd of cross-bearing devotees as they proceed to climb
along a single path towards the summit of a mountain [Fig. 2.5]. Two figures in
the foreground are shown in shadow with their backs to the viewer. While this
demarcation of darkness and light imposes a separation between the viewer
and the scene, it also serves as an invitation to leave the darkness, take up the
cross, and join the others as they walk towards salvation. If one’s commitment
to the journey wavers, inspiration may be found in the example of the man at
right, who walks even though he has lost a limb.
As already noted, Sucquet’s use of emblems is informed by the Jesuit sys-
tem of the Spiritual Exercises devised by Ignatius Loyola. Ralph Dekoninck has
written on the efficacy of Jesuit emblems as instruments of meditative prayer:

The tripartite structure of the emblem, in fact, offers the possibility of

a transposition of the method of Ignatian meditative prayer: its techni-
cal dimension, which lies in the distinction between the composition of
place, meditation, and colloquy; its psychological dimension, which suc-
cessively appeals to the three faculties of the soul (memory, intellect and
will); and its spiritual dimension, which is represented by the journey
of the Christian as three successive stages (purgative, illuminative and
unitive).28

Theodore Galle’s (1571–1633) engraving titled Orbita probitatis [Fig. 2.6], which
appears in Jan David’s Veridicus christiannis, has been cited by Ralph Dekoninck
as a visual precedent for Bolswert’s engravings of the artist since it also depicts
painters at work.29 In Galle’s print the ideal depiction of Christ is represented

27 Via, Book I: Chapter 6, imago 8, 213: ‘Considera crebro quae tibi adversa accidere possint,
et animum ad ea praepara’.
28 Dekoninck R., “Meditation on the res incorporea (invisible or abstract)” in Chor­-
penning J. (ed.), Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library Katho­
lieke Universiteit Leuven (Philadelphia, PA: 2006) 25; Melion The Meditative Art 158. On the
Orbita probitatis, also see Melion, Meditative Art 339, 364; and idem, “Excursus 3” of the
Introduction to this volume.
29 Dekoninck R., “Ut pictura/sculptura meditatio. La métaphore picturale et sculpturale
dans la spiritualité du XVIIE siècle”, in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, numéro
special: La Meditazione nella prima et’ moderna, 41 (Florence: 2006) 680; idem, “Ad Vivum:
108 Barbour

figure 2.5 Boëtius à Bolswert, Be prepared for adversity. Engraving, 13.8 × 9.8 cm
From: Via vitæ aeternæ illustrata per B. a. Bolswert. (Antwerp,
Henricus Aertssius: 1630). Private collection. Photo: the author
with assistance by Allan Cameron
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 109

figure 2.6 Theodore Galle, Orbita Probitatis. Engraving, 15.5 × 11.8 cm

From: Veridicus Christianus, Editio Altera. (Antwerp, Plantin:
[1601], 1651)

by a range of false attempts and multiple points of view.30 Although similar

to Bolswert’s image in that it features scenes from the life of Christ, the com-
position of Orbita probitatis is essentially a circular design consisting of the

Pictorial and Spiritual Imitation in the Allegory of the Pictura Sacra by Frans Francken II”,
in Melion W.S. – Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Ut pictura meditatio 325–329.
30 David J., Veridicus Christianus, editio altera (Antwerp, Plantin: [1601]1651) 351; Melion –
Dekoninck – Guiderdoni-Bruslé (eds.), Ut pictura meditatio 329.
110 Barbour

repetition of multiple panels. The painting by the artist closest to the viewer is
the ideal replica of Christ, for it shows him carrying the cross, while the other
interpretations are deemed less than adequate since the subject matter devi-
ates from the ideal model represented. In addition, some of the paintings are
clearly inappropriate for they depict animals, and in one case even a satyr.
Thus, the viewer is led to conclude that the ideal work of art is one that unwav-
eringly portrays Christ as a figure of indomitable determination, capable of
completing the ultimate sacrifice.
As previously noted, the heart portrayed in Figs. 2.1 and 2.2 represents a
mnemonic table divided into five segments. The segments are identified by
association with stages from the life of Christ, as well as the five wounds of
the Crucifixion. Thus, the heart engages the viewer in an implicitly ekphrastic
conversation, an interplay of textual and visual dialogue that urges the viewer
to fashion an image from the prompts supplied by the image and its inscribed
texts, supplemented by the fuller textual descriptions in the adjacent chapter.
One question leads to another, while the emblem’s allegorical devices point
the way to hermeneutic answers. Bolswert mobilizes this dynamic passage
from question to answer through compositional technique, with an empha-
sis on angular structure and movement within the highly articulated space of
the image. He encourages the exercitant to recall the larger narrative of the
Passion, and to view her/his own life through this lens, by amplifying upon the
heart’s condensed mnemonic device. In this way, the devout reader-viewer is
guided to recall the ekphrastic dialogue between the emblem – its pictura and
related texts – and the expansive and detailed meditative images they inspire.
Outwardly silent, yet inwardly resplendent, the acts of painting and meditat-
ing require constant renegotiation, lodged in the self, between what can be
seen and read in the emblem, and the things to be imagined and conceived
upon this basis. As Mary Carruthers and Frances Yates have argued, the prac-
tice of meditation draws on the monastic tradition of the ars memoria, a con-
ceptual system whereby images are imprinted upon the mind’s eye through
repetitive exercises, and sustained effort, as a basis for cognitive elaboration.31
The recurring presence of the artist in Sucquet’s Via vita aeternae emerges as
an indelible metaphor, an epitome of the relatively solitary practice of medita-
tive image-making based on an exegetical relation to Scripture.
Bolswert’s engravings depict the artist as an agent of the divine, yet one
whose salvation is contingent upon his ability to imitate Christ effectively.
Although the pages of the sequence are not entirely consecutive, the four

31 Carruthers M., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–
1200 (Cambridge: 2008); Yates F.A., The Art of Memory (Chicago: 2001).
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 111

images are unified by the recurring figure of the artist and common features
of the studio. Sucquet’s apparatus recalls Federico Borromeo’s justification of
sacred images: ‘When images excite our minds and stir them with lively inspi-
ration, they are said to be alive and breathing’.32 Verisimilitude was particularly
useful when the viewer, persuaded by mimesis to believe in the truthfulness of
the image, became more receptive to the spiritual and moral message being
transmitted. Certainly, there are earlier emblematic sources that utilize the
trope of the artist to evoke the act of seeing. One example comes from the
emblem book of Achille Bocchi, in which the artist Guilio Bonasone repre-
sented Socrates in the act of drawing a self-portrait while holding a framing
square. His personal daimon looks over his shoulder, a winged figure that prof-
fers advice;33 Bocchi’s accompanying text explains that pictures show a hidden
meaning.34 Writing on this emblem, David Packwood has noted that painting
leads to ‘circumscription’, in the sense of knowledge of oneself.35 The process
of meditation, as inculcated by the writings of St. Thomas of Aquinas, treatises
of the devotio moderna, and the Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, insisted on the
agency of the individual devotee. The theme of choice, as represented by the
path of Virtue in Via vita aeternae, was informed, in part, by the conviction
that human desire to survive is inherent, not only in this life but for all eter-
nity. Therefore, the representation of the soul’s migration in the Via vita aeter­
nae visualizes meditation as a kind of pilgrimage, a pathway, or ductus with as
many steps and layers as a painting has brushstrokes.36

The Tabula Cebetis and Sucquet’s Via Vita Aeternae

The religious allegory of the Via vita aeternae can be interpreted in relation
to the ekphrastic dialogue of the Tabula Cebetis, an ancient Greek work that

32 Borromeo, Sacred Painting 41–42.

33 A daimon representing wisdom appears in the iconography of the Tabula Cebetis as an
elder scholar at the portal to life.
34 Bocchi, A., Symbolicarum qvaestionum, de universo genere, quas serio ludebat, libri quinque
(Bologna, Nova Academia: 1555). Sym. III. Pictura gravium ostenduntur pondera rerum.
Quaeq. Latent magis, haec per mage aperta patent. See Watson, E.S., Achilles Bocchi and
the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form (Cambridge: 1993) 85–6.
35 Packwood D., “Socrates Becomes Narcissus: Moral Mediation and Artistic Representation
in Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicarum quaestionum, Kuntstexte,” (ed.) Langdon H. 2011-06-23:2
Zeitschriftenartikel DOI: 10.18452/7636.
36 Carruthers, Art of Memory 116–117.
 112 Barbour

figure 2.7 Romeyn de Hooghe, The Tabula Cebetis. Engraving, 18.2 × 34.1 cm
From: Epicteti Enchiridium, una cum Cebetis Thebani Tabula. Graece & Latine
[…]. (Abraham Berkelii, Leiden and Amsterdam: 1670)

was rediscovered by early modern scholars, and translated into Latin.37 The
dialogue of the Tabula Cebetis consists of a series of questions and answers
regarding the composition of a painting, located in the Temple of Cronos, or
Saturn. Led by the philosopher Cebes of Thebes (c. 430–350 BCE), the discus-
sion recounts the details of this painting. Cebes, a follower of Socrates, provides
an ekphrastic interpretation of the iconography, and repeatedly emphasizes
the point that the work, in examining the problem of survival, places emphasis
on the crucial importance of ethical conduct.38 As Reinhart Schleier suggests,
emblem book collections bear a marked similarity to the iconography of the
Tabula Cebetis, particularly in terms of the allegorical figures and the integra-
tion of images and literary sources.39
The engraving of the Tabula Cebetis by Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) can
serve as a visual reference to introduce the key figures and compositional ele-
ments of the iconography [Fig. 2.7]. Constructed in a series of three circular

37 Schleier R., Tabula Cebetis; oder, ‘Spiegel des Menschlichen Lebens/ darin Tugent und
untugent abgemalet ist’ Studien zur Rezeption einer antiken Bildbeschreibung im 16. Und
17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1973) 126–12; Bath M., Speaking Pictures (London – New York:
1994) 277–279. On the Tabula Cebetis, also see Weddigen T., “Italienreise als Tugendweg:
Hendrick Goltzius’s Tabula Cebetis”, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 54 (2005) 90–139.
38 Schleier 55–65.
39 Ibid. 63.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 113

zones, the image depicts a large gathering of people conducting a range of

activities including walking, running, praying, climbing, and fighting. The
crowd moves through the various stages of life represented by the three
zones, which are demarcated by walls and gates. The journey begins at the
portal of life, labelled with the letter A, standing for aleph, the first letter of
the Greek alphabet.40 At the portal they are met by the Daimon, a wise elder
who attempts to guide them accordingly, but instead they impetuously accept
a drink of poison from the chalice of Suadela, the personification of deceit.
Despite this ruinous beginning, the young adults proceed through the various
rings of life, seemingly unaware of what they are doing. (By way of comparison,
in a Christian frame of reference, this initial error is similar to the original sin of
Adam and Eve.) Having passed through the portal of life, the figures encounter
Fortuna, and thus are faced with more temptations. Cebes advises the students
that Fortuna’s gifts are not ‘safe or secure’,41 since their value depends upon
the recipient’s intention.42 For the gift is not evil or good, but rather tainted or
enriched by one’s moral character. The next zone is referred to as ‘Education’
or ‘False Education’, and is populated by artists, humanist scholars, clergy, and
militia. In this area, one learns how to apply knowledge and conduct oneself in
society, though as Cebes notes, the poison that was ingested at the beginning
of their journey remains within, and can only be purged if one reaches the top
of the mountain.43 In the third ring, a few stragglers are shown attempting to
scale the rugged face of the mountainside. At the peak a group of saints, angels,
and muses are shown resting upon the clouds.
The Greek word paideia, which the text of Cebes describes as the aspira-
tional goal of life’s journey, pertains to happiness, a sense of wellbeing, and
human flourishing. On the eve of his death, Socrates’s commented that the
‘[…] one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to prac-
tice for dying and death’.44 The philosophical dialogue of the Tabula Cebetis,
which depicts the migration of the soul as a journey on the road to eternity, was
adapted by Sucquet and Bolswert for their Via vitae aeternae. Such allegorical
iconography, taught as a school text, was seen as a ready source of guidance
and spiritual nourishment for Christian devotees. Sucquet’s Via vitae aeternae,

40 Ibid. 122.
41 Fitzgerald – White, The Tabula of Cebes 73.
42 Ibid., The Tabula of Cebes 121–125; Parsons R.D., Cebes’ tablet; with introduction, notes,
vocabulary, and grammatical questions by Richard Parsons (Boston: 1887) 11.
43 Cebes, The Tabula of Cebes 83.
44 Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Mena, Phaedo, trans. G.M. Grube –
Cooper J.M. (Indianapolis/Cambridge: 2002) 101. Simmias and Cebes discuss the subject
with Socrates in the Platonic dialogue of Phaedo.
114 Barbour

through the figure of the painter, converts the life of Christ – his Passion, death
on the cross, and Resurrection, in particular – into a kind of tabula Christi, a
model to be meditated and thereby imitated, very much like the Tabula Cebetis.
The virtuous example of Christ on the cross was a critical point of reference
in innumerable Jesuit iconographical programs, where it invariably functions
as a tether that confirms the faithful soul, inoculating it against vacillation from
the vita Christi. The road to eternal life, as indicated by the Tabula Cebetis, was
difficult, beset by war, disease, and poverty. Sucquet’s writings and Bolswert’s
engravings combine to describe the passage through life in similar terms, even
while proffering a soothing balm for the soul in distress, assisting the devotee
to live a virtuous life through meditative prayer. Both the Tabula Cebetis and
Via vitae aeternae depict moral landscapes through which human life is visual-
ized as a journey, the phases of which, having been observed and analyzed, can
serve as signposts for improvement.
In his monograph on the iconography of the Tabula Cebetis, Reinhart Schleier
cites the Via vitae aeternae as an example of Jesuit adaptation of the ekphras-
tic dialogue of Cebes for its school community in Antwerp.45 Jesuit acad-
emies and curricula were structured according to the pedagogical system
promulgated by the academicians of the Collegio Romano – the so-called ratio
studiorum – which integrated philosophy, mathematics, rhetoric, grammar,
gymnastics, music, and more. In the case of the Jesuit academies, emblem
books formed part of rhetorical training.
The Tabula Cebetis often appeared in bilingual editions and was recom-
mended for Jesuit students of Greek and Latin.46 The frontispiece to Erasmus’s
New Testament featured the Tabula Cebetis after a design by Hans Holbein the
Younger, in order to demonstrate the unbroken lineage from classical philoso-
phy to Christianity.47 It is worth noting that the allegory of the two paths in Via
vitae aeternae also refers indirectly to the Pythagorean upsilon. Sucquet incor-
porates the Pythagorean theme by contrasting a steep mountain with an invit-
ing, easily walkable meadow, but instead of positioning a youth at the portal of
life, as does the Tabula Cebetis, the Jesuit reader-viewer of Via vitae aeternae is
confronted with a choice between imitating the life of Christ or facing certain
damnation.48 As the students of Cebes were advised to model themselves on
ideal exemplars, so the Jesuit users of Via vita aeternae are advised to model

45 Schleier 126.
46 Ibid. 140–141.
47 Erasmus D., Novum Testamentum, vol. 2 (Basel, Froben: 1522).
48 Fitzgerald – White, The Tabula of Cebes 22–25.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 115

themselves on Christ.49 Within Jesuit circles, the dialogic Tabula was venerated
as a kind of moral guidebook, a spiritual map illustrating critical moments of
human life. Sucquet and Bolswert subsequently adapted the concept of the
soul’s journey by creating evocative representations of choice, along with cor-
responding ekphrastic texts. By following the allegorical narrative, one learns
to forge a path, a meditative ductus, in much the same way as a traveller would
prepare for a journey.
Even though scholars have long debated the authorship and dating of the
Tabula, it was published widely in early modern Europe as the work of Cebes,
one of the speakers of Plato’s Phaedo. As Schleier notes, there is a great deal of
variation among the more than one hundred extant iconographical examples,
many of which offer a precedent for Sucquet’s and Bolswert’s Christological
adaptation of the allegory. Not only did the ekphrastic dialogue offer a diver-
sified panorama of humanity, it also conceptualized life as a kind of maze,
an endless circular problem, and many visual artists responded accordingly.
Sucquet and Bolswert adjusted their source, however, depicting the passage
through human life as a more linear progression, whereas the peregrination
of the soul in the Tabula was deemed as recursive and cyclical as the seasons.
If one missed an opportunity, or died while trying, another person would pre-
sumably step in, albeit at a different time and place.
The conflation of Platonic dialogue and Christian narrative is exemplified
by an anonymous wood engraving of the Tabula, dated 1549 and printed in
Venice. The image contains several hundred allegorical and pagan figures,
yet the title contains the word ‘Christiana’, and depicts the risen Christ at the
entrance of a temple located at the top of a mountain. He is shown holding the
banner of the Resurrection while bestowing a blessing on an exhausted man
who has fallen on a set of stairs, apparently crushed by the weight of the cross
upon his back.50 Presumably, he is the one and only person who has managed
to traverse the entire labyrinth and arrive at the temple. In this conflation of
the Christian and the pagan, the road to eternal salvation is described as a
dangerous journey, one that demands perseverance and courage in the face of
adversity. Even if one initially fails, one can try again to resist the temptations
of Vice, the gifts of Fortune, and arrive at the better destination, having learned
by doing.

49 In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a philosopher
named Cebes, though scholars have argued that he is not the author of the Tabula. See
Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev.
J.M. Cooper (Indianapolis: 2002) 100–101.
50 Title: Imagine, Rapresentatione, Overo discorso de la vita morale, et Christiana. Graphic Art
Collection of the Albertina Museum at Vienna.
116 Barbour

For their emblems featuring a painter at his easel, Sucquet and Bolswert
surely also called upon earlier emblems that trope upon the artist at work. In
an essay on emblems on the art of painting, Judith Dundas calls attention to
the form and functions of this trope in Andrea Alciato’s emblem of Fortuna, or
Occasio as she is named in the emblem.51 With a flowing forelock, she stands
on a spinning globe, a statue with the ability ‘to speak directly to the viewer’.52
Alciato’s poem consists of an ekphrastic dialogue, not unlike the Tabula Cebetis,
wherein the hidden meaning of the image is revealed through a series of ques-
tions and responses. The text, borrowed from the Greek Anthology, refers to
the statue of Occasio as an allegory of time.53 Due to the fact that the back of
Occasio’s head is bald, she is able to escape the grip of her pursuers by turn-
ing away. In this way the rotation of Occasio in space is likened to the passing
of time, and past, present, and future are comprised by a single personifica-
tion. An encounter with Occasio may seem like a random event, a game of
chance, or even fate, with consequences entirely contingent on her whims. But
an encounter with a statue of Occasio can have a salutary effect, sharpening a
person’s discernment, enabling her/him to anticipate potential danger in the
future. Similarly, in the case of the artist, creative solutions may remain elusive
or inchoate until the time is ripe, until he is matured by experience. As shown
by Dundas, artistic process and self-criticism is also represented in the emblem
book Mikrokosmos (1579) by Laurentius Haechtanus.54 Emblem 73 shows a
scene recounted by Pliny, wherein Apelles had placed his painting in a public
area in order to hear the unfiltered views of the passersby, though eventually
came to realize that a shoemaker knows more about shoes than paintings.55
Still, by moving a painting from the studio to the unfiltered light of the public
arena, blind spots may be revealed, and insight gained.
The painter in the Via vitae aeternae [Fig. 2.1], leaning back to check his
work against its sacred subject, invites the reader-viewer to imitate this same
process by stepping in and simultaneously out of the frame, as s/he self-
consciously sets about the task of refashioning her-/himself in imitation of

51 Alciato A., Livret des Emblemes (Paris, Chrestien Wechel: 1536) c5v. Adams A., French Em­-
blems at Glasgow. https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FALa016.
52 Dundas J., “Emblems on the Art of Painting: Pictura and Purpose” in Adams A. – Grove L.
(eds.) Emblems and Art History: Nine Essays, Glasgow Emblem Studies 1 (Glasgow: 1996)
69–70.
53 Ibid., 69.
54 Adams – Grove (eds.) Emblems and Art History 77–79; ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam’ in
Haechtanus L., Mikrokosmos: Parvus Mundus (Antwerp: 1579) Emblem 73 http://mateo
.uni-mannheim.de/desbillons/mikro/seite78.html.
55 Adams – Grove, Emblems and Art History 78.
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 117

Christ. The emblematic picturae, detailed as they are, function in conjunction

with ekphrastic textual commentaries that invite further amplification of the
templates provided by the book’s images. As shown by the four aforemen-
tioned engravings from Sucquet’s Via vitae aternae, the artist functions as a
personification of vision, meant to inspire devotees to take up a metaphorical
paintbrush and follow Christ’s example, first by meditating upon him, then by
modelling one’s life on his, as if painting a picture of the vita Christi and the
vita crucis. Bolswert and Sucquet portrayed the artist as both participant and
viewer, as a speculative figure designed to guide the painter-like devotee by
providing her/him with an artistic frame of reference.

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Elements, Books I–VI ( Jihe Yuanben, Beijing, 1607) and Its Reception Up to 1723
(Leiden: 1998).
Erasmus D., Novum Testamentum, vol. 2, (Basel, Froben: 1522).
Levy, E.A., Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: 2004).
Melion W.S., The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625
(Philadelphia: 2009) 151–187.
Nadal J., Adnotationes et Meditationes in Evangelia: Quae in sacrosancto missae sacrifi­
cio toto anno leguntur, cum evangeliorum concordantia, historiae integritati suffici­
enti. (Antwerp, Martinus Nutius: 1593, 1595). See https://catholic-resources.org/Art/
Nadal.htm. Accessed 25/02/2020.
Packwood D., “Socrates Becomes Narcissus: Moral Mediation and Artistic Represen-
tation in Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicarum quaestionum, Kuntstexte,” in Langdon H.
(ed.) Zeitschriftenartikel, 2011-06-23:2. DOI: 10.18452/7636.
Parsons R.D., Cebes’ tablet; with introduction, notes, vocabulary, and grammatical ques­
tions by Richard Parsons (Boston: 1887).
Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Mena, Phaedo, trans. G.M. Grube –
Cooper J.M. (Indianapolis: 2002).
Schleier R., Tabula Cebetis; oder, ‘Spiegel des Menschlichen Lebens/ darin Tugent und
untugentabgemalet ist’ Studien zur Rezeption einer antiken Bildbeschreibung im 16.
Und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1973).
Sucquet A.S.J., Via vitæ aeternæ; iconibus illustrata per Boëtium a Bolswert (Antwerp,
Martinus Nutius: 1620).
ARTIST ’ S FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SUCQUET ’ S VIA VITA AETERNAE 119

Sucquet A.S.J., Den wech des eevwich levens, trans. G. Zoes (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius:
1620).
Sucquet A.S.J., Chemin de la vie eternelle, trans. P. Morin (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius:
1623).
Sucquet A.S.J., Via vitæ aeternæ (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1630).
Watson E., Achilles Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form (Cambridge: 1993).
Weddigen T., “Italienreise als Tugendweg: Hendrick Goltzius’s Tabula Cebetis”,
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 54 (2005) 90–139.
Yates F.A., The Art of Memory (Chicago: 2001).
 chapter 3

‘No Less Difficult to Paint … Than to Describe’:

Chaos in Michel de Marolles’s Tableaux du Temple
des Muses
James Clifton

C’est pourquoy supposant derrier ces nuages, des tenebres immen-

ses, il fait vn plaisant meslange d’eau, de feu, de terre, de fumée,
de vents, & de diuerses constellations qu’il represente confusément
sur des pieces separées du Zodiaque; De sorte que le Verseau y
moüille le Lion celeste, quoy qu’il en soit à present bien éloigné: Le
Sagitaire y décoche ses traits sur les petits Iumeaux: le Capricorne
s’y bat contre le Cancre, & le Taureau contre le Scorpion: la Vierge
y foule aux pieds les Poissons: le Mouton y brüille les bassins de la
Balance: la Canicule y iappe contre le Serpent qui la menace de ses
dents venimeuses, & l’Ourse y essaye de se loger dans le Soleil. Des
Estoiles de la premiere grandeur s’y attachent à des rochers comme
des coquillages sur le bord de la mer, d’autres y sont dans l’eau, &
quelques-vnes dans le feu: & il n’est pas iusques au nom de Peintre
qui n’y soit écrit dans le Ciel.
Michel de Marolles (1655)1

…
On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked,
and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which

1 Marolles Michel de, Tableavx dv temple des mvses; tirez dv cabinet de fev Mr Favereav, Conseiller
du Roy en sa Cour des Aydes, & grauez en Tailles-douces par les meilleurs Maistres de son temps,
pour representer les Vertus & les Vices, sur les plus illustres Fables de l’Antiquité (Paris, Nicolas
L’Anglois: 1655) 3: ‘It is why, supposing some immense darkness behind these clouds, he
makes a pleasant mixture of water, fire, earth, smoke, winds, and various constellations that
are confusedly represented on separate pieces of the zodiac, so that Aquarius throws water
on celestial Leo, though he is now far removed from him: Sagittarius takes aim at the little
Gemini; Capricorn fights against Cancer, and Taurus against Scorpio; Virgo tramples Pisces;
Aries entangles the scales of Libra; the Dog yaps at the Serpent that menaces her with its
venomous teeth; and the Bear tries to lodge itself in the sun. Some stars of the first magnitude
attach themselves to rocks like shells on the seashore, others are in the water, and some in the
fire; and there is even the name of the artist written in the heavens.’

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 121

you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of system-
atic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could
any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccount-
able masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought
some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags,
had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much
and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and espe-
cially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however
wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, lim-
ber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre
of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in
a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to
drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out
what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but,
alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. – It’s the Black Sea in
a midnight gale. – It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal ele-
ments. – It’s a blasted heath. – It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. –
It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all
these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the pic-
ture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But
stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the
great leviathan himself?
Herman Melville (1851)2

∵
Lacking the enargeia (‘vividness’) associated with ancient ekphrasis, Michel de
Marolles’s description of a large engraving after Abraham van Diepenbeeck’s
composition of Chaos [Fig. 3.1] rather drily conveys its appearance, with per-
haps overly detailed listing of minor elements (the signs of the zodiac) and
inadequate acknowledgment of the sheer force of the image, which can only

2 Melville H., Moby-Dicky; or, The Whale (New York – London: 1851) 11–12.
122 J. Clifton

figure 3.1 After Abraham van Diepenbeeck, Chaos. Engraving from Michel de Marolles,
Tableavx du Temple des Muses (Paris, Nicolas L’Anglois: 1655), opp. p. 1
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 123

inadequately be called ‘vn plaisant meslange’.3 It represents a moment of

extreme conflict between primeval, elemental forces that beggars the imagina-
tion, as described by the source text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In contrast stands
Herman Melville’s magisterial and energetic ekphrasis of a scarcely decipher-
able painting in the New Bedford Spouter-Inn, which, satirical or not, conveys
both the appearance of the picture and the turbulence of its subject: the vio-
lent encounter of a ship and a whale in stormy seas. Melville’s text has been
compared to J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, but it is not impossible – given the ref-
erences to chaos and ‘the unnatural combat of the four primal elements’ – that
he was aware of Diepenbeeck’s composition and Marolles’s pale description
and had determined to do the French author one (or several) better.4 But
what occasioned Marolles’s unenergetic text in the first place?
Marolles’s description as such takes up only a small part of the eight pages
he wrote in response to the image in his Tableaux du Temple des Muses. The
book, published in Paris by Nicolas Langlois in 1655 with a dedication to Marie
Louise, Queen of Poland, Marolles’s beloved patron, comprises fifty-eight chap-
ters on various mythological subjects, with plates – one per chapter – designed
by Pierre Brebiette and Diepenbeeck and engraved by Theodoor Matham,
Cornelis II Bloemaert, Michael Lasne, Charles David, and François Poilly
(though none carries an engraver’s name). Each of the plates is accompanied
by Marolles’s description and commentary, followed by his ‘annotations’, in
which he elaborates on his own text, piece by piece, quoting relevant passages
from an array of ancient and modern authors. The complicated illustration
and publication history of the Tableaux du Temple des Muses may be briefly
summarized: Jacques Favereau, poet and Conseiller à la Cour des Aides, con-
ceived the project and commissioned most, and possibly all, of the illustra-
tions, to each of which he intended to juxtapose a sonnet, but a premature
death in 1638 prevented his realization of the project. Twenty-four of the
plates, engraved in Paris, were published, though not in book form, as Tableaux
des Vertus et des Vices.5 Some of Brebiette’s designs were subsequently replaced

3 For ekphrasis (on which, more below), I have relied especially on Webb R., “Ekphrasis
Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre”, Word & Image, 15 (1999) 7–18; and Squire M.,
“Ecphrasis: Visual and Verbal Interactions in Ancient Greek and Latin Literature”, in Oxford
Handbooks Online, 2015, available from https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/
oxfordhb/9780199935390.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935390-e-58 (accessed: 20.04.2020).
4 On the passage in Moby-Dick, see Wallace R.K., Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright
(Athens, GA: 1992); Robillard D., Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint (Kent,
OH – London: 1997) 71–73, 84, 91, 181.
5 For the history of the project, see Johnson W.M., “From Favereau’s Tableaux des vertus et
des vices to Marolles’ Tableaux du temple des muses: A Conflict between the Franco-Flemish
Schools in the Second Quarter of the Seventeenth Century”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, 72
124 J. Clifton

by compositions of the same subjects by Diepenbeeck – probably in the early

1630s – who added others of subjects not represented by Brebiette.6 Several
of Diepenbeeck’s drawings for the project are extant, but no paintings. In the
book’s front matter, Marolles says that Favereau put the ‘tableaux’ in a gallery,
but his meaning is not entirely clear.7
Michel de Marolles, abbé de Villoin (1600–1681), liberal Catholic – devout
but not superstitious – prolific historian, memoirist, translator of ancient
Latin texts and Scripture, and seminal and voracious collector of prints, was
engaged by Favereau’s son to publish the plates (which he received no earlier
than 1647) with his own commentary.8 Though Marolles wrote the texts, he

(1968) 169–190; Vanuxem J., “La mythologie dans ‘Le Temple des muses’ de l’abbé de Marolles”,
Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 25 (1973) 295–310. On Favereau,
see Winegarten R., “A Neglected Critic of Malherbe: Jacques Favereau”, French Studies 6 (1952)
29–34.
6 Mariette, P.J., Abecedario, 6 vols. (Paris: 1851–1860) vol. 2, 107, suggests 1632, when Diepenbeeck
seems to have been in Paris. Steadman, D., Abraham van Diepenbeeck: Seventeenth-Century
Flemish Painter, Studies in Baroque Art History 5 (Ann Arbor, MI: 1982) 12, 13, suggests
1634–35 as another possibility, when the artist may have also been absent from Antwerp,
or even as late as around 1650, if the designs were commissioned by Marolles, which, how-
ever, seems unlikely, considering how Marolles speaks of the compositions, especially the
Chaos. At least some of the compositions were engraved by 1635, when Abraham Bloemaert
showed Arnoldus Buchelius engravings made by his son Cornelis II ‘which a certain Parisian
counsellor had ordered from him in the form of emblems from the Metamorphoses of
Ovid, Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius, Orpheus, Triphidorus, Virgil, and others’; see Bok M.J. –
Roethlisberger M., Abraham Bloemaert and His Sons: Paintings and Prints, 2 vols. (Doornspijk:
1993) vol. 1, 45, 524–525, who, however, argue that Cornelis Bloemaert’s contribution was
limited to the first set of engravings, which were not published in Marolles’s Tableaux du
Temple des Muses. (I am grateful to Jan Blanc for bringing this reference to my attention.)
In the book’s “Avertissement,” Marolles says, simply, ‘L’invention de tous ces Tableaux est
deuë à M. Fauereau’ (Marolles Tableavx dv temple des mvses n.p.). Likewise, in the “Eloge de
Mr Favereav,” he says that Favereau ‘fit grauer les planches de ce Liure’ and ‘il les auoit fait
designer par Diepembeck, & grauer par Mathan Bloemar, & quelques autres des plus excel-
lens Maistres de leur temps, apres en auoir fait tirer des Tableaux en plus grand volume, qu’il
auoit mis dans une gallerie’ (Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses n.p.).
7 Ibidem.
8 On Marolles, see Bosseboeuf L., Un précurseur: Michel de Marolles, abbé de Villeloin, sa vie
et son oeuvre (Tours: 1911) (pp. 288–292 for the Tableaux du temple des muses); Pintard R., Le
libertinage érudit dans la première moité du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: 2000) 278–279 and pas-
sim; Préaud M., “Les volontés dernières, avant-dernières et antépénultièmes de Michel de
Marolles”, in Bonfait O. – Gerard Powell V. – Sénéchal P. (eds.), Curiosité: Études d’histoire de
l’art en l’honneur d’Antoine Schnapper (Paris: 1998) 327–340. Marolles was pronounced ‘[o]ne
of the most prolific and at the same time one of the worst translators of the seventeenth or
any century’ by Ladborough R.W., “Translations from the Ancients in Seventeenth-Century
France”, Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1938) 89. Marolles’s first collection of prints – more
than 120,000 sheets acquired by Jean-Baptiste Colbert for the royal library in 1667, forming
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 125

credited Jacques Favereau as ‘l’Autheur de toute cette invention’ (‘the author

of this entire invention’). The subjects of the Tableaux du Temple des Muses
are drawn from diverse ancient sources. Most of the epigraphs to the images –
chosen, presumably, by Marolles himself – are in Latin, with a few in Greek;
they quote primarily Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in nineteen chapters, but also, in
five chapters each, Homer’s Odyssey and Nonnus’s Dionysiaca; in two chapters
each, Ovid’s Fasti, Hesiod’s Theogony, and the Homeric Hymns; and, with one
chapter each, another twenty-three sources, from Hesiod’s Works and Days to
Sidonius Apollinaris’s Carmina.9 But the sources of his annotations range far
wider, and the work as a whole allows Marolles to put his erudition on full dis-
play. The chapters are grouped into seven books, on “The Origin of the World
and the Course of Creation”, “The Loves of the Gods and Men”, “Hunts and
Combats”, “Twins and Marine Gods”, “Adventures of Air and Water”, “Several
Memorable Things on Earth”, and “Death, Mourning, Hell, and Sleep”.
The Tableaux du Temple des Muses has been called one of the most impor-
tant books of the seventeenth century for the study of mythology in the litera-
ture of the time,10 but it also raises interesting questions about ekphrasis. In
his memoirs, first published in 1656, Marolles remarked that he had written the
Tableaux du Temple des Muses ‘à l’imitation des plattes-peintures de Philostrate,’
that is, like the Imagines (Eikones) of Philostratus the Elder, whose ekphrases
he cited in the Tableaux.11 Writing in the early third century CE, Philostratus
purported to discuss some paintings by various artists set into the walls of a

the kernel of the Cabinet des estampes of the Bibliothèque nationale – is catalogued in
Marolles Michel de, Catalogve de livres d’estampes et de figvres en taille-dovce (Paris, Chez
Frederic Leonard: 1666); his second is catalogued in Marolles Michel de, Catalogue de
livres d’estampes et de figvres en taille-dovce (Paris, Jacques Langlois: 1672). On Marolles
as a print collector, see Marolles Michel de, Memoires, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, n.pub.: 1745)
vol. 1, 288–297; Schnapper A., Curieux du grand siècle: collections et collectionneurs dans
la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: 1994) 247–282; Vermeulen I., “Michel de Marolles’s Album
of Rembrandt Prints and the Reception of Dutch Art in France”, Simiolus 34 (2009/2010)
155–82.
9 Virgil’s Eclogues, Hesiod’s Works and Days, Aeschylus’s Prometheus, Ovid’s Tristia,
Theocritus’s Idylls, Dionysius Periegetes’s Description of the World, Euripides’s The
Bacchae, Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus, Virgil’s Georgics, the Argonautica Orphica, Sidonius
Apollinaris’s Carmina, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Martial’s Liber spectaculorum, Oppian’s
Halieutica, Lucan’s Pharsalia, Horace’s Ars Poetica, Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica,
Apollonius’s Argonautica, Propertius’s Elegies, Tryphiodorus’s Sack of Troy, Virgil’s Aeneid,
Tibullus’s Elegies, and Horace’s Odes.
10 Vanuxem, “La mythologie” 295.
11 Marolles, Memoires vol. 1, 373–374. For his citations of descriptions by Philostratus:
Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 91, 143.
126 J. Clifton

suburban villa at Naples.12 It has been well noted that Philostratus the Younger
uses the term ‘ekphrasis’ (̔έκϕρασις) in reference to his grandfather’s work in
the proem to his own continuation of that work, also called Imagines, but the
Elder Philostratus does not use it (nor does Marolles).13 Though descriptions of
works of art could be considered ekphrasis in antiquity, they were not funda-
mental to the genre; yet, as the term has relatively recently come to refer spe-
cifically and even exclusively to such descriptions, the Imagines is often cited
as an important and influential example of ekphrasis. There is no doubt that
the Imagines gained considerable currency in France with the appearance in
1578 of the first translation of the Imagines from the original Greek into a ver-
nacular language, Blaise de Vigenère’s Les Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture
de Philostrates Sophistes Grecs, which was greatly expanded by Abel L’Angelier
in a posthumous edition of 1597. The amplified text was in turn published in
1614 by Françoise de Louvain, L’Angelier’s widow, with the addition of epigrams
and illustrations (by various engravers after Antoine Caron and others), in a
handsome folio edition – completing a project begun by her husband – which
was republished several times by 1637.14 Marolles – and, before him, Favereau –
presumably had at hand one of these illustrated editions, which provided a
model of sorts for the Tableaux du Temple des Muses both in form, with its
extensive annotations and sophisticated engravings, and in literary genre.15
Multiple purposes for ekphrasis emerge from the genealogy extending from
Philostratus’s Imagines to Marolles’s Tableaux du Temple des Muses. The intro-
duction to the Imagines is largely a defence of painting, but the specific pur-
pose of the work, Philostratus says, is ‘to describe examples of paintings in the

12 Philostratus, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London – New York: 1931), 4–5.
13 Ibidem.
14 Vigenère Blaise de, Les images ov tableavx de platte peintvre [de] Philostrates Sophistes
Grecs (Paris, Chez la veusue Abel l’Angelier: 1615). On Les images, including the various
editions and illustrations, see Johnson W.M., “Prolegomena to the Images ou Tableaux
de Platte Peinture with an Excursus on Two Drawings of the School of Fontainebleau”,
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, 73 (1969) 277–303; Crescenzo R., Peintures d’instruction: La
postérité littéraire des Images de Philostrate en France de Blaise de Vigenère à l’époque clas-
sique (Geneva: 1999); Romagnino R., Théorie(s) de l’ecphrasis entre Antiquité et première
modernité (Paris: 2019) 77–83.
15 The royal privilege for the Tableaux suggests that Favereau had already considered
Philostratus a model: ‘Nostre [i.e., the king’s] cher & bienamé Michel de Marolles Abbé de
Villeloin, nous a fait remonstrer qu’il a recouuré par ses soins diuerses Planches qu’auoit
fait grauer à grands frais, feu nostre amé & feal Conseiller en nostre Cour des Aydes, le
sieur Favereav, contenant des Tableaux des Vertus & des Vices, deßinez, sur les plus illustres
Fables de l’Antiquité, & par les meilleurs Maistres de son temps, auec des Descriptions à la
façon des plates-peintures de Philostrate, & des Annotations & Remarques composées par
l’Exposant’ (Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses n.p. [“Privilege dv Roy”]).
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 127

form of addresses which we have composed for the young, that by this means
they may learn to interpret paintings and to appreciate what is esteemed in
them’.16 In the dedicatory epistle to Barnabé Brisson, royal counsellor and
advocate to parliament, of his translation and annotation of the Imagines,
Blaise de Vigenère restates and extends Philostratus’s aim, shifting the didactic
function from an understanding of paintings to an ability to talk and write
about an endless variety of things:

Philostrate nous esbauche, comme luy mesme nous le tesmoigne en la

preface de cest oeuure, certains themes & lieux communs en forme de
Chries, pour exerciter la ieunesse à scauoir deuiser & escripre à propos,
non seulement des peintures, mais d’infinies autres belles choses dont il
a curieusement recherché les mots conuenables, & appropriez à toutes
sortes de professions, & mestiers.17

Philostratus sketches for us, as he indicated in the preface of this work,

certain themes and commonplaces in the form of chreiai, to teach young
people to know how to speak and write about not only paintings, but
[also] infinite other fine things, of which he has with curiosity sought the
words suitable and appropriate for all sorts of professions and skills.

Vigenère, who notes in several places and at considerable length the rich-
ness and difficulty of Philostratus’s text, full of ‘Prosopopeïes, Hypotyposes, &
Ecphrases’ (‘prosopoeiai, hypotyposes, and ekphrases’),18 then adds his own
goals, again with a linguistic turn:

Moy doncques à son exemple me suis aussi de ma part proposé en luy ces
trois mesmes fins, de toucher tout ce qui m’est venu en memoire concer-
nant l’art de la peinture: De vous desnoüer en ce que i’ay peu l’ancienne
Grecque Mythologie: Et d’accumuler par mesme moyen force vocables &
locutions.19

16 Philostratus, Imagines 5.
17 Vigenère Blaise de, Les images ov tableavx de platte-peintvre de Philostrate Lemnien
Sophiste Grec (Paris, Chez Nicolas Chesneau: 1578) 15–16.
18 Ibidem 8.
19 Ibidem 16. Vigenère further hopes to enrich the language for the learned: ‘Car encore que
i’escripue François, ce n’est pas à dire pourtant que cela s’addresse indifferement à tous
ceux qui entendent la langue. Ie me promeine, ie voltige ça & là autour de l’antiquité
Grecque & Latine, pour essaier … de prendre la[n]gue; c’est à dire d’amener tousiours
quelque chose de plus pour l’enrichisseme[n]t de nostre parler. Ie m’estudie et esuertue
128 J. Clifton

Following his example, then, I have, for my part as well, proposed these
three same ends: to touch on all that comes to my mind concerning the
art of painting; to untangle for you in what little I have of ancient Greek
mythology; and to gather by the same mediocre ability words and phrases.

In the “Advertissement” and letter of dedication to Henri de Bourbon, Prince

de Condé, of her illustrated edition of Vigenère’s translation, Françoise de
Louvain returned, unsurprisingly, to issues of the visual. After paraphrasing
some of the comments in Vigenère’s dedicatory epistle (which she does not
publish in full), including on the speaking and writing ‘d’infinies belles choses’,
she decries the reduction of the visual to the verbal so that a corporeal thing
could be seen only spiritually.20 She goes on to explain that Philostratus, in
describing works not available to the reader’s eye (which, in fact, were pre-
sumed to be an invention of the author), had persuaded the natural senses ‘de
voir en effect l’obiect, dont l’idée agist en leur imagination’ (‘to see, as it were,
the object, the idea of which acts in their imagination’), but she, in provid-
ing illustrations to those descriptions, offered a demonstration wherein ‘l’oeil
puisse arrester & fixer les ombres vagues de l’imaginatiue’ (‘the eye can stop
and fix the vague shadows of the imagination’).21
Marolles explicitly pursues neither the linguistic nor the visual possibili-
ties of the genre. He noted that Favereau had ‘fit graver les figures de ce Livre,
designées par les meilleurs Maistres de son temps, sur les plus illustres Fables
de l’Antiquité, pour enseigner la doctrine des moeurs’ (‘had engraved the
images in this book, designed by the best masters of his time, on the most
illustrious fables of antiquity, to teach the doctrine of mores’). Marolles fur-
ther reported that, according to Favereau’s son, he had intended to write a
discourse on each image, wanting to demonstrate ‘que les plus beaux secrets
de la Physique & de la Peinture sont cachez sous le sens des fables antiques’

de me faire oyr aux ge[n]s doctes, si ie puis atteindre à ce but, & non au lourd, grossier,
idiot populaire qui ne voit que de la longueur de son nez’ (ibidem 20).
20 Louvain Françoise de, “Avertissement”, in Vigenère, Les images 1615 n.p.: ‘Außi semble il
deffectueux, de vouloir simplement reduire en discours, ce qui despend entierement de
la veuë, & vouloir escrire ou parler des tableaux sans peinture, d’autant qu’encore que
l’inuention despende de l’esprit, & parconsequent elle puisse estre communiquée par le
discours: Si est-ce qu’en ce qui concerne les imaginations de ces idées, elles n’ont autre
fin que d’estre representées par le crayon, le pinceau, ou le burin. Voyla la defaut qui auoit
peu estre iusques icy en ces tableaux de platte-peinture. Car mesmes il y a grande appar-
ence qu’ils n’ont iamais esté peints à la verité, ny executez de coloremens, de sorte que
c’estoit vne chose corporelle qui ne se pouuoit voir que spirituellement.’.
21 Louvain Françoise de, “A Monseignevr Monseignevr, Henry de Bovrbon, Prince de Condé
et Premier Prince dv Sang”, in Vigenère, Les images 1615 n.p.
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 129

(‘that the most beautiful secrets of physics and painting are hidden within the
sense of ancient fables’). Marolles had, however, little specific information
about Favereau’s intentions for his text, aside from commentary on the images
of Proteus and Pygmalion shown him by Favereau’s son, in which Favereau
(as Marolles reported) sought the scientific, moral, and political sense of the
subjects.22 Marolles thus organized the material as he saw fit.23 He imagined
the work as a building with five galleries in which the illustrated and described
paintings could be found: ‘c’est pourquoy je l’ay intitulé, Tableaux du Temple
des Muses, parce qu’en effet, ils peuvent servir de matiere aux Poëtes & aux
Amis des Muses, pour composer de bonnes choses sur les Fables heroïques
des Anciens’ (‘it is for this reason I have called it Paintings of the Temple of the
Muses, because, in effect, they can serve as material for poets and friends of
the muses in composing good things on the heroic fables of the ancients’), thus
indicating, at least in part, his own understanding of the purpose or utility of
the work, however limited it may seem.24
To a great extent, Marolles contents himself with telling the stories chosen
by Favereau; that is to say, his text operates parallel to the plates, with occa-
sional points of contact, such as ‘comme il est icy dépeint’ (‘as it is painted

22 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses n.p. (“Avertissement”): ‘I’ay changé d’auis depuis
l’edition de nostre premier liure, pour donner à tout l’ouurage vn tiltre plus court que
celuy que i’auois choisi de Tableaux des Vertus & des Vices, sur les plus illustres Fables de
l’antiquité; il m’a semblé que le second que i’ay pris est plus facile à retenir, & plus conuen-
able au sujet, s’il y en a quelqu’vn auquel se puissent rapporter iustement toutes les Fables
diuerses que contient ce volume: car ie n’ay iamais bien sceu le dessein de l’excellent
homme qui fit grauer ces figures, si ce n’est qu’on en puisse iuger quelque chose par ce
Sonnet, le premier de ceux qu’il destinoit au deuant de chaque Tableau’. […] ‘Mais les
deux discours que i’ay veus de luy entre les mains de M. son fils, l’vn sur le mesme sujet de
Prothée, & l’autre sur celuy de Pygmalion, le feroient connoistre encore mieux, si i’osois
les rapporter tout du long…. Apres cela, il s’etend fort à expliquer toutes les parties de ce
Tableau, & y cherche des sens de Physique, de Morale, & de Politique. De sorte que sa
description pleine de beaucoup d’erudition, contiendroit bien huit ou dix fois la nostre; &
s’il eust par tout continué de la mesme sorte, il eust composé vn fort gros Ouurage, au lieu
que le nostre est petit, & proportionné au peu de temps que i’y ay employé’.
23 Ibidem: ‘L’invention de tous ces Tableaux est deuë à M. Fauereau Conseiller du Roy en sa
Cour des Aydes à Paris, qui sans doute auoit dessein d’en faire dauantage, & d’y ioindre
des discours selon les idées qu’il en auoit conceuës, qu’il ne m’a pas esté facile de deuiner
sur vne partie de deux que i’ay vûs entre les mains de M. son fils, du Cabinet duquel on
a eu les figures, qui ont donné sujet à cet Ouurage. Ie les ay disposées le mieux qu’il m’a
esté possible, mais comme il n’y a pas grande suite, & qu’il seroit malaisé d’y en mettre
vne, selon l’ordre des temps, parce qu’il n’y a presque point de Chronologie obseruée dans
les Fables des Anciens, i’ay creu qu’il ne seroit pas mal à propos de les arranger selon les
matieres, & de les distribuer par liures’.
24 Ibidem n.p. (“Preface”).
130 J. Clifton

here’).25 He often draws the reader’s attention to the composition with a sim-
ple ‘Voyez’ (‘Look’), and he sometimes remarks on whether or not the artist
has followed the sources.26 He might not be sure what the artist has repre-
sented, such as the nude figure with Penelope, of whom he says ‘ie m’imagine
que le Peintre a voulu figurer Hymenée, ou l’Amour conjugal’ (‘I imagine that
the painter intended to represent Hymen or Conjugal Love’).27 Sometimes
there is mild praise for the artist, as when he says that the Hydra grows two
new heads, ‘comme le Peintre l’a fort bien representé, en la place de celles que
vous voyez par terre’ (‘as the painter has very well represented it, in place of
those you see on the ground’)28 or Penelope is ‘parfaitement bien representée
dans ce Tableau’ (‘perfectly well represented in this image’).29 Or stronger: of
Sisyphus’s torment, he says, ‘Ie ne pense pas que cette inquietude se puisse
mieux imaginer que le Peintre l’a exprimée dans ce Tableau’ (‘I don’t think
this disquiet could be better imagined than as the painter has expressed it in
this image’).30
But Marolles also does not hesitate to point out what he perceives as the
compositions’ shortcomings. He damns Diepenbeeck with faint praise in
imagining how Albrecht Dürer could have covered Arion’s nudity in a depic-
tion he apparently finds somewhat distasteful:

Ie voudrois qu’vne main sçauante comme celle du fameux Albert Durer à

faire vne draperie merueilleuse, eust trauaillé sur ce sujet; vne veste mag-
nifique couuriroit cette nudité auec vne bonne partie du dos de l’enorme
poisson, & vne autre partie flotteroit agreablement sur l’eau; & des bras
qui soustiennent cette lyre descendroient des manches doubles enrichies
de broderie à l’antique; & ie ne doute point qu’il n’auroit mis sur sa teste
quelque noble coëfure qui auroit esté proportionnée au reste du veste-
ment. Mais ne nous arrestons pas à des choses imaginaires; ce qui s’offre
à nos yeux est tousiours digne de beaucoup d’estime.31

25 E.g., ibidem 235.

26 E.g., ibidem 363, on Jason: ‘Si ie ne me trompe, le Peintre n’a pas suiuy exactement le sujet
de son Tableau, selon la pensée d’Ouide, qui dit […]’ (though it is worth noting that the
inscription for the image is from Apollonius rather than Ovid).
27 Ibidem 379.
28 Ibidem 179.
29 Ibidem 379.
30 Ibidem 443.
31 Ibidem 300.
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 131

I wish that a knowledgeable hand like that of the famous Albrecht Dürer
at making marvellous drapery had worked on this subject; a magnificent
jacket would cover this nudity with a good part of the back of the enor-
mous fish and another part floating agreeably on the water; and from
the arms holding this lyre would descend sleeves doubly enriched with
embroidery in the antique style; and I do not doubt at all that he would
put on his head some noble coiffure that would have been in proportion
to the rest of the garments. But let us not linger on imaginary things; that
which is offered to our eyes is always worthy of much esteem.

Pictorial skill is not adequate to satisfy Marolles, as he makes clear in his com-
ment on the depiction of Meleager; unhappy with the unregal dress of Althaea,
her turning from her dying son, and his unseemly nudity, he confesses: ‘Encore
que cette piece ne soit pas mal dessignée, selon les regles de la portraiture, il
seroit pourtant à souhaiter qu’elle fust plus conforme au sujet, que son Autheur
a voulu representer’ (‘Even though this piece is not poorly designed according
to the rules of art, it would be wished, however, that it conformed more to the
subject that the author has wanted to represent’).32
Marolles’s sharpest criticism, however, occurs already in the first chapter
of the Tableaux du Temple des Muses – “Le Chaos,” with its engraving after
Diepenbeeck – which provides us an opportunity to examine the limits of both
pictorial and verbal representation. As Marolles asserts in the first sentence of
the chapter, ‘Il ne seroit pas moins difficile de peindre le Chaos que de bien
parler des premiers principes des choses’ (‘It would be no less difficult to paint
Chaos than to speak well of the first beginnings of things’).33 I would like to
put Diepenbeeck’s composition in the context of a few other representations
of chaos and consider Marolles’s criticism of the image, in which, he says, the
artist was content to revel in his poetic imaginations ‘qui ont par-fois beaucoup
de rapport aux rêveries d’un malade’ (‘which sometimes have more to do with
the reveries of a sick person’) – a charge that is at odds with his treatment of
the other images in the book and seems to issue from Marolles’s inability to
reconcile the very concept of chaos with his Christian faith rather than from
any defect in the composition itself.

32 Ibidem 163. See also ibidem 299 (on Arion) and 348–49 (on Niobe). On his discussion of
Diepenbeeck’s innovative depiction of Andromeda as black (ibidem 316), see McGrath E.,
“The Black Andromeda”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992) 12–15.
33 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 1.
132 J. Clifton

1 Chaos

The Chaos plate in the Tableaux du Temple des Muses carries a quotation from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was presumably Diepenbeeck’s primary tex-
tual source. The poet famously opens his work with an announcement that
his mind ‘is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms’ and, from the fifth
line, a cosmogony, which Marolles quotes in French translation at length in his
annotations.

Before the sea was, and the lands, and the sky that hangs over all, the face
of Nature showed alike in her whole round, which state have men called
chaos: a rough, unordered mass of things [rudis indigestaque moles],
nothing at all save lifeless bulk and warring seeds of ill-matched elements
heaped in one [pondus iners congestaque eodem non bene iunctarum dis-
cordia semina rerum]. No sun as yet shone forth upon the world, nor did
the waxing moon renew her slender horns; not yet did the earth hang
poised by her own weight in the circumambient air, nor had the ocean
stretched her arms along the far reaches of the lands. And, though there
was both land and sea and air, no one could tread that land, or swim
that sea; and the air was dark. No form of things remained the same; all
objects were at odds [nulli sua forma manebat,/ obstabatque aliis aliud],
for within one body cold things strove [pugnabant] with hot, and moist
with dry, soft things with hard, things having weight with weightless things.
God – or kindlier Nature – settled this strife [Hanc deus et melior litem
natura diremit – Marolles says ‘Mais enfin Dieu appaisa cette guerre
ciuile’]; for he rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land, and sepa-
rated the ethereal heavens from the dense atmosphere. When thus he had
released these elements and freed them from the blind heap of things, he
set them each in its own place and bound them fast in harmony.34

Ovid goes on to describe, following Aristotle, the ultimate order of the ele-
ments according to their weight, with earth at the bottom, surrounded by
water, above which are air and, in the uppermost register, fire. Surmounting all,
in the superlunary sphere, is ‘the liquid, weightless ether, which has naught of
earthy dregs’. Ovid adds that ‘the creator bid the mists and clouds to take their
place, and thunder […] and winds which produce lightning and thunderbolts’,

34 Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, pp. 2–7 (with slight emendation); Marolles, Tableavx
dv temple des mvses 3–4. Marolles’s extensive translations of Ovid’s poetry, includ-
ing the Metamorphoses, were published after the Tableavx dv temple des mvses: see
Taylor H., “Translating Lives: Ovid and the Seventeenth-Century Modernes”, Translation
and Literature 24 (2015) 147–171.
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 133

and though this moment is subsequent to the ordering of the elements,

Diepenbeeck may have found it suggestive for his inclusion of the winds in his
composition.
Below Diepenbeeck’s image, Marolles quotes from lines eighteen and
nineteen of the first book of the Metamorphoses: ‘Corpore in uno/ Frigida
pugnabant calidis, humentia siccis’ (‘within one body cold thing strove with
hot, and moist with dry’). Diepenbeeck illustrated Ovid’s text, but he includes
elements not specified by Ovid, and his conceit is innovative and even, to my
knowledge, in part unique.
In an oval composition pressed into a rectangular field, Diepenbeeck pres-
ents the four classic elements – fire, air, water, and earth – in a dynamic jumble,
perhaps colliding with each other more than fighting. Consistent with a time
before the demiurge has placed the elements, each can be found throughout
the image: earth as sharply faceted boulders, air as twisting columns of clouds,
fire as multitudinous flames whipping in every direction, and water as rolling
waves. Amidst this melée, we find the sun (at lower left) and the moon (at
upper right); stars, sprinkled throughout; the four winds conventionally figured
as bodiless heads, their cheeks puffed in exhalation; and the signs of the zodiac
on arched fragments of the ecliptic, which are the only motifs in the image that
give it a sense of orientation in keeping with the page itself. Unmentioned by
Ovid, but used by Diepenbeeck to embody the elemental battle, these zodiac
signs are in mutual combat, as Marolles describes.35
The four elements were often represented allegorically, especially as per-
sonifications, as in, for example, Johannes Wierix’s engraving of 1601 [Fig. 3.2]
or Louis Finson’s painting of 1611 (a rare representation of the elements strug-
gling with each other) [Fig. 3.3], but Diepenbeeck represents the elements
mimetically.36 In this, he may have derived his composition from earlier
illustrations of Ovid’s cosmogony. Unlike the rest of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
the cosmogonic beginning was rarely illustrated. When it was, most often the

35 In his annotations, Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 3, readily identifies most of
the motifs in the composition, but is uncertain – as am I – about three, two of which he
associates with stars: the bear by the sun at the lower left, and the dog and serpent facing
off in the upper center. The bear, he says, is either the pole star, which is in the constel-
lation Ursa Minor, or Callisto, ultimately transformed into a bear and set into the sky as
the constellation Ursa Major, along with her son, Arcas, who had wounded her and was
himself set into the sky as Ursa Minor. The dog is either Procyon (a star in Canis Minor),
or Cephalus’s dog, or Orion’s dog, and the serpent – according to some, as he says, not
naming them – is the one hitched to the chariot of Triptolemus, friend of Ceres. It is not
clear why Dipenbeeck included them.
36 On Finson’s painting, see Clifton J., “‘Non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum’: Louis
Finson’s Allegory of the Four Elements”, in Baert B. (ed.), The Right Moment (Leuven: 2021)
279–321.
134 J. Clifton

figure 3.2 Johannes Wierix, The Four Elements. Engraving, 28.8 × 20.5 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 135

figure 3.3 Louis Finson, The Four Elements (1611). Oil on canvas, 179 × 170 cm
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston

demiurge was depicted almost as a biblical Creator, separating light from dark
and land from sea, as in Virgil Solis’s woodcut, identified in Johan Spreng’s 1563
paraphrase of the Metamorphoses as Elementorum distributio [Fig. 3.4],37 or,
perhaps less biblically, in Hendrick Goltzius’s engraving from 1589 [Fig. 3.5].
But there are two woodcuts that may inform Diepenbeeck’s composition. One,

37 Spreng Johan, Metamorphoses Ovidii, argumentis quidem soluta oratione, Enarrationibus

autem & Allegorijs Elegiaco uersu accuratissimè expositae, summaq[ue]; diligentia ac
studio illustratae […] Unà cum uiuis singularum transformationum Iconibus, à Vergilio
Solis eximio pictore, delineatis (Frankfurt, Apud Georgium Corvinum, Sigismundum
Feyerabent & haeredes Wygandi Galli: 1563), f. 1r. On the woodcut, see Chernetsky I., “The
Creation of the World by Virgil Solis”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 79 (2016) 211–225.
136 J. Clifton

figure 3.4 Virgil Solis, Elementorum distributio. Woodcut in Spreng Johan, Metamorphoses
Ovidii, argumentis quidem soluta oratione, Enarrationibus autem & Allegorijs
Elegiaco uersu accuratissimè expositae, summaq[ue]; diligentia ac studio illustratae
[…] Unà cum uiuis singularum transformationum Iconibus, à Vergilio Solis
eximio pictore, delineatis (Frankfurt, Apud Georgium Corvinum, Sigismundum
Feyerabent & haeredes Wygandi Galli: 1563) fol. 1r
Newberry Library, Chicago
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 137

figure 3.5 After Hendrick Goltzius, The Untangling of Chaos, or the Creation of the Four
Elements (1589). Engraving, 17.78 × 25.4 cm
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

a rectangular composition, appears in Barthélemy Aneau’s emblem book,

Picta Poesis of 1552 [Fig. 3.6], not in the context of the entire Metamorphoses
per se, but clearly with reference to its opening chapter, placing Ovid’s descrip-
tion of chaos and the four elements battling with each other (pugnare is the
term he uses, borrowed from Ovid) in the service of a political apophthegm.
Like Diepenbeeck’s composition after it, the Aneau woodcut includes the sun,
moon, stars, and winds. In spite of the Greek label prominently situated across
the centre of the composition, however, this chaos is beginning to resolve itself
into a recognizable land- and seascape like Solis’s, albeit without the presence
of the demiurge. By contrast, lacking any sense of directionality and as chaotic
as Diepenbeeck’s composition is a woodcut in Gabriello Symeoni’s epigram-
matic paraphrase of the Metamorphoses, published in 1559, in which Chaos is
represented before the intervention of the demiurge and the four elements are
jumbled in a ‘confused mass of things without order’, as the inscription says,
appearing within a circle, not so much contained by it as suggesting a view
through a porthole of an unbounded disorder [Fig. 3.7].38 More simply than the
composition in Aneau’s Picta Poesis and Diepenbeeck’s to follow, this woodcut

38 Symeoni Gabriello, La Vita et metamorfoseo d’Ouidio, figurato & abbreuiato in forma

d’Epigrammi (Lyon, Jean de Tournes: 1559) 12.
138 J. Clifton

figure 3.6 Sine iustitia, confusio. Woodcut in Aneau, Picta poesis (Lyon, Apud
Mathiam Bonhomme: 1552)
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 139

figure 3.7 Il Caos. Woodcut in Symeoni Gabriello, La Vita et metamorfoseo d’Ouidio,

figurato & abbreuiato in forma d’Epigrammi (Lyon, Jean de Tournes: 1559) 12
Newberry Library, Chicago
140 J. Clifton

limits itself to the four elements, depicted much as Diepenbeeck will: billowing
clouds, faceted rocks, fluttering flames, and rolling waves of water. What we do
not see in these two woodcuts are, as far as I know, Diepenbeeck’s own innova-
tion: the signs of the zodiac in combat, along with the bear, dog, and snake,
which he has integrated into his otherwise non-directional composition.
Depictions of Ovid’s Chaos before the separation of the elements were rare,
and as Michel de Marolles determined with regard to Diepenbeeck’s composi-
tion, doomed to failure. Marolles’s brief description of Diepenbeeck’s composi-
tion arrives at the very end of his chapter, and he recounts ancient explanations
and descriptions of Chaos, including Ovid’s, only in the annotations. He begins
the chapter, as I mentioned, by asserting the difficulty of representing the sub-
ject, both pictorially and verbally. Yet, rather than consider the possibilities, he
immediately launches into a trenchant critique of the very notion of a primor-
dial chaos itself. If there had ever been a chaos of these first things – that is, the
elements – confused without union, it would seem that there would have been
no beginning and that the space before the creation of the world, as well as
time itself, would be infinite.39 And why, he asks, would the sovereign Author
of all creatures have engendered or created anything of the sort? ‘Comment
vn extréme desordre pourroit-il naistre de la Sagesse infinie?’ (‘How could an
extreme disorder be born from the infinite Wisdom?’)40 And what would have
been the limits of the separated atoms or elements before there were the heav-
ens, which, according to the philosophers, are enclosed within their own form?
All creatures are said to be contained within the last of these heavens, beyond
which is nothing but the immensity of God.41
Marolles asserts, without supporting argument, that the infinite immensity
of God is real (‘comme il n’en faut pas douter’; ‘as one cannot doubt’). Is it, he
then asks, in ‘the nothingness’ (‘le rien’) or in ‘the things that are’ (‘les choses
qui sont’) or both? If, he avers, one says that it is in the nothingness (or, syn-
onymously, the imaginary spaces or the void), as well as in things, it seems

39 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 1: ‘Il ne seroit pas moins difficile de peindre le
Chaos que de bien parler des premiers principes des choses. Que si iamais il y eut vn
Chaos de ces premiers principes confondus sans vnion les vns dans les autres, il y a grande
apparence qu’il n’y a point eu de commencement, & que l’espace qu’il occupoit auant la
creation du Monde estoit infiny, aussi bien que le Temps, qui ne prescript point de termes
à sa durée.’
40 Ibidem 1–2.
41 Ibidem 2: ‘Et quelles auroient esté les bornes des Atomes ou des Elements separez,
auant qu’il y eust des Cieux, qui selon la pensée des plus iudicieux & des plus sçauans
Philosophes, sont au moins renfermez dans leur propre figure? Car plusieurs estiment
que le dernier de ces Cieux contient toutes les Creatures, & qu’au delà, il n’y a rien que
l’Immensité de Dieu.’
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 141

that either one is establishing reality in the nothingness or one must recognize
that there is no empty space (‘espace vuide’) and that the being of things is
infinite. (This is not to say that Marolles rejects the notion of atoms separated
by ‘empty’ space, but, rather, that the space is not really empty because God
is therein.) Thus, he continues in a leap of logic, if the being of things – or
rather the great Being (‘le grand Estre’) is infinite – and a ‘bon Esprit’ could
not think otherwise – it must be impossible to accept ‘que le Monde n’eust
esté autrefois qu’vne masse confuse, que les Poëtes appellent Chaos’ (‘that the
world was none other than a confused mass, which the Poets call Chaos’).42
Marolles apparently does not equate, as some did, the primordial chaos of the
ancient poets – especially Hesiod and Ovid – with the ‘void and empty’ (‘ina-
nis et vacua’) earth of Genesis 1:2 thought to have been created by God who
then reordered this chaos (as it was called by commentators though not in
Scripture) in six days (or six periods of undetermined length).43
All things, Marolles says, were perfectly ordered from the beginning: the
Earth has always been the Earth and was never anything but that, albeit with-
out its eventual ‘ornaments’. It was never heaven nor the shining stars – and
here he seems to take aim at Aristotelianism – ‘car enfin vne chose est toûjours
ce qu’elle est, & il ne faut pas dire qu’elle soit ce qu’elle n’est pas, quoy que par la
corruption d’vne partie il se fasse vne nouuelle generation’ (because ultimately
a thing is always that which it is, and one need not say that it may be that
which it is not, that by the corruption of one part it generates something else

42 Ibidem: ‘Mais sans former icy de longues dificultez sur ces grands espaces, & sur le temps
infiny, oseroit on demander si cette Immensité de Dieu n’est pas reelle? Et si elle est reelle,
comme il n’en faut pas douter, est-elle dans le rien, ou dans les choses qui sont, ou dans
les deux ensemble? Si on dit qu’elle est dans le rien, ou dans les espaces imaginaires, ou
dans le vuide, aussi bien que dans les choses qui sont, il semble qu’on establisse la realité
dans le rien, aussi bien que dans les choses réeles, ou il faut reconnoistre franchement
qu’il n’y a point d’espace vuide, & que l’estre des choses est infiny. Or si l’estre des choses,
ou plutost le grand Estre, est veritablement infiny, comme il n’est pas possible à vn bon
Esprit de le conceuoir d’autre sorte, il luy sera aussi également impossible de se persuader
que le Monde n’eust esté autrefois qu’vne masse confuse, que les Poëtes appellent Chaos.’
43 See Roberts M., “Genesis Chapter 1 and Geological Time from Hugo Grotius and Marin
Mersenne to William Conybeare and Thomas Chalmers (1620–1825)”, in Piccardi L. –
Masse W.B. (eds.), Myth and Geology, Geological Society, London, Special Publications 273
(London: 2007) 39–49, esp. 40–42. Marolles thus rejects, perhaps most proximately, the
assertions in Mersenne Marin, Qvaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, Sebastian
Cramoisy: 1623) cols. 717–720, which Marolles must have known, though he does not
cite it. Mersenne, a Minim priest, explicates the Hebrew terms translated as ‘inanis’ and
‘vacua’, tohu and bohu, linking them to the Greek χάος, also called Chohos, whence the old
Latin Chohum, and the verb inchoo (that is, inchoho) – ‘I begin’ – and quotes the relevant
passage from the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
142 J. Clifton

anew’).44 He acknowledges, however, that there is a perpetual movement – of

atoms, he implies – which we cannot perceive: ‘sans que les voyes de la Nature
puissent tomber sur nos sens: Et comme nous les appellons fort bien secrets
imperceptibles, nous admirons iustement en elles ce que nous ne sçaurions
comprendre’ (‘with the ways of Nature able to fall upon our senses: and as we
very well call them imperceptible secrets, we justly admire in them that which
we do not know how to comprehend’).45
Marolles’s atomism ultimately derives from the natural philosophy of
ancient Epicureanism, which was a source of considerable controversy in
early- and mid-seventeenth-century Europe. He knew well Lucretius’s De
rerum natura, which he had published in prose translation in 1650 as Le Poëte
Lucrece and again, with additional critical apparatus, in 1659 as Les six livres de
Lucrece de la nature des choses.46 In the lengthy preface to the 1650 edition, he
emphasizes the beauty of the author’s poetry, but also acknowledges the natu-
ral philosophy in the work, placing Lucretius, along with Empedocles, among
those epic poets of antiquity ‘qui ont expliqué en de gra[n]ds vers, les princi-
pes des choses & les secrets de la Nature’ (‘who explained in grand verse the
principles of things and the secrets of nature’).47 ‘Là où cet Autheur dispute
des principes des choses, ou des petits corps qui sont indiuisible: où il parle de
leur mouuement & de leurs figures: où il traite du vuide, des images, des fan-
tosmes qui sont poussez de la superficie des corps, de la nature des esprits, […]
& de plusieurs autres choses; il est subtil & profond, & fait paroistre vn sçauoir
exquis’ (‘There where this author discusses the fundaments of things, or the

44 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 2. He here echoes the anti-Aristotelian posi-
tion articulated by Antoine Villon and Etienne de Claves in theses condemned by the
Sorbonne and the Parlement, as reported by Morin Jean-Baptiste, Refvtation des theses
erronees d’Anthoine Villon dit le soldat Philosophe, & Estienne de Claues Medecin Chymiste,
par eux affichées publiquement a Paris, contre la Doctrine d’Aristote le 3. Aoust 1624. à
l’encontre desquelles y a eu consure de la Sorbonne, & Arrest de la Cour de Parlement. Ou
sont doctement traictez les vrays principes des corps & plusieurs autres beaux poincts de
la Nature, & prouuee la solidité de la Doctrine d’Aristote (Paris, chez l’Autheur: 1624) 16
(no. XIII): ‘Il n’y a rien de plus absurde ny de plus repugnant à l’experie[n]ce, que la trans-
mutation que les Peripateticiens afferment entre les Elemens. Car la terre est tousiours
terre, & en nulle maniere transmuable en eau, ou autre element que ce soit, comme ny
l’eau en terre, ny l’air en feu’. On the controversy, see Blair A., “The Teaching of Natural
Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Case of Jean Cécile Frey”, History of
Universities 12 (1993) 118.
45 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 2.
46 Marolles Michel de (trans.), Le Poëte Lvcrece latin et françois (Paris: Chez Toussainct
Quinet, 1650); Marolles Michel de (trans.), Les six livres de Lvcrece de la natvre des choses
(Paris, Chez Gvillavme de Lvyne: 1659).
47 Marolles, Le Poëte Lvcrece n.p. (“Preface”).
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 143

little bodies that are indivisible; where he speaks of their movement and their
forms; where he treats the void, images, phantoms that are pushed from the
surfaces of bodies, the nature of spirits, […] and many other things; he is subtle
and profound, and demonstrates an exquisite knowledge’).48
Marolles quotes the De rerum natura in the annotations to his chapter on
Chaos in the Tableaux, noting with approval the Epicurean contention, articu-
lated by Lucretius, that the world is not very old (against Aristotle and others
who deemed it eternal) and ‘que l’origine du Monde & de toutes choses vient
des Atomes, que la Terre en a esté produite, & que l’Air, la Mer, le Ciel, le Soleil
& les Astres leur doiuent leur naissance’ (that the origin of the world and all
things comes from atoms, that the earth was produced from them, and that the
air, sea, sky, sun, and stars owe them their birth’).49 To be sure, in his preface
to Le Poëte Lvcrece, he recognizes the conflicts between Lucretius’s philosophy
(the shortcomings of which he blames on Epicurus) and his own Christianity,
specifically with regard to the immortality of the soul, divine providence,
the validity of religion, and the sovereign good of pleasure, and he rejects
Epicurus’s opinions on the random movement of atoms and infinite worlds
(which are not necessary to refute because they will collapse on their own, he
says).50 Nonetheless, he argues, ancient authors were read and cited by saintly
persons from Paul through the Church Fathers, and if we were to reject and
condemn all the pagan books that contain teachings opposed to those of the
Gospels, even Plato and Aristotle would be proscribed.51 We take to heart the
verses of Homer, he says, because among the shameful and ridiculous fables
there is also an understanding of nature. Why, then, do we not listen to the

48 Ibidem.
49 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 5; cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans.
W.H.D. Rouse; rev. M.F. Smith (Cambridge, MA – London: 1992) 402–405 (5.306–350).
50 Marolles, Le Poëte Lvcrece n.p. (“Preface”): ‘Mais Lucrece combat l’immortalité de l’Ame,
il nie la prouidence des Dieux, oste toutes les Religions, & establit le souuerain bien
dans la volupté. La faute en cela n’est pas tant de Lucrece que d’Epicure, que Lucrece a
suiuy, & dont il a representé l’opinion. Mais son Poëme, pour auoir des sentimens autant
éloignez de nostre Religion, comme la Philosophie Payenne est éloignée de la doctrine de
l’Euangile, n’est pas moins Poëme pour cela, voire c’est vn Poëme illustre, vn Poëme agre-
able, vn Poëme orné de toutes les graces des Muses.
‘De refuter icy toutes les opinions d’Epicure touchant le concours fortuit des Atomes,
& les Mondes infinis, peut-estre qu’il ne seroit pas fort difficile, mais aussi n’est-il pas
bie[n] necessaire, veu que ces choses-là se detruisent assez d’elles-mesmes, & que la ver-
ité seule en parleroit, quand tout le monde se tairoit.’
51 Ibidem.
144 J. Clifton

pure and eloquent language of Lucretius, speaking of the heavens and the
earth, without the empty shadows of fables and childish fictions?52
Marolles was a man of letters rather than a natural philosopher, but he
was educated in the subject and was acquainted with a number of natu-
ral philosophers. His most significant early training in natural philoso-
phy came at the Parisian Collegium Montaigu from Jean Cécile Frey, whom
Marolles called friend as well as professor, although he did not hold fast to
Frey’s Aristotelianism.53 Marolles’s comments on God, matter, and the origins
of the world probably derive from the natural philosophy of ‘the illustrious’
Pierre Gassendi, ‘dont la science est si profonde & la douceur si charmante’
(‘whose science is so profound and gentleness so charming’) and ‘qui a troué
l’art de ioindre l’humilité Chrestienne auec la hauteur de la Philosophie: & ces
qualitez si opposées entre elles, compatissent heureusement en sa personne’
(‘who found the art of joining Christian humility with the heights of philoso-
phy: and these qualities, so opposed between themselves, co-exist happily in
his person’), according to Marolles.54 Gassendi had spent decades pondering
Epicurean philosophy and mining it for what might be brought into confor-
mity with Catholic orthodoxy, baptizing or Christianizing it, as some say.55

52 Ibidem: ‘Nous appredrons par coeur des vers d’Homere, pour-ce que l’on s’imagine que
parmy des fables honteuses & ridicules, ce Poëte enferme plusieurs connoissances de la
Nature: & nous n’écouterons pas la langue tres-pure & tres-diserte de LVCRECE, par-
lant des principes des choses, du Monde, des parties du Monde, de la vie hueurese & des
choses du Ciel & de la Terre, sans les vaines ombres des fables, & d’vne infinité de feintes
pueriles qui embarrassent mal à propos?’
53 Marolles, Memoires vol. 1, 65–67, 76, 86–87. On Frey and his curriculum, see Blair, “The
Teaching of Natural Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Paris” 95–158 (pp. 101–103
with specific regard to Marolles); Blair A., “Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern
Natural Philosophy: Jean Bodin and Jean-Cecile Frey”, Perspectives on Science 2 (1994)
428–454.
54 Marolles, Memoires vol. 1, 376. Marolles’s attachment to Gassendi came in spite of his
training under, and admiration for, Frey; for examples of Frey’s criticism of Gassendi
(from notes taken by a student in 1628), see Frey Jean Cécile, “Cribrum philosophorum
qui Aristotelem superiore & hac aetate oppugnarunt”, in Opuscula varia nusquam edita
(Paris, Apud Petrum David: 1646) 37–41, 59–62, 72–75. On the “Cribrum”, see Blair, “The
Teaching of Natural Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Paris” 117–122.
55 On Gassendi and his relationship to Epicureanism, see Rochot B., Les travaux de Gassendi
sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme, 1619–1658 (Paris: 1944); Joy L., Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate
of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: 1987); Osler M., Divine Will and the Mechani-
cal Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World
(Cambridge: 1994), esp. pp. 36–79; Johnson M.R., “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?”, History
of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003) 339–360; Darmon J.-C., “Épicurisme et rhétorique au
temps de la ‘révolution scientifique’: Remarques sur le cas Gassendi”, Archives internatio-
nales d’histoire des sciences 55 (2005) 211–234; Fisher S., “Pierre Gassendi”, in Zalta E. (ed.),
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 145

These efforts were realized in several publications, including his translation

of, and extensive commentary on, Diogenes Laertius’s vita of Epicurus, the
Animadversiones In Decimum Librum Diogenis Laertii, Qui Est De Vita, Moribus,
Placitisque Epicuri, published in 1649, which quotes extensively from Lucretius
and to which Marolles directed the readers of his translation of De rerum
natura for an explanation of Lucretius’s philosophy.56 Marolles claimed that
Gassendi, shortly before his death, had helped him in revising his translation
of De rerum natura for its second edition.57 Gassendi’s semi-Epicureanism was
even more profoundly developed in his Syntagma philosophicum, in which he
addressed the origin of the world, including a primordial Chaos. It was pub-
lished posthumously in 1658, thus after the Tableaux du Temple des Muses, but
Gassendi’s thoughts on the subject were probably known to Marolles in their
essentials.58
Like Marolles after him, Gassendi rejected some Epicurean tenets, such as
the formation of the world by mere chance (rather than divine providence) – a
central subject of the arguments around Epicureanism in mid-seventeenth-
century France, even for those who might otherwise be sympathetic to the
natural philosophy59 – but he retained others, including the composition

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), available from https://
plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/gassendi/ (accessed: 08.06.2020); Garau R.,
“Taming Epicurus: Gassendi, Charleton, and the Translation of Epicurus’ Natural Philoso-
phy in the Seventeenth Century”, in Fransen S. – Hodson N. – Enenkel K. (eds), Translat-
ing Early Modern Science, Intersections 51 (Leiden: 2017) 233–257.
56 Gassendi Pierre, Animadversiones In Decimum Librum Diogenis Laertii, Qvi Est De Vita,
Moribus, Placitisque Epicuri (Lyon, Apud Guillelmum Barbier: 1649). Marolles, Le Poëte
Lvcrece n.p. (“Preface”). Marolles also recommends the ‘liure du Cheualier Kenelme d’Igby
Anglois’, that is, presumably, Digby Kenelm, Two Treatises: In the one of which, the natvre
of bodies; In the other, the nature of mans soule, is looked into: in way of discovery of the
immortality of reasonable soules (Paris, Gilles Blaisot: 1644), although it is unlikely that he
had read it; see Cottegnies L., “Michel de Marolles’s 1650 Translation of Lucretius and Its
Reception in England”, in Norbrook D. – Harrison S. – Hardie P. (eds.), Lucretius and the
Early Modern (Oxford: 2016) 167–168; I am grateful to the author for providing me a copy
of the essay.
57 Marolles, Les six livres de Lvcrece, n.p. (“Preface”). In this edition, Marolles also appends a
French translation of Diogenes Laertius’s text on Epicurus, in part after Gassendi’s Latin
translation (ibid., pp. 306–394). On the two editions, see Cottegnies, “Michel de Marolles’s
1650 Translation of Lucretius” (p. 169 for Marolles’s reference to Gassendi’s corrections ‘de
sa propre main’).
58 Gassendi Pierre, Syntagma philosophicvm, in Opera omnia, 6 vols. (Lyon, Laurence
Anisson and Jean-Baptiste Devenet), vols. 1–2.
59 See, for example, Cotin Charles, Theoclée ov la vraye philosophie des principes dv Monde
(Paris, Anthoine de Sommaville: 1646), in which it is claimed in the subtitle of the first
dialogue that ‘il est prouué contre les Sectateurs d’Epicure, Que le Monde est trop parfait
146 J. Clifton

of all things from atoms and the existence of a void between atoms. In his
Memoires, prompted by Gassendi’s recent death, Marolles recounts some of
the priest-philosopher’s views, including comments on time, space, and the
eternity of God.60 Again like Marolles, Gassendi relied on Scripture in believ-
ing that God produced the heavens and the earth from nothing, although he
marshalled other arguments as well.61 Against the Aristotelian hypothesis of
the eternity of the world, Gassendi cites in the Syntagma philocophicum vari-
ous ancient sources, including the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose
Chaos, he concludes, is none other than the primeval material described in
Plato’s Timaeus, bound together by God.62 Gassendi also cites the authority
of the ‘Holy Church’, quoting, inter alia, a stanza of the Transfiguration hymn,
“Quicumque Christum quaeritis”:

Illustre quiddam cernimus,

Quod nesciat finem pati,
Sublime, celsum, interminum,
Antiquius Caelo, & Chao.63

We discern someone shining,

Whose limits we cannot know,
Sublime, exalted, without end,
Older than Heaven and Chaos.

Gassendi also quotes Genesis 1:2, content to conflate this void and empty
earth, this materies Platonica, with Ovid’s ‘rough, unordered mass of things’,

pour estre fait par hazard’, a conclusion confirmed in the second dialogue. The beginning
of this second dialogue, Cotin, Theoclée 111, says, comes from a letter to Marolles, ‘per-
sonne de naissance, d’éminent sçauoir & de probité’, who was also responsible for con-
vincing Cotin to publish the book. Marolles, in turn, calls the erudite abbé Cotin ‘un Ami
intelligent’ and praises his Theoclée as ‘un savant Dialogue touchant la vraie Philosophie
des Principes du monde’; Marolles, Memoires vol. 1, 325, 330.
60 Ibidem, vol. 2, 120: ‘Il disoit que le tems & l’espace étoient infinis, & que quand le monde
ne seroit point, ou qu’il n’auroit jamais été, l’espace, où il est, & la durée ne laisseroient pas
d’être, pour cela, comme l’un & l’autre étoient sans doute avant la création; puisqu’on ne
sauroit douter que Dieu ne soit de toute Eternité.’
61 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicvm, vol. 1, p. 480: ‘Ac nobis quidem Fides Sacra praelu-
cet, quando ex Sacro Geneseos Libro, & habemus DEUM in principio creasse, hoc est,
produxisse ex nihilo Caelum, & Terram’.
62 Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 481: ‘Vbi videtur Chaos nihil esse aliud, quàm materies Platonica, vtpote,
quam Deus, & melior natura in hunc Mundum compegerit’ (see also p. 482).
63 Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 485.
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 147

less concerned than Marolles that it would have been so chaotic that it could
not possibly have been something God would create.64 But Gassendi was not
confronted with the violence of Diepenbeeck’s composition.

2 Poetic Imaginings

In the first chapter of the Tableaux, after his consideration of the immensity
of God, the unchanging nature of Heaven and Earth, and imperceptible and
incomprehensible secrets, Marolles then takes a tack that undermines any
notion of artistic imagination or poetic license, concluding that ‘Peindre donc
le Chaos comme il est icy representé, c’est peindre ce qui ne fut iamais, &
ne peut auoir esté, & confondre imprudemment des choses parfaites qui ne
peuuent estre telles dans vne si mauuaise situation’ (‘Thus, to paint Chaos
as it is represented here is to paint that which never was and can never have
been, and to imprudently confuse perfect things that could never be so in
such a bad situation’).65 In his annotations, Marolles states succinctly, ‘Tout
le raisonnement que ie fais icy n’est que pour monstrer qu’il n’y a point eu de
Chaos’ (‘All the reasoning that I do here is only to demonstrate that there never
was Chaos’).66
Pursuing further his critique from the point of view of natural philosophy –
now as an understanding of natural phenomena rather than speculation on
the origins of the world as a matter of faith – Marolles asks how shadows could
subsist with light, the rough with the polished, ice cold with fiery heat, when
each of these things is formed in its perfection, that is, in pure form. Marolles
charges Diepenbeeck with not bothering to consult natural philosophy on the
subject. He says that Diepenbeeck seemed, rather, to be content with amusing
himself in poetic imaginings that have more do to with fevered dreams, and
that is why the artist made the image as Marolles described it.67 Marolles draws
here on the famous opening to Horace’s Ars Poetica, which he explicitly quotes
and paraphrases in his annotations:

64 Ibidem.
65 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 2–3.
66 Ibidem 6.
67 Ibidem 3: ‘Mais l’autheur de ces peintures ne s’estant pas soucié de consulter la Philosophie
sur ce sujet, s’est contenté de s’égayer dans des imaginations poëtiques qui ont par-fois
beaucoup de rapport aux rêueries d’vn malade’. Note that by the time Marolles was writ-
ing, the traditional doctrine of the four elements had been largely abandoned for all but
metaphorical purposes.
148 J. Clifton

Comme si vn Peintre vouloit ioindre vn col de cheual à vne teste humaine,

& couurir de diuers plumages quelques amas confus de membres rap-
portez de plusieurs endroits dont la partie d’en-haut seroit d’vne belle
femme, & celle d’en-bas d’vn poisson horrible: Surquoy Horace demande
à ses Amis, que si estant venus pour voir vne telle peinture, ils pourroient
s’empescher d’en rire? A quoy il adjoûte, qu’vn liure où seroient represen-
tées des images vaines, telles que sont les resueries d’vn malade ressem-
bleroit fort à vn tel tableau,
Cuius, velut agri somnia, vanae fingentur species.68

If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to

spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there,
so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly
fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from
laughing? Believe me, dear Pisos, quite like such pictures would be a
book, whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dreams, so that
neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape.

Marolles does not, however, provide the rest of Horace’s passage, which was
nonetheless well known and is strikingly relevant to his concerns:

“Painters and poets,” you say, “have always had an equal right in hazard-
ing anything.” We know it: this licence we poets claim and in our turn

68 Ibidem 7. Cf. Horace, “Ars Poetica,” in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton
Fairclough (Cambridge MA and London, 1947), 450 (ll. 1–9): ‘Humano capiti cervicem
pictor equinam / iungere si velit, et varias inducere plumas / undique collatis membris,
ut turpiter atrum / desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne, / spectatum admissi risum
teneatis, amici? / credite, Pisones, isti tabulae fore librum / persimilem, cuius, velut aegri
somnia, vanae / fingentur species, ut nec pes nec caput uni / reddatur formae’. It is worth
pointing out that Marolles also makes reference to this passage of Horace’s text in his
comments on the Sirens, but is there untroubled by the monstrous results (Marolles,
Tableavx dv temple des mvses 251ff). Marolles also seems displeased that Diepenbeeck’s
name has been inserted prominently into the composition. He takes the opportunity to
recount briefly Diepenbeeck’s life, in terms drawn, as he acknowledges, largely from the
inscription on Paulus Pontius’s engraving after Diepenbeeck’s self-portrait, published in
1649 by Jan Meyssens in his Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime. On Meyssens’s book,
see Morselli R., “Jan Meyssens’ 1649 Portfolio of Artists: The Conception and Composition
of the Book Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (and the Inclusion of Three Italian
Painters)”, in Chen P. (ed.), The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in the
Social History of Art, Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets 5 (Leiden – Boston:
2019) 86–114.
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 149

we grant the like; but not so far that savage should mate with tame, or
serpents couple with birds, lambs with tigers.69

Horace’s Ars Poetica had long been imbibed by early modern theorists of
poetry and painting, especially for his famous phrase, ut pictura poesis, but also
for this consideration of the limits of artistic license and the balance between
invention and decorum.70
Marolles then concludes his remarks with the brief and largely neutral
description of Diepenbeeck’s composition quoted at the beginning of this
essay, but the whole account leaves the reader with a strong sense of his dis-
satisfaction not only with Diepenbeeck’s composition but with any attempt
to represent a primordial chaos. This dissatisfaction arises from his reading
the image historically rather than mythographically, as if the artist were not
attempting to represent Chaos as it was understood by the ancients: a mytho-
logical chaos, in line with the representations of other stories in the Tableaux
du Temple des Muses. Nowhere else in the book does Marolles read an image
so literally and consequently question its truth status. For Marolles, there are
no ‘beaux secrets de la Physique & de la Peinture’ hidden in this particular
ancient fable.

3 Genius of a Painter

The original edition of Marolles’s Tableaux du Temple des Muses is relatively

rare. Much more common is a pirated edition, published in Amsterdam in
1676 by Abraham Wolfgank, with the plates in reverse. But long before the
appearance of this edition, Diepenbeeck’s depiction of Chaos had been taken
up in a different context. Just three years after its publication in the Tableaux,
it appears – reversed, in reduced form (albeit complete in its imagery), and
explicitly labelled “Chaos” – in Richard Gaywood’s frontispiece to an English
translation of Giambattista della Porta’s Magia Naturalis, along with sym-
bols of the four elements and personifications of Art and Nature [Fig. 3.8].71
Decades later, it appears in a marvellous bricolage frontispiece for a 1693
abridged edition of Adrien Baillet’s biography of Descartes, first published two

69 Horace, “Ars Poetica” 450–51 (ll. 9–13): ‘“pictoribus atque poetis/ quidlibet audendi sem-
per fuit acqua potestas.”/ scimus, et hanc veniam petimusque damusque vicissim;/ sed
non ut placidis coeant immitia, non ut/ serpentes avibus geminentur, tigribus agni.’
70 See especially Lee R., “Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting”, Art Bulletin
22 (1940) 199 n. 14; 225 n. 145; and 233 n. 171 for the latter.
71 Porta Giambattista della, Natural Magick (London, R. Gaywood: 1658).
150 J. Clifton

figure 3.8 Richard Gaywood, Frontispiece. Engraving in John Baptist Porta, Natural Magick:
in xx Bookes (London, Thomas Young and Samuel Speed: 1658)
British Library, London
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 151

years earlier.72 It was also used for Willem Goeree’s monumental – and mon-
umentally curious – Voor-bereidselen tot de bybelsche wysheid, en gebruik der
heilige en kerklijke historien (Prolegomena to Biblical Wisdom and Use of Sacred
and Ecclesiastical History), published in two volumes in 1700.73
Rather than pursue these off-shoots here, however, I would like to consider
the fate of the image and Marolles’s commentary on it in an eighteenth-century
edition of the Tableaux du Temple des Muses [Fig. 3.9].74 It was published in 1733
in Amsterdam by Zachariah Chatelain, who simultaneously produced editions
in French, English, and Dutch.75 This new edition – in English, The Temple of
the Muses; or, the Principal Histories of Fabulous Antiquity – features engravings
mostly by Bernard Picart, deceased just prior to publication, and mostly cop-
ied directly from the plates in the Tableaux du Temple des Muses. The preface
to the new work – which is much more extensive in the English edition than
in the French – describes the roles played by Favereau and Marolles in the
production of the Tableaux du Temple des Muses, but The Temple of the Muses,
while sometimes drawing on Marolles’s text, largely replaces it with text prob-
ably written by the publisher Chatelain. His preface acknowledges Marolles’s
importance in providing the materials for the present work, but it has been
given ‘quite another Form: Some things that were good are preserved; and
we have rejected others, and put better in their place.’76 Likewise, Chatelain
avers, the illustrations have been changed: ‘And as the Art of Ingraving has
been no less improved since the Time in which he writ, than the Knowledge

72 [Baillet Adrien], La vie de Mr. Des-Cartes, contenant l’histoire de sa philosophie & de ses
autres Ouvrages (Paris, Chez la Veuve Mabre Cramoysi: 1693). The engraving is signed ‘Joh.
v. d. Avolo. inv. fecit. 1692’. The image was noted by Luke Freeman and shared with me by
J.B. Shank; I am grateful to them both for bringing it to my attention.
73 Goeree Willem, Voor-bereidselen tot de bybelsche wysheid, en gebruik der heilige en kerklijke
historien, 2 vols. (Utrecht, Hermannus Ribbius – Anthony Schouten: 1700) vol. 2, opp. 877.
Goeree seems to have borrowed from Baillet’s frontispiece the strange conceit of a bat
holding up Diepenbeeck’s image.
74 I am exceedingly grateful to J.B. Shank for sharing with me his extensive research on
this work and on the subjects of chaos and cosmogony in the eighteenth century more
generally.
75 [Chatelain Zachariah], Le Temple des Muses, orné de LX. tableaux où sont représentés les
evenemens les plus remarquables de l’antinquité fabuleuse; dessinés & gravés par B. Picart
le Romain, & autres habiles Maitres; et accompagnés d’explications et de Remarques, qui
découvrent le vrai sens des fables, & le fondement qu’elles ont dans l’histoire (Amsterdam,
Zachariah Chatelain: 1733); [Chatelain Zachariah], The Temple of the Muses; or, the
Principal Histories of Fabulous Antiquity, Represented in Sixty Sculptures; Designed and
Engraved by Bernard Picart le Romain, and Other Celebrated Masters, with Explications and
Remarks, Which discover the True Meaning of the Fables, and their Foundation in History
(Amsterdam, Zachariah Chatelain: 1733).
76 Ibidem IV.
152 J. Clifton

figure 3.9 Bernard Picart after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, Chaos. Engraving in Le Temple
des Muses, orné de LX. tableaux où sont représentés les Evenemens les plus
remarquables de l’antiquité fabuleuse (Amsterdam, Zacharie Chatelain: 1733), n.p.
Newberry Library, Chicago
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 153

of Fabulous History; we have been obliged to reject several of the Sculptures

of his Edition, and put New ones in their place; and even those that we have
followed the Designs of, are so much altered, that, except the Invention, they
may pass for intirely new.’77 Yet Picart has closely hewn to Diepenbeeck’s com-
position of Chaos.
Chatelain’s Preface of The Temple of the Muses alerts the reader to the pur-
poses of this new version: inter alia, to demonstrate the pernicious falsehood of
mythology; to compare it ‘with the Religion we profess under the Gospel, [and
thus] we discover the bewildered Incoherency of the First and the Excellency
of the Latter’;78 through these fables to discover certain truths that conform to
‘the Truth of several Histories of the Old Testament, and lay open many Traces
and Remains of a venerable Antiquity’;79 and to reveal ‘the most excellent
Lessons of Morality [that] are couched under the Veil of Fable’.80 These goals
are largely in line with Marolles’s text, but he had pursued them less explicitly
and less consistently.
Chatelain’s chapter on Chaos opens with an epigraph that is the same brief
text from Ovid used by Marolles in the Tableaux du Temple des Muses: ‘within
one body cold things strove with hot, and moist with dry’.81 He is particu-
larly concerned with the relationship between an Ovidian and a Mosaic cos-
mogony. Ovid’s description of Chaos is said to be well-known and indicative
of an ancient view of the creation of the universe, for which a genealogy can
be ascertained, as Marolles had already indicated in his annotations: ‘Ce que
le Poëte Latin auoit appris d’Hesiode, comme Hesiode & les Grecs l’auoient
appris des Egyptiens, & ceux-cy des Iuifs’ (‘What Ovid knew of it, he learned
from Hesiod; he & the Greeks had it from the Phenicians, or Egyptians, & they
again from the Jews’) – that is, from the first book of Genesis.82 But Chatelain
diverges from Marolles in treating the natural philosophy of creation:

Revelation which was not intended to instruct us in Natural Philosophy,

does not any way satisfy our Curiosity in this point; but only tells us,
That God by his Word created All things out of Nothing. The Heathen
Poets, being strangers to this divine Light, were not able to compre-
hend how Something could be produced out of Nothing; and therefore,
they believed that Matter had existed from all Eternity. They formed

77 Ibidem IV.
78 Ibidem XX.
79 Ibidem.
80 Ibidem XXI.
81 Ibidem 1.
82 Marolles, Tableavx dv temple des mvses 4; trans. Chatelain, The Temple of the Muses 1 n. 1.
154 J. Clifton

to themselves an idea of a confused disorderly Mass, which contained

the Principles of all Beings; and which afterwards rising by degrees into
Order and Harmony, at length formed the Universe. Tho what they tell
us concerning the Chaos and the Beginning of the World, is so far from
giving us any satisfaction or light into the Matter, that it only shews us
how dark and confused their Ideas were, and how grossly they have dis-
figured the History of the Creation; yet we still perceive some glimmering
Light breaking thro those Fables and Fictions under which the Truth lyes
concealed. If we compare the Beginning of Genesis, with the Accounts
which the Poets give us of the Chaos, the Creation of the World, and the
Events that followed it; we shall easily discover in the Latter, the vener-
able Remains of an obscure Tradition, blended with the Chimeras of a
wild Imagination.83

This ‘wild imagination’ might be said to belong to Diepenbeeck as well, point-

ing to an attitude Chatelain takes toward verbal and visual representation and
their limits differing from that of Marolles. Whereas Marolles had criticized
Diepenbeeck for putatively amusing himself in poetic imaginings, Chatelain
asserts that ‘To give a Description of the Chaos, that is, The state of Confusion
in which Matter is supposed to have been before the Creation of the World,
is an Undertaking that would require the Genius of a Painter or a Poet. What
Form, what Disposition can be given to those first Principles, which every
ingenuous Philosopher must own himself unable to comprehend, and which
have baffled the most laboured Systems that the Spirit of Hypothesis could
invent’?84 Brushing aside Diepenbeeck’s departures from the letter of the text,
he praises the artist’s invention:

The Difficulties which must occur in representing so jarring a Subject

as the Chaos, have not daunted the Invention of the Designer in the
Composition of this first Piece. Less attentive to the Principles of a
sound Philosophy, than to what was proper to strike the Eye, or flatter
the Imagination; he has given his Fancy the Rein, and artfully taken such
Hints from the Poets as he thought might serve to embellish his Design.
[…] Some people may perhaps censure him for introducing Elements
already disingaged and separated one from another, and Constellations
already formed, in a Representation of the Chaos: But he may very well
be allowed to break thrô the common Rules in a Subject so rugged and

83 Ibidem 1–2.
84 Ibidem 1.
CHAOS IN MICHEL DE MAROLLEs ’ S TABLEAUX DU TEMPLE DES MUSES 155

unmanageable as his is, and where the most scrupulous Observers of

Truth must fall infinitely short even of Probability.85

Marolles’s fundamental objection to Diepenbeeck’s image – implicitly a failure,

in his view – was not that it does not accurately illustrate Ovid’s text, but rather
that it depicts a time and a space that are theologically inconceivable and in
conflict with natural philosophy. By contrast, Chatelain sees Diepenbeeck’s
inattention to natural philosophy, criticized by Marolles, and the consequent
freeing of his fancy and invention as precisely what allows him to succeed in
representing a ‘rugged and unmanageable’ subject – a subject that Marolles
had called as difficult to paint as to describe.

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 chapter 4

The Edge of Ekphrasis: Bellori and Reproductive

Printmaking

Annie Maloney

At the conclusion of his famous L’Idea lecture, delivered at the Accademia

di San Luca in 1664 and printed as a preface to his Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori
e architetti moderni in 1672, the renowned biographer, antiquarian, and col-
lector Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) leaves his listener with this final
proclamation:

Ma perché l’idea dell’eloquenza cede tanto all’idea della pittura, quanto

la vista è più efficace delle parole, io però qui manco nel dire, e taccio.

But because the idea of eloquence yields to the idea of painting, to the
extent that sight is more effective than words, I therefore now fail of
speech and fall silent.1

This tantalizing sentence is the starting point for my discussion of Bellori’s

ekphrastic project.2 Here Bellori acknowledges that no matter how elo-
quently he may describe a work of art, or in the context of this lecture, the idea
of beauty, the reader will never truly be able to conjure an image of the work
based on Bellori’s description. How could Bellori, a man who dedicated his life
to the study and description of art, confess that the countless descriptions he
wrote throughout his life all fall short of their aim to conjure a vivid image in
the mind’s eye? And, more importantly, how did he compensate for this per-
ceived failure of ekphrasis?
In this essay, I will argue that Bellori’s collaborations with engravers were
an essential part of his lifelong ekphrastic project by examining two series

1 Bellori G.P., Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed. E. Borea (Turin: 1976) 25;
Bellori G.P., The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. H. Wohl, trans.
A. Sedgwick Wohl (New York: 2005) 62.
2 I would like to extend my thanks to Walter Melion and Art DiFuria for inviting me to present
my work at the Corinth Colloquium, to my fellow authors for their support, feedback, and
enthusiasm during the colloquium, and to my advisor, Dr. Sarah McPhee, for her continued
support of my work at Emory University.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

160 Maloney

of prints etched by Carlo Cesi (1622–1682) and Pietro Aquila (1630–1692).

Throughout his career, Bellori provided commentaries and labels for volumes
of reproductive prints, including reproductions of the Columns of Trajan and
Antoninus Pius, the ancient Tomb of the Nasonii, the works of Raphael, and
the works of Annibale Carracci.3 Throughout these volumes, the prints are the
primary focus of the work. Bellori typically only provided short descriptions
of the works of art being reproduced, allowing the plates that he described to
bear the central focus of the publication. It is my contention that Bellori con-
sidered reproductive prints to be more valuable ekphrastic tools than written
descriptions because they better preserved the composition for future genera-
tions. To assess the way that Bellori used reproductive prints in his work, I will
focus on two series of prints for which Bellori provided written material, Carlo
Cesi’s Galeria nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma […] dipinta da Annibale Caracci,
published in 1657, and Pietro Aquila’s Galeriae Farnesianæ icones, published in
1674.4 Both of these series reproduce Annibale Carracci’s (1560–1609) Farnese
Gallery, painted in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome between 1597 and 1601. Like
many of his contemporaries, Bellori considered Annibale to be the restorer of
art after the Mannerist period, and felt that the Galleria Farnese was his great-
est work. Through a close examination of Bellori’s texts and the prints in these
two series, we can see how Bellori increasingly relied on prints throughout his
career to propagate his ideas about the principles of art and the central impor-
tance of Annibale Carracci in the revival of Roman painting.
For the purposes of this discussion I will be defining ekphrasis as the affec-
tive verbal description of a visual work of art, real or imaginary, for the purpose
of evoking the first-hand experience of viewing that work. In their introduc-
tion to Ekphrastic Encounters, David Kennedy and Richard Meek argue that
throughout much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scholars have
focused on the paragonal model of ekphrasis, in which there is a struggle for
dominance between the verbal and visual representation of a work of art.5

3 For the biography of Giovanni Pietro Bellori, see Donahue K., “‘The Ingenious Bellori’:
A Biographic Study”, Marsyas (1945) 107–138; Previtali G. “Introduzione”, in Borea E. (ed.),
Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni (Turin: 1976) I–L; Montanari T. “Introduction”,
in Wohl H. (ed.), The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (New York:
2005) 1–40.
4 Cesi Carlo, Galeria nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma dipinta da Annibale Caracci, intagliata da
Carlo Cesio (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657); Aquila Pietro, Galeriae Farnesianæ icones
Romae in aedibvs sereniss·Dvcis Parmensis ab Annibale Carracio ad vetervm aemvlationæ pos-
terorvmq admirationæ coloribvs expressae cvm ipsarvm monocromatibvs et ornamentis a Petro
Aqvila delineatæ incisæ (Rome, Giangiacomo de’ Rossi: 1674).
5 Kennedy D. – Meek R. “Introduction”, in Kennedy D. – Meek R. (eds.), Ekphrastic Encounters:
New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (Manchester: 2019) 3.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 161

Although the paragone was a widely used model of ekphrasis during the
Renaissance and into the early modern period, it was not the only model
available. Alternatively, Kennedy and Meek suggest that ut pictura poesis (as
is painting, so is poetry) provides a more productive and interactive model for
understanding ekphrasis.6 This model stresses the equivalence between ver-
bal and visual art, both of which seek to create enargaeia, or pictorial vividness,
for the viewer/reader.7 Twenty-first century critics have begun to favour the ut
pictura poesis model, in part because it allows for a sense of exchange between
the author/painter and the reader.8 As Meek and Kennedy write, today’s crit-
ics are ‘more concerned with the capacity of art – whether visual, verbal, or a
hybrid of the two – to explore the possibility of “aesthetic perfection”; sublime
experiences that are beyond representation or articulation’.9 Bellori’s refer-
ences to his own descriptions echo this sentiment.
I am by no means the first art historian to write about Bellori’s descriptive
method. Several scholars have attempted to characterize Bellori’s approach to
description, including Bellori himself. In his Vite, Bellori wrote that Nicolas
Poussin had urged him to write about paintings in a new mode based on his
unpublished description of Raphael’s Stanze at the Vatican; in this manuscript,
he described the ‘overall invention’ of the painting, in addition to the conceit
and movement of each figure, as well as their affetti, or emotional states.10
Bellori goes on the say that ‘the delight of painting resides in sight’, so that he
has limited himself to ‘the role of mere translator’, without adding more than
the works themselves warrant.11 This statement suggests that Bellori did not
view his task as a literary one, in which the paintings he described acted as
springboards for lengthy essays that displayed his erudition or rhetorical skill.
Rather, Bellori hoped to place the compositions of the paintings he described
clearly in the mind’s eye of the reader, and let the work speak for itself when-
ever possible.
Modern scholars have focused on the systematic clarity of Bellori’s descrip-
tions, noting their origins in his antiquarian publications and the writing
of his contemporaries. In his introduction to Evelina Borea’s 1976 edition
of Bellori’s Vite, Giovanni Previtali wrote that Bellori would have been well
aware of the classical works of ekphrasis of Homer, Philostratus, Lucian, and

6 Ibidem 6.
7 Ibidem 6.
8 Ibidem 11–13.
9 Ibidem 14. Kennedy and Meeks present “sublime experiences” as those that engage the
viewer’s emotions moreso than elicit an intellectual response.
10 Bellori, The Lives 50.
11 Ibidem 50.
162 Maloney

Callistratus, along with the modern work of Giorgio Vasari. Previtali charac-
terizes Bellori’s descriptive method as having four main components: 1) The
Argument of the Fable, 2) The True and Proper Description, 3) The Allegory,
and 4) Stylistic Observations, which he believes Bellori partially adopted from
Franciscus Junius’ De pictura veterum (1637).12 Previtali’s analysis of Bellori’s
style remains a critical text for Bellori scholars today. Bellori diverges from the
standard definition of ekphrasis in his writing by not attempting to elicit an
affective response in his verbal description. Instead, he places that burden on
the reproductive prints that accompany his descriptions.
In addition to ancient and Renaissance models, Bellori studied the writ-
ing of his contemporaries. In her 1989 article, ““L’arte di descrivere: La tecnica
dell’ecfrasi in Malvasia d Bellori”, Giovanna Perini sees Carlo Dati (1619–1676), a
Florentine man of letters and author of a biography of the ancient painters, as
a model for Bellori.13 In his descriptions of the work of ancient painters Dati
(following the descriptions of Pliny, Philostratus, and Lucian) focused on the
affetti of the figures, the chiaroscuro, and the chromatic qualities of the paint-
ings. Perini suggests that Bellori seems to have modeled his own descriptive
technique for portraying the affetti on Dati’s work.
Martina Hansmann also discusses the contemporary sources for Bellori’s
descriptive method in her essay “Con modo nuovo li descrive: Bellori’s Descriptive
Method”.14 These included descriptions of paintings written in letters by early
modern scholars. One such writer was the art theorist Giovanni Battista
Agucchi (1570–1632), whose undated description of Annibale Carracci’s paint-
ing of Sleeping Venus was clear, systematic, object-oriented, and focused on the
spatial relationships in the painting rather than the temporal aspects of the
story being portrayed.15 Hansmann considers Bellori’s Argomento della Galeria
Farnese dipinta da Annibale Caracci as the first instance in which a common
antiquarian practice of presenting texts and reproductive engravings side-by-
side was used to present a work of contemporary art, but with the added task
of providing a cogent interpretation of the fresco cycle. Hansmann argues
that because the etchings do the work of a pictorial description, Bellori can

12 Previtali, “Introduzione” LI–LIII.

13 Perini G., “L’arte di descrivere: La tecnica dell’ecfrasi in Malvasia d Bellori”, I Tatti Studies in
the Italian Renaissance 3 (1989) 193–195. For Carlo Dati’s biography see Vigilant M., “Carlo
Dati,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/carlo-
roberto-dati_(Dizionario-Biografico)/, accessed 04/22/2020.
14 Hansmann M., “Con modo nuovo li descrive: Bellori’s Descriptive Method”, in Bell J. (ed),
Art History in the Age of Bellori (Cambridge: 2002) 224–238.
15 Ibidem 225–226.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 163

focus on the subject matter.16 Bellori developed his descriptive method in his
Descrizzione delle imagini dipinte da Rafaelle d’Urbino nelle camere del pala-
zzo apostolico Vaticano, which was written before 1670 but only published in
1695.17 Here, Bellori accounts for the historical significance of the frescoes
while explaining how the individual frescoes function within the overall deco-
ration to create a cohesive system with various levels of meaning.18
Finally, Margaret Davis Daly has argued that “attempts to associate Bellori
with the ancient rhetorical tradition of classical ekphrasis are problematic”.19
Bellori’s writing, as she notes, diverges from the ancient rhetorical model
in foregoing digressive displays of rhetorical virtuosity. Davis Daly follows
Previtali in understanding Bellori’s most detailed descriptions as pure visual
description, subdivided into Previtali’s categories as listed above.20 Davis
Daly also places the origin of Bellori’s descriptive method in the objective and
detailed archaeological descriptions that Bellori would have learned from his
tutor and adopted father, the antiquarian Francesco Angeloni.21
I would argue, following Previtali, that Bellori’s ekphrastic style falls more
closely in line with the ut pictura poesis model described by Kennedy and
Meek.22 Apart from Bellori’s Vite and his Descrizzione delle imagini dipinte
da Rafaelle d’Urbino, the majority of his ekphrastic descriptions were accom-
panied by reproductive prints.23 Bellori alludes directly to the prints in his
descriptions, often directing the reader toward details labelled with letters
or numbers within the print. While several of the scholars discussed above
acknowledge that the prints for which Bellori wrote descriptions allow him to
leave several constituent parts undescribed, I believe that the prints themselves
have been neglected as instruments of knowledge and exempla of a certain
kind of visual ekphrasis. One must closely examine the prints to understand
how they transmit knowledge about the original works of art they reproduce.

16 Ibidem 227.
17 Ibidem 229.
18 Ibidem 230.
19 Daly Davis M., “Giovan Pietro Bellori and the ‘Nota delli musei, librerie, galerie, et orna-
menti di statue e pitture ne’ palazzi, nelle case, e ne’ giardini di Roma’ (1664): Modern
Libraries and Ancient Painting in Seicento Rome”, Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte 68.2
(2005) 219.
20 Ibidem 224.
21 Ibidem 227.
22 Previtali LIV.
23 And in fact, the Descrizzione was likely originally meant to include reproductive prints,
but the project was delayed and published just before Bellori’s death. Throughout the text
Bellori alludes to published reproductive prints and encourages the reader to study exist-
ing prints in conjunction with his text.
164 Maloney

Both the print and the text work together to recreate the original work of art
vividly in the mind of the reader. Where the print lacks color, the text describes
it. Where the text leaves out compositional details, the print supplies them.
The two are part of an inseparable and equal exchange that preserves the
painting in word and image.
Furthermore, I would like to suggest that Bellori and the etchers with whom
he worked factored the viewer’s experience into their ekphrastic descriptions.
Like traditional works of verbal ekphrasis, the reproductive prints created by
Bellori’s collaborators are meant to reproduce the experience of seeing the
painting in person, but in a more intimate setting. Many of the early mod-
ern paintings that Bellori wrote about and reproduced were ceiling frescoes,
which, as anyone who has seen a ceiling fresco in person can attest, can be
quite difficult to study closely. Scholars studying Bellori’s writings tend to take
this fact for granted. Environmental factors such as lighting, the curvature of
the ceiling, and height make total visibility nearly impossible.24 A viewer can
only focus on one portion of a ceiling fresco at a time, and frequently must
move not only her eye but her entire body through a room to see every part
of the ceiling. To recreate the sensation of moving through a room, the repro-
ductive prints that Bellori sponsored were typically printed as large folio-sized
sheets, measuring fifty-one by seventy-one centimeters. These sheets can
easily fill one’s entire field of vision when spread out on a table, and one can
understand the act of flipping through the pages as analogous to the process of
walking through a gallery, allowing different sections of the fresco to fill one’s
field of vision. In her 1992 article “Giovan Pietro Bellori e la ‘Commodità delle
stampe’,” Evelina Borea argued that Bellori valued engravings for their ability to
bolster the persuasiveness of this arguments about the allegorical meaning of
the Galleria Farnese and other works of art.25 In a certain sense, the prints are
easier to study than the original frescoes. As I hope to demonstrate, Bellori took
advantage of these discrepancies between the original and printed equivalent
when writing his own ekphrastic descriptions of the Galleria Farnese. The
Galleria Farnese was accessible to artists and travellers with elite connections
throughout the seventeenth century.26 For example, both the British travelers
John Evelyn and Richard Symonds were also able to access the gallery with

24 Especially in an age before electricity, when visitors would have needed to rely on sunlight
or lanterns.
25 Borea E., “Giovan Pietro Bellori e la ‘Commodità delle stampe’”, in Cropper E. – Perini G. –
Solinas F. (eds.), Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-duke Ferdinand I
to Pope Alexander VII: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1990
(Bologna: 1992) 266.
26 Galego, R., “De los Carracci a Sebastiano Conca: la Sala Grande del palacio Farnesecomo
espacio para la formaciónde los artistas en ciernes”, Acta Artis, 2 (2014) 35–39.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 165

the help of servants in the palace and tour guides.27 Although the gallery was
open to select visitors and artists, Bellori’s print series transmitted Annibale’s
frescoes to a broader audience who could admire their clarity and bellezza in
printed form.
Moreover, the goal of a reproductive print is, in fact, quite similar to that of
an ekphrastic description: namely, the translation of a work of art from one
medium to another. A writer, such as Bellori, translates the figure groups, nar-
ratives, colors, and other aesthetic qualities of a fresco into words, sentences,
paragraphs, printed in black ink on a white page. Either through exacting
description or rhetorical style, writers seek to capture the experience of view-
ing a painting in words. Theoretically, a successful description would repli-
cate the act of looking so thoroughly that the reader feels as though she has
viewed the painting.
The reproductive printmaker also acts a translator, but he has a distinct
advantage. While the writer of ekphrasis must describe not only the image but
also the act of viewing the image, the printmaker produces an actual image of
the original work. And an engraving, while lacking the colour of a fresco or the
spatial dimension and scale of a ceiling, can at the very least replicate the most
prominent lines, groups, and values of a composition, using a visual language
like that of the painter. As Robert Hopkins has argued, ‘We look at those prop-
erties [in the print that] we assume to be shared with the original, overlook
those we take to be different, and use our perception of the former as our guide
in imagining the rest of the source’s features’.28 The reproductive print works
together with the mind’s eye to reconstitute the original work of art.
Finally, Bellori’s ekphrastic project could also be understood as a part of a
conservation project. By the late-seventeenth century, the frescoes of Annibale
Carracci and Raphael were both heavily damaged by years of tracing by art-
ists and exposure to the elements. Throughout his writings, Bellori frequently
disparages the damage done to both ancient and early modern works of art,
and discusses the efforts made to conserve them. In his Descrizzione of the
works of Raphael, he includes a detailed account of the artist Carlo Maratti’s
restoration campaigns at the Galleria Farnese and the Loggia of Psyche in the
Villa Farnesina, the two properties of the Farnese family that stood on either
side of the Tiber river.29 Bellori writes that the agent of the Duke of Parma, the

27 Brookes, A., Richard Symonds in Rome, 1649–1651 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of

Nottingham: 2000) 106–127.
28 Hopkins, R., “Reproductive Prints as Aesthetic Surrogates”, The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 73.1 (2015) 15.
29 Bellori Giovanni Pietro, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino nel Camere
del Palazzo Vaticano, di Gio. Pietro Bellori alla Santità di Nostro Signore Papa Innocenzo
 166 Maloney

Figure 4.1 Annibale Carracci, Farnese Gallery, (ca. 1596–1601), Approximately 20.7 × 6.4 meters, Fresco
painting, Rome, Farnese Palace
Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Volta
_della_Galleria_Farnese_dopo_il_restauro_del_2015.jpg

Abbot Francesco Felini, sought permission to have the Galleria Farnese and
the Villa Farnesina restored, and hired Maratti on the advice of the architect
Carlo Fontana.30
Bellori records that the Galleria Farnese had two major areas of damage
[Fig. 4.1]. The first was a large crack that ran along the width of the vault, which
was causing peeling along the wall. Parts of the painting of Andromeda had
also started falling off the wall, and saltpeter build-up over the paintings of
Aurora and Cephalus had left a white efflorescence on the fresco.31 Bellori
attributes the large crack to the weight of the ceiling pushing the outer, south-
western wall of the room outwards.32 He writes that a new conservation tech-
nique was used to secure the cracking parts of the wall with glue [colla], and
nails were used to secure wool or silk on top of the curling parts of the fresco.33

Duodecimo (Rome, Nella Stamparia di Gio. Giacomo Komarek Boëmo alla Fontana di
Trevi: 1695) 81–86.
30 Ibidem 81.
31 Ibidem 81–82: ‘Il primo [area of damage] consisteva in una creapatura da capo à piede
della volta, che segando per mezzo la lerghezza, si stendeva giù per i muri fin’ al pavimento,
ed aveva prodotto molti peli più piccolo, di modo che s’era staccato quasi tutta la colla
della colta, e molto più quella del muro verso mezza giorno, ove è dipinta l’Andromeda, e
già cominciava à cadere à pezzi, si come n’andavano cadendo alcuni pezzetti dalla volta
stessa. Il secondo mancamento era una fioritura di salnitro in quella parte, ove è dipinta
l’Aurora, e Cefalo, che si stendeva anco à medaglioni, & à i nudi contigui’.
32 Ibidem 82.
33 Ibidem 82. Bellori writes that Giovanni Francesco Rossi developed this technique.
 THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 167

figure 4.2 Raphael, Loggia of Psyche, (ca. 1516–1517), Fresco Painting, Rome, Villa Farnesina
Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Loggia_of
_Psyche_%28Villa_Farnesina%2C_Rome%29.jpg

After drilling in the nails Maratti would fill the areas of loss with gesso. Maratti
repainted the areas of loss with watercolors, carefully matching the colors to
the original fresco so that the difference between the fresco and watercolor
was barely discernable.34 Another conservator working with Maratti named
Giovanni Francesco Rossi used a secret method to remove the saltpeter that
had spread in the gallery.35
Meanwhile, the much older Loggia of Psyche, which had been painted at
the Villa Farnesina between 1517 and 1518, had been more extensively damaged
due to 140 years of exposure to the elements [Fig. 4.2].36 Bellori notes that the
colors had faded and that parts of the fresco had darkened beyond recogni-
tion, so much so that the blue backgrounds had turned black.37 Maratti had
to position several pins in the ceiling to keep the flaking bits of fresco from
falling off the wall.38 He also decided that it would be best to enclose the loggia
with large glass windows to protect the frescoes from future exposure to the
elements. In doing so, Maratti converted the loggia into a galleria, strengthen-
ing the visual and architectural link between Raphael and Annibale Carracci’s
masterpieces.39

34 Ibidem: ‘Fatta quest’operazione, lasciava che s’asciugasse la colla, che l’uso del geffo aveva
bagnata intorno al chiodo, e poi v’andava sopra con certe acquarelle di tinta in tutto
somigliante à quella di prima, e corrispondente alle parti rimaste della pittura, quali rese
asciutte, s’univano così bene, che non era possibile ritrovarvi un divario imaginabile’.
35 Ibidem 83.
36 Ibidem 83.
37 Ibidem 84.
38 Ibidem 83.
39 Ibidem 85. This conservation work was carried out by Maratti, Domenico Paradisi, and
Giuseppe Belletti.
168 Maloney

When studying Bellori’s descriptions and reproductive prints, one must

consider them in the context of both a physical and historical restoration
campaign. For Bellori, restoring and recording the frescoes of Raphael and
Annibale Carracci were no different than recording archaeological discoveries.
After all, Raphael’s works were more than a century old in Bellori’s day. In the
minds of Baroque artists, Raphael’s works were practically antiquities, exist-
ing side-by-side with the ancient frescoes found in the tombs and catacombs
of Rome. Raphael’s use of ancient fresco motifs found in the Domus Aurea in
Rome only strengthened his reputation as an ancient painter, and Bellori com-
monly referred to him as the Apelles of his age. In a section of the Descrizzione
titled, “Dell’Ingegno, eccellenza, e grazia di Rafaëlle comparator ad Apelle”, (On
the Genius, Excellence, and Grace of Raphael Compared to Apelles), Bellori
argues that like the famed Greek painter Apelles, Raphael imbued his figures
with the same divine grace that he embodied.40 Perhaps because Bellori could
not study the lost works of Apelles, in his comparison between Raphael and
Apelles he frequently refers to their shared character traits, such as modesty,
intelligence, and dignity, alongside the characteristics their paintings share.41
Raphael was able to rival Apelles because of their shared characteristics, and
‘return Painting to her ancient throne’ because of his various works.42
And what of the works of the first Apelles? As Bellori laments in his intro-
duction to Le pitture antiche del sepolcro de Nasonii, the works of Apelles,
Zeuxis, Parnasius, and Timanthes were all lost to history. Their works ‘durando
solo nella memoria delle lettere’ (endure only in the memory of authors, who
bring them perpetual fame).43 As helpful as ancient descriptions are, they can-
not truly recapture the lost compositions of these artists. In fact, Bellori writes:

Ma io credo bene che se in ricercar sotto terra le Pitture, si fosse impie-

gata l’istessa cura, che si usa nelle Statue, e ne’marmi, al certo che oggi
potremmo ravvisa meglio l’eccellenza de gli Antichi pennelli; ma la dis-
aventra si può attribuire al poco studio nostro, & al quasto de’Cavatori,

40 Ibidem 93.
41 Ibidem 94.
42 Ibidem 95: ‘Ma per ravvisare maggiormentoe la fecondità, e gli altri pregi, co’ quali Rafaëlle
ripose nel suo antico seggio la Pittura, non dobbiamo solamente arrestarci nelle Vaticane
camera, nelle quali ci lasciò sì ciosi, e ammirandi concetti della sua fabbricatrice idea, ma
voliamoci ancora al gran numero delle altre sue invenzioni nelle loggie, ne arazzi, che
aricchiseono il Vaticano, e le Regie de Monarchi in Francia, in Inghilterra, in Polonia in
altre regioni’.
43 Bellori Giovanni Pietro – Santi Bartoli Pietro, Le pitture antiche del sepolcro de Nasonii
nella Via Flaminia: disegnate, ed intagliate alla similitudine degli antichi originali (Rome,
Per Gio. Battista Bussotti: 1680) 5.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 169

che avidi à trar fuori sassi, e rovine, riducono in calcigni, & in cenere li più
rari avanzi dell’Antichità.44

But I believe that if in searching under the earth for pictures, and if we
use the same care that we use for statues, it would be certain that today
we could recognize better the excellence of ancient brushes, but the mis-
fortune can be attributed to our lack of study, and to the fault of excava-
tors who greedily pull down stones and ruins, reducing them to mortar,
and burning these rarest of antiquities.

For Bellori the Archaeologist, the visual evidence always superseded the verbal
evidence.
In this same vein, to make reproductive prints after Raphael and Annibale
was to ensure that their works did not suffer the same fate as those of the
famed ancient painters Apelles and Zeuxis, whose works had been lost. The
prints, accompanied by Bellori’s brief annotations, provided artists and collec-
tors the opportunity to study the works of art up close, without causing further
damage to the originals. The prints also served as an archaeological record,
not unlike the records made by Bellori’s friend and collaborator Pietro Santi
Bartoli of the ancient frescoes discovered in and around Rome. In 1680, Bellori
and Bartoli published the volume Le pitture antiche del sepolcro de Nasonii
nella Via Flaminia: disegnate, ed intagliate alla similitudine degli antichi origi-
nali, which recorded the frescoes discovered in the Tomb of the Nasonii along
the Via Flaminia in 1674 [Fig. 4.3].45 In this volume Bartoli provided views and
plans of the interior of the tomb alongside individual frescoes. Bellori provided
descriptions for each fresco as well as an argument for the entire tomb, which
he believed was a monument to the poet Ovid.46
In print, the frescoes of the ancient tombs, the Loggia of Psyche, and the
Galleria Farnese appeared in the same format, and artists in Italy and abroad
could easily compare the works side-by-side. Therefore, prints are part of the
historical and conservational nature of Bellori’s entire enterprise. Having seen
the value of recording ancient frescoes, whose vivid colors began to disinte-
grate when exposed to air for the first time in thousands of years, Bellori recog-
nized that the art of his own time, the art of Raphael, Annibale, and so many
others, could eventually fade from sight and memory if not properly recorded.

44 Ibidem.
45 See note 41 supra.
46 For a history of the Tomb of the Nasonii, see Messineo G., La Tomba Dei Nasonii (Rome:
2000).
170 Maloney

figure 4.3 Pietro Santi Bartoli, “Discovery of the Tomb of the Nasonii,” in Pietro Santi Bartoli,
Michelangelo de la Chausse and Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le pitture antiche delle
grotte di Roma, e del sepolcro de’ Nasonj […] (Rome, Nella nuova stamparia di
Gaetano degli Zenobj: 1706). Etching, 36 × 48 cm
Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare
Book Library
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 171

As we will see, this desire to conserve the works of Raphael and Annibale drove
Bellori’s descriptive projects throughout his career.

1 Bellori’s Argomento della Galeria Farnese dipinta da Annibale

Caracci, 1657

Bellori’s first ekphrasis of the Galleria Farnese, the Argomento della Galeria
Farnese dipinta da Annibale Caracci, accompanied a series of forty-four etch-
ings by Carlo Cesi and was published by Francesco Collignon in 1657.47 The
Argomento was published as a separate, ten-page booklet that accompanied
Cesi’s prints. The text was likely commissioned by the publisher, Francesco
Collignon, who wrote in his letter to the reader: ‘I thought it appropriate, for
the delight and utility of all, to add a few short notes, more wholly conformed
to the ingeniousness of the Painter, that entirely explain the fables, which are
themselves enclosed’.48 These notes were taken from Bellori’s manuscript for
his Vita of Annibale Carracci, and in fact the text is closely aligned to what
Bellori published in 1672.49 By referring to Bellori’s text as ‘a few short notes’
(‘brevissime annotationi’), Collignon implies that the text was always meant
to be an ancillary apparatus for the images. Even so, this is Bellori’s earliest
recorded text on a work of contemporary art, and its importance cannot be
understated.50 It is in this short text that Bellori began to develop the descrip-
tive method that he would use throughout his career.
As Margaret Daly Davis has argued, the method of description that Bellori
used for the Argomento is based on the same descriptive method he used when
discussing ancient works of art and Raphael’s works in the Descrizzione.51

47 Bellori Giovanni Pietro, Argomento della Galleria Farnese, dipinta da Annibale Carracci,
disegnata et intagliata da Carlo Cesio, nel quale spiegansi e riduconsi allegoricamente
alla moralità le favole poetiche in essa rappresentate (Rome, V. Mascardi: 1657). I have
not been able to access a physical copy of the Argomento for this essay, but the text is
available through Paola Barocchi’s digitization project, sponsored by the Scuola Normale
Superiore di Pisa and the Fondazione Memofonta Onlus. The text can be found here:
http://barocchi.sns.it/opera/GPB_A/p-001.
48 Ibidem 3. “Il che senza dubbio, ha ritardato la disgratia del passato contagio; ma trovan-
domi di presente, all’ordine qualche numero di libri, ho stimato opportuno, per mag-
gior diletto, ed utilità di tutti, l’aggiungervi brevissime annotationi, più tosto conformi
all’ingegno del Pittore, che all’intera spositione delle favole, le quali sono per se stesse,
divulgate.”
49 Daly Davis, “Giovan Pietro Bellori and the ‘Nota delli musei’” 216.
50 Previtali, “Introduzione” XXII.
51 Ibidem 216.
172 Maloney

First, Bellori described the general composition and its theme. Then, he
focused on key figures, their actions, and their affetti (affective expressions).
Finally, Bellori provided his interpretation of the allegory of each scene.52
I would like to suggest that while Bellori’s descriptions do not exactly mirror
the rhetorical form and function of ancient epitomes of ekphrastic technique,
such as the works of Philostratus, his general aim, that of persuasion and the
display of erudition, still aligns with the spirit of classical ekphrases. Bellori’s
concise, objective descriptions follow their own rhetorical conventions, and
his insistence on uncovering the allegorical meaning of Annibale’s ceiling sug-
gests a need to display his erudition alongside that of Annibale. Rather than
abandoning the principles of ancient ekphrasis, Bellori has distilled and reor-
ganized them for a modern audience.
In the Argomento, Bellori provides an interpretation of Carracci’s ceiling as
a broader metaphor for the conflict between Sacred and Profane Love.53 In
the opening lines of the Argomento Bellori writes that Annibale used various
emblems to depict the war and peace between Sacred and Profane Love, as
written about by Plato.54 He goes on to state that the fables on the ceiling
allude to the punitive pains of vice and the pleasurable rewards of virtue.55 As
Charles Dempsey has argued, Bellori’s interpretation, which relies primarily on
the four sparring Cupids in the corners of the ceiling and the scenes of Perseus
on the walls below, is in fact an interpretation born out of the second paint-
ing campaign in the gallery, for which Giovanni Battista Agucchi was likely
the advisor.56 Agucchi appears to have modified the program of the entire
room. Whereas Annibale’s original theme, Omnia vincit amor was based on his
gallery’s relationship with Raphael’s Loggia of Psyche, the later campaign on
the walls of the gallery was carried out by Annibale’s pupil Domenichino and
included personifications of virtues.
Bellori’s attempt to find a more spiritual meaning in the amorous myths
populating the Galleria Farnese was driven by a desire to present Annibale
Carracci as a philosopher-painter, a more appropriate vision of the man Bellori
considered the savior of seventeenth-century art. In the letter to the reader,
Collignon writes that Annibale Carracci planned the entire gallery to follow a
single allegorical theme ‘because Annibale was very attentive to philosophy,

52 Ibidem 224.
53 Dempsey, C., “‘Et Nos Cedamus Amori’: Observations on the Farnese Gallery”, The Art
Bulletin 50.4 (1968) 363–74.
54 Bellori, Argomento 5: ‘Volle figurare il Pittore, con vari emblemi, la guerra, e la pace tra’l
celeste, e’l vulgare Amore, instituiti da Platone […]’.
55 Ibidem 5.
56 Dempsey, “‘Et Nos Cedamus Amori’” 365–366.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 173

just as one reads of the ancient Greek painters’.57 His ekphrasis is not only
descriptive, but interpretive, as he attempts to persuade the reader that the
subjects of the paintings are all meant to relate to one another and reveal a
moral truth.
After setting out his general interpretation of the gallery’s theme, Bellori
gives a description of the entire gallery, going through the length and width
of the gallery (ninety palmi long, twenty-eight palmi wide).58 After giving a
description of the lengths and widths of the different quadri riportati (fictive
easel paintings) in the ceiling and noting the positions of herms and medal-
lions, Bellori seems to stop to acknowledge how futile this description of
length, width, and height really is. Instead, Bellori turns to the overall effect of
the space, saying:

Ma chi può mai lodare a bastanza, le bellissime positure, e movimenti

degl’ignudi, e li modelli de’ Termini, la copia degli ornamenti e delle
inventioni, mentre l’occhio, e la mente presi restano dalla varia concor-
danza loro.

But who can ever praise enough the most beautiful postures and move-
ments of the ignudi, the modelling of the Terms, the copiousness of the
ornaments and inventions, while the eye and the mind have taken rest
from their harmonious variety?59

Bellori expands this description of the harmonious variety of the gallery in

Annibale’s Vite:

But who could ever adequately recount the parts of these decorations,
seeing the whole ordered with stupendous variety in such a way that
things are dissimilar in their similarity, and are constantly changing for
beauty’s sake. Hence we shall hasten to those particulars that are a great
joy to the eye but annoy the ear when described in detail.60

57 Bellori, Argomento 3–4: ‘Quello nondimeno, che io estimo cosa più rara, è l’argomento
di tutta la Galeria, non essendovi le favole stesse a caso dipinte (secondo altri si è per-
suaso) ma eseguite, con ogni miglior dottrina, perché Annibale fu attentissimo a filoso-
fare, come si legge de gli antichissimi Greci pittori, et particolarmente di Polignoto Tasio,
che dipinse, in Atene, quel famoso portico, dal quale Zenone d’insegnare a suoi discepoli,
prese argomento’. Here Bellori and Collignon also reject the notion that the subjects of
the quadri riportati were chosen at random, like others had previously suggested.
58 Ibidem 5. One Roman palmo equals 0.2234 meters.
59 Ibidem 6.
60 Bellori, The Lives 83.
174 Maloney

In both passages Bellori confesses that a written description is incapable of

capturing the ‘stupendous variety’ of the Galleria Farnese. Because the framing
elements of the gallery have little to no narrative content, they would require
a monotonous and repetitive description. Better than a laborious description,
Bellori’s self-imposed silence forces the reader to conjure up his or her own
vision of the beauty of the entire gallery. As in his L’Idea lecture, Bellori recog-
nizes the value of leaving something to the reader’s imagination.
After giving an overview of his interpretation of the gallery, Bellori turns
to the individual scenes, though he does not dwell on his descriptions. He
describes each fable in one or two brief sentences that focus on the actions of
the central figures. When prevalent, he refers to Annibale’s references, such as
Raphael’s Mercury in the Loggia of Psyche or Tasso’s description of the story
of Hercules and Iole. For example, in his brief description of Mercury handing
the golden apple to Paris, he simply writes: ‘Mercury hands the golden apple
to Paris, holding the trumpet painted in imitation of Raphael, signifying the
fame of her, who will be considered the most beautiful by Paris’.61 There is no
mention of the figures’ affetti, the pastoral background, or the dog sitting in
the lower left corner. There is also no explanation of the fable’s position in the
ceiling, or the frame adorned with faux stucco sphinxes and the gorgon car-
touches. There is also no mention of color.
Cesi’s reproductive print of the same scene provides much more infor-
mation than Bellori’s description, but even the print leaves something to be
desired [Fig. 4.4].62 Cesi retains the stretched, octagonal shape of the paint-
ing and reproduces the composition fairly accurately. There are some minor
inconsistencies, including the angle of Paris’ staff and the position of his left
foot, which gets cut off by the frame in Annibale’s ceiling. Cesi also struggled
with the complicated foreshortening on the figure on Mercury. This struggle is
most noticeable in Mercury’s left, trumpet-bearing arm. Even with these errors,
Cesi’s Paris is beautifully modeled, and the etcher has captured the highlights
and shadows in the scene quite well. Anyone wishing to understand the overall

61 Bellori, Argomento 6: ‘Mercurio porge il pomo d’oro a Paride, tiene in mano la tromba dip-
inta ad imitatione di Rafaelle, significando la fama di colei, che da Paride verrà giudicata
la più bella’.
62 Carlo Cesi (1626–1682) was born in Rieti and studied painting and engraving in the circle
of Pietro da Cortona. In the same year that he completed the reproductive etchings in the
Farnese Gallery, he also participated in the decorative project carried out under Pietro
da Cortona at the Palazzo Quirinale. Cesi later went on to make reproductive engravings
after Cortona’s gallery painted in the Palazzo Pamphilj at Piazza Navona. Pascoli Lione,
Vite de’ pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni (Rome, Per Antonio de’ Rossi: 1730–1736)
163–176.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 175

figure 4.4 Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Mercury bringing the golden apple to Paris,”
in Carlo Cesi and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma
[…] (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657). Etching, 35.8 × 24.8 cm. Amsterdam,
Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.915
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
 176 Maloney

figure 4.5 Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Mercury bringing the golden apple to Paris,” in Carlo Cesi
and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma […] (Rome, Francesco Colignon:
1657). Etching, 26.0 × 53.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.903
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

composition of Annibale’s painting would do well to study this print in lieu of

access to the gallery.
For the medallions, Bellori gives little more than captions. For the medal-
lion of Leander and Hero he writes: ‘Leander swims across the Hellespont
[Dardanelles] guided by a cupid, and Hero, deeply in love, shines a light for
him from the tower’.63 Nowhere in his text does Bellori specify that this scene
is represented in one of the bronze medallions. Once again, Cesi’s print pro-
vides much more detail [Fig. 4.5]. For this portion of the frieze Cesi provides
the illusionistic framing devices, including the herms, ignudi, masks, and putti
surrounding the medallion. Cesi has distinguished between the two layers of
illusion – the frame and the medallion – by accentuating the chiaroscuro light-
ing on the figures within the frame and depicting the low relief of the faux
medallion, using minimal contours. This is the ‘stupendous variety’ that Bellori
felt words could not convey.
For the culminating scene, the wedding of Bacchus and Ariadne, Bellori
writes:

63 Bellori, Argomento 8: ‘Leandro passa a nuoto l’Hellesponto con la guida d’Amore, et Hero
innnamorata gli fa lume dalla Torre’.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 177

Bacchus and Ariadne: one above the golden chariot, the other above
the silver chariot, with Love, who crowns her with stars. The intoxicated
Chorus of Silenus precedes, led by the Faun riding the ass: lying on the
ground Venus Vulgare, in the act of awakening from slumber, regards
Silenus, so as to represent the correspondence between drunkenness and
lasciviousness. In the Satyr, which embraces the Goat, the brutal appetite
is denoted.64

Here, for the first time in his description, Bellori gives some indication of the
arrangement of the figures and the iconography; however, I would hardly count
this as a description that vividly brings the painting to life in the mind of the
viewer. Cesi created a larger foldout print for this scene, which corresponds to
the scene’s centrality in the ceiling as well as its relative size compared to the
other quadri riportati. The figures are beautifully modeled, with dominating
contours. It is in the print that we find the expressions of Bacchus and Ariadne
and experience the drunken revelry of the satyrs.
The fighting Cupids that are so central to Bellori’s interpretation are dis-
cussed in the first section of the Argomento. Here Bellori directly refers to
plates twenty-two and twenty-three, writing that Annibale ‘painted in the
four corners of the gallery, four most learned images, for the foundation of the
whole work […] Celestial Love, who fights with Vulgar [Love], and tears his
hair’. These two Cupids represent philosophy and the most holy laws, which
elevate man to Heaven. A laurel crown floats above them, representing man’s
victory over unreasonable appetites.65 In another corner, Divine love attempts
to steal a torch from Impure Love, who hides it behind his back. In a third cor-
ner, Supreme Love and Earthly Love embrace, symbolizing the passions unit-
ing with reason. Finally, in the fourth corner, Anteros steals a palm from Eros,
‘in the same form of statues that the Eleans collected in their schools’.66 These

64 Ibidem 7: ‘Bacco et Arianna: l’uno sopra il carro d’oro, l’altra sopra il carro d’argento, con
Amore, che l’incorona di stelle. Precede il Coro di Sileno ebbro, e sostentato da’Fauni
sopra l’asinello: giace a terra Venere Vulgare in atto che si desta dal sonno e riguarda
Sileno, per la corrispondenza tra l’ubbriachezza, e la lascivia. Nel Satiro, che abbraccia la
Capra vien denotato il brutale appetito’.
65 Ibidem 5: ‘[…] l’Amor Celeste, che lutta col Vulgare, e lo tira per li capelli: questa è la
Filosofia, e la santissima legge, che porta l’anima fuori del corpo corruttibile, e caduco, per
elevarla in alto. Fecevi però, nel mezzo di chiarissima luce, una corona di Lauro, dimost-
rando, che la vittoria contro gl’inragionevoli appetiti, inalza gli huomini al Cielo’.
66 Ibidem: ‘Nella quarta immagine vien descritto l’Amor mutuo; cioè Cupidine, ed Anterote,
che stringono un ramo di palma, nella forma, che gli Elei collocarono le statue nelle
loro scuole’.
178 Maloney

descriptions of the cupids demonstrate Annibale’s powers of invenzione along-

side his study of ancient works of art.
Cesi gives the four pairs of Cupids their own space in his series of prints,
but his depiction of them actually presents less information than Bellori’s
description does [Fig. 4.6a–b]. Cesi depicts the cupids in four separate reg-
isters divided over two pages, tussling on simple ground lines against a blank
background. The first pair, Celestial and Vulgar Love, are shown without
the laurel crown floating above them in a state of the print at the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, making it difficult for the viewer to identify them.67 A sec-
ond state at the Rijksmuseum includes the laurel crown. Careful examination
of the Rijksmuseum print reveals faint traces of the original background cross-
hatching beneath the crown, suggesting that Cesi burnished the plate and
added the crown to identify the cupids as Celestial and Vulgar Love more accu-
rately. The balustrades on which they stand in the fresco have been removed,
and the viewer would have no idea that within the illusionistic framework of
the gallery, the cupids appear against an open sky, as though they have just
landed at the four corners of Annibale’s faux architectural construction to view
the quadri riportati themselves. It seems in this instance, Bellori’s ekphrasis of
the Cupids provides more information than the prints.
Bellori’s text concludes with “The Allegory of the Fables”, in which he argues
that each of the individual quadri riportati is meant to be read as an allegory
that demonstrates the power of love. For example, the apple Mercury gives
to Paris and the wool Pan gives to Diana represent the gifts with which love
makes itself Lord of the human soul. The central Bacchanalia is a symbol of
drunkenness, the mother of impure desires. And the story of Andromeda
chained to the rock represents the state of the soul when it is bound to the
senses. The soul becomes food for vice (the sea monster) and must be saved
by reason (Perseus).68 Every scene, from the largest painting to the smallest
bronze medallion, has a moral lesson behind it.
Bellori concludes by praising Annibale’s skill in depicting a variety of fig-
ures, passions, and nature. He writes that ‘in this work alone Annibale trans-
lated [tradusse] the beauty of the Greeks: yes, that painting in his hands, which
had fallen after Raphael, has risen anew to its ancient majesty’.69 Bellori thus

67 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Shelfmark Stamp.Chig.S.158. The BAV copy of Galeria

nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma also presents Celestial and Vulgar Love on the same page
as Anteros and Eros struggling over the palm, while the Rijskmuseum copy presents
Celestial and Vulgar Love next to Supreme Love and Earthly love.
68 Ibidem 9.
69 Ibidem 10: ‘Et a dire il vero, in quest’opera sola tradusse Annibale le bellezze Greche: sì che
la pittura per le sue mani, dopo Rafaelle caduta, si è di nuovo inalzata alla maestà antica’.
 THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 179

figure 4.6a Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Supreme Love and Earthly Love; Celestial and
Vulgar Love,” in Carlo Cesi and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma
[…] (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657). Etching, 20.4 × 15.3 cm (plate). Amsterdam,
Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.908
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 4.6b Carlo Cesi, after Annibale Carracci, “Anteros and Eros; Divine Love and Impure Love,”
in Carlo Cesi and Francesco Colignon, Galeria nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma […] (Rome,
Francesco Colignon: 1657). Etching, 19 × 15.9 cm (plate). Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet,
inv. no. RP-P-OB-35.909
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
180 Maloney

suggests that Annibale has captured the lost beauty of the ancient Greek
paintings which had survived only in the form of ancient ekphrases. One
could argue that here Bellori is once again making the case for visual repro-
ductions over written ekphrases, because as a painter Annibale could resur-
rect the glory of ancient painting in a way that a writer could only describe.
Indeed, many of Annibale’s compositions appear to be based on ancient
ekphrases.70 For example, the Polyphemus and Galatea derives from Philos-
tratus’ description in the Imagines.71 Annibale recreated the ancient fable by
modeling Polyphemus’ torso on the Belvedere Torso, and alluding overall to
Raphael’s Galatea at the Villa Farnesina, two of the best examples of ancient
and modern art. In translating Philostratus’ narrative back into a visual work,
Annibale made it possible for modern viewers to study once again the works
of ancient masters.
The format in which Bellori’s first ‘modern’ ekphrastic text was published,
and how that text interacts with the printed reproductions, also reveals
Bellori’s approach to ekphrasis. While Cesi’s prints were published as full-sized
folio pages, Bellori’s text appeared as a smaller booklet. In early modern Rome,
suites of prints were often sold unbound, allowing collectors to bind them
according to their preferences. Bellori’s text may have been sold separately
from the prints.72 By publishing a booklet separate from Carlo Cesi’s engrav-
ings, Collignon made it easy for readers to place image and text side-by-side to
verify Bellori’s description against Cesi’s images. A reader could also examine
one of Cesi’s prints, unobstructed from any kind of text, then turn to Bellori’s
interpretation in the Argomento without flipping back and forth between the
pages. Better yet, visitors to Palazzo Farnese could easily bring Bellori’s book-
let with them to the gallery, moving throughout the room while referring to
Bellori’s text as a guide. This format makes Bellori’s words subservient to the
images, instead of substitutes for them. By publishing a separate booklet,
Bellori’s entire allegorical interpretation of the gallery also becomes remove-
able, both physically and mentally. One could argue that Bellori’s text acts as
an interpretive frame for the prints. But like many frames, it is removable.

70 Dempsey, “‘Et Nos Cedamus Amori’” 371.

71 Philostratus, Philostratus, Imagines: Callistratus, Descriptions, Loeb Classical Library 256,
trans. A. Fairbanks (New York: 1931) 212–215.
72 A copy of the prints bound together with the booklet is held in the British Museum,
though I have not yet been able to examine it in person. According to the online catalogue
description, Bellori’s booklet is bound at the beginning of the volume on five folio sheets.
British Museum, London, Accession number A,31.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 181

However, I would also argue that Cesi’s prints fall short of their aim to repro-
duce the experience of seeing the paintings in the gallery. In his suite of prints,
Cesi reproduces many of the quadri riportati as if they had been ripped out of
the frame, a frame that Bellori praises highly in his text, and gives little infor-
mation about their location in the gallery or relative scale.73 While the prints
capture the individual disegni within Annibale’s gallery, they do little to cap-
ture the effect of looking. Viewers looking at Cesi’s prints lose the sense of the
gallery’s ‘stupendous variety’, praised by Bellori in his Argomento. Bellori’s deci-
sion to publish a second suite of reproductive prints in 1674 suggests that he,
too, was unsatisfied with Cesi’s etchings.

2 Bellori’s Vita of Annibale Carracci and Pietro Aquila’s Galeriae

Farnesianae icones of 1674

Bellori clearly recognized the shortcomings of Cesi’s prints, and together

with Carlo Maratti, he later sponsored a second suite of prints recording the
Galleria Farnese, Pietro Aquila’s 1674 Galeriae Farnesianae icones. The new
suite, supplied with short Latin inscriptions by Bellori, was designed partially
to address the faults in Cesi’s prints. As the frontispiece announces, these new
prints are meant truly to emulate the expressive color and ornament of the
Galleria Farnese with monochromatic prints [Fig. 4.7]. This second suite was
published a mere two years after Bellori’s Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti
moderni, which included Bellori’s expanded description of the Galleria Farnese
within the “Life of Annibale Carracci”. Parts of the description in the Vite are
nearly identical to the text in the Argomento, including the opening and clos-
ing explanations of the theme of the gallery. However, the unillustrated Vite
also includes longer descriptions of the individual scenes within the gallery.
Therefore, readers of the Vite could apply Bellori’s interpretation to the new
series of prints.
Even in the Vite, Bellori maintained that careful looking is more beneficial
than verbal description. Bellori placed his description of the Galleria Farnese
after his description of the Camerino Farnese, the other room painted by
Annibale Carracci in the Palazzo Farnese in 1595.74 At the end of his discussion

73 Hansmann, “Con modo nuovo li descrive” 227.

74 Pietro Aquila would also reproduce this room in a series of etchings; see Aquila, Imagines
Farnesiani Cubiculi cum ipsarum monocromatibus et ornamentis (Rome, Giovanni
Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1670–1692).
182 Maloney

figure 4.7 Pietro Aquila, “Title Page,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […]
(Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 45.9 × 71.3 cm. Melbourne,
National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P123-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

of the Camerino, Bellori warns the viewer not to rush when examining
Annibale’s works. He writes:

But before passing from the images in this chamber to the others in the
Gallery, we must caution that their form requires an attentive and keen-
witted viewer, whose judgement resides not in sight but in intellect. Such
a one will surely not be satisfied to take in at a glance all that he sees,
rather he will dwell on understanding the mute eloquence of the colors,
for painting has such power that it does not stop at the eyes as if confined
to them, but diffuses in the mind upon contemplation.75

75 Bellori, Lives 82. Bellori, Le Vite 56: ‘Ma avanti di passare piú oltre dall’mmagini di questa
camera all’altre della Galeria, dobbiamo avvertire che la loro forma richiede spettatore
attento ed ingegnoso, il cui giudicio non risiesa nella vista ma nell’intelletto. Questi al certo
non resterà sodisfatto di comprendere in una occhiata tutto quello che vede, anzi dimor-
erà nell’intendere la muta eloquenza de’ colori, essendo la pittura di tal forza che non si
arresta ne gli ochi come in suoi confine, ma si diffonde nella menta alla contemplazione’.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 183

figure 4.8 Carlo Maratti, etched by Pietro Aquila, “Annibale Carracci Introduces Painting
to Apollo and Minerva,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […]
(Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 46 × 64.1 cm, trimmed. New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 51.501.2593
Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Here Bellori instructs the reader how to look at the works of Annibale. The
viewer cannot and should not be satisfied with a sweeping overview of the gal-
lery. In fact, it can be argued that Bellori intended the second suite of Galleria
Farnese to model this mode of careful looking and contemplation.
The new series of prints begins with an allegorical print designed by Carlo
Maratti, in which Annibale Carracci guides the personification of Painting out
of the darkness of a Roman grotto, signified by the Tiber River and She-Wolf
[Fig. 4.8]. The grotto itself likely alludes to ancient structures like the Domus
Aurea, where Raphael and Annibale had studied ancient grotesques.76
Annibale, accompanied by Genius bearing a torch, guides Painting toward
Apollo and Minerva, the gods of art and wisdom. I would argue that this print
acts as a visual form of epideictic, or laudatory, oratory, praising Annibale as

76 For more on Bellori, Annibale and ancient painting see Joyce H., “From Darkness to Light:
Annibale Carracci, Bellori, and Ancient Painting”, in Bell J. (ed), Art History in the Age of
Bellori (Cambridge: 2002) 170–188.
184 Maloney

the restorer of art. It summarizes all that Bellori had set out to achieve in his
Vite, restoring Annibale’s reputation and urging artists to follow his example by
studying ancient art.
Aquila’s prints follow Maratti’s frontispiece. Unlike Cesi, Aquila fully incor-
porated the quadri riportati of the Galleria Farnese into their respective
frameworks.77 Aquila divided the gallery into a series of twenty-one prints. The
largest quadri riportati, including the central Bacchanalia, Paris receiving the
Golden Apple, and Pan and Diana, Andromeda, and Perseus and Medusa, are
still presented alone. However, Aquila has included the frames that surround
each picture, thereby acknowledging their connection to the gallery. Aquila
divided the frieze across four prints. In each section he includes every element
of the frieze along with the struggling cupids in the ceiling corners. The ensem-
bles at either end of the gallery, which include the two Polyphemus scenes, are
also represented in their entirety, with the pairs of cupids visible as well. Aquila
also included the decoration on the walls of the Galleria Farnese, including the
ancient sculptures in their niches and the ignudi surrounding the door frames.
Finally, Aquila created a separate print for the paired cupids, similar to Cesi’s
cupids, along with a print that groups together busts and smaller decorative
elements within the gallery.
Several stylistic qualities in Aquila’s prints encourage the viewer to engage
in close looking. They are much more strongly modelled than Cesi’s. The sub-
tle modulation of light and dark emulates the sculptural quality of Annibale’s
painting. Aquila pays careful attention to the use of light in the gallery, even
going so far as to record the shadow cast by the cornice from below. No textual
introduction accompanies his prints, in contradistinction to the Argomento of
1657. Instead, for each of the major fables, Bellori wrote short Latin inscriptions
describing the scenes. Bellori’s captions are also relatively compact, unlike the
images, and this encourages the viewer to look more than read, and to com-
pare the caption to what is being shown.
We can model this method of close looking on a few examples, beginning
with the painting of Polyphemus and Galatea [Fig. 4.9]. The picture is sur-
rounded by ignudi and medallions, just as in the gallery, and the paired putti
are partially visible along the blurred edges of the work, perhaps mimicking

77 Hansmann, 228. See also Pierguidi, S. “Bellori, Le ‘macchine’ di età Barocca e le stampi”, in
Bacchi A. – Barbero L.M. (eds.), Studi in onore di Stefano Tumidei (Bologna: 2016) 289–297.
Excellent digital reproductions of Aquila’s prints are available on the National Gallery of
Victoria’s website, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/, accessed 04/22/2020.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 185

figure 4.9 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Polyphemus and Galatea; Apollo’s
abduction of Hyacinth,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome,
Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 45.8 × 71.3 cm. Melbourne, National
Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P126-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

the way objects in our peripheral vision lose clarity. Bellori provides a Latin
caption below that reads:

Ardet amans, scopuloque sedens POLYPHEMVS acuto

Ad numerum inflatis calamis, dat sibila cantu;
Concomitata choro gaudet GALATEA sub antro,
Et latitans rauci suspiria ridet amantis.

Burning with love, Polyphemus sits on a rocky crag;

Reeds full-blown, he hisses with song;
Accompanied by a chorus, Galatea rejoices below the cave,
And giving a wide birth, laughs at the sighs of the hoarse-sounding lover.

Bellori’s inscription works with the print to activate the viewer’s imagina-
tion and incite his or her sense of hearing: the quatrain evokes the sound of
 186 Maloney

figure 4.10 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne,” in Pietro Aquila,
Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 45.9 ×
71.2 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P137-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Polyphemus’s rustic pan-pipes, his sighs, hissing song, and hoarse laugh. It
may be that Bellori is drawing attention to the ‘mute eloquence’ of Annibale’s
paintings. Here picture and poetry unite to bring Annibale’s work to life for the
viewer.
The Triumph of Bacchus most beautifully demonstrates Aquila’s skill as an
engraver and as a translator of the tone and value of Annibale’s composition in
print [Fig. 4.10]. Placing the image within its frame, Aquila captures the modu-
lations of shade and colour value that were lacking in Cesi’s prints. The inscrip-
tion for the Triumph of Bacchus is divided into three couplets, spread out along
the bottom of the frame:

Bacchantum thyasis ibat comitatis IACCHUS

Victor ab Eoo rediens, Oriente subacto;

Desertam Theseo complexus littore GNOSSIN

Coniugio iunxit sociam, currusque, triumphique
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 187

Ut semper niteat, sponseo de fronte coronam

Sumpsit, et oethereis fulgentibus intulit astris.

Accompanied by the Bacchantes’ dances, Iacchus was riding forth,

The victor returning by the morning-star, the East having been conquered.

Having embraced the woman of Gnosus, deserted by Theseus on the shore,

He bound her in marriage as sharer of both the chariot and the triumph.

That it might shine forever, he took the crown from the spousal brow
And set it with glittering celestial stars.78

While Bellori evoked the sense of hearing in his caption for the image of
Polyphemus playing his pipes, in this poem Bellori focuses on the narrative
power of Annibale’s painting. The poem provides the origin story for the union
of Bacchus and Ariadne, announcing that Ariadne had been abandoned by
her lover Theseus on the shore of Naxos. Aside from leaving more room for the
image, by spreading the couplets along the bottom of the frame he compels the
viewer to read the picture from left to right: after seeing Bacchus and Ariadne
enthroned in their chariots, one then takes in the musical revellers and finally
settles upon the drunken Silenus and the slatternly Venus-like nymph with
whom he exchanges glances. Once again, the format of the print guides the
viewers’ eyes, encouraging him or her to peruse the painting.
Aquila’s method of dividing the gallery’s parts into separate prints also
models the best practices of viewing. In the four prints reproducing the frieze,
Aquila evokes the rest of the gallery by blurring the edges of the frieze [Fig. 4.11].
In doing so, he implies that the painting continues beyond its delimiting bor-
ders. The blurred edge encourages the viewer to attach the print to the next
one in the series – to find the adjoining edge. Bellori’s captions for these prints
are richly condensed Latin descriptions of the subject matter. They evoke the
characters’ emotions, but do so in a shorthand that relies for its full effect on
the more detailed and formally accurate information supplied by the print
after the painted frieze.
Finally, Aquila assures the viewer that his prints are accurate reproductions
of the entire gallery. Aquila also recorded the walls of the Farnese Gallery, as
well as the ancient sculptures with which the frescoes were meant to interact,
showing them in their niches and alongside some of the smaller panels and

78 Many thanks to Walter Melion and Rachel Patt for assisting with Latin translations.
 188 Maloney

figure 4.11 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Hero and Leander; Hercules and Iole; Pan and
Syrinx,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi:
1674). Etching, 45.9 × 71.2 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P135-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

busts [Fig. 4.12–4.13]. With the help of these details, the viewer can reconstruct
the entire gallery, not just the ceiling. Providing separate views of the sculp-
tures and smaller panels also recalls the practice of depicting related groups
of archaeological artifacts in a single print that Bellori’s collaborator Pietro
Santi Bartoli used in several publications [Fig. 4.14].79 Aquila calls attention to
the ancient sculptures using a similar format to place them. Finally, the print
with the section of wall that includes Domenichino’s Virgin and the Unicorn
incorporates a scale of palmi; this device testifies to the archaeological impulse
accurately record the dimensions of the gallery for future viewers [Fig. 4.15].
The scale assures them that the reproductions have been based on methodical
and accurate study of the original gallery.
For Bellori, the prints were also a visual representation of his earlier
Argomento. While in the actual Galleria Farnese, the four pairs of Cupids
are encompassed by the ceiling’s plethora of other figures, in both Cesi’s and
Aquila’s prints, the Cupids are isolated and placed on an equal playing field,
namely, the printed page [Fig. 4.16]. Comparably, they are actually larger in
printed form than other figures in the gallery, which further underscores their
centrality to Bellori’s interpretation of the ceiling. In Cesi’s series the Cupids

79 One example of this technique can be found in Santi Bartoli Pietro, Gli antichi sepolcri,
overo, Mausolei Romani, et Etruschi, trouati in Roma & in altri luoghi celebri: nelli quali si
contengono molte erudite memorie (Rome, Antonio de’ Rossi: 1697).
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 189

figure 4.12 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Detail of one of the walls in the
Farnese Gallery,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian
Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 71.4 × 45.9 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery
of Victoria, inv. no. P144-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
190 Maloney

figure 4.13 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Panels and sculptures from the Farnese
Gallery,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian
Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching, 71.2 × 46.0 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery
of Victoria, inv. no. P146-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 191

figure 4.14 Pietro Santi Bartoli, “Funerary vessels of clay and glass found in the tombs of
Villa Corsina outside of the Porta of S. Pancratio,” in Pietro Santi Bartoli, Gli
antichi sepolcri, overo, Mausolei Romani, et Etruschi, trouati in Roma & in altri
luoghi celebri: nelli quali si contengono molte erudite memorie (Rome, Antonio
de’ Rossi: 1697). Etching
Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gli
_antichi_sepolcri,_ovvero,_Mausolei_romani_ed_etruschi_trovati_in_Roma
_ed_in_altri_luoghi_celebri_-_nelli_quali_si_contengono_molte_erudite
_memorie_(1767)_(14598162817).jpg
192 Maloney

figure 4.15 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, “Virgin with
the unicorn and surrounding wall decoration,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae
Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi: 1674). Etching,
71.4 × 46.0 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P143-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
 THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 193

figure 4.16 Pietro Aquila, after Annibale Carracci, “Four corner-pieces showing Eros and Anteros
fighting,” in Pietro Aquila, Galeriae Farnesianae icones […] (Rome, Gian Giacomo de’ Rossi:
1674). Etching, 45.9 × 71.2 cm. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, inv. no. P139-1991
Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

are unlabelled and spread out over two pages, placed against a dark rectangu-
lar ground with a white ground line that in no way conveys their position in
the corners of the ceiling. However, in Aquila’s prints they are represented both
within the apparatus of the frame and together on a separate page with the
Latin caption ‘Caelestis ac vulgaris amoris imagines quator in totidem asidis
angulis pictae a quibus pendent allegoriae et argumenta fabularum’ (Heavenly
and Profane images of Loves in the four corners of the painting, upon which
the arguments of the allegory and fables depend). Anyone familiar with either
Bellori’s Argomento booklet or his ekphrasis of the Gallery in Annibale’s Vite
would be able to expand upon the caption. Here the Cupids are placed against
a blank expanse, and the fictive balustrades on which they struggle have
194 Maloney

been cropped to resemble pedestals. This print acts as a visual shorthand for
Bellori’s ekphrasis, presenting the four pairs of cupids as the hermeneutic keys
for unlocking the meaning of the ceiling.

3 Conclusion

The success that Bellori found with Pietro Aquila’s suite of prints carried over
into other projects. In 1693 Bellori provided captions for Nicolas Dorigny’s suite
of eleven plates after Raphael’s Loggia of Psyche, entitled Psyches et Amoris
nutptiæ ac fabula a Raphaele Sancto Urbinate […].80 This series of prints acts
as the companion to Aquila’s Galleria Farnese prints by further supporting
Bellori’s argument that Raphael and Annibale restored the glory of ancient
painting in modern times. The plates in this publication follow the same format
as Pietro Aquila’s etchings, printed on large folios with Bellori’s captions lining
the bottom of the image. Bellori also includes an Argumentum fabulae under
the pendentive in which Venus commands Cupid to punish Psyche [Fig. 4.17].81
For the central images painted on fictive tapestries in the loggia, The Council of
the Gods and The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, Bellori tailors his descriptions
to numbers placed over various figures in the image [Figs. 4.18–4.19]. The prints
allow the viewer to see the frescoes with new eyes, focusing on details lost in
the ‘stupendous variety’ of the ceilings. Bellori’s brief ekphrases provide just
enough direction to viewers to teach them how to become ‘attentive and keen-
witted observers, whose judgement resides not in sight but in intellect’, as he
stated in his biography of Annibale. In the end, Bellori’s silent contemplation
of these two great masters ensures that his words do not overpower or outlive
the masterpieces that they are meant to praise.

80 Dorigny N. – Bellori, G.P., Psyches Et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula a Raphaele Sanctio Vrbinate
Romae in Farnesianis hortis transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem ac laudem colorum
luminibus expressa (Rome, Domenico de’ Rossi: 1693). I have consulted the copy available
at the Rose Library at Emory University, 12 plates, 51 × 76 cm (inv. no. FOLIO 2011 126).
Excellent digital photographs of the prints are available on the website of the Victoria &
Albert Museum, https://www.vam.ac.uk/ (Accessed 4/27/20).
81 The argument reads: ‘Venus odio prosequens Psychen Regiam puellam quod suo post-
habito numine, àcuntis pro Dea haberetur, eius nuptijs cum Cupidine filio insenso animo
adversatur. Quare infelix puella imperio Veneris, multis periculis aditis, causam apud
Iovem agente Cupidine adversus Matrem, per Mercurium, Psyche in coelum sertur, ac
nectaris potu sit immortalis. Vocati Dij nuptiali convivio discumbunt’.
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 195

figure 4.17 Nicolas Dorigny, After Raphael, “Venus irâ incensa adversus Psyche,” in Nicolas
Dorigny, Psyches Et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula a Raphaele Sanctio Vrbinate
Romae in Farnesianis hortis transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem ac laudem
colorum luminibus expressa (Rome, Domenico de’ Rossi: 1693). Etching, 50 ×
76 cm. London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. DYCE.253
Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

figure 4.18 Nicolas Dorigny, After Raphael, “Cupidinis Ee Psyches nuptialis caena,” in
Nicolas Dorigny, Psyches Et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula a Raphaele Sanctio
Vrbinate Romae in Farnesianis hortis transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem
ac laudem colorum luminibus expressa (Rome, Domenico de’ Rossi: 1693).
Etching, 50 × 76 cm. London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. DYCE.2540
Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
196 Maloney

figure 4.19 Nicolas Dorigny, After Raphael, “Deorum Concilium,” in Nicolas Dorigny,
Psyches Et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula a Raphaele Sanctio Vrbinate Romae in
Farnesianis hortis transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem ac laudem colorum
luminibus expressa (Rome, Domenico de’ Rossi: 1693). Etching, 50 × 76 cm.
London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. DYCE.2539
Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Select Bibliography

Aquila Pietro, Galeriae Farnesianæ icones Romae in aedibvs sereniss·Dvcis Parmensis

ab Annibale Carracio ad vetervm aemvlationæ posterorvmq admirationæ coloribvs
expressae cvm ipsarvm monocromatibvs et ornamentis a Petro Aqvila delineatæ
incisæ (Rome, Giangiacomo de’ Rossi: 1674).
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino nel
Camere del Palazzo Vaticano, di Gio. Pietro Bellori alla Santità di Nostro Signore Papa
Innocenzo Duodecimo (Rome, Nella Stamparia di Gio: Giacomo Komarek Boëmo
alla Fontana di Trevi, 1695).
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed. Evelina Borea
(Turin: 1976).
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed.
Hellmut Wohl, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (New York: 2005).
Bellori Giovanni Pietro and Santi Bartoli Pietro Santi Bartoli, Le Pitture antiche del
sepolcro de Nasonii nella via Flaminia (Rome, Per Gio: Battista Bussotti: 1680).
Borea E., “Giovan Pietro Bellori e la ‘Commodità delle stampe’,” in Cropper E. –
Perini G. – Solinas F. (eds.), Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-duke
THE EDGE OF EKPHRASIS: BELLORI AND REPRODUCTIVE PRINTMAKING 197

Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa
Spelman, Florence, 1990 (Bologna: 1992).
Cesi Carlo, Galeria nel Palazzo Farnese in Roma dipinta da Annibale Caracci, intagliata
da Carlo Cesio (Rome, Francesco Colignon: 1657).
Daly Davis M., “Giovan Pietro Bellori and the ‘Nota delli musei, librerie, galerie, et orna-
menti di statue e pitture ne’ palazzi, nelle case, e ne’ giardini di Roma’ (1664): Modern
Libraries and Ancient Painting in Seicento Rome”, Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte
68, 2 (2005).
Dempsey C., “‘Et Nos Cedamus Amori’: Observations on the Farnese Gallery”, The Art
Bulletin 50, 4 (1968) 363–74.
Donahue K., “‘The Ingenious Bellori’: A Biographic Study,” Marsyas (1945) 107–138.
Hansmann M., “Con modo nuovo li descrive: Bellori’s Descriptive Method,” in Bell J. (ed),
Art History in the Age of Bellori (Cambridge: 2002) 224–238.
Hopkins R., “Reproductive Prints as Aesthetic Surrogates,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 73, 1 (2015).
Kennedy D. – Meek R., “Introduction,” in Kennedy D. – Meek R. (eds.), Ekphrastic
Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (Man­
chester: 2019).
Perini G., “L’arte di descrivere: La tecnica dell’ecfrasi in Malvasia d Bellori.” I Tatti Studies
in the Italian Renaissance 3 (1989): 193–195.
Stefano Pierguidi S., “Bellori, Le ‘macchine’ di età Barocca e le stampi”, in Bacchi A. –
Barbero L.M. (eds.), Studi in onore di Stefano Tumidei (Bologna: 2016) 289–297.
 part 2
Poem, Image, Ekphrasis

∵
 chapter 5

Mythography as Ekphrasis: Ludovico Lazzarelli’s

De gentilium deorum imaginibus, and the Poetics
of Humanism
Karl Enenkel

What does a card game have to do with poetics, didactic poetry with ekph-
rasis, and mythography with the self-definition of humanism? The poem De
gentilium deorum imaginibus,1 authored by the 15th-century Italian humanist
Ludovico Lazzarelli, is an intriguing text because it sheds light on the poetics,
the construction of mythography, and the role ekphrasis played in the trans-
mission of knowledge of 15th-century Italian humanism. Lazzarelli’s poem
also deserves special interest because it is composed across the intersections
of different traditions and media: the mythographical treatises from late antiq-
uity and the Middle Ages until Boccaccio’s Genealogiae deorum gentilium; the
Latin dialogue (with elaborate mise-en-scène); substantial didactic poetry
(Lehrgedicht), especially on astronomy (Aratus and Manilius); the illustrated
book; the learned Latin commentary of the Middle Ages; classical panegyrical
poetry after the example of Virgil and Claudian; and, most importantly, Latin
ekphrastic poetry. The result of all these generic ingredients, media perspec-
tives, and lines of traditions is an intriguing melting pot that is unique among
its kind; the basic element of its textual organization, however, is ekphrasis: in
the introduction Lazzarelli presents his poems a kind of didactic commentary

1 For the Latin text of the work, see the excellent edition by C. Corfiati (Messina: 2006) (Biblioteca
umanistica 6); the Latin texts quoted in this contribution are taken from this edition. An ear-
lier edition by W.J. O’Neal (A Critical Edition of De gentilium deorum imaginibus by Ludovico
Lazzarelli. First Edited Text with Introduction by W.J. O’Neal (Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter:
1997)) suffers from a number of mistakes and imperfections; cf. the comment by Corfiati, in
the introduction to her edition. On the work cf. Meloni M., “Ludovico Lazzarelli umanista
settempedano e il ‘De gentilium deorum imaginibus’”, Studia picena 66 (2001) 91–173; for an
assessment of Lazzarelli’s De gentilium deorum imaginibus as a didactic poem in the con-
text of the early modern genre of the Lehrgedicht cf. my “Ludovico Lazzarelli’s De gentilium
deorum imaginibus als frühneuzeitliches Lehrgedicht” (forthcoming). On Lazzarelli and
ek­phrasis, cf. also Corfiati’s “Introduzione”, in: Lazzarelli, De gentilium deorum imaginibus,
ed. Corfiati XXIII–XXX.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

202 Enenkel

to a set of playing cards, the so-called tarocchi of Andrea Mantegna.2 Each

chapter of Lazzarelli’s work (in two books) represents an ekphrasis of one play-
ing card, e.g. chapter I, 6, of card no. 47 with the image of Saturnus [Fig. 5.7];
and chapter I, 9, of card no. 44 with the image of Sol [Fig. 5.1].
Ludovico Lazzarelli was born in February of the year 1447 in the small town
of Sanseverino in the Italian region Marche,3 the son of a medical doctor and

2 On the “Mantegna tarocchi” cf., inter alia, Dorsini C., I Tarocchi del Mantegna (Milano: 2017);
Debenetti D., Soothsaying Tarot and the Mantegna Revealed (2018); Lippincott K. “Mantegna’s
Tarocchi”, Print Quarterly 3 (1986) 357–360; Berti G. – Vitali A. (eds.), Le arte di corte. I Tarocchi.
Gioco e magia alla corte degli Estensi (Bologna: 1987); Cieri Via C., “I Tarocchi cosidetti del
Mantegna: Origine, significato e fortuna di un ciclo di immagini”, in Berti G. – Vitali A. (eds.),
Le arte di corte 49–77; Giovannoni G., Mantova e i Tarocchi del Mantegna (Mantua: 1987),
exh. cat. Mantua, Casa del Mantegna; Ambesi A.C., “I Tarocchi del Mantegna”, L’Esopo 12
(1981) 49–63; Westfehling U., “Johann Ladenspelders Tarocchi. Die Kölner Fassung der soge-
nannten Tarock-Karten des Mantegna. Einführung und Spielanleitung”, in exh. cat. Köln,
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, “Tarocchi”. Menschenwelt und Kosmos. Ladenspelder, Dürer und die
Tarock-Karten des Mantegna (Cologne: 1988) 62 ff.; Donati L., “Le fonti iconografice di alcuni
manoscritti urbinati della Biblioteca Vaticana. Osservazioni intorno ai cosidetti ‘Tarocchi
di Mantegna’”, La Bibliofilia 60 (1958) 48–129; Brockhaus H., “Ein Edles Geduldsspiel: Die
Leitung der Welt oder die Himmelsleiter. Die sogenannten Tarocks Mantegnas vom Jahre
1459–60”, in Miscellanea di storia dell’arte in onore di Igino Benvenuto Supino (Florenz:
1933) 397–416; Kaplan S.R., The Encyclopedia of Tarot (New York: 1978) 35–47; Hoffmann D.,
Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte der Spielkarte (1995) 62–63; Huson P., Mystical Origins of the
Tarot: From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage (Rochester, Vermont: 2004) 48–49; Richter E.H.,
“The Tarocchi Prints”, The Print Collector’s Quarterly 6 (1916) 37–88; Hind A.M., Early Italian
Engraving. A Critical catalogue with Complete Reproduction of all the Prints described, part I
(New York – London: 1938; reprint 1978) 221–240; Corfiati’s “Introduzione”, in: Lazzarelli, De
gentilium deorum imaginibus, ed. Corfiati X–XX; exhibition catalogue Pavia, Museo Civico,
I Tarocchi detti del Mantegna (Pavia: 1992); Levenson A. – Oberhuber K. – Sheenan J.L., Early
Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art (Washington 1973) 81–157; Willshire W.H.,
A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and other Cards in the British Museum (London: 1876)
65–73.
3 For Lazzarelli’s biography cf. Arbizzoni G., “Lazzarelli, Ludovico”, in. Dizionario Biografico
degli Italiani (DBI), vol. 65 (2005), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ludovico-lazzarelli_
(Dizionario-Biografico)/; and Hanegraaff W.J., “Lazzarelli’s Early Years”, and “Poetic Maturity”,
in Hanegraaff W.J. – Bouthoorn R.M. (eds.), Ludovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500), The Hermetic
Writings and Related Documents (Tempe, Arizona: 2005) 8–12, and 12–16; Saci M.P., Ludovico
Lazzarelli: Da Elicona a Sion (Rome: 1999); Tenerelli N., Ludovico Lazzarelli e il rinascimento
filosofico italiano (Bari: 1991); Aleandri V.E., “La famiglia Lazzarelli di San Severino”, Giornale
eraldico e genealogico-diplomatico 3 (1984) 272–279. An important source of Ludovico
Lazzarelli’s life is the contemporary Latin biography composed by his brother Filippo:
Lazzarelli Philippus, Vita Lodovici Lazarelli Septempedani poetae laureati per Philippum fra-
trem ad Angelum Colotium (Aesium: 1765); this hagiographic biography is edited with an
English translation in Hanegraaff W.J. – Bouthoorn R.M. (eds.), Ludovico Lazzarelli (1447–
1500), The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Tempe, Arizona: 2005) 284–309.
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 203

figure 5.1 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 47: “Sol”

Public domain
204 Enenkel

an aristocratic lady from Campli, a village in the vicinity of Teramo (in the
modern province of Abruzzi).4 Lazzarelli’s father died only two years after
the birth of his son, and by consequence the family moved to Campli, where
the education of the boy took place. His first teacher in Campli was a certain
Cristoforo da Montone. Haanegraff claims that Lazzarelli received a typi-
cal humanist education,5 but that is not sure. However, 1462–1464 Lazzarelli
worked in Atri, in the service of condottiere Matteo di Capua, as teacher of his
eldest son Bernardino di Capua.6 When Matteo lost power in 1464, Lazzarelli
left his court. At the age of seventeen, he got in touch for the first time with the
advanced humanism of the Roman Academy. Giannantonio Campano (1429–
1477), a member of the Roman Academy, was appointed bishop of Teramo in
1463 and made Lazzarelli teacher of his younger brother, a position he prob-
ably held for about two years (1464–1466). Filippo Lazzarelli claimed in his
hagiographical biography that the years 1464–1466 were important because
Ludovico would have been instructed in humanist poetry, oratory and philos-
ophy by Campano. Partly, this may have been true; nevertheless, one should
not forget that Lazzarelli’s main task was to educate Campano’s younger fam-
ily member. Saci claimed that Lazzarelli – via Campano – came already then
in contact with the corpus Hermeticum.7 However, this is very unlikely.8 After
that, Lazzarelli moved to the Veneto (Venice and Padua) in order to complete
his scholarly education and probably also in search of a new position. He
was, among other things, a pupil of the humanist Giorgio Merula. Already in
Teramo Lazzarelli had composed Latin poetry, and in doing so he was probably
further stimulated by Merula. In 1468, when Emperor Frederick III visited Italy,
he passed Pordenone; Lazzarelli was admitted to speak in front of the Emperor,
and he recited an oration entitled De laudibus poesis et de dignitate poetica;
The Emperor was impressed by that speech and crowned Lazzarelli poet lau-
reate in Nov. 1468.9 After his coronation Lazzarelli composed the first version
of De gentilium deorum imaginibus, probably in Venice.10 The first version of

4 Hanegraaff, “Lazzarelli’s Early Years” 8–9.

5 Ibidem 9.
6 Ibidem 10.
7 Saci, Ludovico Lazzarelli 30.
8 Cf. Hanegraaff, “Lazzarelli’s Early Years” 11.
9 Ibidem 13–14.
10 Hanegraaff (ibidem 14) says that Lazzarelli wrote De gentilium deorum imaginibus in
Venice in 1468–1469, Arbizzoni does not give a specific indication of time (and place).
Filippo Lazzarelli mentiones that his brother wrote the work after his return to Venice,
and he suggests he did so immediately after the coronation in Pordeneone Nov. 30th,
1468.
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 205

the poem must have been near completion in 1471, when he decided to dedi-
cate it to Borso d’Este who had just been appointed Duke of Este. However,
Borso died already in August of the same year; Lazzarelli searched for a new
addressee, and continued to work on the poem. The second version of it was
certainly completed by 1473, when Lazzarelli, in search of a new patron, moved
to Rome. He had hoped that he would be supported by the Venetian patrician
Lorenzo Zane, the new patriarch of Antioch, but he was bitterly disappointed.
Nevertheless, he stayed in Rome and tried to establish himself as a Latin poet,
especially of didactic poetry. Among other things, he authored a Lehrgedicht in
emulation of Ovid’s Fasti, the Fasti Christianae religionis, which he dedicated
finally to the king of Naples, Ferrante of Aragon [Fig. 5.2].
The material base of Lazzarelli’s ekphrastic poem consisted of printed
playing cards produced in the technique of (early) copper engraving; unlike
what their title tarocchi di Mantegna suggests, the cards were not meant for
playing tarot in its proper sense, and the images were not invented by Andrea
Mantegna but by an anonymous artist who worked in Northern Italy around
1465; as the subscriptions show, the cards must have been made in or for the
region of Veneto (“Zintilomo”, Fig. 5.3A), and Lazzarelli must have bought them
during his stay there,11 i.e. in 1466 to 1468 or 1469. The card game was probably
invented for educational purposes,12 maybe in order to transmit encyclopaedic
knowledge. Its exact rules are unknown, but obviously they implied a system of
“trumps”, because in Italian the game was called “trionfi”. The cards contained
images of human society, the world, and the cosmos: the hierarchy of human
society from the beggar to the emperor (and pope), the Seven Liberal Arts, the
Seven Virtues, the Seven Planets, the nine Muses, and so on [Fig. 5.3B, Clio].
In his ekphrastic chapters, Lazzarelli does not describe all 50 cards, but
only those with the images of the gods from antiquity (= the Seven Planets),
including Apollo and the nine Muses and the personifications of Poetry and
Rhetoric. Apparently the card game was very much en vogue when De deo-
rum gentilium imaginibus was written. Lazzarelli was not particularly happy
with that. He complains that the images of the gods were ‘soiled by the hands
of the ignorant vulgus’ or ‘uneducated boys’. ‘Soiled’ is meant both in a literal
and a metaphorical sense: literally because through play the cards got dirty,
and metaphorically because, in Lazzarelli’s opinion, the players did not have
the mythological, philological, and philosophical knowledge required for the

11 Arbizzoni, “Lazzarelli”; Corfiati, “Introduzione” XVIII–XIX.

12 As is generally assumed, at least since Brockhaus, “Ein Edles Geduldsspiel”.
206 Enenkel

figure 5.2 Ludovico Lazzarelli, with the help of the muse Thalia, presents his work Fasti
Christianae religionis to Ferdinand I of Aragon (Ferrante), king of Naples.
Illumination of the dedication scene in the manuscript Yale, Beinecke 391
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 207

figure 5.3a “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 5: “Zintilomo”. Engraving, 18.5 ×

10.6 cm. London, National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald Collection,
1943.3.9510
Public domain
208 Enenkel

figure 5.3b “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 19: “Clio”. Engraving, 17.8 × 10 cm.
London, National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald Collection, 1969.6.10
Public domain
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 209

correct understanding and interpretation of the images. In the dedicatory pref-

ace of his poem, addressed to Duke Federico da Montefeltro, he says:

Nunc quas vulgus inhers et nescia turba triumphos/

Appellat tactu commaculatque rudi,/
Priscorum formas sequor et simulachras deorum:/
Pictores tabulis, nunc ego signo sonis./
Inter enim pueros dum versarentur et inter/
Indoctos visa est Pieris alma cohors (I, 1, 7–12).13

Now I deal with the images and the figures of the ancient gods;
Those who the painters depict on panels, I design now with sounds
(or: words),
Those who the ignorant and lazy vulgus calls ‘trionfi’
And soils with its rude fingers.
For the nurturing chorus of the Muses appeared before my eyes
While they dwelled among uneducated boys.

Lazzarelli regards his most important goal as being the restoration of the
mythological knowledge necessary for the understanding of the images on the
cards. In the surviving manuscripts of De deorum gentilium imaginibus, each
chapter is composed after the same ekphrastic scheme: it starts with a painted
image of the goddess (with attributes and accompanying figures), which is,
in fact, always a copy of the copper engraving of the relevant playing card.
Following the image are Lazzarelli’s explanatory verses in elegiac distichs
(usually some 80–100 lines), which contain information on a number of well-
chosen topics on the god: (1) his (correct) name(s), and, optionally, etymo-
logical, physical, and other explanations of the name; (2) his genealogy and
family relationships; (3) historical facts viz. the god’s accomplishments from
an Euhemeristic perspective; (4) the god’s (other) iconographical features, and
their explanation; (5) his power and agency; and (6) astronomical and astro-
logical aspects: the god as planet. Usually, intersections between these topics
occur in their presentation, and the sequence of the topics is not always the
same. This is probably due to a poetic quality the author tried to achieve, i.e.
varietas, a means in order to avoid boredom. For the way Lazzarelli construes
his didactic poem it is of paramount importance for him to present all catego-
ries of information in the framework of ekphrasis. He adorns each chapter with
a manuscript illumination, made after the card template. Lazzarelli’s poem

13 Ed. Corfiati, p. 3.
210 Enenkel

seems to offer a kind of comment on the images, and one gets the impression
that the comment also would offer a kind of instruction for the players.
The attractiveness of Lazzarelli’s ekphrastic construction is enhanced by the
fact that ekphrasis of a similar kind also plays an important role in the medi-
eval tradition of mythography, from late antiquity (Fabius Fulgentius, around
500) to the famous “Third Vatican Mythographer” (Mythographus tertius), who
composed his work around 1200 and has frequently been identified with a cer-
tain Albricus (or Albericus).14
Actually, Fulgentius (a Christian from North Africa but very familiar with the
pagan culture of Greco-Roman antiquity)15 had already, in his Mitologiarum
libri tres, taken as his starting point visual representations of the pagan gods.
In every section of his work (devoted to a certain god) he refers to the god’s
visual representation(s), and in doing so he uses the vocabulary of painting
(pingitur, pingunt). In Fulgentius’s case, this does not necessarily mean that
he indeed described really existing paintings with mythological topics. By
‘pingitur’ Fulgentius means in the first place something like ‘is represented’,
which includes, on the one hand, all kind of representations in various arts
and crafts (e.g. stone, wood, ivory and bronze sculptures, coins, and medals)
and, on the other hand, images of the gods that were evoked in Greco-Roman
poetry, especially in the epos. In antique poetry as well the pagan gods were
equipped with certain features and attributes. However, Fulgentius’s focus on
iconography was not caused by a kind of archaeological interest; nor did he
intend to describe individual pieces of art. His main interests were philosophy
(above all Neoplatonism, Stoicism, and Euhemerism), linguistics (etymology),
and poetics, especially allegory, which he considered to be the core business of
poetry. Being a Christian, Fulgentius was persuaded that it was a no go to take
the pagan gods in a literal sense: rather, he saved them through his allegorical
explanations as a vital part of the relevant encyclopaedic knowledge for the
ages to come, from the 6th to the 15th centuries.
In Fulgentius’s work, allegorical ekphrasis is in the first place a philosophical
endeavour: usually he construes a mixture of Platonic, Stoic, and Euhemeristic
explanations. Fulgentius considered these philosophical schools and explan-
atory models to be compatible with Christian belief. The works of the most
influential philosophers of antiquity are omnipresent in the Mitologiae: some-
times, Fulgentius quotes them by name and literally, sometimes by allusion.

14 Mythographus tertius, De diis gentium et illorum allegoriis, ed. G.H. Bode, in idem (ed.),
Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti […] (Celle: 1834) 152–256.
15 For Fulgentius’s biography cf. Fulgentius the Mythographer. Translated from the Latin
with introductions by L.G. Whitbread (Columbus, Ohio: 1971) 3–11.
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 211

Moreover, the personification of Philosophia plays an important part in the

presentation of mythological knowledge. As Fulgentius suggests in a sen-
tence in the opening section of the Mitologiae, the whole first book is spoken
by Philosophia; in this section, Philosophia’s allegorical explanations are also
immediately characterized as ekphrasis:

Saturnus Polluris filius dicitur, Opis maritus, senior, velato capite, falcem
ferens […]. Itaque quid sibi de hoc Philosophia sentiat, audiamus. Tum
illa: ‘Saturnus primus in Italia regnum obtinuit [….]’.16

The name of the son of Pollus, and the husband of Ops, is Saturn: an
elderly man with his head covered, carrying a scythe […]. Let us then
hear how Philosophy interprets this. She says thus: ‘Saturn first secured
dominion in Italy […]’.17

In Fulgentius’s mythography, the mythological figures of pagan antiquity are

interpreted as figurative speech, and this is done through another kind of figu-
rative speech, personification (personificatio; prosopopoeia). It is once more
proof of Fulgentius’s sophisticated presentation that the personificatio of
Philosophia is embedded in a subtle web of mise-en-scène which starts with
the appearance of Calliope, the Muse of rhetoric, philosophy, epic poetry, and
science, or, to be more precise, with a highly evocative ekphrastic description
of this goddess:

Hoc itaque sacrificali carmine Gorgonei fontis adspargine madidas et

praepetis ungulae rivo merulentas Pierides abstraxit. Adstiterant itaque
sirmate nebuloso tralucidae terneae viragines edera largiore circumfluae,
quarum familiaris Calliope ludibundo palmulae tactu meum vaporans
pectusculum poeticae proriginis dulcedinem sparsit; erat enim grav-
ido, ut apparebat, pectore, crine neglecto, quem margaritis praenitens
diadema constrinxerat, talo tenus bis tinctam recolligens vestem, quod
credo et itineris propter et ne meandricos tam subtilis elementi aliquate-
nus limbos aculeati herbarum vertices scinderent. Adstitit propter; erec-
tus ergo in cubitum veneratus sum verbosam viraginem […].18

16 Mitologiae, ed. R. Helm, in Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii V.C. opera (Leipzig: 1898) I, 2 (p. 17).
17 Fulgentius the Mythographer 49.
18 Mitologiae, ed. Helm, p. 8.
212 Enenkel

Thus, through this sacred song I enticed the Muses, wet with spray from
the Gorgonean fountain and drunk from the liquid brought forth by the
winged horse. The maidens had been standing in groups of three, shim-
mering in their long, gossamer-like robes, and amply begirt with ivy; and
among them was Calliope, the epic Muse, who was familiar to me: with
a playful touch of her palm branch she hit my breast, and with the drops
of her sacred water she stirred up in my poor breast the sweet itch of
poetry. By her appearance she looked distressed and heavy-hearted; her
dishevelled hair was held by a diadem gleaming with pearls as she gath-
ered up her bicolored robe to the ankle, I suppose because of her travels
and to avoid the flowing hem of such fine-woven material being torn in
any way by the prickly snags of the weeds on the road. She stood close by
me; and, rising and resting on my ellbow, I paid reverence to the queen
of eloquence […].19

In this way Fulgentius designs an impressive ekphrasis of the Muse Calliope,

the personification of rhetoric, philosophy, and epic poetry and, at the same
time, one of the pagan goddesses who are to be explained in the Mitologiae
through ekphrastic descriptions. It is this miraculous personification with
whom Fulgentius discusses the shades of his authorship, his choice of topic,
and manner of working. Moreover, the ekphrastic evocation of the Muse figures
as authorization of the Mitologiae. As becomes clear from the above-quoted
passage, she performs a true Dichterweihe immediately after her appearance,
by solemnly touching the poet with a palm branch, wet with the water of the
sacred fountain. For further support and authorization, the ekphrastic figure
brings to the stage two other personifications: Urania, the Muse of astronomy
and astrology, and the personification of philosophy, Philosophia. Urania and
Philosophia ensure that the poet will interpret the gods in a true and correct
way, and in the following it is Philosophia who speaks and performs the much-
desired allegorical ekphrases of the pagan gods.20
Lazzarelli was inspired by Fulgentius’s subtle use of ekphrasis: in fact, he
construes a very similar web of figurative speech. As Fulgentius did, so too does
Lazzarelli transmit figurative interpretation through figurative speech, and like
his Roman predecessor, he does so through an elaborate mise-en-scène with
the epiphany of personifications.21 In Lazzarelli’s case, too, a Muse in distress

19 Translation after Whitbread’s, in Fulgentius the Mythographer 43, with alterations.

20 Mitologiae, ed. Helm, p. 17.
21 For the figuration of “personification” in Early modern literature and art cf. Melion W.S. –
Ramakers B. (eds.), Personification. Embodying Meaning and Emotion (Leiden – Boston:
2016) (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 41).
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 213

appears: Clio, the Muse of history. She is heavy-hearted because in recent times
the gods of antiquity had been abandoned and neglected, and she does not
approve of the young poet Lazzarelli dedicating himself to less important
things, such as writing theatre plays. She tasks him with giving up iambic verse
and instead composing a poem on the gods of antiquity.22 In the following
chapters it is mostly the Muses who are speaking: first Clio, then Polimnia
(= Polihymnia), and above all Urania, the Muse of astronomy and astrology.
And thus it is the Muses who are presented as the inventors and performers
of the various ekphrastic chapters. Clio takes the lead: she initiates the work
and proposes its topic, as well as its dedicatee, Federico da Montefeltro, duke
of Urbino (I, 1, 19–54); she is followed by Polimnia (I, 3). After that it is Urania
who takes the word in the remaining chapters of book I (I, 4, 4–13). At the end
of book I she disappears all of a sudden (I, 13, 71–72).23 In Lazzarelli’s work,
Urania in fact takes the part of Fulgentius’s Philosophia. It may well be that
Lazzarelli took this step in order to enhance the astronomical aspects of the
pagan gods.
Ekphrasis also plays a pivotal role in the presentation of Albricus, or the
“Third Vatican Mythographer” (ca. 1200). While he does not use the figura-
tive devices of dialogue, personification, and mise-en-scène, he nevertheless
applies ekphrasis in an even more systematic way: in a number of chapters
(each chapter describes a certain god) he devotes the first paragraph solely
to the god’s outward appearance, and in the following paragraphs he inter-
prets the iconographic features allegorically, from the perspective of various
intellectual disciplines (history, poetry, astronomy and astrology, philosophy,
mathematics, medicine, etc.): in these interpretations he usually refers to the
description given in the first paragraph. In other chapters the “Third mythogra-
pher” proceeds in a linear mode of presentation: he gives a certain element of a
god’s visual appearance and equips it immediately with allegorical interpreta-
tions; then comes the next feature, also followed by an allegorical explanation,
and so on. The “Third Mythographer’s” chapter on Saturnus, for example, is
construed according to the first mode:

§1. Primum deorum Saturnum ponunt. Hunc maestum, senem, canum,

caput glauco amictu coopertum habentem, filiorum suorum voratorem
falcemque ferentem, draconem etiam flammivorum, qui caudae suae
ultima devorat, in dextra tenetem inducunt. […] §3. Hunc […] maestum
ubique describunt poetae, utpote bello victum et a regno violenter extru-
sum. Mathematici tamen rem subtilius contemplantes ideo maestum

22 I, 1 (= dedication to Federico da Montefeltro), 19–22.

23 ‘Dixit et ex oculis rapta est dea candida nostris:/ Mansit odor mansit colloquiique lepos’.
214 Enenkel

dicunt, quia stella Saturno deputata ortu suo tristitiam semper denun-
tiant. […] pluvias […] grandines […] fulmina […] ventos […] alia nocua
apportat. Addunt etiam ideo maestum esse, quia sidus eius tardissimum
est. […] §4. Senem eum depingunt, quia sicut senex est a calore iuven-
tutis destitutus et frigiditate laborat (minuitur in eis sanguis, unde et
tremunt); ita huius stella frigidissma exisitimatur. Nec mirum, quum a
sole, a quo omnis calor procedit, sit remotissima. […] Frigidus tamen a
nonnullis eo tantum, quod nocens sit, dictus est. Quod autem “frigidus”
pro “nocens” ponatur, innuit Servius. In Virgilio exemplum habes, ubi
ait: “Frigidus, o pueri, fugite hinc!/ Latet anguis in herba”.24 […] Caput
tectum habet, ut tamquam senex et frigens contra frigus se munire […]
putetur. Glauco amictu ideo, quod aquosae vel frigidae et naturae stella
eius. […]. §6. Falcem fert sive quod fructus, quos tempus producit, falce
metuntur, sive quod, ut supra diximus, primus Latinis Saturnus usum tra-
dit falcis, sive quod ad imitationem curvaminis falcium etiam tempora
omnia in se recurrunt […].25

§1. The first god, they say, is Saturnus. They present him as a gloomy,
old, bald man who has covered his head with a greenish blue gown (or:
cloak), and who devours his children; in his one hand he holds a sickle,
in his right hand is a snake that devours the end of its tail and spits fire.
[…] §3. The poets always describe him as a sad man because he was
defeated in war and violently thrown out of his kingdom. The astrologers
who analyse this in a more subtle way call him sad because the planet
named Saturnus, when it rises, always forebodes some misery (or: catas-
trophe), bringing about […] rain […], hail […], thunderstorms or other
means of harm […]. And they add that he is called “gloomy” because this
planet is the slowest. […] §4. They depict him as an old man because he
is deprived of the warmth (and energy) of young age and suffers from
cold; because old people have less blood, and this is why they tremble.
Therefore, Saturnus is regarded as the coldest of all planets […]. And this
is no wonder, because he is the most remote from the sun, which is the
source of all heat. […] Nevertheless, some scholars think that he is called
“cold” just because he causes harm. Servius at least agrees that the word
“cold” (“frigidus”) may be used in the denotation of “harmful” (“nocens”).
There is an instance in Virgil where he says: “Oh boys, run away, there is
a cold snake hidden in the grass”. […] He has his head covered, which

24 Ecloga III, 93.

25 Mythographus tertius, 1, 1–6, ed. Bode, pp. 153–155.
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 215

makes one think he is protecting himself against the cold, just like an old
man or a man who suffers from cold; he is covered with a greenish blue
gown because this planet is humid and cold […]. §6. He holds a sickle in
his hand because the fruits of time are harvested with the help of a sickle,
or because – as we said above – he taught the people of Latium the use
of the sickle, or because – in imitation of the round sickle – all time is, in
the end, returning to its origin.

Other chapters, such as the one on Venus, are construed in the second mode.
Either way, the third Mythographer’s (or Albricus’s) ekphrases are always
focussed on allegorical interpretation, and that is why the work also bears the
alternative title Allegoriae poeticae, as in the Paris edition of 1520.26 Lazzarelli,
in his description of the various gods, principally follows Albricus, first in the
sense that his ekphrases are always indissolubly intertwined with allegorical
explanations, second because he uses the same compositional devices for his
combinations of ekphrasis and allegory. In the case of Saturnus, Lazarelli, after
having related the Euhemeristic “history” of the god, first construes an ekph-
rasis of the statue the ‘ancients’ (‘veteres’, l. 45) (supposedly) erected in his
memory (I, 6, 49–54):27

Quam colerent (sc. veteres) terris simul et sculpsere figuram,

Apta fuit stellae nec minus apta viro.
Nam gravis incessu est, gelidus tristisque senecta
Rusticus aspectu pignora ore vorat,
Vertice velato, glauco quoque tectus amictu,
Angue recurvato falce oneratque manum.
Rex fuerat, nunc Tempus erit, nunc sideris astrum,
Saturnus terris plurima damna ferens (I, 6, 49–56).

The sculpture they (i.e. the ancients)28 made of him at the same time29
in order to worship him

26 Albricus, Allegoriae Poeticae […] (New York – London: 1976; reprint of the edition Paris,
Jean Petit: 1520).
27 Ed. Corfiati, p. 22.
28 Cf. O’Neill’s translation; this translation has been consulted, but has been altered here
substantially.
29 ‘The same time’ refers to the moment the ancients decided to keep Saturnus’s memory
and to worship him, first through naming a planet after him, and second by erecting a
statue of him.
216 Enenkel

On earth, represented him in a way that was as suitable for a man as

for a planet:
For the statue rendered him slow in step, cold as ice and sad with old age.
With his rustic looks he devours his children with his mouth;
With his head veiled, and covered with a greenish blue cloak,
He holds in his hand a sickle, and a snake coiling in a circle.
Once he was a king, now shall Saturnus be the personification of Time,
Now a star in heaven that causes much damage on earth.

Lazzarelli seems to proceed here like an Euhemeristic historian of religion

who tells the origin of Saturnus’s cult in Roman antiquity. Following the
Euhemeristic model he interprets Saturnus as a human being, as a mortal man
who lived for a certain period (i.e. in the Golden Age) in the Italian region
of Latium; there, he became king of Latium; there, he was the first to intro-
duce agriculture in the life of men, and as such he made the autochthonous
nomad people who were restlessly wandering around settle down in villages
and towns. After his successful and beneficial reign Saturnus died. For his great
achievements and gifts the grateful people wanted to keep his memory and to
venerate him in the future. And this is why they erected a statue of him.
Lazzarelli construes the ekphrasis of this statue as a central element and
visual proof of his historical account. The fact that he presents Saturnus’s
image as a sculpture (‘sculpsere figuram’) enhances the historical plausibility
of his account. Nevertheless, there are curious elements in his description of
antiquity’s image of Saturnus: For example, one wonders how an artist could
have rendered a person in a sculpture to be ‘slow in step’ (‘gravis incessu’), and
‘cold as ice’ (‘gelidus’). Curious is also the indication ‘covered with a greenish
blue cloak’, which seems more suitable for a painting. It is, of course, true that
ancient sculptures from stone or marble were often painted, but Lazzarelli
was not aware of this archaeological detail. Also, it is not plausible that any
ancient statue would hold two different attributes in its hand, let alone attri-
butes as different as a scythe and a snake (coiled in a circle). But it is also in
other respects that Lazzarelli’s statue does not really render the iconography of
Saturnus in Roman antiquity, i.e. a man with his head veiled and a sickle in his
hand [Fig. 5.4].30 In literature, the features of the god’s Roman icon were trans-
mitted by, for example, Virgil, in Aeneid VII, 179–180: an old man with a sickle.

30 Cf. Mastrocinque A., “Saturnus”, in Der neue Pauly 11 (2001), col. 118; idem, “Il culto
di Saturno nell’ Italia settentrionale Romana”, in idem (ed.), Culti pagani nell’ Italia
settentrionale (Trento: 1994) 97–117; Krause B.H., Jupiter Optimus Maximus Saturnus
(Mainz: 1984).
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 217

figure 5.4 Roman altar with image of Saturnus, ca. 50 AD

inconnu – User:Jean-Pol GRANDMONT (2011), CC BY 3.0, https://commons
.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26196274

The other elements of Lazzarelli’s ekphrasis are drawn from medieval mythog-
raphy, especially from Albricus’s ekphrasis quoted above31 and Boccaccio’s
Genealogiae. If one compares Lazzarelli’s with Albricus’s ekphrasis, only two
details are lacking: first, that Saturnus was bald (‘canus’), and second, that the
snake he held in his hand was spitting fire (‘dracontem flammivomum’).
It is characteristic of Lazzarelli’s type of ekphrasis that he blurs the anthro-
pomorphic image of the statue of Saturnus with Saturnus the planet, as he
indicates in the introductory line (50). As he puts it, each iconographical detail
is as relevant for the planet as it is for the man Saturnus. In the rest of the chap-
ter Lazzarelli elaborates on the allegorical explanation of his ekphrasis. In his
allegorical interpretations Lazzarelli used different perspectives: euhemeristic,
medical, astronomical, astrological, physical, and philosophical (ethical) ones,
and from these perspectives he interprets the ekphrastic features in a sense
that they become relevant both for the man and the planet Saturnus: for exam-
ple, the sickle ( falx) is relevant for the man Saturnus because it is the symbol
of agriculture, which he invented (44–45, and 68), and for the planet because

31 Mythographus tertius, 1, 1, ed. Bode, p. 153.

 218 Enenkel

figure 5.5 Elliptic orbits of the planets around the sun

its elliptic orbit [Fig. 5.5] resembled a sickle. Medieval and Renaissance sickles
had a kind of elliptic form. That Saturnus was ‘slow in step’ was relevant for the
man because anger made him immobile (63, ‘tumida immobilis ira’), and for
the planet because of the long amount of time it required for its orbital rota-
tion around the sun: as Lazzarelli has it (after the example of Fulgentius and
Albricus) this is 30 years – according to modern measurements 29 years and 166
days – with an average orbital speed of 9.68 km per hour.32 That Saturnus has
his head veiled (‘capite velato’) is due to the man, i.e. his icon in Roman times,
but it was also considered to be relevant for the planet because of its weak
radiance: ‘Sideris aspectum velato vertice signat:/ Saturni fusco lumine stella
nitet’ – ‘With his veiled head he signifies the appearance of his planet:/ The
star of Saturn is shining with a pale light’ (77–78). Indeed, one characteristic of
the planet’s outward appearance is that it has a pale yellow hue caused by the
presence of ammonia crystals in its upper atmosphere [Fig. 5.6]. The idea of
this kind of “double ekphrasis” was already expressed in Boccaccio’s ekphrastic
description of Saturnus in his Genealogiae: ‘Quod autem mestus, senex, obvo-
lutus capite tardusque et sordidus sit atque ornatus falce, et planete et homini
conveniunt omnia’ – ‘For that he is (depicted) as being sad, as an old man, with
his head enwrapped, slow and dirty and equipped with a sickle, all that suits
the planet and the man Saturnus as well’.33
Interestingly, in the course of his explanations Lazzarelli added more visual
details to his ekphrasis; for example, that Saturnus had only a thin beard on
his chin (nothing on his cheeks or his neck; 61, ‘parva […] lanugine mentum’),
had small eyes, and suffered from weak vision, so that he was always staring

32 Williams D.R., “Saturn Fact Sheet”, NASA (2018).

33 Boccaccio, Genealogiae VIII, 1, 16; cf. Corfiati’s edition 126.
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 219

figure 5.6 Saturnus in its natural colour, as photographed by orbiter Cassini in July 2008
CC BY 2.0, Image Editor, https://www.flickr.com/photos/11304375@
N07/2818891443

at the ground when walking (62); that he was extremely skinny (63, ‘macer’);
that he was always suffering from attacks of hunger (63, ‘vorax’); that he had
a dark, red complexion because of anger (63–64); that he had a skin that was
so thin that it barely covered his bones (64, ‘tenuis conteget ossa cutis’); and
so on. If one looks at these details, it becomes immediately clear that they are
not congruent with the god’s image in Roman antiquity. The figure of the old
man with a full beard was actually one of the authentic features of the Roman
icon [Figs. 5.4 and 5.7]. Nor do Lazzarelli’s ekphrastic details stem from the
mythographical manuals from Fulgentius to Boccaccio. Rather, they belong to
a combination of medical humoral pathology (as developed by Hippocrates
and Galenus and broadly applied in medieval medicine)34 and medieval native
astrology: as Lazzarelli had already remarked in the first part of his ekphrasis,

34 Cf., i.a., Arikha N., Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Passions et tempéra-
ments, histoire des humeurs) (Ecco: 2007); Nutton V., “Humoralism”, in Bynum W.F. –
Porter R. (eds.), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, vol. 1 (London a.o.:
1993) 281–291; Bein Th., “Lebensalter und Säfte. Aspekte der antik-mittelalterlichen
Humoralpathologie und ihre Reflexe in Dichtung und Kunst”, in Dubois H. –
Zink M. (eds.), Les âges de la vie au moyen âge. Actes du colloque du Département d’Etudes
Médiévales de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne et de l’Université Friedrich-Wilhelm de Bonn
(Provins, 16th–17th March 1990) (Paris: 1992) 85–105; Derschka H., Die Viersäftelehre als
Persönlichkeitstheorie. Zur Weiterentwicklung eines antiken Konzepts im 12. Jahrhundert
(Ostfildern: 2013); Seigel R.E., Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine. An Analysis of his
Doctrines and Observations on Bloodflow, Respiration, Humors and Internal Diseases (Basel
a.o.: 1968); Klibansky R. – Panofsky E. – Saxl F., Saturne et la mélancolie (Paris: 1989).
220 Enenkel

Saturnus had a cold complexion (‘gelidus’); in the second part he states that
Saturnus had the above-mentioned bodily and psychological characteristics
because he was born in the house of Aquarius and Capricornus (57, ‘Saturni
domus est Caprarius Aquarius atque’). Obviously he considered the constel-
lation of Saturnus with these zodiac signs to be responsible for diseases that
are related to a cold complexion. In humoral pathology, attacks of anger and a
weak, thin skin are explained by a cold and dry complexion.
Furthermore, it is illuminating to compare Lazzarelli’s ekphrasis of Saturnus
with the image on the playing card. Although Lazzarelli seems to have addressed
some of its features, it is clear that he has construed his ekphrasis not just as
a description of the god’s image on the card. A number of his ekphrastic ele-
ments are not visible there, and others are in contradiction to what is visible
on the card [Fig. 5.7] and on the manuscript illustration (Urb. Lat. 717), which
was a copy of the card: the Saturnus depicted on the card is not extremely
skinny, his eyes are not very small, and the image does not show that he was
slow in step or suffered from thin skin. On the contrary, the card’s Saturnus
has rather big, expressive eyes [Fig. 5.7], an aspect that is enhanced on the
manuscript illustration. Whereas Lazzarelli ascribes to Saturnus only a thin
beard on his chin, the playing card depicts him with a very long and full beard
[Fig. 5.7], and so does the illumination in the manuscript. Also, the Saturnus on
the card is not properly veiled (like a Roman priest who performs rites capite
velato), as Lazzarelli indicates, but wears some kind of bizarre helmet [Fig. 5.7].
Indications of colour of course represent a special problem because the cards
were originally printed without colour (but were sometimes hand-coloured).
For example, Lazzarelli describing Saturnus’s cloak as greenish blue is using
information he drew from literary sources, such as Albricus. In the manuscript
illustration, Saturnus’s coat is brown. Apparently Lazzarelli did not supervise
the process of illumination of Urb. Lat. 717, and, as it was common practice, the
illuminator did not read the Latin poem.
Thus, it appears that Lazzarelli’s ekphrasis was guided above all by his lit-
erary sources, in the first place the mythographers Albricus, Fulgentius, and
Boccaccio. Furthermore, Lazzarelli also had other literary sources at his dis-
posal, such as epic ekphrases, which represent a venerable tradition from
Homer and Virgil to Petrarch’s Africa. In an elaborate ekphrasis in the third
book (III, 88–266) of his famous epos, Petrarch gives a description of the pal-
ace of Syphax, king of Western Numidia, in Cirta. Scipio’s ambassador Laelius
travelled to Cirte in order to persuade Syphax to become an ally of the Romans,
and it is through the ambassador’s eyes the reader observes the artful ceilings
of the African king’s palace: in this passage, Petrarch describes the 12 zodiac
signs (III, 111–135) and especially the planets, which he identifies with the pagan
gods (III, 136–262). In this passage Petrarch turns “classical” mythography in
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 221

figure 5.7 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 47: “Saturno”. Engraving, 17.8 × 10 cm.
London, National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald Collection, 1969.6.20
Public domain
222 Enenkel

the style of Fulgentius and Albricus into poetic practice; because he gives a
complete list of descriptions his epic ekphrasis may also claim the status of a
didactic poem that teaches the iconography of the pagan gods. In his ekphrasis
as well, Petrarch blurs the image of the famous men (the poet laureate also
was an adherent of Euhemeristic interpretation) with the image of the plan-
ets. He describes a ceiling in dark blue, representing the firmament. On the
firmament the stars/planets appear, radiating golden light (painted in gold).
But interestingly, the stars have the shape of human figures: ‘Undique fulgen-
tes auro speciesque deorum/ Et forme heroum occurrunt […]’ – ‘Everywhere
appeared the figures of the gods and heroes glittering with gold’ (III, 138–139).
Obviously, Petrarch conceived the anthropomorphic figures as painted relief
sculptures (as he did with respect to the zodiac signs)35 or as frescos on stucco,
with the use of gold leaves or gold colour.36 In his poem, Lazzarelli referred to
Petrarch’s impressive ekphrasis: the first part of his iconography of Saturnus (I,
6, 51–54) is actually an aemulatio of Petrarch’s ekphrasis:

Inde autem incessu gravior tristisque senecta

Velato capite et glauco distinctus amictu
Rastra manu falcemque gerens Saturnus agresti
Rusticus aspectu natos pater ore vorabat
Flammivomusque draco caude postrema recurve
Ore tenens magnos sese torquebat in orbes (III, 143–148, ed. N. Festa).37

Then comes Saturnus with his very slow walk, sad with old age,
Characterized by his veiled head and his greenish blue cloak;
Because he holds in his hand a pickaxe and a sickle he looks like a farmer;
He, the father, devours his children with his mouth,
And a fire-spitting dragon holds his tail in its mouth, and
Coils in big circles.

The idea of Petrarch’s ekphrasis could be translated into Renaissance ceil-

ing decorations, and this was done, for example, in the audience room of the

35 The gods were sculpted as the zodiac signs were, cf. 111–112: ‘Hec supra horrificis diversa
animalia passim/ Vultibus et variis cernuntur sculpta figuris’.
36 He finishes his ekphrasis with: ‘Haec variis insculpta modis atque ordine miro […]’
(line 263).
37 Petrarca Francesco, L’Africa. Edizione critica per cura di N. Festa (Florence: 1926).
 MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 223

figure 5.8 Perugia, Collegio del Cambio, Sala d’audienze. Frescos by Pietro Perugino. Ceiling: the pagan
gods as planets (1496–1500)
wikimedia commons

Collegio del Cambio in Perugia [Fig. 5.8].38 From 1496 on Perugino worked
on the frescos of this room: the decorative paintings on the ceiling (in the
shape of a baldachin) were meant to represent the firmament, and they
were predominantly in blue and gold; in the tondos Perugino depicted the
planets – as Petrarch described them in his ekphrasis – as anthropomorphic
figures. Saturnus, for example, appears as an old bearded man on a chariot,
holding a scythe in his hand [Fig. 5.9].
A peculiar device of blurring a divine planet with its related anthropomor-
phic god is the use of chariots. Perugino, for example, used it on his images of
the pagan gods on the ceiling of the Collegio di Cambio [Fig. 5.9, Saturnus]. The
chariot was meant to represent the planet’s rotating movement; in the case of
Saturnus, the wheels of the chariot are the zodiac signs that were attached to
him, the Aquarius and the Capricornus (cf. Lazzarelli, l. 57), and the draught
animals are two dragons, which are transformed from the god’s attribute, the
snake coiled in a circle [Fig. 5.9]. Petrarch already had used this device in his

38 Cf. e.g., Lunghi E. – Fusetti S. – Virili. P., The Collegio Del Cambio in Perugia. Comments on
the Restauration (Rome: 2003; originally in Italian, 1996).
224 Enenkel

figure 5.9 Pietro Perugino. The planet Saturnus in anthropomorphic appearance on his
chariot. Perugia, Collegio di Cambio, Sala d’audienze, ceiling (1496–1500)
wikimedia commons

ekphrasis of the pagan gods in the palace of Syphax: for example, for Neptune;
Cybele, whose chariot was drawn by lions (l. 241: ‘Curribus hec agitur domita
cervice leonum’); and Mars:

Necnon funerei post hec Mavortis imago,

Curribus insistens aderat furibunda cruentis:
Hinc lupus, hinc rauce stridentes tristia Dire.
Cassis erat capiti fulgens manibusque flagellum (III, 186–189, ed. N. Festa).

Then comes the image of lethal Mars:

Furiously he stands on his bloody chariot;
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 225

On the one side he is accompanied by the wolf, on the other by the Furies
who
With their awful sound announce sad things;
On his head he wears a sparkling helmet and in his hands he holds a
horsewhip.

Lazzarelli opens his chapter on Mars with a similar image:

Interea effulgens divi armipotentis imago

Offertur numeris sponte canenda meis:
Tegmine munitus Mavors thoracis aeni,
Casside caesariem, sed gravat ense manum;
Armatus residet curru; metuendus ab alto
Ferreus et vultu bella rigente vocat.
Stat lupus et nunquam domini vestigia linquit
Atque rapax preda vivere semper avet (I, 8, 1–8).39

Meanwhile the bright image of the god of war

Offers itself, and asks to be described by my verses:
Mars wears a brazen chest protector, a helmet covers his long hair,
And in his hand he holds a sword.
In full arms he sits on his chariot; he, the greatly feared iron man, calls
to war,
From his high position and with his rigid face.
The wolf stands by his side, and never leaves the feet of his master;
He, a rapacious monster, always enjoys living on prey.40

In this case, the most important example for Lazzarelli’s ekphrasis was Petrarch’s
description of the god in the Africa. Albricus and Boccaccio do not have a sep-
arate chapter on Mars (they treat him only briefly, and in conjunction with
Venus),41 and they do not offer an ekphrastic description of his image. Of
course, Lazzarelli also had on hand the image of the playing card [Fig. 5.10],
and he may have derived the attribute of the sword from it (Petrarch’s ekph-
rasis offers a ‘horsewhip’). But in this case Lazzarelli’s description also differs
from the image on the card: e.g. Lazzarelli’s wolf stands (‘stat’) by the side of

39 Ed. Corfiati, p. 27.

40 The translation is my own; cf. O’Neal’s transl., p. 35.
41 Mythographus tertius, ed. Bode, 11, 10, pp. 234–235; Boccaccio, Genealogiae deorum gen-
tilium III, 22, 11, ed. Solomon, pp. 388–391.
226 Enenkel

figure 5.10 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 37 “Mars”. London, National Gallery
of Art
Public domain
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 227

his master, whereas on the card he is lying on the chariot and resembles more
a dog than a wolf [Fig. 5.10]. Lazzarelli’s ekphrasis has little to do with the
ancient Roman iconography of the god: usually, the god was not depicted on a
chariot, and he was not accompanied by a wolf [Fig. 5.11].
In Perugino’s inventiones of the pagan gods, the chariot is a guiding prin-
ciple (cf. the images of Mars and Venus, Figs. 5.13 and 5.14). Lazzarelli does not
always use the chariot, but he does use it in a number of cases: sometimes his
source is Petrarch’s Africa, sometimes an ancient poet, sometimes one of the
mythographers; in other cases he may have been inspired by the playing card
as well. In the case of Mars, it is likely that he emulated the Africa; in the case of
Venus, he was probably inspired by Boccaccio’s Genealogiae;42 Lazzarelli says
that a white swan is drawing Venus’s chariot:

Albus holor currumque trahit. Nam mulcet amantes

Cantus et argutae stamina tacta lyrae.
Cignus in extrema vitae iam concinit hora:
Sic et amans tamquam carmina dat moriens (I, 10, 51–54, ed. Corfiati).

And a white swan draws her chariot. For the lovers are soothed by its song
And by the strings of the melodious lyre when they are plucked.
The swan sings even in the last hour of its life:
In the same way the lover sings a song as if he were dying.

In this case, the source of Lazzarelli’s ekphrastic image, including its allegorical
exegesis, must have been Boccaccio’s Geneologiae:

Currus autem ideo Veneri designatur, quia sicuti cetere planete, per suos
circulos circumagitur motu continuo. Quod a cignis eius trahatur currus,
duplex potest esse ratio: aut quia per albedinem significant lautitiam
muliebrem, aut quia dulcissime canant, et maxime morti propinqui, ut
demonstretur amantium animos cantu trahi, et quod cantu amantes fere
desiderio nimio morientes passiones explicent suas (III, 22, 17).

A chariot is ascribed to Venus because, like other the planets, Venus con-
tinuously revolves in a certain circular rotation. That the chariot is drawn
by swans can be for two reasons, either because through their white-
ness they signify the splendid beauty of a woman, or because they sing
so sweetly, especially near death, demonstrating that the mind of lovers

42 In the Africa ekphrasis, Petrarch does not mention Venus’s chariot.

228 Enenkel

figure 5.11 Marble statue of Mars (Mars Ultor), 2nd century AD, Musei
Capitolini
Public domain
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 229

figure 5.12 Pietro Perugino. The planet Mars in its anthropomorphic appearance on his
chariot. Perugia, Collegio di Cambio, Sala d’audienze, ceiling (1496–1500)
wikimedia commons

figure 5.13 Pietro Perugino. The planet Venus in its anthropomorphic appearance.
Perugia, Collegio di Cambio, Sala delle audienze, ceiling (1496–1500)
wikimedia commons
230 Enenkel

figure 5.14 “Mantegna tarocchi”, card no. 43: “Venus”. Engraving,

18.4 × 10.6 cm. London, National Gallery of Art. Rosenwald
Collection, 1964.8.32
Public domain
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 231

is attracted by songs, nearly dying in their excessive desire, display their

passions through song.43

As one can see, Lazzarelli has chosen one of the two explanations offered by
Boccaccio. The beautiful ekphrasis of the swan drawing Venus’s chariot, how-
ever, does not imply that Lazzarelli felt obliged to depict a single, coherent
image of the god. Already in the next two lines Venus appears swimming in
the sea and holding a shell in her right hand. And above, Lazzarelli had already
mentioned that her attributes were doves, red roses, and the myrtle (I, 10,
39–50). It is not clear whether she is holding roses in her hands or wearing
them in her hair, and it is unclear in what way doves would accompany her
when she is swimming in the sea, or in what way the attribute of the myr-
tle would add to the goddesses’ appearance. On the playing card and on the
illustration [Fig. 5.14] Venus is depicted nude, standing in the water and hold-
ing a shell in her hand, and she is accompanied by doves (that fly in the air),
and furthermore by Amor and the three Graces. However, no chariot drawn
by a swan is to be seen, and no roses or myrtles either. These features appear
in Boccaccio’s Genealogiae: Amor in §8, the Graces in 9, the doves in 14 and
16, and the myrtles and the roses in 17. In his Africa, Petrarch depicted Venus
through a composite image which resembles Lazzarelli’s, in the sense that it
collects features and attributes that seem to contradict each other:

Nuda Venus pelagoque natans, ubi prima refertur

Turpis origo dee, concam lasciva gerebat
Purpureis ornata rosis volucresque columbas
Semper habens, nudisque tribus comitata puellis,
Quarum prima quidem nobis aversa, sed ambe
Ad nos conversos oculos vultusque tenebant
Innixe alternis praecandida brachia nodis.
Nec puer alatus nec acutis plena sagittis
Post tergum pharetra deerat nec mortifer arcus (III, 212–220, ed. N. Festa).

Venus, nude and swimming in the sea, from where

She derives her disgraceful origin, the lascivious one holds a shell in her
hand, and
Adorned with purple roses, she always has doves at her side
And is accompanied by three naked girls;

43 Cf. Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, ed. and transl. Solomon, vol. 1, 392–395.
English translation by Solomon, with alterations. Cf. also comment by Corfiati 146.
232 Enenkel

The first one shows us her back, but the two others their faces,
And they hold each other with their white arms entwined.
Nor is lacking the winged boy, with his quiver filled with sharp arrows
And with his lethal bow.

The ekphrasis of the pagan gods in the third book of the Africa makes a pow-
erful impression on the “epic eye”, ambassador Laelius, and likewise on the
reader. This works on different levels. Laelius is totally overwhelmed, on the
one hand by the beauty and artistry of the palace’s ceiling, and on the other by
surprise: he has travelled to a barbarian country but discovers that the gods of
his fatherland are venerated there as well. He had been afraid that he would
be in danger amidst hostile tribes, but he finds himself all of a sudden in the
middle of a highly developed culture, moreover the culture he was familiar
with: these people apparently have the same forebears as the Romans, and
they venerate the same heroes. This miracle affects the reader as well, albeit
on another level. It not only recreates the pagan gods with stunning and vivid
images, but it also justifies their miraculous appearances for Christian viewers:
once the pagan gods had been mortal men who, after their deaths, were hon­-
oured by the people for their great gifts and achievements. Through his ek­-
phrasis Petrarch demonstrates – in a leçon par l’exemple – that pagan mythology
is of pivotal importance for poetry, both ancient and contemporary. From its
origin, it has been the core business of poetry to keep the memory of outstand-
ing individuals alive, and to express religious veneration: in that sense, poetry
represents the very fundament of human society. It was the heroes of long-
ago ages, such as Saturnus, Jupiter, Minerva, and Ceres, who created culture
and society, and for human society the cult of these heroes was indispensable.
The poets were responsible for the songs of memory and veneration, and thus
for shaping the religious cult. Petrarch’s ekphrasis put this function of poetry
through a leçon par l’exemple before the eyes of the reader. In poetical theory,
Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio expressed similar ideas, especially in his mythogra-
phy. In the 14th book of the Genealogiae deorum gentilium he presented a vig-
orous defence of poetry, and of the use of pagan mythology.44 In his argument,
he once and again uses a mix of allegorical and euhemeristic interpretation.
The result of Boccaccio’s defence is (1) that pagan mythology appears as an
indispensable topic for poetry, and (2) that his mythological manual gets the
status of a didactic work on poetry.

44 Cf. Boccaccio, In Defence of Poetry. Genealogiae deorum gentilium liber XIV, ed. J. Reedy
(Toronto: 1978).
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 233

This kind of allegorical poetics was characteristic of the age of Petrarch

and Boccaccio. Although the picture slowly changed in the 15th century when
humanists developed other, more authentic sorts of antiquicizing poetry,
for example through the discovery of Latin love elegy after the example of
Tibullus and Propertius, Latin lyrical poetry after the example of Catullus, and
the antique epigram in the style of Martial and Catullus, allegorical interpreta-
tion of the pagan gods continued to play a role. Interestingly, this aspect also
was taken over by the newly discovered poetic genres (such as elegy and epi-
gram). In these genres, ekphrastic poetry was composed, even with the use of
dialogue speech, as Lazzarelli did in his De gentilium deorum imaginibus. An
illuminating example is an epigram of some 44 lines authored by Enea Silvio
Piccolomini, entitled “In effigiem amoris”, “On an image of Amor”, in recent edi-
tions Carmen varium, no. 117.45 This elegy is a didactic mythographical poem
on a painting of Amor, addressed to a certain Carolus of Cyprus.46 In his poem,
Enea Silvio gives an ekphrasis of this unknown painting, teaches the allegori-
cal meaning of Amor’s appearance and attributes, and concludes with a moral
lesson for his friend Carolus, who apparently had fallen deeply in love with
a woman. Furthermore, Enea Silvio presents his lesson as a combination of
dialogue speech (of the poet and his Muse Calliope), and monological speech
(of the poet, addressed to his friend). The poet introduces himself as standing
in front of the painting and then describes the god’s image (lines 1–10); then,
Enea Silvio asks the Muse Calliope to explain to him the proper allegorical
meaning of Amor’s features, for example:

‘Vidimus effigiem lascivi nuper Amoris,

Quae nimium mentem movit imago meam.
Nec barbam malis nec corpore tegmen habebat […] (1–3)
[…]
Cur puer imberbes nulla lanugine malas,
Cur melius nulla copora veste tegat,
Lumine cur careat, pharetram cur gestet et arcum,
Cur habeat pennas, Calliopea, refer’.
Sic ego. Sic retulit quaesitas ilico causas
Maxima Pegasei Calliopea chori (7–12):
‘[…]

45 Carmina varia, no. 117, in Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Carmina, ed. A. van Heck (Vatican City:
1994) 188–189.
46 Not identified by van Heck, cf. ibidem 189, note 42.
234 Enenkel

Pingitur et nudus: nullum servare pudorem

Et meminit simplex et manifestus amans.
Pingitur et caecus, quia non bene cernit honestum,
Nec scit quo virtus, quo ferat error amans,
Vel quia quae peccet, credit secreta latere,
Cuncta nec in sese lumina versa videt.
Sic est omnis amans, sic se, sic omnia nescit,
Consilium, famam, federa, iura, deos […]’ (17–24).47

‘Lately I saw an image of lascivious Amor

That made a great impression on my mind.
Neither were his cheeks bearded nor his body covered with any clothes
[…] (1–3)
Please, Calliope, tell me, why the cheeks of the boy are beardless,
Why he prefers not to cover his body with any clothes,
Why he is blind, why he bears a bow and arrows,
And why he has wings’.
This is what I said. And this answer gave the greatest Muse
Of Pegasus’s chorus to my questions: (7–12)
‘[…]
Also he (Amor) is depicted naked, because he who is simply
And overtly loving does not think anymore of chastity.
Also he is depicted as blind, because he does not see what is honest,
And he does not know what virtue, what the mistake of a lover brings
about,
Or because he thinks that his sins will remain secret,
And does not see that all are watching him.
Like this is every lover: he does not know himself, he does not know
anything:
Not advice, reputation, agreements, oaths, gods’ (17–24).48

Like Lazzarelli, Enea Silvio instrumentalizes Calliope as the source and author-
ity of the allegorical knowledge he transmits; as in Lazzarelli’s didactic poem,
the poet appears in the first part of the work as a pupil who is taught by the

47 Carmina varia, no. 117, in Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Carmina, ed. A. van Heck (Vatican City:
1994) 188–189.
48 Translation mine.
MYTHOGRAPHY AS EKPHRASIS 235

Muse, and in the second part he presents himself as a teacher and transmitter
of knowledge.
Thus, with respect to its textual organization as ekphrasis, Lazzarelli’s
poem on the pagan gods appears to be firmly rooted in the tradition of late
antique and medieval allegorical mythography, and in the practice of human-
ist ekphrasis as well, from Petrarch to the first half of the 15th century. – What
exactly did Lazzarelli mean when he complained that the mythological knowl-
edge of the pagan gods had in his time become obsolete and forgotten, and
when he claimed that it was his central task to revive this knowledge? First of
all, Lazzarelli could hardly have maintained that the knowledge of classical
mythology as such had disappeared in his time. This was simply not true: the
works of the great mythological poets of antiquity (Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc.)
were widely read and used in the 15th century, and they were newly edited,
intensely studied, and commented upon, and additionally Greek poets in
which classical mythology was transmitted (such as Homer and Hesiod) were
newly studied and translated into Latin. For example, Bonino Mombrizio
(1424–1478/82), professor of Latin and Greek in Milan, translated Hesiod’s
Theogonia just before Lazzarelli composed his De imaginibus deorum gentilium.
Interestingly, the Latin translation of Hesiod’s Theogonia was dedicated to the
same addressee as Lazzarelli first had in mind for his mythographical poem:
Borso d’Este (who died in August 1471). After the death of Borso, Lazzarelli was
forced to search for another dedicatee, and he found Federico da Montefeltro.
Moreover, Neolatin poetry of the 15th century had an abundance of classical
mythology, whether it was the lofty epos or the “smaller” genres.
In my opinion, the background for a better understanding of Lazzarelli’s
argument in De imaginibus deorum gentilium is the change of paradigms in
humanism that took place over the course of the 15th century. This change
was brought forth through new developments in humanist philology, Latin
grammar and style, the historical and archaeological approach to antiquity,
and, last but not least, Latin poetics. With respect to understanding antiquity a
new pursuit of authenticity came up, in all the above-mentioned fields. In the
15th-century perception of Latin grammar and good style, the achievements of
the early humanists, such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, were considered obsolete
and outdated; with respect to cultural history, Biondo Flavio initiated a new
approach, and this also implied a new understanding of Roman religion and
mythology, an understanding which was now based on sources such as Cicero’s
De natura deorum and Livius’s Decades. In Latin grammar and style, a greater
authenticity was proclaimed by Lorenzo Valla, through his ground-breaking
Elegantiae linguae Latinae: by consequence, older models of style, such as
Petrarch and Boccaccio, were abandoned; in humanist poetics, the monopoly
236 Enenkel

of allegory (sacred in the 14th century) was crumbling away. These new devel-
opments, of course, did not take place in all parts of Italy at the same time and
with the same intensity as in the centres of the avant-garde humanism, e.g. in
Rome with the humanist Academy guided by Pomponio Leto. Lazzarelli was
certainly influenced by Italian humanism, but this is not to say that he also was
a fervent adherent of its newest developments. His thought and poetics were
shaped by the humanism of the famous father figures Petrarch and Boccaccio,
and he was all but willing to abandon them. His mythographical poem was
motivated by the fear that the sacrosanct achievements of Italian humanism
might tumble into oblivion in the second half of the 15th century, and they
included Petrarch’s cult epos Africa, Boccaccio’s monumental mythology, and
the allegorical use of the pagan gods as the core business of Latin poetry. In this
context, with his didactic poem Lazzarelli made a conspicuous effort to restore
and re-evaluate the knowledge offered by the mythographical manuals from
Fulgentius to Boccaccio, and the lofty poetics proclaimed through Boccaccio’s
theory of poetry and Petrarch’s splendid poetical practices, as displayed in
Africa. I think that the vogue for card game triggered Lazzarelli’s endeavour
because the images of the planetary gods reminded him of the good, old,
sacred (but in fact medieval) mythography that had recently been challenged
by new developments, but which Lazzarelli still considered to be of pivotal
importance for humanist poetics.

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Lazzarelli L., A Critical Edition of De gentilium deorum imaginibus by Ludovico Lazzarelli.
First Edited Text with Introduction, ed. W.J. O’Neal (Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter:
1997).
Levenson A. – Oberhuber K. – Sheenan J.L., Early Italian Engravings from the National
Gallery of Art (Washington 1973).
Lippincott K., “Mantegna’s Tarocchi”, Print Quarterly 3 (1986) 49–63.
Lunghi E. – Fusetti S. – Virili. P., The Collegio Del Cambio in Perugia. Comments on the
Restauration (Rome: 2003; originally in Italian, 1996).
Mastrocinque A., “Il culto di Saturno nell’Italia settentrionale Romana”, in idem (ed.),
Culti pagani nell’Italia settentrionale (Trento: 1994) 97–117.
Mastrocinque A., “Saturnus”, in Der neue Pauly 11 (2001), col. 118.
Melion W.S. – Ramakers B. (eds.), Personification. Embodying Meaning and Emotion,
Intersections 41 (Leiden – Boston: 2016).
Meloni M., “Ludovico Lazzarelli umanista settempedano e il ‘De gentilium deorum
imaginibus’”, Studia picena 66 (2001) 91–173.
238 Enenkel

Mythographus tertius, De diis gentium et illorum allegoriis, ed. G.H. Bode, in idem
(ed.), Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti […] (Celle: 1834)
152–256.
Nutton V., “Humoralism”, in Bynum W.F. – Porter R. (eds.), Companion Encyclopedia of
the History of Medicine, vol. 1 (London a.o.: 1993) 281–291.
Petrarca Francesco, L’Africa. Edizione critica per cura di N. Festa (Florence: 1926).
Richter E.H., “The Tarocchi Prints”, The Print Collector’s Quarterly 6 (1916) 37–88.
Saci M.P., Ludovico Lazzarelli: Da Elicona a Sion (Rome: 1999).
Tenerelli N., Ludovico Lazzarelli e il rinascimento filosofico italiano (Bari: 1991).
Westfehling U., “Johann Ladenspelders Tarocchi. Die Kölner Fassung der sogenannten
Tarock-Karten des Mantegna. Einführung und Spielanleitung”, in “Tarocchi”.
Menschenwelt und Kosmos. Ladenspelder, Dürer und die Tarock-Karten des Mantegna,
exh. cat., Wallraff-Richartz-Museum (Cologne: 1988).
Willshire W.H., A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and other Cards in the British Museum
(London: 1876).
 chapter 6

Antithesis, Ekphrasis, and Antiphrasis in Joachim

du Bellay’s Ruinscape, Les Antiquités de Rome

Arthur J. DiFuria

In 1553, French poet and humanist Joachim du Bellay (1522–60) entered Rome
as secretary to his older cousin, antiquarian, collector, and patron, Cardinal
Jean du Bellay (1492–1560).*, 1 During his four-year stay in Rome, the poet pro-
duced several literary works comprising a response to his brief time there.2 It
should seem no wonder that a prevalent theme in du Bellay’s Roman writings
is sadness over humanity’s failings. The time surrounding his Roman phase was
highly troubled. Before he arrived in Rome, he had already experienced a con-
siderable number of trials and tragedies at levels ranging from the professional
to the personal. By 1550, he had become one of French poetry’s most embattled
figures. He engaged his contemporary, influential French poet Thomas Sébillet
(1512–1589), who had misrepresented the poetic theories of the poets in du
Bellay’s circle, known as the Pléiade, and which included Pierre de Ronsard
(1524–1585). Their response, the Défense et illustration de la langue française
(1549), argued firmly for French’s capacity to imitate, emulate, and invent new
antiquarian literature out of the great works of antiquity, matching or even
surpassing them.3 This stance damaged du Bellay’s reputation during his life-
time. In the early 1550s, he also became seriously ill for two years and lost most
of his hearing as a result. And most tragically, just before his departure for

* The ideas in this essay received their first airing at Emory University’s Lovis Corinth
Colloquium X, “Ekphrastic Image-Making in Early Modern Europe and the Americas.” This
essay belongs to a larger project in progress that explores under studied aspects of land-
scape’s development during the sixteenth-century, abandoned aspects of its growth towards
a fully-formed independent pictorial category. I should thank Walter Melion and several
other of the colloquium’s participants for their comments. They gave me much to think
about that has improved these ideas in their translation from presentation to essay.
1 For Joachim du Bellay in Rome, see Dickinson, G., Du Bellay in Rome (Leiden – Boston:
1960) and Cooper, R., “Poetry in Ruins: the Literary Context of Du Bellay’s Cycles on Rome”,
Renaissance Studies 93 (1978) 275–289 and Melehy. H., “Du Bellay’s Time in Rome: The
Antiquitez”, 2 (2001) 1–22.
2 For a complete annotated bibliography of du Bellay’s works, see Noirrot, C., Joachim du Bellay
(Oxford: 2018).
3 Bellay, Joachim du, Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française (Paris: 1920).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

240 DiFuria

Rome, his nephew and ward died an untimely death. During du Bellay’s time
in Rome, the French crown’s fortunes in the Italian wars took a serious down-
turn. France supplied troops to Siena for the Battle of Marciano, a miserably
failed attempt to quell Florence’s advances on Siena. With the Florentine side
subsidized by Holy Roman Emperor, papal ally, and rival to the French crown,
Charles V (1500–1558), the fight could hardly be described as fair. The resulting
loss of thousands of French soldiers proved to be a decisive blow to France’s
all-but-dashed imperialist pursuits on the Italian peninsula.
Given the many trying circumstances surrounding du Bellay’s Roman sojourn,
a mix of awe and melancholy in response to the august magnificence in Rome’s
ruins appears as an appropriate mode for his Roman writings.4 None of his
Roman works provide a more sustained meditation on the blend of grandeur
and loss in the Eternal City’s ruins than his Regrets, the Romae Descriptio, and
the sonnets comprising the main focus of this essay, Les Antiquités de Rome.5
Each deploys a different poetic conceit allowing du Bellay to voice a range of
responses to Rome’s ruins. For example, the 191 sonnets of Les Regrets, argu-
ably his most famous Roman work, respond to Rome’s ruins directly, via a per-
sonalized perspective, even using them satirically for an extended meditation
on the disappointment he felt while in the city; in its ruined state, cows in
the forum, Rome appeared to du Bellay to be much less spectacular than the
grandiose – and as we shall see, ekphrastic – notion of the Eternal City he had
received, imagined, and anticipated before arriving.6 In the Romae Descriptio,
du Bellay triangulates this self-awareness with the topographical and histori-
cal memory embedded in Rome’s ancient, fragmented monuments and the
spectre of his recently deceased friend, Louis de Bailleul, with whom he often
walked the city, discussing the antiquities they encountered.7 The 32 sonnets

4 For the persistence of this antithesis in du Bellay’s Roman works, see McGowan, M. The
Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: 2000) 187–227.
5 Les Regrets and Les Antiquités appeared in 1558 in Paris, published by Fédéric Morel. For Les
Antiquités, see Bellay, Joachim du, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description de
sa Grandeur et Comme une Déploration de sa Ruine (Paris: 1919). For Les Regrets, see idem,
Les Regrets, intro. R. Beauplan (Paris: 1907). For the Romae Descriptio, see idem., Oeuvres
Poétiques, VII, Oeuvres Latines. Poemata (Paris: 1984) 96–99.
6 Dickinson, G., Du Bellay in Rome 2–3. For a broader overview of Rome in the medieval and
early modern imagination, see Thompson, D. (ed.), The Idea of Rome From Antiquity to the
Renaissance (Albuquerque: 1971) and Stinger, C., The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington:
1998) 31–76. For Rome in the sixteenth-century French imagination see McGowan, M., Vision
of Rome 21–25.
7 Dickinson, G., Du Bellay in Rome 2–3; McGowan, M., Vision of Rome 188; Helgerson, R. (ed.)
Joachim du Bellay: “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The
Defense and enrichment of the French”: a Bilingual Edition (Philadelphia: 2006) 80.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 241

of Les Antiquités, however, are notable for their abandonment of personal,

autobiographical concerns. They are most consistently trained on epochal, his-
toricizing notions, making of Rome’s ruins the exclusive point of departure for
a preponderance of historical, mythological, and literary concerns. Unlike Les
Regrets’ elaboration of a metaphor between the poetic voice’s consciousness
of loss and the ruin’s status as a marker of historical collapse, Les Antiquités
contrasts the speaker’s exaltations at the sight of ancient Rome’s remains with
the multivalence of their lost grandeur. Because of du Bellay’s direct address
of ancient poets in Les Antiquités and his appropriation of poetic sources from
antiquity and after the antique, scholarly consensus has identified poetry –
and more specifically, its exhumation and reuse – as his prescribed means for
reconstituting Rome.8 Collectively, the sonnets bear a polyphony of tones in
response to the ruins, ranging from unabashed panegyric to inquisitiveness, to
aporetic expressions of misgiving, to nearly scornful, satiric irony. Debates on
Les Antiquités have thus focused on where they finally land: do they celebrate
or denigrate a reconstructed or rebirthed Rome?9 Less binary in approach
is Margaret McGowan’s treatment of the sonnets in her landmark study of
sixteenth-century French antiquarianism.10 McGowan situates du Bellay’s
Roman works within the broader circumstances that entailed the flower-
ing of a nuanced antiquarianism among overlapping subcultures of French
patrons, collectors, humanists, publishers, and court artists and architects.11
Contextualizing Les Antiquités comprehensively ultimately leads McGowan to
conclude that the sonnets highlight ‘the property of ruins to provoke moral
meditation and … to encourage reconstruction’.12 While McGowan’s assess-
ment is certainly true – du Bellay all but proclaims as much in his dedication
of Les Antiquités to King Henri II (r. 1547–49) – were this all Les Antiquités had
to offer its readers, we would doubtless regard the sonnets as unremarkable.
Although studies of du Bellay’s Roman oeuvre acknowledge its status as
an expansive discourse prompted by an artistic visual prompt – the image of
Rome’s ruins – our understanding of this observation’s ekphrastic implications

8 Coleman, D., The Chaste Muse: A study of Joachim du Bellay’s Poetry (Leiden: 1980) 90–111;
Melehy, H. “Time in Rome” 1, provides a recent summarization of this consensus as du
Bellay’s ‘poetic mission … [to find] the ancient models that will provide the source of a
new French poetry’, to fulfill the theory previously laid out in the Défense.
9 For a summation of these scholarly conditions ca. 2000, see McGowan, M., Vision of Rome
187–89.
10 Ibidem 187–227 takes this binary as her starting point and sustains a critique of it.
11 Ibidem 188 describes her intent to ‘place du Bellay’s creative theory and practice within
the larger frame of artistic reconstruction and shared knowledge of Rome’.
12 Ibidem 216.
242 DiFuria

is currently underdeveloped.13 It would not be a reach at all, however, to state

that Les Antiquités in particular comprises an ekphrastic meditation on Rome’s
ruin-populated vistas according to the device’s traditional definition. While
such an observation runs counter to the conventional thinking that ekphrasis
does not appear to have been a popular rhetorical device in sixteenth-century
France, du Bellay did indeed deploy a range of descriptive, poetic enrichments
of his visual source.14 The sonnets construct the experience of viewing Rome’s
ruins vividly and inventively, with true epideictic panache. The vestiges of the
Eternal City form a prompt with dramatic imaginative flights and emotional
swings, comprising a visual point of departure for an extended metaphorical
discourse. More specifically, Les Antiquités identifies the ruin and the pictorial
category of landscape as potent ekphrastic instruments to develop a textual
‘ruinscape’ out of the fragments of earlier poetic sources.
Even before explicitly invoking the image of the ruins, du Bellay primes the
reader of Les Antiquités for an ekphrastic experience. His prefatory dedication
to King Henri II (r. 1547–49) elaborates a Horatian conflation of image and
text.15 Alluding to the French throne’s aggressively acquisitive antiquarian-
ism, the poet notes apologetically that he is unable to give Henri ‘ces ouvrages
antiques’ (these ancient works) for either of the royal chateaux, Saint-Germain
or Fontainebleau. He goes on to describe the forthcoming poems as ‘ce petit
tableau, / Peint, le mieux que j’ay peu, de couleurs poëtiques’ (this humble
painted tableau of poetic colours, the best I could have done).16 Further, the
dedication builds, using this elision of text with image – and words with paint –
to identify the French language as the palette with which the poet hopes to
rebuild antiquity on French soil:

13 Ibidem 187 for example, opens her section on du Bellay by stating that ‘no one disputes
that the sight of Rome … provided Joachim du Bellay with rich poetic inspiration’. See
Galand-Hallyn, P., “Jeux intertextuels de Du Bellay dans les poèmes romains: de l’emphase
des Antiquitez à l’ekphrase des Elegiæ”, in Rieu, J. (ed) Du Bellay: Antiquité et nouveaux
mondes dans les recueils romains. Journées d’études du XVIe siècle de l’Université de Nice –
Sophia Antipolis. Actes du Colloque de Nice (17–18 Février 1995) (Nice: 1995) 93–95. A major
work on the ekphrastic implications in du Bellay’s Roman oeuvre is Tucker, G.H., “Roma
Instaurata en Dialogue Avec Roma Prisca: La Répresentation Néo-Latine de Rome Sous
Jules III 1553–1555, Chez Janus Vitalis, Joachim du Bellay et Lelio Capilupi (de L’Ekphrasis
à la Prosopopée)”, Camenae 2 (2007) 1–34.
14 Tucker, G.H., “Roma Instaurata” 3–11, 22–24 is especially attentive to the visual or ‘pseudo-
visuel’ aspects of the poets he discusses; among them du Bellay is the only French poet.
15 Scholars note du Bellay’s interest in Horace, but not for Horace’s notion of painting as
poetry. See Helgerson R. (ed), The Regrets 31 and Coleman, D., Chaste Muse 7, 33, 75.
16 The dedication appears in the original French, unpaginated, in Bellay, Joachim du,
Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description. The translation here is in
Helgerson R. (ed), The Regrets 247.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 243

Que vous puissant le Dieux un jour donner tant d’heur,

De rebastir en France une telle grandeur,
Que je la voudrois bien peindre en vostre langage …

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.

Beginning by moving discourse past pedestrian distinctions between image

and text, du Bellay prepares his readers for a mode of reading akin to view-
ing. Moreover, he signals the image of the ruins as the prompt for his textual
imagination, manifest in the sonnets to follow. Inversely, he also establishes
the sonnets themselves as prompts for his readers’ pictorial imaginings, mani-
fest in the images they contain. Reading becomes viewing. Further, with his
wish to rebuild the grandeur of antiquity in France, du Bellay advances reading
consciousness past ostensible divisions between past and present to describe
a new French antiquity elaborated from Rome’s remains. Before even begin-
ning, then, du Bellay has proposed to remake Henri’s France as an ekphrasis of
Roman antiquity’s remains.
Accordingly, the sonnets begin with the poetic voice gazing upon ‘ces murs’
(these [ruined] walls), the sight of which prompts a vision of the ashes of
ancient poets buried beneath them, and an invocation of their spirits, that the
poetic voice might travel through the ages for them to hear it.

Divin esprits, dont la poudreuse cendre

Gist sous le fais de tant de murs couvers,
Non, vostre los, qui vif par vos beaux vers
Ne se verra sous la terre descender.
Si des humains la voix se peut estendre
Depuis ici jusqu’au fond des enfers,
Soyent à mon cry les abysmes overs
Tant que d’en bas vous me puissiez entendre.17

Divine spirits, whose powdery ashes lie

Under this weight of ruins, covered deep;
Yet not the fame, your living verse will keep
From Hades’ halls’ fame that will never die
If we have power to make our human cry

17 Bellay, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 1.

244 DiFuria

Down, from here, to that region leap,

Let mine pierce the abyss, this dark steep,
That you might hear my voice from on high.18

Images of ‘powdery ash’ advance the dedication’s conflation of image and text
by bringing Rome’s fragmented rubble into contact with the remains of ancient
poets.19 Thinking through this image’s implications, we begin by noting that
these ashes lay beneath ruins; they thus commingle with them and, more point-
edly, are like them; once reduced to powder, we cannot distinguish the ashes
from what is absent in ruins. We thus compare their poetry with antiquity’s
wrecked remains. Moreover, by beginning with powder du Bellay visualizes the
ruin’s jagged surfaces, the specific site for marble’s transformation into dust,
the locus for the transition from extant to vanished. Thus, du Bellay establishes
the ruin as the locus – or better, the conduit – for a reciprocal, supratemporal
discourse. This is to say, as ancient verse continues to live in the minds of its
present-day readers, the new verses du Bellay writes are to travel to the ears of
ancient poets, via the ruin. As we will see, the reduction of Rome’s grandeur to
powder or dust is a key leitmotif of Les Antiquités’ ekphrasis.
With Sonnet V, du Bellay sustains suggestions of the ruin’s capacity to
prompt temporal and medial fluidity and certifies the ruin’s ekphrastic impe-
tus. There, he has the voice of Les Antiquités ask if the act of viewing the ruins
enables one to see what has been lost of Rome, which, in turn, he likens to a
painting.

Qui voudra voir tout ce qu’ont peu nature,

L’art, et le ciel (Rome) te vienne voir:
J’entens s’il peut ta grandeur concevoir
Par ce qui n’est que ta morte peinture.20

He who would see the vast power of Nature,

Art, and heaven: Rome, let him view you.

18 Aside from the dedicatory preface to Henri II, translated passages come from Bellay,
Joachim du, The Ruins of Rome (Les Antiquités de Rome), trans. A.S. Kline (2009) https://
www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/RuinsOfRome.php accessed August, 2019.
Unlike Edmund Spenser’s translation, Kline’s is generally faithful to du Bellay’s original
rhyme scheme: abba, abba, ccd, ede.
19 For an analysis of this passage’s implicit distinction of pagan versus Christian, see
Melehy, H., “Spenser and Du Bellay: Translation, Imitation, Ruin”, Comparative Literature
Studies 40 (2003) 423.
20 Bellay, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 5.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 245

I long to know if he could now construe,

From what death reveals, your painting.21

Thus, at the beginning of Les Antiquités, the ostensible stasis of the broken
past’s remains serves as the impetus for a poetic energeia so vivid that it is pic-
torial. The reader of the sonnets becomes a viewer of ruins and then, in turn,
an audience for a lost Rome that could manifest as a painting.
It would perhaps seem sufficient, then, to state that du Bellay’s explicit
grounding of Les Antiquités’ poetry in the pictorial realm and its continued
return to its visual source of poetic inspiration allows us to conclusively pro-
claim its ekphrastic status and then proceed to demonstrate its other references
to gazing upon the ruins.22 Here, however, we use such observations as a start-
ing point for further exploring du Bellay’s embrace of the ruinscape as an invi-
tation to explore the ekphrastic mechanism, the enrichment of its conflation
of image and text in the copiously historicized image of a ruined Rome.23 But
more than this, we argue that du Bellay seizes upon the ruin-laden Roman land-
scape as an imperative for activating a persistently antithetical rhetorical com-
plex. In addition to their exploitation of ekphrasis’s invitation to vivify Rome’s
glory via its ruins, the sonnets oscillate – in some cases swiftly, violently – to an
understated descriptive mode that is by turns ironic and in some cases what
we might loosely describe as a type of antiphrasis.24 Les Antiquités depends

21 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 6.

22 Other references to the sight of the ruins include: Sonnet XVIII, ‘Ces vieux murs que tu
vois’ (These old walls that you see), XIX, ‘Sous le monceaux de ces vielles ruines’ (Beneath
the stones of these old ruins), and XXVII, ‘Juge, en voyant ces ruines si amples’ (Judge,
seeing these ruins so ample).
23 For an account of the expansive manner in which scholars have interpreted the ekphras-
tic mode beyond the ‘purist’ notion of it see Bartsch, S. and Elsner, J. “Introduction: Eight
Ways of Looking at an Ekphrasis”, Classical Philology 102 (2007), i–vi.
24 The Oxford English Dictionary, https://0-www-oed-com.library.scad.edu/view/Entry/8771
?redirectedFrom=antiphrasis#eid. Accessed September, 2019, traces the device’s origins
from Latin to Greek, ἀντίϕρασις, ‘to express by the opposite’ and defines it as ‘a figure of
speech by which words are used in a sense opposite to their proper meaning’. However,
its earliest use, by Anglicus, Bartholomaeus, De proprietatib[us] re]rum], trans. J. Trevisa
(Magdeburg: 1495) VII. Lix. Sig. rvj(v)/1, describes the device more generally as ‘by con-
trary manere spekynge’. Similarly, More, Thomas, The debellacyon of Salem and Bizance
(London: 1533) f. xxix, likens the device to irony, ‘the figure of ironye or antiphrasys’. We
define antiphrasis here in a manner closer to its early modern usages, combining Anglicus
and More, not as the use of a word with the opposite of its intrinsic meaning, but in con-
text, as the application of a word, a series of words, or an idea expressed in a manner that
is the contrary to that to which it is applied, in this case, du Bellay’s reductive descriptions
of Rome’s magnificence.
246 DiFuria

upon a rhetorical scheme wherein the ruin elicits ekphrastic descriptions of

Rome in a limitless geographical and topographical scope that even achieves
the extra-terrestrial, while many of its sonnets are conversely notable for their
author’s deployment of harshly reductive descriptions of Rome’s broken gran-
deur via the ruin. The Roman ruin’s partially-present, partially-absent state
embeds the potential for such an antithesis, the deployment of both modes,
which du Bellay develops. Though they emblematize a grand narrative of
myth, legend, and history, Rome’s vistas are also persistently ruined, primar-
ily functioning as images of the exalted past’s present-day functionlessness.
The Roman ruinscape thus comprises a call to probe the archaeological poet-
ics of discourse and, transitively, to enrich the space between subject and
object with inventive elaborations based on the subject’s understanding of the
object’s richness: to re-imagine the absent part of the fragmented present out
of a multivalent memory of the past while foregrounding its diminished state.
Key to understanding the ekphrastic aspect of Les Antiquités’ pictorial mode,
and thus far escaping scholarly notice, are the ekphrastic qualities that several
of its passages share with landscape. Here, we refer to the pictorial category
writ large in its nascent sixteenth-century condition, its affinities with poetry,
city views, cartography, and the charting of the heavens.25 More specifically,
however, we also refer to the species of mid-sixteenth-century landscape
abundant with invented antiquities and ruins – also known as fantasie – that
proliferated especially in paintings and prints, peaking in popularity in the
very same years when du Bellay visited Rome.26 Les Antiquités indexes each of
these tendencies, with the ruinscape as its overarching model. Recent studies
have embraced specific examples of sixteenth-century poetry’s affinities with
landscape. Monica Farnetti’s description of Ludovico Ariosto’s (1474–1533)
Orlando Furioso as bearing ‘several extraordinary panoramas’ is notable in this
context, especially since du Bellay was among Ariosto’s most ardent admirers

25 For landscape’s development in the sixteenth-century Netherlands, see Silver, L.,

Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of the Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market
(Philadelphia: 2006) and Wood, C., Albrecht Altdorfer and the origins of Landscape
(London: 2014). For landscape and poetry, see Mackenzie, L., The Poetry of Place: Lyric,
Landscape and Ideology in Renaissance France. For the state of celestial cartography in the
sixteenth-century, see Kanas, N., “Alessandro Piccolomini and the First Printed Star Atlas
(1540)”, Imago Mundi 58 (2006) 70–76.
26 For sixteenth-century ruin landscape imagery, see Dacos. N., Roma Quanta Fuit: Ou
L’Invention du Paysage de Ruines (Brussels: 2004). By ‘fantasia’, we refer to Cennini,
Cennino., Il Libro dell’Arte (Vicenza: 1971), 3, who writes of the painter’s freedom to com-
pose and combine figures as do poets, ‘come gli piace, secondo sua fantasia’ (as he pleases,
according to his imagination).
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 247

and emulators; as we shall see, Les Antiquités sustains a panoramic mode.27 In

her study of sixteenth-century French poetry’s use of place as a poetic device,
Louisa McKenzie characterizes du Bellay’s consciousness of landscape as a
means of rhetorical control, a locus of ‘productive tension’ between the local
and places of broader scope.28
We find in Les Antiquités an acute awareness of place’s rhetorical potency
via its poetic elasticity. Rome’s ruins serve the sonnets as a prompt for the
development of an invented landscape of boundless spatial compass in which
Rome achieves umbilicus mundus status. As we will see, the persistence of such
devices across Les Antiquités enriches the ekphrastic readings of Rome’s ruin
vistas in broad-view ruin landscapes. An establishing point, contemplation
of Rome’s ruins prompts Sonnet II’s initial rendering of a weltlandschaft via
an enumeration of the seven world wonders in its octave and the first half of
its sestet:

Le Babylonien ses hauts mur vantera,

Et ses vergers en l’air, de son Ephesienne!
La Grece descrira la fabrique ancienne,
Et le people du Nil ses points chantera:
La mesme Grece encor’ vanteuse publira
De son grand Juppiter l’image Olympienne,
Le Mausole sera la gloire Carienne,
Et son vieux Labyrinth’ la Crete n’oublira.
L’antique Rhodien eslevera la gloire
De son fameux colosse, au temple de Memoire:
Et si quelque oeuvre encore digne se peut vanter.29

The Babylonian praises his high wall,

And gardens high in air; Ephesian
Forms the Greek will praise again;
The people of the Nile their Pyramids tall;
And that same Greek still boasting will recall
Their statue of Jove the Olympian;
The Tomb of Mausolus, some Carian;
Cretans their long-lost labyrinthine hall.

27 Farnetti, M., “Ariosto: Landscape Artist”, in Beecher, D. – Ciavolella, M. – Fedi, R. (eds.)

Ariosto Today: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: 2003) 93.
28 Mackenzie, L., Poetry of Place 60.
29 Bellay, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 2.
248 DiFuria

The ancient Rhodian will praise the glory

Of that renowned Colossus, great in story
And whatever noble work he can raise.30

Upon having established such broad scope, however, the poetic voice of the
sonnet places the world wonders in a paragone with the seven hills of Rome in
the second half of the sestet.

De marcher enc e ranc, quelque plus grand’faconde

Le dira: quant à moy, pour tous je veux chanter
Les sept costaux Romain, sept miracles du monde.31

To a like renown, some boaster thunders,

From on high; while I, above all, I praise
Rome’s seven hills, the world’s seven wonders.32

Here, the world wonders garner only localized boasts. But Rome’s landscape is
worthy of even greater praise of a divine nature. In this way, Sonnet II subor-
dinates the world wonders in a metonymy with Rome’s hills. Du Bellay inverts
geography, ekphrastically suggesting Rome’s topographical limits as limitless;
Rome’s local compass is universal via its unsurpassed history. Du Bellay sustains
such panoramic invocations, returning to them with regularity in the remain-
ing sonnets of Les Antiquités. In Sonnet IV, for example, the speaker recalls that
the Roman empire had ‘One hand on Scythia (modern day Ukraine), the other
on Spain’ (D’un main sur le Scythe, et l’autre sur le More).33 The beginning of
Sonnet VIII further pushes Rome’s extent towards boundlessness.

Par armes et vaisseaux Rome donta le monde,

Et pouvoit-on juger qu’une seule cité
Avoit de sa grandeur le terme limité
Par la mesme rondeur de la terre et de l’onde.34

With arms and vassals Rome the world subdued,

So that one might judge this single city

30 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 4.

31 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 2.
32 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 4.
33 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 4; Idem, The Ruins of Rome 5.
34 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 8.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 249

Had found her grandeur held in check solely

By earth and ocean’s depth and latitude.35

Recounting the Greek travel myth of the Golden Fleece, the second half of
Sonnet X’s octave describes Rome as a glory that illumines houses at both ends
of the myth’s geographical extent, east and west.

Ceste ville qui fut en sa jeune saison

Un hydre de guerriers se vit bravement pleine
De braves nourrissons, dont la gloire hautaine
A rempli d’un soleil l’une et l’autre maison.36

This city, that in youthful season bore

A Hydra’s nest of warriors, raised a yeast
Of Brave nurslings, who their proud glory saw
Fill the Sun’s mansions, to the west and east.37

Also broadly expansive, Sonnet XXII maps the city onto the extent of the
Roman empire, from the Danube to Africa to the shores of the Thames.38 And
Sonnet XXIX returns readers to thoughts of Rome’s geographical reach via an
enumeration of all of the places whose objects the city housed; the treasures of
Egypt, Asia, and especially Greece, all on view in Rome, which was ‘l’ornement
du monde’ (the ornament of the world).39
Alongside this set of reminders of Rome’s colossal earthly extent, du Bellay
offers further expansions on the scope of the ekphrastic vision of Rome
prompted by the sight of the ruins, maintaining it only within a limitlessly ren-
dered Rome. Sonnet IV, for example, takes readers beyond the Roman land-
scape, approaching universal extent. Rome’s ‘head the stars surpassed … held
the round of earth and sky encompassed’ (son chef les étoiles passoit … De la
terre et du ciel la rondeur compassoit). Here, once again, the seven hills extend

35 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 8.

36 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 10.
37 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 8.
38 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 22: ‘Quand ce brave sejour,
honneur du nom Latin, / Qui borna sa grandeur d’Afrique, et la Bise / De ce people qui
tient les bords de la Tamise […]’; Idem, The Ruins of Rome 14: ‘When this brave city, hon-
ouring the Latin name, / Bounded on the Danube, in Africa, / Among the tribes along the
Thames’ shore […]’
39 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 29: ‘Rome vivant fut
l’ornement du monde’; Idem, The Ruins of Rome 19: ‘Living Rome, the ornament of the
world’.
250 DiFuria

past their earthly limits. Jupiter, so afraid of even greater scope for Rome, ‘piled
these hills on her, these seven that soar’.40 Du Bellay sustains this unbounded
landscape theme elsewhere among the 32 Sonnets, but returns to it with full
force in Sonnet XXVI.

Qui voudroit figurer la Romaine grandeur

En ses dimensions, il ne luy faudroit querre
A la ligne, et au plomb, au compass, à l’equerre
Sa longueur at largeur, hautesse et profondeur:41

Who would demonstrate Rome’s true grandeur,

In all her vast dimensions, all her might,
Her length and breadth, and all her depth and height
Needs no line or lead, compass or measure.42

Here, the poem’s voice clarifies the ekphrastic nature of Rome itself. The
Eternal City’s ‘true grandeur,’ the true nature of its scope, is ultimately immea-
surable. The speaker’s reference to the compass cites the notion that the only
sufficient measure of Rome is the circle, the geometric shape with no begin-
ning or end, thus notable for its eternal nature.43 After establishing the image
of the circle as the only means for sufficiently encompassing Rome, du Bellay
returns us to themes of landscape, now aligned with the heavens.

Il luy faudroit cerner d’une eagle rondeur

Tout ce que l’Ocean de ses long brass enserre,
Soit où l’Astre annuel eschauffe plus la terre,
Soit où soufle Aquilon sa plus grande froideur.44

40 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 4: ‘Cell qui de son chef les
étroiles passoit, / Et d’un pied sur Thetis, l’autre dessous l’Aurore, / D’une main sur le
Scythe, et l’autre sur le More, / De la terre et du ciel la rondeur compassoit: / Jupiter ayant
peur, si plus elle croissoit, / Que l’orgueil des Geans se relevast encore, / L’accabla sous
ces monts, ces sept monts qui sont ore […]’; Idem, The Ruins of Rome 5: ‘She, who with
her head the stars surpassed, / One foot on Dawn, the other on the Main, / One hand on
Scythia, the other Spain, / Held the round of earth and sky encompassed: / Jupiter fearing,
if higher she was classed, / That the old Giants’ pride might rise again, / Piled these hills
on her, these seven that soar[…]’.
41 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 26.
42 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 17.
43 For the currency of the cosmological symbolism of circle in mid-century Rome, see
Shrimplin-Evangelidis, V., “Sun-Symbolism and Cosmology in Michelangelo’s Last
Judgement”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990) 607–644.
44 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 26.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 251

He only need draw a circle, at his leisure,

Round all that Ocean in his arms holds tight,
Be it where Sirius scorches with his light,
Or where the northerlies blow cold forever.45

Finally, in the sonnet’s sestet, the voice of Les Antiquités states it most plainly in
a triply ekphrastic conflation. Rome’s ruins tell us that Rome is the world, and
thus a map of Rome portrays the entire world.

Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome.

Et si par mesmes noms mesmes chose on nomme,
Comme du nom de Rome on se pourroit passer,
La nommant par le nom de la terre et de l’onde:
Ainsi le monde on peut sur Rome compasser,
Puisque le plan de Rome est la carte du monde.46

Rome was the world, and all the world is Rome.

If naming like things alike may bring it home,
The name of Rome why bother to employ?
Name but the land and sea, your map unfurled,
Since world, itself, for Rome, you may deploy,
For a map of Rome’s a map of all the world.47

The hyperbolic paragone of Rome with the celestial and the invocation of
the circle as the means for articulating its eternal nature find du Bellay min-
ing a visual tradition traceable back to the middle ages, but popular at mid-
century. He maps Rome onto the kind of ‘star map’ we find circulating in
northern Europe through the first half of the sixteenth-century. Celestial maps
by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) [Fig. 6.1], for example, link du Bellay’s poetic
formulations to an image culture that is ekphrastic in its own right.48 Here,
the constellations as seen from the northern hemisphere are grafted onto the
poetic perfection of the circle, which is partitioned for measuring the move-
ment of the stars across time. Although Dürer’s images draw on a long tradi-
tion traceable back to Arabic astrological practices, his were the first prints of
this type to enjoy circulation in Europe. During the 1530s and 40s a variant on

45 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 17.

46 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 26.
47 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 17.
48 Bartrum, G., Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy, exh. cat., British Museum (London: 2002)
no. 138.
252 DiFuria

figure 6.1 Albrecht Dürer, Imagines coeli Septentrionales cum duodecim imaginibus zodiaci,
1515, ink on paper, 45.5 × 43 cm
British Museum

the image Dürer executed received publication in Basel, a woodcut by Johan

Honterus (1498–1549), suggesting the continued currency of such formulations
at mid-century.49
Where the sonnets of Les Antiquités go beyond landscape, beyond the ter-
restrial, to reach for the cosmos, they echo Homer’s famous description of
Achilles’ shield as Vulcan forged it. There, the ancient Greek poet states:

49 Johannes Honterus, Imagines Constellationem borealium et australium (Basel: 1532). See

Bernard, J., Konsolidierung des reformierten Bekenntnisses im Riech der Stephanskrone
(Göttingen: 2017) 167 and n. 115.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 253

He [Vulcan] made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water,
And the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness,
And upon it all the constellations that festoon the heavens,
The Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion
And the Bear, whom men give also the name of the Wagon,
Who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion
And she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean.50

As W.J.T. Mitchell has observed, Homer’s passage ‘equivocates between catego-

ries of time and space’.51 Readers are free to imagine the shield’s past, when
Vulcan was in the process of making it. Thus, audiences are encouraged to
see or inhabit the space of the forge where he made it. But they are also free
to imagine that they view the shield after its completion. Finally, the passage
invites readers to inhabit the shield’s historical and visual spaces according to
Homer’s textual portrayal of its image. As we have seen, Les Antiquités uses the
ruin to activate a comparable regime of temporal and spatial fluidities. The
pictorial and discursive abundance in both shield and ruinscape rupture tradi-
tional blockages between ostensibly discrete categories. Moreover, in its echo
of Homer’s ekphrasis, du Bellay has performed a double-mapping. His outlin-
ing of the Eternal City’s unbounded scope via the ruin occurs via his mapping
of his discourse onto a poetic passage universally acknowledged as the point of
origin for all ekphrastic discourse. As such, he has created an unlimited space
for Les Antiquités – he has extended the scope of its landscape beyond the
land – while also confirming Sonnet I’s inaugural vivification of ancient poetry
by exemplifying its presence in his new poem.
Du Bellay’s references to earlier poetic productions in Les Antiquités extend
beyond its mention of the ashes of dead poets and its call-and-response rela-
tionship with Homer’s seminal ekphrasis by alluding more directly to a vari-
ety of literary and pictorial sources. Les Antiquités’ ruinscape – particularly its
references to the world wonders – aligns it with a painting that would have
been close by while du Bellay was in Rome. We must grant the possibility that
his ekphrastic description of Rome as an unframeable landscape including
the world wonders was mediated by his experience of viewing Maarten van
Heemskerck’s Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the
World [Fig. 6.2], a monumentally-scaled broad-view landscape notable for its

50 Homer, The Iliad, trans. R. Lattimore (Chicago: 1961) 18.483–489.

51 Mitchell, W.J.T., Picture Theory (Chicago: 1994) 177.
 254 DiFuria

figure 6.2 Maarten van Heemskerck, Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the
World, 1535–1536, oil on canvas, 147.3 × 383.5 cm
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD

inclusion of some of the world wonders.52 Although Van Heemskerck’s Helen

canvas was ‘old’ by the 1550s, doubtless obsolete in relation to its original con-
text and audience, its pictorial idiom was no less relevant than it had been
in the mid-30s when Van Heemskerck devised it for what must have been an
elite audience with Holy Roman imperial ties.53 Inventories suggest that by the
early 1550s, the Helen was on display in the collection of Cardinal Rodolfo Pio
da Carpi. Roldolfo had previously spent significant time in France as a papal
liaison to the French crown.54 There were no degrees of separation between
poet and cardinal. Moreover, du Bellay’s host in Rome, his cousin, Cardinal
Jean du Bellay, was an avid collector of antiquities and art after the antique
himself. Thus, a visit to Rodolfo’s collection at some point during the four years
of the poet’s Roman sojourn would seem to have been inevitable.

52 See Stritt, M., Die schöne Helena in de Romruinen. Uberlegungen zu einem Gemälde
Maarten van Heemskercks (Frankfurt: 2004) 43–45.
53 The painting’s iconography suggests that Van Heemskerck executed it for someone
with ties to the Habsburg dynasty and the Farnese family. See DiFuria, A., Maarten van
Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Cult of Ruins (Leiden – Boston: 2019)
174–176.
54 Rodolfo’s collection of antiquities and paintings, housed on the grounds of his villa on
the Quirinal Hill, was extensive. He was in France until July of 1537, after which he was
between France, Rome, and Ancona. Van Heemskerck finished the Helen, which bears a
‘double date’ of 1535–36, before Carpi’s time in Rome. It is doubtful that he commissioned
the painting from Van Heemskerck. For the whereabouts of Van Heemskerck’s Helen can-
vas see Franzoni, C., Gli inventari dell’eredetà cardinale Rodolfo Pio da Carpi (Pisa: 2002)
60, which lists it in Roldolfo’s inventory of 1564, suggesting his acquisition of it after he
began collecting in the early 1540s.
 ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 255

figure 6.3 Maarten van Heemskerck, Panorama Looking East from Janiculum, 1532–ca. 1537, ink on paper,
13.2 × 20.9 cm (left), 13.4 × 20.9 cm (right)
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

Painted by Van Heemskerck near the end of his Roman sojourn (1532–ca. 37),
Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World is
among the first of his paintings to exploit the inherently ekphrastic potential
in the Roman ruin vistas he encountered during his time in Rome, coupling
them with the emergent pictorial category of landscape.55 The Helen canvas
is also the earliest of his works to cultivate the ruin as a bearer of meaning
and a source for visual ekphrases in the form of ruin fantasie, portrayals of
invented structures that are the product of the artist’s imaginative memory
out of the study of ruins. These fantasie could assume the form of ruins or
intact buildings. Per our definition of ekphrastic discourse as having an elab-
orated, inventive relation to its object of description in an epideictic mode,
pictorial architectural fantasie such as those on display in the Helen and Van
Heemskerck’s later works are indeed visual ekphrases.56
With Rome as the visual and conceptual basis for his painting, Van Heemskerck
has invented an alternative Eternal City, a visual ekphrasis of the Rome he
encountered and drew on hundreds of sheets in the mid-1530s.57 The paint-
ing’s natural topography combines the broad-view landscape drawing of the
city that he executed on two sheets from atop the Janiculum Hill [Fig. 6.3] with
his similarly scoped double-sheeted view of the Ripa Grande, which he drew
from atop the Aventine [Fig. 6.4]. Several of the painting’s buildings reinvent

55 For the Helen’s date, see King, E.S., “A New Heemskerck”, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery
(1945) 61–73.
56 For Van Heemskerck’s inventiveness with Rome’s ruins and a detailed demonstration of
the relation of these drawings to the Helen canvas, see DiFuria, A., Van Heemskerck’s Rome
167–203.
57 For the Helen an ekphrastic interpretation of Rome, see Ibidem 167–174.
 256 DiFuria

figure 6.4 Maarten van Heemskerck, Panoramic View of the Ripa Grande Looking North from Aventine,
1532–ca. 1537, ink on paper, 12.3 × 20.4 cm (left), 13.5 × 20.8 cm (right)
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

the distant, and therefore summarily rendered, ruins in these drawings.58

For example, the latter drawing’s portrayal of the Ponte Fabbriccio reappears
almost verbatim as the bridge that is parallel to the picture plain in the Helen’s
central distance. Also easy to spot, the arcaded substructures in the paint-
ing’s upper left distance comprise a variation on Palatine Hill’s substructures,
which Van Heemskerck also drew [Fig. 6.5].59 Several circular buildings bear-
ing obelisks in the painting’s distance reprise the Castel Sant’Angelo’s appear-
ance in other drawings by Van Heemskerck.60 Other Helen motifs do not refer
to those we see in extant drawings by Van Heemskerck, but strongly suggest
his observation of specific Roman monuments. The painting’s centrally fore-
grounded circular temple, merely one example, suggests that he observed
and drew Bramante’s famous Tempietto. Its attic story, replete with pilasters
of gilded herms, its narrative frieze, and gilded composite capitals embel-
lish Il Tempietto’s Doric, more laconic affect. This particular fantasia by Van
Heemskerck thus engages an especially enriched poetics of invention. The
painter’s choice to make an unprecedented, wholly pictorial architectural
antiquity out of a building that his contemporaries – antiquarian artists, archi-
tects, and patrons in Rome – already viewed as a ‘new antiquity’ on par with
Rome’s ancient works, embeds the notion of continued if not infinite invention
after the antique.61 More important for our purposes here, Van Heemskerck’s

58 Ibidem, cat. nos. 57 and 56, respectively.

59 The substructures of the Palatine appear on several sheets among Van Heemskerck’s
Roman drawings, with the closest match being the one reproduced here, Ibidem, cat.
no. 15. See also cat. nos. 12 and 13.
60 E.g., ibidem, cat. no. 7.
61 For invention after the antique and Bramante, see Guillerme, J. – Vérin, H., and Sartarell, S.,
“The Archaeology of Section”, Perspecta 25 (1989) 226; Sankovitch, A., “Anachronism and
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 257

figure 6.5 Copy After Maarten van Heemskerck (by ‘Anonymous A’ /Hermannus
Posthumus?) Northern Side of the Palatine Hill, 1532–ca. 1537, ink on paper,
19.8 × 30.8 cm
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

selection of three of the world’s wonders in a panoramic landscape so evocative

of Rome functions similarly to du Bellay’s deployment of the wonders; the pres-
ence of some wonders in the Helen alludes to the rest of them, thus embed-
ding the idea of a panoramic scope, a transgression of the frame.62 Therefore,
even though Van Heemskerck’s broad-view landscape is necessarily contained
within a frame, it is truly panoramic for its references to points beyond what it
pictures, akin to the previously noted panoramic evocations in Les Antiquités.
Such imagery signals its relation to ruins with the same mechanisms of spatial
reinvention as du Bellay’s verbiage.
By the 1550s, the production of architectural fantasie like those on view in
the Helen had become a commonplace among Northern European artists and
architects, who engaged a broadly inventive pictorial mode comparable to

Simulation in Renaissance Architectural Theory”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49/50

(2006) 192–194. For Bramante’s use of ancient theory and materials for Il Tempietto see
Rowland, I., “From Vitruvian Scholarship to Vitruvian Practice”, Memoirs of the American
Academy in Rome 50 (2005) 15–40.
62 Stritt, M., Romruin 44.
258 DiFuria

that on display in Van Heemskerck’s Helen.63 Even Hieronymus Cock’s famous

ruinscapes, which allege documentary status, reinvent the landscapes they
portray.64 French antiquarian visual culture was as deeply invested in imaging
ancient and modern Rome – as well as in visualizing a new, ekphrastic Rome –
as du Bellay was in textualizing it. We trace the roots of this commitment to
the reign of Francis I (r. 1515–1547), famous for his relentless attempts to import
Italian artists and antiquities to France over the course of his reign. His suc-
cessor, Henri II, the dedicatee of Les Antqiuités, was a comparably committed
antiquarian on behalf of the French crown. We can point to numerous strands
of antiquarian productivity resulting from royal impetus. A prime mover in
the importation of an architectural language after the antique to France with
which to invent a new French antiquity was the publication of Sebastiano
Serlio’s illustrated books of architecture there.65 As Mario Carpo has observed,
although Serlio’s books formulated a canon of architectural antiquities, they
translated ancient Roman architecture into the pictorial realm, enabling a
fluid importation of antiquity to France, or anywhere, in reduced parts – ‘bib-
liospace’ in Carpo’s coinage.66 As such, Serlio’s books embedded a de facto
imperative to invent architecture after the antique.
As important in France as Serlio’s publications for ekphrastic antiquarian
productions combining image and text was Jean Martin’s translation of the
Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 into French, adapted
and published in France in 1549 as Le Songe de Poliphile.67 Originally published
at the turn of the Cinquecento on the Aldine imprint in Venice, Colonna’s
book exemplifies the impetus to invent after the antique. The book’s catalyst,
Poliphilo, falls asleep and dreams while in search of his love, Polia. The limit-
less conceptual framework of the dream state – which accommodates scenar-
ios that are impossible in the waking realm of the everyday – provides author
Colonna with the all the leverage he needs to describe Poliphilo’s dream journey
through an ekphrastic antiquity, replete with impossible structures. Notably,
although the dream state allows for seemingly unthinkable architecture,

63 Dacos, N., Roma Quanta Fuit; DiFuria, A., Van Heemskerck’s Rome, 29–36; Stewart, S., The
Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Princeton: 2020) 119–154.
64 Van Grieken, J. (ed), Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print (New Haven – London:
2013).
65 Serlio, Sebastiano, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, Hart, V. – Hicks, P. (eds.) (New
Haven – London: 1996–2001).
66 Carpo, M., Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed
Images in the History of Architectural Theory, trans. S. Benson (Cambridge: 2001) 46 and
157 n. 7.
67 Colonna, Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans.
J. Godwin (London: 1999); McGowan, Vision of Rome 133–136.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 259

Poliphilo also encounters ruin fragments, which appear in many of the book’s
illustrations of inventions combining known buildings from antiquity.68
The prints of Antoine LaFrery (1512–1577) and Étienne Dupérac (1525–1604),
both of whom were based in Rome at the same time as du Bellay, stand as
hallmarks of French antiquarianism’s visual exponent.69 Though the most
encyclopedic manifestations of their efforts appeared in the decades after du
Bellay’s death, their enterprise must have appeared to the poet as exceedingly
vast, a lifework, thus bringing home the seemingly immeasurable depths of
Rome’s past. But the fantastic strain of imagery after the antique that prolifer-
ated from the workshops of French artists, ruinscapes by Leonard Thiry (active
1530–50), Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (1510–1584), Jean Cousin the Younger
(1522–1595), and Antoine Carron (1521–1599), most strongly suggests the per-
vasiveness of an ekphrastic pictorial antiquarianism aligned with du Bellay’s
Horatian declaration in his dedication of Les Antiquités to Henri II.70 Cousin’s
ruin fantasies, for example [Fig. 6.6], construct entirely new antique vistas out
of a French understanding of Roman antiquity via the study of its ruins. The
inclusion of putti in the foreground of the example from the British Museum,
which we present here, may have been meant to provide a placeholder
for more meaningful narrative figures in a subsequent painted or printed
version.71 But the drawing’s main element is the remarkably complete, well-
integrated ruinscape in its backdrop. No implausible mishmash of motifs, not
reliant on the conceptual framework of a dream state for its pictorial leverage,
Cousin’s ruinscape reads comparably to Van Heemskerck’s Helen. Its seamless
integration of natural and built topography suggests an organic environment;
circular temples, ruined substructures, commemorative columns, obelisks,
and arcaded loggias surmount a steep hill in ways we would expect the built
environment to coalesce with the landscape. With their broad-view scopes
emphasizing landscape over figure and the apparent balance in their attention
to nature and construction, Van Heemskerck’s and Cousin’s ruinscapes suggest
landscape’s status as an appropriate pictorial venue for imaging a complete,
virtual, new, alternative antiquity out of its actual source, akin to the ambition
that du Bellay describes in his dedication to Henri.
Less deftly integrated images that portray ruins at closer range, especially
those coming out of France at mid-century, broadcast more plainly the

68 E.g., Colonna, Hypnerotomachia 21, 26.

69 Zorach. R. (ed), The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the
Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (Chicago: 2007).
70 McGowan, M., Vision of Rome 136–160.
71 See also, McGowan, M., Vision of Rome 151, describing the ‘tiny children’ in Cousin’s simi-
larly composed Enfants jouant près d’une fontaine as ‘almost an afterthought’.
260 DiFuria

figure 6.6 Jean Cousin the Younger, Putti Playing in a Landscape with Classical Ruins,
ca. 1550, ink on paper, 15.9 × 23.4 cm
British Museum

mechanics of pictorial ekphrasis that interest us here because they provide

a more conspicuous assemblage of sources akin to the quotational mode of
appropriating the literary past that we approach in Les Antiquités. Consider,
for example, Artists Drawing a Ruin Fantasy [Fig. 6.7], a print executed by
Virgil Solis (1514–1562) and composed by Léonard Thiry, a Flemish artist who
worked at the Royal Chateau of Fontainebleau.72 Composed in the 1540s, dur-
ing the period leading up to du Bellay’s Roman phase, the print can hardly
be described as remarkable in craftsmanship or unique in content. However,
because of the overt implausibility in its combinations of motifs and its
inclusion of artists rendering them, it comprises an essay on the multivalent
ekphrastic reuse Rome’s topography and its regeneration out of artistic study.
The print’s distant backdrop alone refracts Rome ekphrastically by stacking
three structures whose appearance would remind audiences of the columns of
Hadrian or Trajan, the Pantheon, and Rome’s many pyramidal and obelisk-like
structures. Yet, their generic and partial appearance combined with their prox-
imity to one another confirms that they are not in – and do not belong to – the

72 Dacos, N. “Léonard Thiry de Belges, peintre excellent: De Bruxelle à Fontainebleau en pas-

sant par Rome”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 127 (1996) 199–212 and 128 (1996) 21–36.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 261

figure 6.7 Virgil Solis after Léonard Thiry, “Artists Drawing a Ruin Fantasy”, The Little book of
Architectural Ruins, 1550–62, ink on paper, 15 × 10.2 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
262 DiFuria

Rome they may initially suggest to viewers, though that Rome is indeed the
source of their genesis. Via their spatial relation to one another alone, they sig-
nal that the ‘Rome’ on view in this print exists exclusively in the pictorial realm.
Rather, the composer of the print has transported them from the historical,
experienced Rome to another rearranged, reconfigured, reinvented one. We
find further embellishments and reinventions of Rome’s ancient urban ambi-
ent at ground level in the background, where what appears to be an arcaded
interior stands adjacent to steps resembling the many sets of steps found
throughout the Eternal City, aids to surmounting its seven hills. The middle
and foregrounds elaborate monumental arches with rusticated voussoirs rest-
ing on piers resembling those at the Colosseum. The coffered interiors of each
vault resemble nothing found in a specific Roman edifice, but instead appear
as simplified versions of the designs for ‘mazes and knots’ available to drafts-
men from France and the Low Countries in Serlio’s Book IV on ornament.73 In
an exceptionally ekphrastic turn, either Thiry or Solis has rendered into these
vaults a spatial and visual implausibility; although the vaults are broken to
the point where they display open holes, the structures behind them do not
appear visible through the holes, even though they should. Rather than dismiss
this as a pictorial lapse, a mistake, we can regard it as an artistic choice, a signal
regarding the pictorial realm’s relation to lived experience.74 Thiry shows his
audience that the image before them is an assemblage, so obviously a recon-
figuring of its disparate sources that it privileges broadcasting the nature of its
own making over concealing it, just as textual ekphrases call attention to their
own implausibilities in relation to the images they describe. Thus, no viewer
could conceivably construe the all’antica environment Thiry has devised as
anything other than a deliberate re-imagining of its Roman source. Audiences
are meant to read it as such.
Via the Thiry print’s inclusion of artists poised with pen and paper in hand
drawing the ruins before them, the image reflexively signals the means of its
own ekphrasis, in self-aware fashion. Two draftsmen look up from their draw-
ings to gaze intently at an antique sculptural fragment, while a third appears
to be in mid-stroke. A fourth looks over the shoulder of the draftsman at upper
left. Clearly, none of them will produce the same drawing. As they translate
the haptic experience of sharing space with the architecture before them into
the pictorial realm, motifs become subject to the mode of inventive, even play-
ful reuse we view in the very print they inhabit. Thus, Artists Drawing a Ruin
73 Serlio, Sebastiano, Serlio on Architecture IV, fols. 68–70.
74 See also Thiry’s image of a comparable scene in British Museum no. 1850.0223.127, where
a hole in the vaulting does reveal the ruins behind it, indicating that Solis and Thiry could
have shown the ruins through the damaged vaults in our present example.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 263

Fantasy certifies Rome’s ruins as an ekphrastic source while presenting a new

pictorial invention out of them, an image of an imagined environment never
actually inhabited by bodies, though it is portrayed as such. In this way, too,
the image behaves on traditional ekphrastic terms; it re-describes its source
with vivid reinvention. Its new combinations of antiquities result in invented
ruins and intact buildings, affirming that the ruin – the antique fragment – is
the fountainhead of invention. Moreover, the presence of artists within Thiry’s
pictorial ekphrasis of Rome suggests the creation and proliferation of many
such images. The type of image we view here received numerous variations
from Thiry also executed by Solis and widely circulated by Jacques Androuet
du Cerceau. But the prolificacy of such imagery and its seemingly generic
affect speak not only to the post-Serlian bibliospatial redistribution of the
architectural language of antiquity, but also to the freedom with which art-
ists and audiences consumed and produced this language via an allusive mode
entailing quotation and recombination.
We should consider the discursive modes we read in Les Antiquités and
see in the images by Van Heemskerck, Cousin, and Thiry and du Cerceau we
have presented here as being abundant with what W.J.T. Mitchell has termed
‘ekphrastic hope’, a cultural production’s invitation to ‘discover a “sense”
in which language can … make [its audience] see’. For Mitchell, ekphrastic
hope forms an intervention between an object and its ekphrastic response
‘not just for verbal representation of visual experience, but for the shaping
of language into formal patterns … a spatial, formal array’. He states further
that all ekphrasis ‘seeks to create a specific image that is to be found only in
the text as its “resident alien”, and … nowhere else.’ Mitchell therefore revises
John Hollander’s distinction between ‘notional’ and ‘imaginary’ ekphrases –
the former describing lost sources, the latter describing well-known or extant
ones. Because objects of description can only exist as resident aliens in texts
describing them, Mitchell argues, ekphrasis response is always notional.75
Thus, although Mitchell discusses verbal representations of visual sources, his
formulation of ekphrastic hope is notable for its flexibility; our examples from
Van Heemskerck, Cousin, Thiry (and du Cerceau) function in a manner that is
analogous to Les Antiquités. Each image responds to Rome’s visual aspect as
a text. The architectural language of antiquity the images present ‘makes us
see’ Rome. However, each example presents a reconfigured Rome that exists
only as ‘resident alien’ in their images, available for consumption only in those
works. Likewise reconfigured by du Bellay according to the infinitely expansive
mode we identified above, a limitless panoramic landscape unmediated even

75 Mitchell, W.J.T., Picture Theory 154–159.

264 DiFuria

by history, Rome also achieves resident alien status in Les Antiquités. Moreover,
because of their basis in the partially-present, partially-absent status of the
ruin, all of these mid-century productions, be they literary or pictorial, confirm
Mitchell’s notion that all ekphrasis is notional.
That Les Antiquités bears allusions to – and quotations from – pre-existing
productions furthers its ekphrasis. Ancient, medieval, and contemporary
poetry receives reference in Les Antiquités, but not merely as a dazzling dis-
play of erudition or a deft grafting of disparate sources. Rather, an ekphrasis of
Rome via the image of its ruins invites the construction of such a referential
complex. Michel Foucault provides a useful frame through which to see the
engagement of any antiquated artifact as a call for the invention of new works
bearing the traces of earlier ones.

The conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse,

the historical conditions required if one is to ‘say anything’ about it,
and if several people are to say different things about it, the conditions
necessary if it is to exist in relation to other objects, if it is to establish
with them relations of resemblance, proximity, distance, difference,
transformation – as we can see, these conditions are many and imposing.
Which means that one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy
to say something new.76

Foucault’s observation also provides an apt way of seeing the referential aspect
of Les Antiquités’ rhetorical framework, its relation to relevant visual and literary
productions. As we have seen, sixteenth-century artists concerned with estab-
lishing links between ancient works and their own cultural moment imbued
their own productions with the retrospective erudition Foucault describes; it
is well known that the enrichment of a work of art or literature by quoting ear-
lier sources, a conspicuous display of difficulty – difficotlà according to Giorgio
Vasari (1511–1574) for example, in which works of art call attention to the com-
plex referentiality of their own production and consumption, a difficulty of
‘saying something new’ – was a prevalent practice among sixteenth-century
makers.77 Such appropriations could, of course, range from verbatim quota-
tions that explicitly signal the new work’s indebtedness to its sources to more
inventive, seamlessly-crafted revisions, barely-recognizable allusions, where

76 Foucault, M., Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans. A.M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: 1972) 44.
77 Rubin, P., Giorgio Vasari and Art History (New Haven – London: 1995) vii, 273–275, 388.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 265

even the identity of quoted sources could be subject to debate.78 Across these
extremes, knowledgeable audiences would find in such devices a range of more
or less enriched opportunities to prove their memories – to display the mul-
tiple forms of knowledge they possessed, their erudition, their understanding
of history, their knowledge of art – and make associations between the work at
hand and other works, sorting out significances. For audiences engaged in such
interpretive exercises, the discovery of such allusions is automatically tanta-
mount to establishing lines of inquiry that take them out of direct contact with
the production at hand, only to return them to it if they persist with a few
specific routes of inquiry. How is the quoted work relatable to the new work?
How could associations between the work at hand and their referents generate
meaning? Does the work at hand shed new light on the meaning of the work to
which it refers? While such a conspicuously constructed mode of production
has long received recognition as a hallmark of sixteenth-century productions
throughout Europe, the meanings that such quotations generate have proven
resistant to closure, dependent as they are upon relations that are specific to
an individual work and those it has appropriated. Ostensibly, such referential-
ity stabilizes or even delimits the newly produced image or text by suspending
it within a broader discursive web.79 However, in the same moment of recogni-
tion, such allusions distance descriptive texts from the objects they describe
by populating the production at hand with a set of related productions bear-
ing their own concerns. Such interventions provide what we should call an
‘ekphrastic hedge’, between description and object, an opportunity to move
beyond a singularly focused description of streamlined accessibility approach-
ing the concrete, into an enriched interpretative zone highlighting the richly
generative qualities of the object described.
The nature of the relation of du Bellay’s poetry to its myriad sources has
fascinated scholars who have mined his works to reveal his adroit use of a
vast literary canon to craft his own multifaceted, allusive voice. The poetic
inspirations for Les Antiquités include Florentine poet, Francesco Petrarca,
better known as Petrarch (1304–1374), Janus Vitalis (1485–1560), Baldassare
Castiglione (1478–1529), and Ariosto, all important for Les Antiquités in spe-
cific ways. Scholars have noted du Bellay’s particular indebtedness to Vitalis,
deeming it especially palpable because of conspicuous variations on passages

78 The literature on the use of quotation in the sixteenth century is copious. The seminal
source is still Shearman, J., Mannerism (Harmondsworth: 1967). See also Freedberg, S.
“Observations on the Painting of the Maniera”, The Art Bulletin 47 (1965) 190.
79 For the relation of quotation and appropriation to the origins of ekphrasis, see Chinn, C.,
“Statius Silv. 4.6 and the Epigrammatic Origins of Ekphrasis”, The Classical Journal 100
(2005) 247–263.
266 DiFuria

from Vitalis’s own poetry on Rome’s ruins.80 We broaden our understanding of

the ekphrastic complex du Bellay constructed for Les Antiquités by unpacking
perhaps its richest allusion. The most important concept for du Bellay’s ruin
poetics manifests in an expression we trace to the famous lament by Petrarch:
‘Nusquam minus Roma cognoscitur quam Romae’ (Rome is least known in
Rome).81 Petrarch made the observation during his travel to the Eternal City in
a letter to his friend, Giovanni Colonna. In context, his statement documents
his antithetical response to being a Florentine in the Eternal City: awe at the
feet of the ruins and wonder at their embodiment of the absence of Rome in
Rome, how unknowable the Eternal City was, even by Romans themselves. His
response to the ruins embodies Mitchell’s identification of ‘ekphrastic other-
ness’, a useful foundation for situating poetic consciousness in relation to the
ruin.82 As we have seen, among the most fundamental features of ekphrasis
according to Mitchell is its ‘hope’ that its text will function as a surrogate for
the image it describes, thus overcoming its medium’s ‘otherness’ in relation
to its object. We locate the ekphrastic otherness of Petrarch’s paradox in its
concise acknowledgement of a similar transitive dysfunction; Rome has an
enriched textual history known to concerned non-Romans, who nonetheless
find it wanting upon seeing the city for themselves; because Rome is in ruin,
Romans do not know Rome; however, thus, the discursive gap in the ruined
image of Rome posits ekphrastic otherness in the historical texts describing it.
In turn, then, Rome’s ruined state makes further descriptions of it a necessarily
ekphrastic venture.
Petrarch’s paradox set the tone for poetic responses to the city’s ruins well
into the 17th century. Before du Bellay, his Italian predecessor, Vitalis appro-
priated Petrarch’s phrase. And after him, so did Francisco de Quevedo (1580–
1645). While Petrarch’s initial observation was grounded in his experience of
the city, all three subsequent writers, especially du Bellay, utilized its poetics.
The sentiment at its core functioned as an axis around which to build rhe-
torical structures analogous to the ruin itself; through their very status as the
fragmented remains of the antique past, Roman ruins paradoxically form
powerful reminders of Rome’s lost grandeur while also leaving our notion of

80 Skyrme, R., “Quevedo, Du Bellay, and Janus Vitalis”, Comparative Literature Studies 19
(1982) 281–295; Tucker, G.H., “Roma Instaurata”; Haldane, M. “‘Et Rome Rome a vaincu
seulement’: Du Bellay’s Sonnet III of the Antiquitez de Rome”, Neophilologus 97 (2013)
465–480.
81 Rebhorn, W., “Du Bellay’s Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Petrarchist Sonnet
Sequence”, Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980) 609–622.
82 Mitchell, W., Picture Theory, 156–57.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 267

it incomplete. In Les Antiquités, this sentiment resurfaces at the beginning of

Sonnet III.

Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome

Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois,
Ces vieux palais, ce vieux arcs que tu vois,
Et ce vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme.83

Newcomer, who looks for Rome in Rome,

And little of Rome in Rome can perceive,
These old walls and palaces, yet believe,
These ancient archways; are what men call Rome.84

Du Bellay’s allusion to Petrarch’s sentiment would suffice to comprise an

ekphrastic hedge by itself. However, the reference is mediated by its closer syn-
tactical relationship to Vitalis’s own variation on Petrarch in his epigram, Roma
Prisca.

Qui Romam in media quaeris novus advena Roma

Et Romam in Roma vix reperis media.

The newcomer who in the midst of Rome seeks Rome

Will hardly find Rome in Rome.85

Roma Prisca appeared in print in Iani Vitalis Panormitani Sacrosanctae Roma-

nae Ecclesiae Elogia during 1553, the same year du Bellay entered Rome.86
The close relationship between du Bellay’s and Vitalis’s text suggests that the
French poet was at least aware of Vitalis’s variation, and more likely that he
deliberately choice to broadcast his appropriation of it. Both sixteenth-century
poems increase the tension in Petrarch’s paradox by making more explicit the
link between the image of Rome’s ruins – ‘Ces vieux palais … que tu vois’ –
and the elusiveness of Rome in Rome, the place where one would, ironically,
expect to find it most readily available.

83 Bellay, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 3.

84 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 5.
85 Translation mine. Stewart, S., Ruins Lesson 124–125 describes Vitalis’s epigram as an ‘elo-
quent summation of the process of ruination and the problems of its representation’.
86 For Roma Prisca’s impact, see McGowan, M., Vision of Rome 226–227.
268 DiFuria

Though Petrarch and Vitalis were Italian, Du Bellay was like both of them
in that all three were visitors to Rome, non-Romans for whom the very sight of
the ruins was extraordinary, inscrutable. While Rome’s remains of course con-
tinued to dominate vistas in the Eternal City for over a millennium after the
empire’s collapse, those who lived among them continued to build and rebuild
with them. And as such, after a millennium had passed, although medieval
and then early modern Rome had grown out of the germ of ancient Rome,
authors from Petrarch to du Bellay and beyond inherited the Eternal City as a
palimpsest in various stages of development, subject to layers and erasures, the
product of the ‘substitutive’ interventions on the Roman ambient described
by Nagel and Wood in Anachronic Renaissance.87 Thus, the Rome that du
Bellay and other ‘newcomers’ sought – not the ancient, medieval, or modern
Rome, but the idea of Rome – was the least known by its own because they did
not possess the distance from it to formulate it; they remained forever in its
midst, continued to grow it and from that enmeshed vantage point, watched
its minutiae evolve infinitesimally. Moreover, Petrarch’s paradox underscores
the city’s status as an ekphrasis unto itself, an undone organism, eternally in
the process of re-describing itself in vivid terms to an onlooker to whom it is
not known experientially, as it is unmade by participants who do not know it
either. Whether or not this was perceived as a real set of conditions is possible,
but matters little; that a set of non-Roman onlookers came to the city and par-
took of this as a poeticized set of conditions foregrounding the ruin, however,
matters immeasurably.
Further, in several ways, the ideational chain at the core of Petrarch’s
paradox founds the antithesis at the heart of Les Antiquités; although native
Romans must be more authentically Roman than concerned newcomers, they
are subject to the same decay, the same corrosion of memory, that we see in
ancient Rome’s ruined buildings themselves; the beholder who is non-Roman
thus cannot find Rome in her citizens or her urban fabric; therefore, that which
is known of Rome – the text of Rome – is fluid, evolving; and while the thresh-
old between knowing and not knowing is an inevitable pathway to invention, it
is founded in a reduction of the past, an invitation to reductive descriptions.88
Thus, du Bellay offsets his deployment of a voice that exalts Rome as a
sweeping supraterrestrial geography with a brutally frank, by turns antiphras-
tic voice that revisits an embittered fixation on the loss of Rome’s grandeur by

87 Nagel, A. – Wood, C., Anachronic Renaissance (New York: 2010) 29–34.

88 This insight builds on Stewart’s association in Ruins Lesson 68–69 of Petrarch’s ruin dis-
course, which ‘produces an effect of anticipation and constant motion’ via an account of
perambulation through the city, with the loss of Livy’s writings.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 269

developing the leitmotif of dust introduced in the first line of Sonnet I, and of
Rome devouring itself, inaugurated in Sonnet III, which uses Petrarch’s para-
dox as its point of departure. Naturally, then, Sonnet III contains the most pal-
pable tension between the antithetical voices at the heart of Les Antiquités. For
example, immediately following the Petrarchan reference, the speaker’s visu-
alization of ‘ruin and … pride’ before him (‘Voy quell orgueil, quelle ruine’) ini-
tiates the use of both. Further, the exalted Rome that confounded all (‘donter
tout’) became like every other earthly entity, prey to time, the consumer of all
(‘et devint proye au temps qui tout consomme’), echoing the Ovidian phrase,
‘tempus edax rerum’. Sonnet III then activates the notion that only Rome
could devour itself (‘Rome Rome a vaincu seulement’), a concept that embeds
Les Antiquités’ driving antithesis: if we recognize Rome as the only entity that
could destroy Rome, we exalt its unique, unsurpassed power, but we also blame
Rome for the mishandling of that power.89 Sonnet VI returns us to Rome, the
destroyer of Rome.

Rome seule pouvoit à Rome ressembler,

Rome seule pouvoit Rome faire trembler.90

Only Rome could mighty Rome resemble

Only Rome could force sacred Rome to tremble.91

Here, the speaker essentially declares Rome the ‘resident alien’ of Les Antiquités.
Neither the sonnets nor any other representation of Rome can describe it
adequately. Nor can any other entity destroy Rome. Both tasks are only within
reach of a lost Rome, which has been undone by Rome itself; both tasks there-
fore approach the impossible. Accordingly, in Sonnet VII, only Rome’s monu-
ments can retain Rome’s name, but do so inadequately, in their lamentable,
fragmented state; they thus receive praise and then are swiftly reduced to dust.

Sacrez costaux, et vous sainctes ruines

qui le seul nom de Rome retenez,
vieux monumens qui encor soustenez
l’honneur poudreux de tant d’âmes divines.
Arcs triomphaux, pointes du ciel voisines,
qui de vous voir le ciel mesme estonnez,

89 Bellay, The Ruins of Rome 5; Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 3.
90 Ibidem 6.
91 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 6.
270 DiFuria

Las, peu à peu cendre vous devenez

Fable du peuple, et publiques rapines!92

You sacred ruins, and you holy shores,

You that, alone, the name of Rome retain,
Old monuments, that still in dust maintain
Those divine spirits’ ever-honoured cause.
Triumphal arches, domes at heaven’s doors,
That an astonished heaven sees full plain,
Alas, by degrees, turned to dust again
The people’s fable that the public gnaws!93

In what is perhaps the harshest antiphrasis among the sonnets, Rome’s once
unsurpassed buildings go from reaching the heavens to being so woefully
unable to embody Rome that they even render the discursive colossus that
is Rome’s history into a ‘fable of the people’. Such an expression elaborates
Petrarch’s observation that the Romans have forgotten Rome, which is no
longer available to them. But it may also allude to the fabular nature of the
description of Rome’s monuments in guidebooks such as the 12th century’s
Mirabilia Vrbis Romae, which bears a multitude of ekphrases of the Eternal
City’s monuments.94 The leitmotif of dust receives further development in
subsequent sonnets. In Sonnet XV, the speaker addresses the proud spirits
who made Rome and asks them to speak. Calling them ‘ombres poudreuses’
(dusty shadows), likening them to the ruined state of their city of ‘reliques cen-
dreuses’, he asks them, mockingly, how it must feel to see Rome reduced to ‘une
poudreuse plaine’ (a dusty plain).

Parlez esprits, Ombres poudreuse

Qui jouyssant de la clarté du jour,
Fistes sortir cest orgueilleux sejour
Dont nous voyons les reliques cendreuses.
Dites, esprits (ainsi les tenebreuses
Rives de Styx non passable au retour,
Vous enlaçant d’un trois fois triple tour,
N’enferment point vos images ombreuses)

92 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 7.

93 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 7.
94 Nichols, F.M. (ed), Mirabilia Vrbis Romae (London: 1889); Stinger, C. Renaissance in Rome
31–45.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 271

Dites-moy donc (car quelqu’une de vous

possible encor se cache ici dessous)
Ne sentez-vous augmenter vostre peine,
Quand quelquefois de ces costaux Romains
Vous contemplez l’ouvrage de vos mains
N’estre plus rien qu’une poudreuse plaine?95

You pallid ghost, and you, pale ashen spirit,

Who joyful in the bright light of day
Created all that arrogant display,
Whose dusty ruin now greets our visit:
Speak, spirits (since that shadowy limit
Of Stygian shore that ensures your stay,
Enclosing you in thrice threefold array,
Sight of your dark images, may permit),
Tell me, now (since it may be one of you,
Here above, may yet be hid from view)
Do you not feel a greater depth of pain,
When from hour to hour in Roman lands
You contemplate the work of your hands,
Reduced to nothing but a dusty plain?96

Dust and other reductive descriptions of Rome’s hills and monuments recur
in Sonnet XVII, where even Rome’s hills turn to dust (‘Ces braves monts autre-
fois mis en poudre’) and Sonnet XVIII, where Rome’s old walls are nothing
more than great heaps of stone (‘Ces grand monceaux pierreux, ces vieux
murs que tu vois’).97 Sonnets XXVII and XXVIII exalt the ruins, but end once
again with reminders that they are reductions to dust of imperial grandeur
(‘ces poudreuses ruines’ and ‘Ce vieil honneur poudreux est le plus honoré’,
respectively).98 The latter’s description of the greatness of Rome as ‘the most
honored dust’ is an especially biting antiphrasis. But the former sonnet, per-
haps the most ekphrastically enriched of all across the entire group, warrants
our attention for its status as a compendium of Les Antiquités’ key themes
and its recognition of the ruin’s especially ekphrastic qualities, its status as an
opportunity for invention out of the detritus of the past.

95 Bellay, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 15.

96 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 11.
97 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 17, 18.
98 Ibidem 27, 28.
272 DiFuria

Toy qui de Rome esmerveillé contemples

L’antique orgueil qui menassoit les cieux,
Ces vieux palais, ces monts audacieux,
Ces murs, ces arcs, ces thermes et ces temples,
Juge, envoyant ces ruines si amples,
Ce qu’a rongé le temples injurieux,
Puisqu’aux ouvriers les plus industreiux
Ces vieux fragmens encore servent d’exemples,
Regard après, comme de jour en jour
Rome fouillant son antique sejour
Se rebastist de tant d’œuvres divines.
Tu jugeras, que le dœmon Romain
S’efforce encore d’une fatale main
Ressuciter ces poudreuses ruines.99

You, by Rome astonished, who gaze here

On ancient pride, once threatening the skies,
These old palaces, where the brave hills rise,
Walls, archways, baths, the temples that appear:
Judge, as you view these ruins, shattered, sere,
All that injurious Time’s devoured: the wise
Architect and mason, their plans devise
Still from these fragments, these patterns clear:
Then note how Rome, still, from day to day,
Rummaging through her ancient decay,
Renews herself with hosts of sacred things:
You’d think the Roman spirit yet alive,
With destined hands continuing to strive,
That to these dusty ruins, new life brings.100

Here, we are once again put before the ‘proud’ ruins, not only to gaze upon
them, but to be simultaneously astonished by them and vividly reminded of
their broken state. But further, to look at them closely is not only to see what
time has destroyed. It is also to see their containment of their original design,
which in turn enables their resuscitation.
However, as Les Antiquités works towards its conclusion, these hopes dis-
sipate; overweening pride of empire is no match for time, which only verse

99 Ibidem 27.
100 Idem 18.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 273

can overcome. Sonnet XXIX’s expression of the panoramic breadth of Rome’s

geographic extent, signalled by her status as a storehouse of treasures from the
world over, only serve’s the sonnet’s concise containment of antithetical ten-
sions between grandeur and its loss.

Rome vivant fut l’ornement du monde,

Et morte elle est du monde le tombeau.101

Living Rome, the ornament of the world,

Now dead, remains the world’s monument.102

A more literal translation of the final line, not bound to rhyme schemes, would
read ‘and dead, she is the world’s tomb’, making more vivid the sentiment’s
antithetical combination of ekphrastic vastness and antiphrastic irony; Rome
encompasses the world, yes, but she is also dead, a tomb of her own making.
With Rome thus memorialized, Du Bellay ends Les Antiquités by returning to
the notion of his verse, questioning its durability and reminding readers once
more of a paragone between image and text.

Esperez-vous que la posterité

Doive, mes vers, pour tout jamais vous lire?
Esperez-vous que l’œuvre d’une lyre,
Puisse acquerir tell immortalité?
Si sous le ciel fust quelque eternité,
Le monumens que je vous ai fait dire,
None en papier, mais en marbre et porphyre,
Eussent gardé leur vive antiquité.

Do you have hopes that posterity

Will read you, my Verse, for evermore?
Do you have hopes the lyre can soar
So high as to win immortality?
If what’s beneath the sky knew eternity,
The monuments, whose form I had you draw,
Not on paper but in marble, porphyry,
Would yet preserve their live antiquity.

101 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 29.

102 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 19.
274 DiFuria

Here, we find a summation of the poem’s self-aware concern with verse’s

ability to outlast that which it describes. We are thus once again returned to
Mitchell’s argument that ekphrasis is always notional. Du Bellay concludes by
noting the possibility that time may fail to destroy his description of Rome,
though Rome itself is destroyed, thus allowing his verse to always boast of his
achievement: to have been the first to sing the glory of Rome in French.

Ne laisse pas toutefois de sonner

Luth, qu’Apollon m’a bien daigné donner,
Car, si le temps ta gloire ne disrobe,
Vanter te peux, quelque bas que tu sois,
D’avoir chanté le premier des Fançois
L’antique honneur du people à long robe.103

Yet may you never cease to echo sweetly,

Lyre, that great Apollo deigned to grant me:
For if Time fails to topple you from place,
You may boast, however slight a thing
You are, you were first, in French, to sing
The ancient glory of the toga’d race.104

Thus, although the question of whether the sonnets of Les Antiquités advocate
for the reconstruction of Rome out of its ruins or elaborate the impossibil-
ity of such a task appears as their ongoing concern, attempts to answer that
question miss the point in their pervasive antithesis. Mid-century responses
to Rome suggest the city as much more than just an urban fabric evoking
such a binary. As we have seen, the time and space of Les Antiquités utilizes
the Roman ruinscape as an emblem for the universal compass of the idea of
Rome – mythical, historical, and ultimately poetic. Thus, in du Bellay’s poetics,
the impetus to rebuild the past out of its remains contains the impossibility
of doing so; making, unmaking, re-making again, empire’s helplessness in the
face of time, power and glory diminished to dust, and then remembered, albeit
partially, but enough to desire reconstruction, all fall short of the poetic idea
of Rome, which outstrips all. But without the ruin’s partial prompt to envi-
sion and imagine the antique past, positing such impossibility might itself
appear less possible. At the heart of our endeavour, then, is a partially lost city
with the most storied past of all, and those who have endeavoured to keep

103 Idem, Antiquités de Rome: Contenant un Générale Description 32.

104 Idem, The Ruins of Rome 20.
ANTITHESIS, EKPHRASIS, & ANTIPHRASIS IN DU BELLAY ’ S RUINSCAPE 275

it alive in discourse – istoria, poesie, and pictures. Are such efforts inevitably
ekphrastic? Is the ruined state of the Eternal City enough to ensure that any
visual or literary response to it is a de facto ekphrasis? It would seem so, but
only if makers engage the ruin’s poetics in earnest, with equal parts interest
in probing its historical and inventive implications, its presence and absence.
And within the limitless poetic universe du Bellay initiates in Les Antiquités,
ekphrasis is not only inevitable, it is the only means for discursive genesis. Up
to the moment of the 1550s, Les Antiquités functions as a summa of the ruin’s
capacity as an ekphrastic prompt. As the fragment that is almost always only
cryptically indicative of its own completion, the ruin invites infinite recon-
structions, and thus forms a de facto invitation to ekphrasis. Thus, exploring
the sonnets through the lens of ekphrasis is necessary for cultivating a fuller
understanding of the rhetorical complex they construct. And Du Bellay’s iden-
tification of the ruinscape as the exemplum for a supratemporal, supraterres-
trial ekphrasis of Rome entails the very antithesis at the heart of the sonnets.
As we have seen, the ruin’s status as a partial reminder of Rome’s grandeur
makes it ripe for such antithetical discourse. By engaging the ruin in a liter-
ary Roman landscape with hills that outdistance the extent of the universe,
du Bellay initiates a multivalent description of the Eternal City that exploits
the ekphrastic mechanism’s epideictic capacity to its fullest. The rebuilding of
‘new Romes’ out of the knowledge of its past entailed a project that was partly
historical and archaeological, but it was also mnemonic in the most expan-
sive sense imaginable. And with the latter entailment, new Romes also entail
poetics, metaphorics, vivification, ekphrasis. Thus, as Les Antiquités’ references
to past poetry suggests, we should consider du Bellay’s advocacy for French’s
capacity to reuse Latin inventively, surpassing literal translation, as a working
theory that underpins the epideictics of his ekphrastic reuse of Rome’s ruins
to create a textual panorama of the city. At the same time, however, we should
also note that Les Antqiuités reveals that the ruin’s status as an antiphrasis, a
reduction of something grand. The broad view landscapes within which the
ruin appears in Les Antqiuités in turn reveal landscape as both an ekphrastic
and antiphrastic pictorial category; on the one hand, a broad-view landscape
extends a visual description of its subject; by the same token, however, it func-
tions as a framed view of everything, and as such, reduces or understates its
experienced geographic and topographic vastness to something that is visu-
ally encompassed, traversed in a glance, contained. Finally, before conclud-
ing, we would be remiss not to return to the contextual conditions with which
we began this essay; as du Bellay contemplated the deeper significances in
Rome’s ruins, there can be no doubt that the multitude of trials he encoun-
tered in many aspects of his life made the antithesis of triumph and tragedy
276 DiFuria

they embodied all the more poignant to him. His own health failing, his nation
and King defeated, mortality and failure surrounded him in many forms. That
even such a wonder as Rome could fall must have seemed to him the greatest
and smallest wonder at all.

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 chapter 7

Through a Poet’s Eyes: Jan van der Noot’s Poem on

the Capital Sins

Caecilie Weissert
With a translation of the poem by Anna Dlabacova

In 1570 or 1571 the Flemish and French poet Jan van der Noot (ca. 1539–ca. 1595)
published the anthology of poems Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden
Poëtixe werken in England with the publishers Henry Bynneman and John
Day.1,2 [Figs. 7.1–7.2] Only three copies are still known today, located in the
libraries in Ghent (University Library), Haarlem (Municipal Library), and
Washington, DC (Folger Shakespeare Library). These three copies differ in
several respects, because van der Noot intervened in the printing process.3 So
he dedicated the copy now kept in Haarlem to Charles Frederick, heir appar-
ent of Jülich and Cleves. A second dedication in this copy is to William Parr,
Earl of Northampton, with a poem right at the beginning of the volume. A
sonnet to William of Orange and an ode to his brother Louis of Nassau also
in this volume seems to reveal van der Noot’s affinity to Protestantism.4 In
the Ghent copy, the dedication to Charles Frederick is missing and the two
above-mentioned poems were also removed. The ode with which van der Noot
dedicated Het Bosken to William Parr has been moved to the end of the vol-
ume, and three handwritten poems are supplemented. Werner Waterschoot
ascribes these changes to the fact that the dedication of the book to William
Parr was not relevant for the customer and therefore did not have to be at the
beginning.5 The absence of the poems to William of Orange and to his brother

1 See the text of Jan van der Noot’s poem on the capital sins in the appendix below, pp. 302–
307, trans. Anna Dlabacova – ed. Walter S. Melion.
2 For the printers and the publication date, see Waterschoot W., “Jan van der Noot’s Het Bosken
Re-examined”, Quaerendo 22 (1992) 28–48. For the life of Jan van der Noot, see Vermeylen A.,
Leven en Werken van Jonker van der Noot (Antwerpen: 1899).
3 Waterschoot, “Jan van der Noot’s Het Bosken”. See Woodfield D.B., Surreptitious Printing
in England, 1550–1640 (New York: 1973) 106; Smit W.A.P. – Vermeer W. (ed.), Het Bosken en
Het Theatre. By Jan Van der Noot (Amsterdam – Antwerpen: 1953) 13–34; and Friedland
L.S., “Reviewed Work(s): Het Bosken en Het Theatre by Jan Van der Noot, W.A.P. Smit and
W. Vermeer”, Comparative Literature 7.1 (1955) 76–78.
4 For bibliographical descriptions and a comparison of the copies, see Waterschoot, “Jan van
der Noot’s Het Bosken”.
5 Ibid. 40.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

 JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 279

figure 7.1 Isaac Duchemius after Adriaen de Weert, Portrait of Jan van der Noot, between 1579 and 1595.
Engraving, 40.5 × 33.4 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Image © Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
280 Weissert

figure 7.2 Jan van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden poëtixe wercken (London:
1570 or 1571?), title page. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library
Image © Folger Shakespeare Library

Louis, both leaders of the revolt in the Netherlands, probably has to do with
a different political attitude of the customer for whom the Ghent copy was
intended.6 The copy in Washington is preceded by part of another publication
by van der Noot. It combines the preliminaries to the Dutch version of Het
Theatre published in 1568: the title and the laudatory verses by the physician
and poet Gerardus Goossenius and by the painter and poet Lucas de Heere
from Ghent. And it is supplemented with twenty etchings ascribed to Marcus
Gheeraerts the Elder with the accompanying poems.7 The great differences in
the individual copies makes it obvious that van der Noot has taken great care
to tailor his publication to each recipient. All three volumes, however, include

6 Waterschoot presumes that Van der Noot was also concerned not to reveal his close contacts
with Protestantism in this copy. See ibid.: ‘In the seventeenth century this copy was bound
together with ‘Een schoon profijtelick Boeck, genaemt den benauden verjaechden, vervolch-
den Christen’ by the Lierre rhetorician Jeronimus van der Voort (Dordrecht 1615). No doubt
the final section of Het Bosken with its devotional texts was the reason for it’.
7 Waterschoot, “Jan van der Noot’s Het Bosken” 41. The long explanatory prose commentary on
the emblems is missing here. About the commentary, see Witstein S.F., De verzencommentar
in Het Theatre van Jan van der Noot: bronnen en bewerkingswijze (Utrecht: 1965).
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 281

the poem entitled “Beschrijvinghe van de hooft sonden, Inden eersten van
Houerdye” (Description of the Capital Sins, First of Pride) which is the subject
of the following. (For a facsimile of the poem and its English translation, see
the appendix.)
In nine verses with rhyming couplets that vary greatly in length, van der
Noot describes nine female personifications of sins and vices: pride, envy,
greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, sloth, villainy, and hypocrisy. The first seven sins
are numbered consecutively and thus identified as the seven capital or deadly
sins. They are supplemented by the personifications of villainy and hypoc-
risy, which is specified here as feigned sanctity (gheueysde heylicheyt). The
poem gives several indications that it describes a painting and therefore, as
the Dutch literary historian W.A.P. Smit notes, gives rise to the assumption
that ‘apparently Van der Noot here presents an allegorical representation of
the seven deadly sins as he has seen them in a painting’.8 In the following,
the assumption that van der Noot’s “Beschrijvinghe van der hooft sonden” is a
picture-poem will be examined more closely.

1 “Beschrijvinghe van de Hooft Sonden”

In this poem the author assumes the perspective of a viewer by reporting on

what he gradually perceives, what he notices in particular, and what associa-
tions this triggers in him. At the outset, he describes the female personification
of pride or arrogance (Lat. superbia; 12 verses), Houerdye, who is depicted sit-
ting very splendidly. Being convinced of her own perfection, she is richly deco-
rated with pearls and precious stones and luxuriously dressed in a garment
and coat. Before the eyes of the reader or listener a colourful picture emerges,
because the shining pearls, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds shim-
mer on her gold-coloured and sky-blue garments. The colours are reflected in
the plumage of the beautiful peacock that is seen beside Houerdye. In this way
pride embodies luxury, wealth, and arrogant hubris.
In contrast to pride, Nydicheyt, the personification of envy (Latin invidia; 22
verses), sits in a dark hollow deprived of the light of the stars and any source of
refreshment. Deadly pale and sallow, ugly and dirty with yellow, wobbly teeth
and full of dirty mucus, her hideous appearance mirrors her inner being and
character: her cold heart, her evil gaze, her breast filled with green bile or the

8 Smit – Vermeer, Het Bosken en Het Theatre 125: ‘Blijkbaar geeft Van der Noot hier een alle-
gorische voorstelling der zeven hoofdzonden weer, zoals hij deze op een schilderij heeft
gezien’.
282 Weissert

poison of her tongue. Her being is completely determined by inner factors, and
the effects of her soul manifest themselves clearly in her outer appearance.
Filled with fear, she becomes a smithy of vice, including gloating. Her deeply
evil nature is reflected by the dangerous dog lying next to her. Van der Noot
also speaks of the foul smelling excrement in which she sits, evoking not only
a gloomy and desolate mood but also a matching association of odour, some-
thing a painting cannot convey. Here the poet (and painter) creates a powerful
contrast to the beautiful, vain pride shining in bright colours.
Then he sees the standing personification of greed (Latin avaritia; 22
verses), Ghiericheyt. Dirty, smudged, and in tattered old clothes, she is hoard-
ing her money and her treasures. Greed is associated with the gallows, with the
fate of petty thieves, and with the injustice of not usually holding the instiga-
tors accountable for their actions, summed up in the proverb ‘the petty ones
are hung, while the big ones are released’ (stanza 46). This sin is character-
ized by the main aspect of hoarding riches. She is unscrupulous and greedy
in her intentions and actions, which is also reflected in her outer appearance.
She is accompanied by a toad that anxiously clings to the lump of mud it has
snatched. The poet praises the personification with her distorted hands as out-
standingly depicted, thus confirming that he has seen the painting. This praise
of artistic execution sheds light on the aesthetic evaluation criteria of van der
Noot’s contemporaries, who were also willing and able to look at the repulsive
and ugly with pleasure.
Then he turns to lust (Lat. luxuria; 6 verses). Oncuysheyt is naked and is
spending pleasurable moments with her lover, who nevertheless will never be
able to satisfy her. She is accompanied by a rooster, and the poet thinks he is
hearing its lustful crowing. Here, too, the dimension of sound is evoked. The
fifth place among the capital sins – and the centre of all the described vices – is
occupied by wrath (Lat. ira; 8 verses). Gramschap is characterized as a ruthless,
grim, haggard, hard person. With her teeth clenched, her sharp claws exposed
for battle, she would like to take revenge on someone in her rage. In her outer
manifestation she has already approached her symbolic animal, a bloodthirsty
and furious lion, with sharp and bloody claws. Her inner rage has obviously
completely taken possession of her and deformed her hands into claws. Then
follows gluttony (Lat. gula; 17 verses), Gulsicheyt. The poet starts by saying that
gluttony is very eccentrically depicted. Sitting at a table overflowing with food
and surrounded by bottles and pots, she is already full and drunken, covered
with spilled food and drink. Her face is red like carbonkel steenen (purple crim-
son), a play on words, which could mean a red ruby or a big red pimple.9 Her legs

9 Smit – Vermeer, Het Bosken en Het Theatre 124.

JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 283

are swollen, and she can even not control her excrement. A sow accompanies
her, eating the leftovers. The last personification of the seven deadly sins is
sloth (Lat. acedia; 8 verses), which here is linked to poorness, which she suf-
fers terribly from because of her inertia. Still half asleep, she is just about to
wake up and, yawning, takes on an attitude that is, as the poet emphasizes,
extremely ridiculous for the viewer. She seems very depressed by the fact that
she has achieved nothing of what she had hoped for and is now mocked for her
inactivity. As with the turtle who is described as slowly crawling next to her,
her image is presented to the reader as very laggardly.
The seven main sins are supplemented by that of villainy (8 verses), Vileynie.
On the other side – so the poet says – he saw ‘the ugly image of angry villainy’
(stanza 97). She is not described in her pictorial appearance, but her character
is named: impure, evil, disrespectful of others, arrogant, false, boastful, cruel,
merciless, coarse, and looking down on others. No symbolic animal accom-
panies her. The last vice is hypocrisy or feigned sanctity, Ipocrisie (gheueysde
heylicheyt; 52 lines). It is by far the most extensively described personification
of the vices convening here. The poet sees her standing a little further away:
sad, serious, and melancholic, she lets her head hang because of her fantasies.
She is skinny and pale due to consuming herself by constant self-defamation
and having fasted for forty days. Over her own gown she wears a grey coat from
head to toe. Through a tear in the robe the poet spies a second dress, which he
describes in nineteen lines: on the dress one can see, very craftily embroidered
by a foreign hand – like a picture in the picture – a castle, a town, a village, a
country, a forest, trees, farmsteads, and parks. The poet sees a crown and pre-
cious treasures. He recognizes horses and mules, carriages, coaches, and sedan
chairs. He sees weapons, lances, firearms, guns, riders, executioners, and ser-
vants. He sees ships, sailing in all winds – in a word, all goods of the world.
Out of this ‘groot cleet’ (enormous robbery, stanza 128) crawl strange, fearsome
creatures, threatening the whole good of the world, destroying and persecut-
ing mankind. Van der Noot recognizes in the representation of light spots that
these creatures fear light and flee it to sell their deception elsewhere.
Here the poetic description of the painting ends. Yet typographically it
seems to continue, because at the end of the page a written Een leads the
reader to the next page, where one finds an ode calling upon the reader to
avoid the sins described and to adhere to the good: An admonishment to avoid
the aforementioned sins, and to keep oneself to the good (see appendix).
Since almost all the poems collected in the volume are separated from one
another by typographical ornaments, it is obviously van der Noot’s wish to
relate picture-poem and ode to one another. Under the heading of the ode,
284 Weissert

an explanation on its content and origin is given: it deals with wine, the king,
women, and truth. The source for the ode is the Old Testament, the fourth chap-
ter of the third book of Ezra. Under the name of Ezra, four books are included.
Originally in the Hebrew canon, the book of Ezra formed together with the
book of Nehemiah one book. The third book of Ezra belongs to the apocryphal
or deuterocanonical scriptures and was not included in all Bible editions in
the sixteenth century (e.g., it does not belong to the Lutheran Bible). But it can
be found in the Vostermansbijbel (1528/1531), in the Leuvsebijbel (1548), in the
Bieskenbijbel (1560), and also in the Deux-Aesbijbel (1562). The restoration of
the worship service in Israel according to the law of God is the main issue of
this book. Beginning with the Pesach feast purified by Josiah, it ends with the
reestablished celebration under Ezra.10 The ode is based on the competition
between the guards of King Dareios, reported in chapters 3 and 4, over which
of them finds the word that holds the greatest power. King Dareios would
decide the competition and reward the victor richly. One of the guards had
the opinion: ‘Wine is the strongest’. The other: ‘The strongest is the king’. The
third: ‘Women are strongest, but the truth triumphs over everything’. The third
emerges as the victor, for the truth is perceived as the strongest, since there is
nothing unjust in its judgment. In the ode, each of the four arguments is cov-
ered in one stanza. Too much wine takes control over body and mind. The king
decides arbitrarily and unfairly because of his power. Love for women leads
to violence and war. Only the truth gives everyone his due reward, and truth
remains when everything else has long since passed.

2 Picture-Poems

At first there is much to suggest that van der Noot bases his poem on a paint-
ing. The first line says that the personification of pride was very splendidly
seated (stanza 1), and the author praises the visual qualities of the personifica-
tion of greed because ‘extremely well-made was the image, I have to admit’
(stanza 50). Picture-poems are verses that refer to a pictorial work of art (paint-
ing, sculpture, prints, etc.). In these poems, a lyric work of art responds to a
pictorial work (i.e., the work of another artist becomes the subject of poetry).11

10 Genthe H.-A. (ed.), Bibelbuch: Die Bibel übersetzt für das genaue Lesen des Textes, www.
bibelbuch.de/apokryphe-schriften/3-esra/ (accessed 30.05.2020).
11 See the seminal book on picture-poems: Kranz G., Das Bildgedicht. Theorie – Lexikon –
Bibliographie, 2 vols. (Köln – Wien: 1981).
 JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 285

figure 7.3 Peter de Witte (Peter Candid), Allegory of the Deadly Sins. Oil on panel, 102 × 146 cm
Private collection. Image © RKD

Often the poem appears together with the image, for example in the ancient
epigram, in which the text was carved into sculptures or their pedestals, in
the titulus of medieval wall paintings, in depictions of the Dance of Death,
in single-leaf woodcuts, in Bible illustrations, on picture frames, or even on
the painting itself. For example, the painting of sins attributed to Peter de
Witte (Peter Candid) combines an allegorical depiction of sins with a poem
that names the protagonists and their actions in six verses of six lines each.12
[Fig. 7.3] The painting and text are a good example of the fact that the text
is not simply a doubling of what is depicted. The text leaves much open,
names only parts of the painting, and encourages the viewer to compare and
reflect. The Judas kiss stands for envy and flattery, Venus and Bacchus for

12 The painting was auctioned in Vienna at the Dorotheum, lot 206, 6 December 2001.
286 Weissert

sexual immorality and gluttony. Justitia (with sword) in the foreground is fast
asleep and therefore fails to protect the law and punish evil. Evil, personified
in Cupid, sends arrows of unkindness, so that the cold heart must be warmed
over the embers. The poem proceeds in an ordering manner, names and evalu-
ates, but it does not describe the painting, in the sense of a verbal vividness of
the depicted. Everything concerning colour, light, or the rendering of emotions
is taken over by the painting.
The tradition of paintings with pictorial poems was widespread among
the humanists. Hieronymus Busleyden, for example, wrote distichs and tetra-
distichs on the artworks in his art collection, and Thomas More composed a
poem on the portraits of his friends, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Peter Gillis.13
Very famous is the ode written by Lucas de Heere on the Ghent Altarpiece of
the van Eyck brothers, which could be read in the Veits chapel in St Bavo in
Ghent since about 1559.14 There it could be read or heard in the immediate
presence of the altar. De Heere’s ode is about the Ghent altar in its open state.
[Fig. 7.4] It praises the painting and its painters but also instructs the viewer
on how to look at the altar: the first glance is at God the Father, followed by the
faces of John and Mary.15 Then he directs the reader’s attention to Adam, who,
frighteningly alive, reacts with restraint to Eve’s offer to try the fig. Only then
follows the angel choir next to Adam and Eve. In the lower register, he guides
the viewer first to the group of elders and Church Fathers, then to the group
of maids, and finally to the kings, princes, counts, and lords. In this group de
Heere also recognizes the two painters, Jan and Hubert van Eyck. This is his
cue for turning to praise of the painters. What is certainly surprising here is
that de Heere completely ignores the religious centre, the lamb and the cross.
Common to these examples is the intention that the poems should ideally be
read, recited, or heard before, during, or after viewing the painting. In a poem
on Anthony Mor’s portrait of Johann Gallus, written on the original frame of
the oak panel (now lost), the Flemish humanist, poet, and painter Domenicus
Lampsonius then also mentions the function of a picture-poem: to be an addi-
tion (supplement) to the painting.

13 See Roggen D. – Dhanens E., “De humanist Busleyden en de oorsprong van het Italianisme
in de Nedelandse kunst”, Gentse bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis en oudheidkunde 13
(1951) 127–152; and Weissert C., “Wer ist der Tor? Wort und Bild im Selbstporträt von
Anthonis Mor (1558)”, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 44 (2017) 39–61.
14 Waterschoot W., “Lucas d’Heere en Marcus van Vaernewijck voor het Lam Gods”, Jaarboek
De Fonteine (1966) 109–118.
15 De Heere Lucas, Den hof en boomgaerd der poësien, inhoudende menigherley soorten van
poëtijckelicke blommen […] (Ghent, Ghileyn Manilius: 1565) 29–33.
 JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 287

figure 7.4 Jan and Hubert van Eyck, Ghenter Altarpiece (inside), 1432. Wood, tempera, and oil, 3,5 m ×
4,6 m. Ghent, St. Bavo
Image © public domain

Mor, emulator of Apelles, captured me Joannus Gallus;

Lampsonius added this eulogy to the panel so that,
Spectator, you are justified in being able to say:
‘This portrait lacks nothing, not even words’.

(Morus Joannem Gallum me fixit, Apelles

Aemulus; Elogium Lampsonius tabulae
Additit ut merito, spectator, dicere possis:
‘Mori picturis sermo nec ipse deest.’)16

But what if painting and poem are not perceived together, as in the case of
van der Noot’s poem? Even in the case of Lucas de Heere’s poem on the Ghent

16 Translation cited from Woodall J., Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority (Zwolle: 2007) 445, for
the Latin, 485, note 64.
288 Weissert

Altarpiece, the reception of both together was not always possible, because the
altar was closed almost the whole year and only opened to important guests
or on festive days.17 This means that the poem describes the interior painting,
which was hidden from the view of the majority of visitors. When read on its
own, the picture-poem cannot have the function of an addition. If the painting
itself is not perceived by the reader, then the task of the poem is not to supple-
ment the image but to represent it.18

3 The Personification of Ipocrisie

If we follow Smit in the assumption that van der Noot’s poem is based on an
allegorical painting that is no longer known today, then we can assume that
van der Noot transposed the painting’s structure into the poem. Perhaps this is
reflected in the verses of different lengths: pride (12 stanzas), envy (22 stanzas),
greed (22 stanzas), lust (6 stanzas), wrath (8 stanzas), gluttony (17 stanzas),
sloth (8 stanzas), villainy (8 stanzas), and hypocrisy (52 stanzas). In this order,
hypocrisy forms the climax and closure. In any case, the poet judges the value
of each sin merely according to his length. If one arranges the sins according
to the length of the verses, a different order emerges, with hypocrisy as the
initial and the most prominent sin: hypocrisy (52 stanzas), envy (22 stanzas),
greed (22 stanzas), gluttony (17 stanzas), pride (12 stanzas), wrath (8 stanzas),
sloth (8 stanzas), and lust (6 stanzas). Hypocrisy, the sinful desire to feign what
one is not, by pretending to have alleged virtues, is opposed to truthfulness. In
van der Noot’s poem, this is one reason for its prominent position. Hypocrisy
also occupies an important place in the Protestants’ argumentation against the
abuses of the Catholic Church and in the criticism of a merely external fulfil-
ment of the law.
The poem’s comparison of the personification of Superbia with a saintly
image decorated with jewellery, as found in Catholic churches (stanza 6), can
be read as an indication that van der Noot agrees with this criticism.19 A little

17 Waterschoot, “Lucas d’Heere” 112.

18 From this perspective, the omissions of de Heere in relation to the Ghent Altarpiece
are all the more interesting. See the ongoing discussion on the restoration of the altar-
piece. Hart A. – Dam F. van, “Seeing God’s Glory: Van Eyck’s Optical Lore in the Sixteenth
Century”, in Borchert T.-H. – Dumolyn J. – Martens M., Van Eyck. An Optical Revolution,
exh. cat., MSK Ghent (London: 2020) 180–203.
19 Jan van der Noot was born in Brecht and died in Antwerp. He was born into a noble family
and called himself jonker (a member of the nobility who had not yet assumed knight-
hood). In 1567 he fled to England for reasons of faith, being a member of the Reformed
 JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 289

figure 7.5 Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, after Adriaan de Weerdt, Huichelarij neemt de plaats in van
vroomheid, 1604. Etching – engraving, 20.6 × 12.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Image © Rijksmuseum

later, the twelve-part graphic series The Moral Decline of the Clergy, by Dirk
Volkertsz. Coornherts and Adriaan van Weerts (who was also the author of van
der Noot’s portrait), published between 1572 and 1576 in Cologne, deals exactly
with this kind of dissatisfaction with the church. The sixth image shows the
female personification of hypocrisy.20 [Fig. 7.5] In the middle stands Hipocrisis
or Scijn-Doecht (False Virtue), as the Dutch text calls her. She holds a chalice
filled with something that looks like an intestinal excretion, wears a rosary on
her belt, and bears a monkey on her back. Thus she now replaces true virtue,
as the caption explains. Her true nature is made clear by the image of a wolf
in sheepskin who is about to put a monk cap on a male figure with hoofed
feet. The falsity and illegitimacy of the Catholic Church are presented here in
contrast to true faith.

Church. In 1571 he was in Cologne, in 1579 in France; he finally returned to Antwerp. See
Vermeylen, Leven en werken 18–32.
20 On the series of twelve images entitled The Moral Decline of the Clergy; or, The Root of the
Dutch Revolt and the Iconoclastic Fury, see Kaminska B.A., “Looking beyond Confessional
Boundaries: Discourse of Religious Tolerance in Prints by Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert and
Adriaan de Weert”, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 36.3 (2013)
83–126.
290 Weissert

The naming of feigned sanctity as Ipocrisie in the poem by Jan van der Noot
points to the Greek origin of the word: ‘acting on the stage’.21 The figurative
scenes also spread out on her robe and hem, which were obviously only grad-
ually attached there, remind one of the theatre costumes of the chamber of
rhetoric. Recently, Bart Ramakers has drawn attention to a dress embellished
with similar motifs.22 In 1596 Hendrick Goltzius designed costumes for the
Haarlem chamber of rhetoric, which are described in detail in the publication
Den lusthof van Rhetorica (The pleasure garden of rhetoric). For the costume
of one of the eight personifications that together represented tyranny, it says:

The Life of the Tyrants, as a Lady of War with a Helmet on her head, on
which stood a man-devouring Dragon [which] instead of a Plume [was]
mounted with a Birch Rod, as [a sign of] God’s punishment, which most
Tyrants have been. The same Life [of the Tyrants] had two wings called
Own Lust, which drive her to villainy. [She] carried a Gown covered with
various devouring beasts, like Lions, Wolves, Dragons, Serpents, and
Scorpions, all cut out of paper and glued onto it. Around her neck [was] a
collar overlaid by disgraceful animals of all sorts. Her hands were bloody,
and in one hand [she] carried a naked, bloody sword […].23

Thus dressed and outfitted, this personification represents the sin of pretend-
ing virtue or goodness, which means that she too is a personification of hypoc-
risy. Therefore, it could also be possible that van der Noot refers in his poem to
an earlier theatrical event he has seen.24
Van der Noot’s relationship to a painting or a theatrical performance also
remains ambiguous in that the poet sees the true garment of Ipocrisie only
through a tear in her cloak and thus sees something that should actually
remain hidden by the cloak (stanza 113). Here the tear is a threshold motif that
marks the border between reality and the dreamlike, comparable to the motif
of looking out the window or into the distance. With the description of her
true garment that he characterises as enormous, the poet leaves aside logical
size relations in comparison with the other personifications. The true dress of

21 For the etymology, see the Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/word/

hypocrisy (accessed 30.05.2020).
22 Ramakers B., “Paper, Paint, and Metal Foil: How to Costume a Tyrant in Late Sixteenth-
Century Holland”, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 68 (2019) 137–167.
23 Ibid. 146.
24 Ekphrases on actors and theatrical performances have not yet been sufficiently studied
for the period before 1800. For the period after 1800, see Singer R., Mimen-Ekphrasis.
Schauspielkunst in der Literatur um 1800 und um 1900 (Göttingen: 2018).
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 291

hypocrisy is given to him thus as a vision. The description of the undergarment

of hypocrisy, which now reveals her true character comparable to the image of
the wolf in sheepskin, acts like a paragonal element through which the poet
uses the pictorialism of language to create images that pose no problem to the
imagination of the poet and reader, but would confront the painter with an
impossible task. In the context of the poem, he creates here the most complex
and lively picture.
It is particularly noteworthy that Van der Noot does not even use the noun
schilderije or the verb schilderen, which would have given a clear connection
to the painting.25 When he describes the individual personifications, he always
speaks of beeldt. In the sixteenth century beeldt also had the broader meaning
of an image, a simulacrum, or even an imagination.26

4 Ekphrasis and Enargeia

Undeniably, van der Noot evokes in the imagination of the reader or listener
the painting or certain aspects of the painting through his art of language. The
memory of what has been seen (in nature and art) has an effect here in both
the poet and the reader: but colours, shapes, figures, movement, odour, and
taste are not realized in the material as visible, palpable, smellable, and taste-
able but in language and through language in the imagination.27 Thus van der
Noot literally accomplishes the task of ekphrasis, the act of showing, of making
known and making clear.28
The concept and the word ekphrasis date back to Greek antiquity. The Greek
philosopher Theon, for example, says ‘ekphrasis is a descriptive text that viv-
idly visualizes what is communicated’.29 Nikolaos of Myra (fourth century ad)

25 Lucas de Heere uses the word schilderye when he describes a painting. See De Heere, Den
hof en boomgaerd der poësien 29, 35, 57, 60, 81, 95.
26 The French-Dutch dictionary of 1581 mentions beeldt as a translation for simulacrum. See
Taye Ian, Dictionnaire Francois – Flamen […] (Gent, La Hault: 1582), with reference to an
ode by Lucas de Heere.
27 See Kranz G., Das Bildgedicht in Europa (Paderborn: 1973) 9–10.
28 Graf F., “Ekphrasis: Die Entstehung der Gattung in der Antike”, in Boehm G. – Pfotenhauer
H. (eds.), Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegen­
wart (München: 1995) 143–155, esp. 143.
29 Theon, Progymnasmata 11 (S. 118,7 Stengel), as quoted in Graf, “Ekphrasis” 144. Also see
Graf, “Ekphrasis” 145: “In dieser ganzen antiken Rhetorikertradition wird also Ekphrasis
außerordentlich weit gefaßt: es ist jede Beschreibung. Bildbeschreibung ist keine Sonder-
kategorie, ja sie kommt als Möglichkeit der Ekphrasis in der Kategorisierung schon gar
nicht vor”.
292 Weissert

specifies: ‘One uses clearness (vividness/lucidity) as a special feature of the

ekphrasis, because it differs from the report above all in that it contains a mere
representation of the object, which tries to turn the listeners into spectators’.30
Clarity, lucidity, and vividness are called enargeia in Greek, which is a key
word of ekphrasis.31 Enargeia is an important rhetorical category that is not
limited to ekphrasis alone. Quintilian attributes to it the power and task of
arousing emotional affect (affectus).32 According to Quintilian, feelings are
aroused when one sees phantasia – the images of absent things – in one’s mind
as if they were present. He speaks in Latin of visiones. In order to experience
the corresponding emotions, we would therefore only have to evoke such visio-
nes within ourselves.33 From this results enargeia, and it is followed by feelings
as if we were present at the events themselves.34 Phantasia means the impres-
sion (also in the sense of imprinting) that reaches the soul via the sense organs.
It is nothing intellectual or rational; enargeia caused in the soul by the imprint
is immediate, not a sensual vision controlled by the intellect – it is the pathos
that affects the soul.35 That means enargeia is a means to awaken uncontrolled
emotions, which seems also to be a goal of van der Noot’s poem on the capi-
tal sins.
The ekphrasis produces the rhetorical and aesthetical effects of the image
description but does not yet explain why van der Noot gives the ekphrasis the
form of a poem. Since antiquity, poems have been performed and heard. Even
the ancient authors were already aware of this, because Dion Chrisostomos
puts the words into the mouth of Phidias, the most famous sculptor of antiq-
uity. It is said that the eyes are much harder to convince and require much
more clarity than the ears, since the eyes must come together directly with
what they have seen, but the ears can fly into the air and break the boundaries
of reason by allowing simulations to be made that enchant with metrics and
sound forms.36 Van der Noot seems to have been very aware of this: the accents
included in the printed poem of the capital sins, to guide the reader in its pro-
nunciation, prove that van der Noot had also intended his poem to be recited
aloud.37 In the opening remarks of the Dutch edition of Het Theatre, Lucas de

30 Nikolaos, Progymnasmata 68 (Felten), as quoted in Graf, “Ekphrasis” 145.

31 Ibid. In Cicero, it is translated as perspicuitas, inlustratio, evidentia; see Cicero, Acade­
mica 2, 17.
32 Quintilian, Institutiones 6, 2. See Graf, “Ekphrasis” 145.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. 146.
36 Dion, Oratio 12 (De dei cognitione) 55–83, as quoted in Graf, “Ekphrasis” 147.
37 See endé stanzas 23 and 83; alsoó stanza 56; hooghé stanza 78; beestelycké stanza 82;
alommé stanza 115; veelryckelycké stanza 119; dléven stanza 127; soó stanza 134; willendé
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 293

Heere explicitly points out that the interested reader will not only find use and
edification in the book but also pleasures for the eyes and ears.38 The pictorial
power of language is united with the power of poetry and increases the felt,
emotional effect.
But there are more strategies to produce a lively picture. Another aspect is
the great interest in colours and pictorial effects such as lustre, as these are
carefully described. Before the inner eye of the listener/reader, sparkling gem-
stones appear in all colours: golden, azure, but also grey and translucent robes.
The skin colours of sins appear pale, sallow, or bright red. The first thing van
der Noot describes about the deception or monsters in the wake of Ipocrisie
is their different degrees of colourfulness in the form of an anaphor (i.e., the
multiple repetition of the word soms at the beginning of successive parts of
sentences and verses): some were red, some blue, some white, some pale, some
dark grey, some purple, some multicoloured. To colourfulness of the depicted
figures thus produced are added suggestions of movement, sounds, and smells:
Envy sits in a stinking hole, the rooster crows loudly, the spook creatures sing
and scream.
Another way to stimulate the reader’s imagination is through linguistic con-
trasts, such as between the description of the beautiful, proud Superbia sur-
rounded by sparkling gems and colours in contrast to the personification of
Envy sitting in a murky hole, with her breasts tinted green by the overflowing
bile. Contrasts are also created by the interweaving of the narrative with the
compositional arrangement, by the description of the facts, and by the activa-
tion of effects and affects.39
An important function within the ekphrases is taken over by deictic expres-
sions. Three times van der Noot refers the reader to what the author is seeing or
looking at (stanza 35, stanza 58, stanza 96, stanzas 150–154), and once he asks
him to look directly at it (stanza 85). In this way he draws the reader’s attention
to what he is seeing and emphasizes its pictorial character. In the case of a pic-
torial poem, the viewer is thus invited to compare the painting with the poetic

stanza 144; mercté stanza 150; claré stanza 151; sommighé stanza 153. In the ode, deés
stanza 11.
38 Lucas d’Heere, “Op de Visioenen van mijn Heere Vander Noot”, in Noot Jan van der, Het
theatre oft Toon-neel waer in ter eender de ongelucken ende elenden die den werelts gesin-
den ende boosen menschen toecomen: ende op dander syde tgheluck goet ende ruste die de
gheloouighe ghenieten, vertoont worden. Niet min proftelyck dan verheuchelyck voor alle
lief hebbers des goddelycken woorts, der poëteryen ende schilderen, (London, J. Day: 1568),
fol. *A.5.v°. Also see Smit – Vermeer, Het Bosken en Het Theatre 189.
39 On the rhetorical means and effects of ekphrasis, see Boehm G., “Bildbeschreibung.
Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache”, in Boehm G. – Pfotenhauer H. (eds.),
Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart
(Munich: 1995) 23–40.
294 Weissert

figure 7.6 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Oil on panel,
118 × 164.5 cm (detail). Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum
Image © Kunsthistorisches Museum

image. Although this is not possible in this case, the detailed description of the
personifications evokes in the viewer memories of previously seen works of
art. The poem also refers to the context of life: the personification of pride is
reminiscent of a saintly image; the personification of greed is seen in connec-
tion with the petty thief killed on the gallows. For example, with the statement
that Ipocrisie had fasted for forty days, her long ash-grey robe evokes the asso-
ciation of Lenten fasting from Ash Wednesday to Easter Monday, in the man-
ner that Pieter Bruegel the Elder has painted it. [Fig. 7.6] The light that drives
out the spooky creatures will remind the poet’s contemporaries of John 8:12–14
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 295

when Jesus says: ‘I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk
in darkness, but will have the light of life’. And a little later John 8:31–32: ‘If you
will abide in my speech, you are in truth my disciples and will know the truth,
and the truth will set you free’. In contrast, the poem contains a threat written
on the hem of the robe of Ipocrisie, saying that any brave person who dares
to contradict the plot (i.e., who dares to speak the truth) is threatened with
death (stanza 127). Thus the poet evokes, in his contemporaries, associations
of a historical, biblical, ethical, aesthetic, literary, and personal nature that
are difficult to reconstruct today. The poem contains all the elements that are
listed in the eighteenth century under the theory of association: resemblance,
contiguity, causes of effect.40

5 Vision and Images

Picture-poems start from a real work of art; ekphrases can just as well refer to a
fictional work of art. Finally, pictures can refer to poems. Van der Noot has also
dealt with this form of reference between text and image. He published Het
Bosken in England in three editions.41 It is composed of twenty-one epigrams
and sonnets and a 164-page religious text.42 Twenty of the twenty-one poems
were illustrated by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder. [Fig. 7.7] The copy of Het
Bosken that is now kept in Washington combines, as already mentioned, the
poems and illustrations from Van der Noot’s Dutch version of Het Theatre. In
the dedication to the reader, the epigrams and sonnets are called visions (visio-
nes en ghesichten), which underlines their imaginative and dreamlike charac-
ter and creates a bridge to the vision of the dress of Ipocrisie in the poem.43
The classification of the poems as visions also refers to their origin: the first six
poems – entitled epigrams – are translations of the six twelve-line visions of
which consists Petrarch’s famous canzone “In Morte di Madonna Laura”, one
of the most translated, imitated, and commented poems during the sixteenth

40 See Lobsien E., Kunst der Assoziation. Phänomenologie eines ästhetischen Grundbegriffs
vor und nach der Romantik (Munich: 1999).
41 See Smit – Vermeer, Het Bosken en Het Theatre; Waterschoot W., “An Author’s Strategy:
Jan van der Noot’s Het Theatre”, in Westerweel B. (ed.), Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Field
of the Emblem (Leiden – New York – Köln: 1997) 35–47; and Bostoen K.J., Dichterschap
en koopmanschap in de zestiende eeuw. Omtrent de dichters Guillaume de Poetou en Jan
vander Noot (Deventer: 1987).
42 See Witstein, De verzencommentaar in Het Theatre 20–23.
43 Van der Noot, Het Theatre C.6.v°; also see Smit – Vermeer, Het Bosken en Het Theatre 232.
296 Weissert

figure 7.7 Epigramme after Petrarch, by Jan van der Noot (poem) and Marcus Gheeraerts
(etching), in Jan van der Noot, Het theatre oft toon-neel (London: 1568). This copy
is combined with Jan Van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden poëtixe
wercken (London: 1570 or 1571?). Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library
Image © Folger Shakespeare Library

century.44 In their first part these visions describe a thing of beauty, and in
their second part its destruction and downfall. Van der Noot’s Dutch Petrarch
translation is based in large part on the widely used French translation by
Clement Marot, which first appeared under the title “Visions de Pétrarque” in
1533 and had over sixty editions by 1568.45 Then follow nine translations of
the sonnets “Songe ou Visions sur le mesme subject” written by Joachim Du
Bellay, which were published in 1558 as the second part in Du Bellay’s poetry
collection Le premier livre des Antiquitez de Rome contenant une generale

44 Compilation and comparison of the poems and translations of Petrarch, Marot, Du Bellay,
and van der Noot by Smith; see Het Bosken en Het Theatre 194–227. On Van der Noot’s
translations in Het Theatre, see Smith P.J., Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French
Renaissance Literature (Leiden – Boston: 2007) 133–142.
45 Ibid. 137.
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 297

description de sa grandeur, et comme une deploration de sa mine. The fifteen

dream visions describe an initially glorious appearance that in the end col-
lapses ingloriously.46 The poems are completed by four sonnets by Jan van der
Noot, which are based on the visions of John’s Apocalypse (the Seven-headed
Monster, the Whore of Babylon, the Final Judgment, the Eternal City).47
The engravings for the epigrams of Petrarch are in close relation to the
watercolours of a manuscript, which were created for Marot’s translations of
Petrarch’s poems.48 The illustrator of the manuscript divides the poems into
six verses each, which correspond to the visions in regard to content. The man-
uscript always gives two images to a stanza, which are brought together in the
prints.49 The visual realization of Joachim Du Bellay’s sonnets also shows this
double structure of a beautiful and intact appearance in the foreground and
its destruction in the background. [Fig. 7.8] Here, too, Gheeraerts makes use
of known works. The fifth vision, for example, is based on one of his illustra-
tions for the animal fables published in 1567, and the triumphal arch of the
ninth vision reminds the connoisseur of the Arch of Titus at the entrance to
the Forum Romanum.50 Gheeraerts also draws on models for the etchings for
the poems of the Apocalypse visions: for example, the image of the Whore of
Babylon is based on an emblem from the French edition of Alciato’s emblem
book by Barthélemy Aneau (1548), in which the Babylonian Whore was equated

46 Melehy J., “Joachim Du Bellay’s Dream Language: The ‘Songe’ as Allegory of Poetic Signi-
fication”, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, New Series / Nouvelle
Série 24.2 (2000) 3–21; and Russell D., “Du Bellay’s Emblematic Vision of Rome”, Yale
French Studies 47 (1972) 98–109.
47 See Bostoen K., “Van der Noot’s Apocalyptic Visions: Do You ‘See’ What You Read?”, in
Westerweel B. (ed.), Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Field of the Emblem (Leiden – New York –
Köln: 1997) 49–61.
48 There are two manuscripts, one in Glasgow (University Library, Ms. SMMs) and one in
Berlin (Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Ms. Phill. 1926). For a comparison of the two manuscripts,
see Orth M. – Cooper R., “Un manuscrit peint des ‘Visions de Pétrarque’ traduites par
Marot”, in Balsamo J. (ed.), Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque (Geneva:
2004) 53–71. For a detailed examination of the relationship between the manuscript
and the woodcuts used for the English version of Het Theatre, see Bath M., “Verse
Form and Pictorial Space in Van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings”, in Höltgen K.J. –
Daly P.M. – Lottes W. (eds.), Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of
English Literature and the Visual Arts (Erlangen: 1988) 73–105.
49 For the manuscript in Berlin, see Petrarca, F., Les Six Triumphes et Les Six Visions Messire
Francoys Petracque. Manuscrit Ms. Phil 1926 Conservé à la Deutsche Staatsbibliothek Berlin
(Wiesbaden: 1988).
50 See Waterschoot W., “An Author’s Strategy” 40.
298 Weissert

figure 7.8 Sonnet after Joachim du Bellay, by Jan van der Noot (poem) and Marcus
Gheeraerts (etching), in Jan Van der Noot, Het theatre oft toon-neel (London: 1568).
This copy is combined with Jan Van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden
poëtixe wercken (London: 1570 or 1571?). Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare
Library
Image © Folger Shakespeare Library

with the sin of hypocrisy.51 [Figs. 7.9–7.10] The task of the etchings is to present
the reader with a concrete image of the visions and dreams, because in each
poem the author emphasizes that he sees something (‘sach ich’). However, the
relationship between image and text is by no means one-dimensional; it is not
limited to the fact that the images illustrate and concretize the text. The text
not only gives rise to the engravings but in turn completes them, because only
the naming of the colours and materials amend the picture. Only through the
text does the viewer/reader learn that the base of the triumphal arch is made of
gold, the capitals of alabaster, the friezes of crystal [fig. 7.8]. Only when reading

51 Andrea Alciato’s Emblemes (Lyons, Macé Bonhomme for Guillaume Rouille: 1549) is
a French translation by Barthélemy Aneau. See www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/
index.php (accessed 30.05.2020). For the French translations of Alciato, see Saunders A.,
“Sixteenth-Century French Translations of Alciati’s Emblemata”, French Studies 44 (1990)
271–288.
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 299

figure 7.9 Pierre Eskrich (Pierre Vase), Fainct Religion, in Andrea Alciato’s Emblemes
(Lyons: 1549), fol. 24. Woodcut. The French translation is by Barthélemy
Aneau. Glasgow University Library: SM33
Image © Glasgow University Library
300 Weissert

figure 7.10 The Whore of Babylon, by Jan van der Noot (poem) and Marcus Gheeraerts
(etching), in Jan van der Noot, Het theatre oft toon-neel (London: 1568). This
copy is combined with Jan Van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden
poëtixe wercken (London: 1570 or 1571?). Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare
Library
Image © Folger Shakespeare Library

the poem does the Babylonian whore shine, adorned with pearls, purple and
gold. In this case, the text extends the image, because the poet hears the loud
voice of an angel announcing the fall of the Babylonian Whore [fig. 7.10].
Van der Noot was obviously also well acquainted with current developments
in emblem literature, for in Het Bosken, too, four emblems can be traced back
to Barthélemy Aneau’s French translation (1549) of the Emblems of Alciato.52
Regardless of the question of whether van der Noot also follows the tripar-
tite structure of an emblem (inscriptio – pictura – subscriptio) in Het Theatre
by combining poem, image, and commentary, the composition of the poems

52 See Smit – Vermeer, Het Bosken en Het Theatre 116–121; Porteman K., “Miscellannea
emblematica”, Spiegel der letteren 17 (1975) 161–193, esp. 186–187; and Waterschoot W.,
“Emblematica in Jan van der Noot’s Poetische Werken”, Emblematica 8.2 (1994) 209–219.
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 301

follows, as Michael Bath has shown, its own strategy.53 Starting with Petrarch’s
window-gaze and his disappointments in love, through the visions of du Bellay
and his lamentation over the transience of great political and cultural power,
to John’s religious revelation, they culminate in the vision of the Heavenly
Jerusalem, in a glance into the future.
In addition, the Dutch version of Het Theatre is also a paean to the Dutch lan-
guage and poetry, because, building on the admiring imitation of the Italians
and the French (also based on the Italians), the anthology culminates in the
Dutch sonnets. This strategy recalls the Landjuweel, the poetry competition
of the Brabant Chambers of Rhetoric, held in Antwerp in 1561, in whose pub-
lication the Flemish poet Willem van Haecht mentions precisely these three
stages: in the near future, the Dutch poet will be equal to the Italian (Petrarch,
among others) and the French (Marot, among others). The combination of Het
Theatre with Het Bosken presents van der Noot’s poems as proof of this devel-
opment and thus as a self-testimony of the poet Jan van der Noot.54

6 A Poetic Emblem

In the poem “Beschrijvinghe van de hooft sonden”, van der Noot gives many
indications that he is describing a painting. But by neither naming the external
circumstances of the painting nor getting lost in panegyric praise of the artist,
and choosing instead the form of the ekphrasis, he replaces the missing picture
for the reader and lets it emerge before his inner eyes. Van der Noot’s ekph-
rasis, like all ekphrases, makes present without having to assume a concrete
reference to the work.55 In the case of the capital sins poem, it creates a deter-
rent image with a stirring effect on the reader. Van der Noot does not leave the
reader or listener alone with the evoked images, emotions, and associations
but rather channels them through his interpretation of the image. All the vices
and horrors fade into the horizon of truth. Where the light of truth shines, the
fearsome creatures who seek to destroy the good of the world disappear. Truth
as a counterpart to all vices and especially to hypocrisy will in the end award
everyone his just wage.

53 See Bath, “Verse Form” 73–105. Waterschoot, “An Author’s Strategy”, argues against plac-
ing the image-text relation in Het Theatre in the tradition of the emblem, whereas Karel
Bostoen takes this position firmly; see Bostoen, “Van der Noot’s apocalyptic visions”.
54 Spelen van sinne vol schoone allegatien, loflijcke leeringhen ende schriftuerlijcke ondervvijs-
inghen […] (Antwerp, Willem Silvius: 1562) fol. b2v.
55 See Boehm, “Bildbeschreibung” 36.
302 Weissert

It is quite obvious from the layout of the print that we are meant to read the
poem on the capital sins together with the ode. Therefore, if the headline, the
pictorial poem, and the ode are taken together, the structure of an emblem
results, with a motto (lemma or inscription), a picture (pictura or icon), and a
verse text or epigram (the subscriptio), whereby the heading is the inscription
and the picture poem replaces the pictura or icon by its visual character. The
pictura fulfils two main tasks of the ekphrasis, namely, to create a vivid image
and to create emotions. The subscription (the ode) reassures the emotion thus
stirred up with the certainty that lies in the truth. Seen in this light, the picture
poem is a full substitute for the described painting. The ekphrasis is not an end
in itself, not a rhetorical exercise, but the reader goes through a catharsis, a
purification of the soul, and consolidates his confidence in a steadfast faith in
the justice of Christian truth.
Jan van der Noot’s poem on the capital sins – which in the literature is repeat-
edly regarded as an early work – reveals him as a master of the ekphrasis.56
His starting point was probably a painting he was familiar with. Irrespective
of whether the recipient knows the painting in turn, he is transported by the
pictorialism of his language into the world of sins and is intellectually and
emotionally gripped by the spectacle thus presented to him. Here, unlike the
epigrams and sonnets in Het Theatre, which juxtapose poem and image for the
recipient, the poem creates the painting.

Appendix

Description of the Capital Sins,

First, of Pride

1. Pride.
1 Pride was seated very splendidly,
2 She who has often rebuked others
3 For all their shortcomings, and despised and condemned them:
4 Considering only herself to be perfect.
5 Very florid was she, on all sides
6 Finely adorned with jewels like the statues of saints,
7 With pearls, precious diamonds, rubies,
8 Sapphires, too, emeralds that gleam:

56 Smit – Vermeer, Het Bosken en Het Theatre 16–22.

JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 303

9 And further, she wore round her neck

10 A cloak of gold – in appearance a proud lady indeed:
11 Her undergarments were golden and sky-blue
12 And beside her there stood a beautiful peacock.

2. Envy.
13 Envy sat there in a pit,
14 Dark and dejected, stinking and filthy,
15 Because at no time could the Sun, stars or moon,
16 Nor any light reach or touch her:
17 Nor sweet air, warmth or refreshment;
18 The forge of slander, she was full of melancholy,
19 And of every sort of sinful food and drink,
20 Which one might find there in abundance.
21 Very deathly and pale was her countenance.
22 She had a callous heart, and an evil glance,
23 A misshapen body and filthy hands,
24 And befouled with slime, her yellow teeth were loose:
25 Most grisly and misshapen in appearance
26 Was she, her bosom green with gall,
27 And she bore a tongue no less full of venom;
28 No one ever saw her laugh at anyone
29 Except folks doing badly or discontented:
30 She was never seen to rest.
31 But waiting for each person’s misfortune,
32 She listens keenly for things to go wrong:
33 And beside her lay a dog,
34 Often growling as his sort tends to do.

3. Greed.
35 A little farther along, I also Greed standing,
36 She who is always ready to take,
37 And has performed many an amazing thing in pursuit of gain,
38 But of giving would not hear:
39 She was very dirty, soiled and foul,
40 Patched, cobbled, ragged, threadbare, torn;
41 It is she who through a vast desire
42 For money and riches never rests,
43 And further, always counsels thieves to steal,
44 Whom one often sees hanging at their throats,
45 The petty ones mostly, for it is an ancient saying,
304 Weissert

46 The petty ones are hung, while the big ones are freed:
47 Yes, she also lets them drink the blood of man,
48 To attain the money and the goods they crave:
49 Hands remarkably crooked had she and twisted claws,
50 Extremely well-made was the image, I have to admit:
51 Because Greed is always, if truth be told,
52 Prepared intently to deceive every man.
53 Next to her sat a despicable toad,
54 Holding underfoot a lump
55 Of earth or mud, full of fear that she might
56 Loose even such a thing – or so I thought.

4. Lust
57 Lust, naked, I observed there as well,
58 Who with her lover had freely come there
59 Indecently to amuse herself,
60 But could never ever find content.
61 One saw close by her a rooster pleasuring itself,
62 Which having played itself out, crowed sensually.

5. Wrath
63 Nor indeed was Wrath here in any way forgotten,
64 Ferocious, nearly worn out,
65 Snarling fiercely and gnashing all her teeth;
66 She seemed ready to fight and strike:
67 Her sharp claws cruelly bared,
68 She had eagerly – so it seemed – avenged some wrong,
69 And a lion, brutal and audacious,
70 Stood by her, its sharp claws bloody.

6. Gluttony
71 Gluttony was there as well, seated very oddly
72 At a table full-set with victuals ready to eat,
73 And all round her stood bottles and pitchers,
74 Trays for many spits, grills and pans,
75 And mugs, too, cups, ewers and jugs,
76 Full of wine and beer, padding for bellies:
77 Her mug/puss was of purple crimson,
78 Thickly stained with beer and good wine,
79 Furnished lavishly with many carbuncles,
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 305

80 And moreover she had between her swollen legs,

81 Utterly disgusting, a foul, runny opening:
82 She was – so it seemed – filled full like a beast,
83 From all that she had drunk and eaten,
84 For she sat there soiled and spat upon,
85 But this, see, deterred her not at all;
86 An sordid swine kept her company,
87 And gobbled up everything that fell behind her.

7. Sloth
88 A little farther on sat Sloth, in dire straits, too,
89 And very sad not to have acquired
90 The goods she was ever wont to crave.
91 Here she idly sat, mocked by everyone:
92 One saw her still half asleep, stretching her arms
93 A little, and yawning ridiculously:
94 While poverty came to torment her exceedingly,
95 And next to her a turtle crept along.

Villainy.
96 And furthermore I saw standing on the other side
97 The ugly figure of angry villainy,
98 It appeared very clearly from this tainted figure,
99 That she must be a wicked creature,
100 Disdainful, haughty, deceitful and pedantic,
101 Boasting much, full of cruelty,
102 Merciless, contemptuous, and rude,
103 No one had ever seen creature more depraved.

Hypocrisy or feigned sanctity.

104 A little further on stood the evil hypocrisy,
105 Who seemed in appearance not cheerful,
106 Instead sad and grave, full of melancholy,
107 Letting her head hang despondently;
108 Skinny and pallid was she through gnawing upon herself,
109 As if she had fasted the forty days;
110 She had over her head a pale ash-grey coat
111 Which straightway reached the ground:
112 With this white cape she covered herself.
113 Her undergarment I could also see through a tear,
306 Weissert

114 Embroidered over the long term

115 (For she always sought to profit herself)
116 Cunningly by other people’s hands,
117 With many a stronghold, towns, villages and domains,
118 Many a large forest, meadows, farmsteads, commons,
119 And crowns too, many precious treasures:
120 Horses and mules, carts, carriages, litters,
121 All kinds of weapons, lances, arquebuses, rapiers,
122 And heavy artillery, cavalry, executioners and armigers,
123 Many Generals as well to fight against the light,
124 Ships at sea, tacking to every wind:
125 In brief, one could find none of the world’s good
126 That was not here, and on the rim stood written:
127 Whoever speaks out about this, his life shall be taken.
128 From out of this enormous robe weird spectres came forth,
129 To gather these goods from everywhere,
130 And this apparition was motley in color,
131 And ate, drank, sang, and clamored:
132 Partly it was a gorgeous red, partly it looked blue,
133 Partly white, partly pale, partly dark grey,
134 Partly violet, partly multi-coloured, and so on,
135 Partly it flew, being unused to walking,
136 Partly it resembled maggots, partly caterpillars,
137 Moths partly, and partly it resembled wasps,
138 Mosquitos partly, partly toads and fleas,
139 The scorpion that comes crawling to kill:
140 Partly it resembled mice, rats, lice,
141 This queer good-for-nothing [was] in peoples’ homes,
142 In towns, too, in acreages and fields,
143 Yea – what is more – tormented souls,
144 Even at their death: wishing to prevail
145 Over their goods, conscience and life.
146 This infernal spectre had occupied every land,
147 And through its deadly gnawing
148 Had completely destroyed all possessions: and see, an even worse plague,
149 The best goods had been conveyed to her followers.
150 I noticed here that they greatly feared the light,
151 And that they wholly fled the bright light of day:
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 307

152 For in this image I observed a few spots,

153 Where the light shone, and saw departing from there
154 This sly scum skulking away gradually,
155 Confusedly going forth to sell their swindled loot elsewhere.

An admonition to avoid the aforementioned sins, and to keep oneself to

the good.

On the wine, on the King, on the lady, and on the truth, from the 3. book
of Ezra, in the 4. Chapter.

Ode.
1 The wine is strong and he reveals great power,
2 Over him who consumes or drinks it too much,
3 He often generates in him strife and discord,
4 And makes him walk like a person who limps:
5 Yes he takes away his reason and judgement.
6 The King, too, has great power

7 Over his people, and the one he magnifies,

8 He elevates greatly, making him rich and happy:
9 The other he banishes naked and bare,
10 Yes he casts him out like a rotting carcass.
11 But women wholly outdo these two,
12 For the king and he who plants the vineyard,
13 Exist all because of them: They adorn all courts,
14 A man leaves friends and homeland for their sake,
15 Yes plunders, fights, burns, searches for riches to honour her.
16 But above all the fair truth triumphs,
17 Who stays, eternal, while all things perish:
18 The wine, the lady, the King with his crown
19 Are all very feeble, unjust, yes wicked:
20 The truth gives every man his reward.
308 Weissert
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 309
310 Weissert

J an van der Noot, Het Bosken. Inhoudende verscheyden Poëtixe wercken (London, Henry
Bynneman and John Day: 1570 or 1571)
GHENT, UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
JAN VAN DER NOOT ’ S POEM ON THE CAPITAL SINS 311

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Guillaume de Poetou en Jan vander Noot (Deventer: 1987).
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poëtijckelicke blommen […] (Ghent, Ghileyn Manilius: 1565).
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Kaminska B.A., “Looking beyond Confessional Boundaries: Discourse of Religious
Tolerance in Prints by Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert and Adriaan de Weert”, Renaissance
and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 36.3 (2013) 83–126.
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 chapter 8

Virtual Reality of the Early Modern Anatomical

Poem in Denmark and England

Ivana Bičak

Art history has had a long-standing interest in early modern anatomy and its
prolific print tradition in Europe.*,1 A highly graphic nature of the anatomi-
cal activities performed on human and animal subjects resulted in a deluge of
medical illustrations, elaborate frontispieces, and anatomical atlases. However,
these artful productions were not the only visual products of early modern
anatomy. A rich but critically neglected corpus of Neo-Latin poetry employed
ekphrasis to bring to life contemporary anatomical practices in Europe.
The ‘anatomical’ poems of Copenhagen and London, two bustling research
centres of northern Europe, offer portals into the world of early modern com-
parative anatomy. This chapter will bring to light several notable examples of
Danish and British anatomical poetry by adopting Claire Preston’s definition
of ekphrasis as ‘a kind of virtual reality’ that offers its readers a mimetic repre-
sentation in space.2 The early modern anatomical poem places the reader in
the anatomy theatre and makes him/her witness the experimental procedure
first hand. This particular kind of poetry also paints in words the afterlife of the
research animal. The writers of the poems, who were often anatomists them-
selves, create vivid panels and draw the reader into the scene. They do so by
relying on enargeia, the vivid quality of language that turns the spectator into
an eyewitness.3
* I am indebted to COFUND, Durham University, and the Royal Society, whose generosity
made the research for this article possible.
1 See Harcourt G., “Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture”, Representations
17 (1987) 28–61; Kemp M., “‘The Mark of Truth’: Looking and Learning in Some Anatomical
Illustrations from the Renaissance and the Eighteenth Century”, in Bynum W.F. – Porter R.
(eds.), Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge: 1993) 85–121; Hansen J.V., “Resurrecting Death:
Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch”, The Art Bulletin 78 (1996) 663–679;
Laurenza D., Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy: Images from a Scientific Revolution (New
Haven: 2012); Canalis R.F. – Ciavolella M. (eds.), Andreas Vesalius and the Fabrica in the Age of
Printing: Art, Anatomy, and Printing in the Italian Renaissance (Turnhout: 2018).
2 Preston C., “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words”, in Adamson S. – Alexander G. – Ettenhuber K.
(eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: 2007) 115–129.
3 O’Connell P.A., “Enargeia, Persuasion, and the Vividness Effect in Athenian Forensic Oratory”,
Advances in the History of Rhetoric 20 (2017) 225–251.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 315

There were notable interrelations between Danish and British anatomy at

the time, with anatomists paying international visits to each other and con-
ducting experiments together.4 The similarities in the poetic output are one
aspect of this connection. At the time when thousands of amphibians, birds,
and mammals underwent vivisection and dissection, Danish and British
authors composed verses on the animals’ experience. Their visually rich poetic
works provide an indication of how this type of research was perceived by con-
temporary subjects, witnesses, and objects.
To understand the poems produced in these two locales, it is necessary to
place them in their historical context. In the case of Denmark, its first anat-
omy theatre was established in 1644, after a special chair of anatomy, surgery,
and botany was instituted at the University of Copenhagen in 1639.5 The
chair was created specifically for Simon Paulli (1603–80), a German physician
and a former Professor of Medicine at Rostock University. As the founder of
Anatomihuset, Paulli perfected the technique of boiling bones for the pur-
poses of assembling skeletons and decorating the walls of the anatomy theatre.
This ‘most elegant method’ was applicable not only to humans, but also to all
animals: bipeds and quadrupeds as well as winged or feathery creatures.6
Paulli’s guide to cooking, drying, and bleaching the bones for creating perfectly
shining skeletons was revealed in the form of a short text entitled ‘Modus deal-
bandi ossa pro Sceletopœia’ (‘A Method of Bleaching Bones for Assembling
Skeletons’) and published in Denmark’s first scientific journal, Acta Medica &
Philosophica Hafniensia.
Paulli’s anatomical and skeletal-assembling work would not have been
the same without the help of his diligent research assistant, Michael Kirstein
(1620–1678). A German physician like Paulli, Kirstein loved his knife as much as
he did his pen. He breathed life into Paulli’s anatomical collection by accompa-
nying it with witty Latin epigrams. The walls of Copenhagen’s Anatomy House
were thus filled with the mounted skeletons of animals that reflect on their
fate in the form of short verse inscriptions.
Whereas the skeleton collection perished in the great fire of 1728, Kirstein’s
epigrams survived in the pages of his Libelli III Epigrammatum (1645?). Among
them is a striking poem on the ordeal of a monkey dissected in Copenhagen’s

4 See Gotfredsen E., “Some Relations Between British and Danish Medicine in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 8 (1953)
46–55.
5 For an exhaustive commentary on the Anatomy House, see Niels W. Bruun’s edition of
Thomas Bartholin’s The Anatomy House in Copenhagen (Copenhagen: 2015).
6 Bartholin Thomas, “Modus dealbandi ossa pro Sceletopœia”, in Acta Medica & Philosophica
Hafniensia. Vol. 2 (Copenhagen, Georgius Godianus: 1673) 42–46.
316 Bičak

anatomy theatre. Exotic animals were common in seventeenth-century

Copenhagen: noblemen kept monkeys and parrots as pets, and a polar bear
could be seen in the harbour.7 ‘De SIMIA indignis modis interempta’ (‘On
a MONKEY Irreverently Murdered’)8 represents an invaluable example of
an early modern poem on animal experimentation. In less than twenty verses,
Kirstein creates a micronarrative endowed with motion, a fictive reality that
encompasses not only the past and the present, but also a possible future.
The poem starts in medias res, raising the curtain to unveil a tragic scene
and imitating the elevated style of Seneca the Younger. The influence of
Thyestes, both in the choice of words and form, quickly becomes apparent.
The poem is written in iambic trimeter, the principal metre of dramatic dia-
logue. Here it is used not for the purposes of dialogue, but for its stateliness and
the potential for verbal attack. As Horace concluded, iamb was proprio rabies,
‘rage’s own’.9 Kirstein conjures vivid images of the anatomists gathered around
the anatomy table:

Horrenda conspiratio, nefas atrox!

In immerentis Simiæ caput terni,
Dira nefariaque fraude, conjurant,
Quartumque conjurationis ad crimen
Per se pium, purumque fraudis adsciscunt. (1–5)

A dreadful plot, a savage crime!

Three conspire against the life of an innocent monkey,
In an awful and heinous fraud,
And to their crime of conspiracy appoint the fourth one,
Pious in nature, and undefiled by offence.10

The first line immediately brings to mind the human bestiality of Seneca’s
Atreus, who is plotting to carry out his evil deed against his brother Thyestes as
he proclaims: Aliquod audendum est nefas/Atrox, cruentum (‘Some crime must
be dared, dreadful, bloody’, 193–194).11 Educated readers of Kirstein’s poem
could easily supply the adjective cruentum in their minds, and preemptively

7 See Steensberg A., Dagligliv i Danmark i det syttende og attende århundrede (Copenhagen:
1969) 141.
8 Kirstein Michael, Libelli III Epigrammatum (Copenhagen, Georgius Lamprecht: 1645?),
Book 1, Epigram XXXVIII.
9 Horace, Ars Poetica 79.
10 All translations from Latin are mine if not stated otherwise.
11 Seneca, Tragoediae (Leipzig: 1921). Trans. in Davis P.J., Seneca: Thyestes (London: 2003) 44.
VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 317

imagine a bloody scene. Moreover, this line provides the introduction to the
anatomical table via the banquet table where Atreus serves his brother a dish
made of his own children. Thus, the close space around the anatomical table
is steeped in gore even before it is properly described. Fraus (‘deceit’), which
is at the centre of Thyestes, proves essential in the crime against the immerens
(‘innocent’) monkey. Kirstein is literally painting the scene in words, both his
own and Seneca’s. As three experienced anatomists are joined by the fourth
one, the reader imagines them towering above the helpless animal. The prepa-
ration for the procedure is termed conspiratio and conjuratio, which highlights
the deceitfully friendly approach to the experimental animal in order to gain
its trust. Feigning benevolence, the anatomists offer a potion to the monkey:

Primum veneno rem gerunt: at hoc cauta

Spernente Simia, feras manus armant,
Et vim parantes fune comprimunt fauces.
Factum est; tenetur illa, pallet, expirat! (6–9)

They first proceed with poison: but when the cautious

Monkey spurns it, they arm their fierce hands,
And, preparing to use force, restrain her12 throat with rope.
It is done; she is held down, grows pale, expires!

In order to kill the monkey before they begin the dissection, the anatomists try
to persuade it to swallow poison. Such detailed descriptions of the moments
preceding the animal’s death are not that common in contemporary anatom-
ical treatises, textbooks, and other similar works in prose. In the poem, the
reader is granted the vantage point of the fictional viewer as s/he observes
the procedure in this little vignette. The cautious monkey rejects the offer, and
the anatomists use force instead, strangling it with rope. With the rhetorical
figure of gradatio, the monkey dies before the reader’s eyes: it is ‘held down,
grows pale, expires!’ The verses then turn to named accusations, heightening
the material reality of the situation:

At te, Borusse, teque sæve Berlinas,

Et te, Morave, Simiæ peremptores,
Vos umbra, vos imago, vos minax vultus
Morientis insectabitur […] (10–13)

12 The female simia is a more frequent form than male simius. I am using the pronoun ‘she’
on purpose because the monkey is not seen as a mere object in the poem.
318 Bičak

But you, Borussus, and you, raging Berlinas,

And you, Moravus, monkey-murderers,
You will be pursued by the shadow, you will be pursued by the image,
You will be pursued by her menacing dying face […]

As the agents are referred to only by their nicknames, it is difficult to identify the
historical figures behind them.13 But it is possible that Borussus and Berlinas
were Kirstein’s former colleagues at Rostock University and his guests at the
Anatomy House. Moravus, interestingly enough, refers to Kirstein himself.14
The name of the fourth, pious anatomist, is conspicuously omitted. With the
powerful repetition of vos, Kirstein invokes phantasmagoric images of the
monkey’s haunting face in the possible future. The shadow materialises before
the reader’s eyes, becomes an image, and is finally fleshed out into a menacing
face. Although the above verses might not be completely free of irony, they
nevertheless bring to the surface the disconcerting aspect of animal experi-
mentation in the period. As is well known, many experimenters expressed
empathy towards their research subjects, especially in England, and were far
from immune to their screams and struggles.15 Kirstein finds a channel for this
worry in constructing his stage in terms of a Roman tragedy.
The poem finishes with a practical solution to the problem of the guilty con-
science. Kirstein proposes the anatomists do the following:

[…] nisi impuras

Probe expietis dexteras, & illustri
Loco reposta, non humo putri injecta
Colatis ossa, sic subinde dicentes:
NON TERRA SIMIÆ LEVIS SIT, AST AER. (13–17)

[…] except if you

Rightly purge your impure hands, and, putting her to rest
In an illustrious place, not throwing her into putrid earth,
You revere her bones, saying from now on:
MAY THE AIR, NOT THE EARTH,
REST LIGHTLY ON THE MONKEY.

13 Several historical persons shared the same nickname.

14 Kirstein was born in Moravia and regularly signed his works as Moravus.
15 See the examples in Shugg W., “Humanitarian Attitudes in the Early Animal Experiments
of the Royal Society”, Annals of Science 24 (1968) 227–238.
VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 319

Kirstein sees his mentor’s technique of bleaching bones and assembling

skeletons as an opportunity to give dead animals a second life. Once assem-
bled, the monkey will occupy an ‘illustrious place’, much like the statues of
renowned men. From this position, the monkey will be able to look down
on the anatomists, who will ‘revere her bones’ and utter an incantation. This
reverses the image from the beginning of the poem, as the monkey towers
above the anatomists for a change.
A similarly theatrical and visual quality characterises Kirstein’s poem on a
dissected stork. As with the monkey, we witness the past, present, and future
in a series of little ekphrastic panels. The poem on the stork is preceded by
“EPITAPHIUM CICONIÆ”, a playful take on the siste viator tradition of the
epitaph. Here, the stork addresses the passer-by:

Insons Ales ego: nulli pietate secunda,

Occubui sæva dilaniata manu.
Exemplo discas prudentior esse Viator,
Amplius in Mundo nil juvat esse pium.

An innocent Bird am I: I died lacerated

By a savage hand that observed no piety.
From my example, Traveller, learn to be wiser,
It is of no use anymore to be good in this World.16

As the monkey is immerens, so is the stork insons. The cruelty of the anatomists
is another continuing motif, which introduces us to the longer poem on the
stork’s fate:

VIATOR, hic ubi vides decussatim

Binos pedes, eosque non breves clavo
Fixos ad asserem, Ciconia est cæsa.
Heu immerentis horridum alitis fatum!
Has illa per virentis areas horti
Deambulabat nuper, ore sollerti
Ranas nocentes, & malos legens vermes.
Ast nunc misella propter atra Cocyti
Fluenta grallatorio salit passu,
Proserpinæ venata luridas ranas,
Multo Æaci tribunal invocans questu.

16 Kirstein, “EPITAPHIUM CICONIÆ”, in Libelli III Epigrammatum, Book 2, Epigram XXIX.

320 Bičak

O Parce, parce mitis Ales, en nummum

Tibi, & sepulchrum! desinas querellarum,
His et Culex Maronis acquiescebat.

TRAVELLER, here where you see

Two long legs, crossed and fixed to a pole
With a nail, a Stork has been killed.
Oh the horrid fate of the innocent bird!
Not long ago it was promenading through the grounds
Of a green garden, catching with its skilled beak
Harmful frogs & noxious worms.
But now, poor one, it hops stilt-like
Near the dark waters of Cocytus,
Hunting the ghastly frogs of Proserpina,
Invoking with a great lament the court of Æacus.
O gentle Bird, desist, desist. Stop your complaints,
See, there is your reward & tomb,
Even Virgil’s Culex was pleased with those.17

Kirstein makes the reader imagine two long stork legs nailed to a stake. This
image of immobility and death is contrasted with the creature’s past life, which
it enjoyed until recently, promenading happily through the verdant gardens.
This, again, is in contrast with the imagined present, in which the stork is left
to roam the banks of Cocytus, one of the five rivers encircling Hades. Coming
from the Greek κωκύω (‘wail’), this river is ‘nam’d of lamentation loud/Heard
on the ru’ful stream’ (2.579–80), as Milton would write two decades later in
Paradise Lost.18 No greenery is here, only darkness and wan amphibians. With
a few carefully chosen words, Kirstein is able to conjure evocative images of
the afterworld. The poem finishes by imploring the bird to stop its laments to
Æacus, one of the three judges in Hades.
The vivid description of the bird’s past and present activities (nuper and
nunc) can be seen as a poetic counterpart to the popular contemporary engrav-
ings of skeletons in landscape. These include not only Vesalius’s muscle-men,
but also plates of animal skeletons inserted into their natural habitats or rural
landscapes.19 In these images, ‘the dissected body was not shown to be forcibly

17 Ibid., “Aliud ejusdem”, Book 2, Epigram XXX.

18 Milton John, Paradise Lost (London, S. Simmons: 1674), II. 579–80.
19 Good examples are the engravings of Andries Jakobsz Stock and Hendrick Hondius after
the drawings of Teodoro Filippo di Liagno, published as Quis est homo qui vivet et non
videbit mortem (The Hague, Stock – Hondius?: 1626).
VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 321

wrenched from the world of the living’, in Jonathan Sawday’s words.20 Sawday
sees the cadavers as ‘liminal figures, existing at the margin of living society,
while, equally, they participate in a new community of the dead’.21 A typical
example is found in Jean Germain’s Italian treatise Breve e sustantiale trattato
intorno alle figure anathomiche [Fig. 8.1].22 A rather lively skeleton of a spoon-
bill looms large against the background of a rural landscape. A man stands
next to the river and reminds the viewer that this is the world of the living.
Kirstein’s stork challenges the view that dissected animals are not ‘forcibly
wrenched’ from the living world. His stork has been violently ‘lacerated/By a
savage hand’ and sent to the underworld, whose landscape is an uncanny mir-
ror of the mortal landscape. The green garden has been replaced by a dark river,
and the natural amphibians by their ghostly twins. Unlike Germain’s spoonbill,
the stork has forever left the familiar rural landscape. As in many of his poems,
Kirstein is here preoccupied with the afterlife of the experimental animal.
The last line of the poem brings in a work from Appendix Vergiliana, “Culex”,
or “The Gnat”.23 In this pastoral epyllion, a snake approaches a sleeping shep-
herd and is about to bite him when a gnat lands on his eyelid. The shepherd
reflexively kills the gnat, and that night the insect appears in his dream and
laments its undeserved fate. Then the gnat gives a long description of the
underworld. The shepherd, feeling guilty, constructs a shrine to the gnat in the
grove.
This parodic touch should not discourage the reader from seeing some signs
of empathy with the stork in the poem. Owing to their mild nature, storks
have enjoyed a special status in classical and Christian tradition. Aristotle
recounts that killing a stork was a criminal act in Thessaly, on the same level
as homicide.24 And in Christianity the stork has been a long-lasting symbol of
piety, prudence, and resurrection. Considering the abovementioned evidence
of seventeenth-century anatomy guilt trips, it is difficult to imagine Kirstein
savagely tearing his animals asunder and gleefully enjoying every moment of it.
As we have seen, classical allusions play a significant role in Kirstein’s con-
struction of the virtual reality, in which we watch a succession of kinetic images

20 Sawday J., The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture
(London: 1995) 114.
21 Ibid. 114.
22 Germain Jean, Breve e sustantiale trattato intorno alle figure anathomiche delli piu princi-
pali animali terestri, aquatili, et volatili, con la simpatia et convenienza che hanno ó in parte,
ó in tutto, con il corpo humano (Naples, D. Maccarano: 1625) 50.
23 Scaliger Joseph (ed.), Publii Virgilii Maronis Appendix (Lyon, Gulielmus Rovillius: 1573)
7–20.
24 “On Marvellous Things Heard”, in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton:
1984) 1275.
322 Bičak

figure 8.1 Jean Germain, “La Paletta”. Illustration in Germain, Breve e sustantiale trattato
intorno alle figure anathomiche delli più principali animali terestri, aquatili, et
volatili (Naples, D. Maccarano: 1625). Engraving
Image © Wellcome Collection
VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 323

of the animals’ past, present, and future lives. The adoption of the iambic trim-
eter paints the poems’ content in tragic – and occasionally parodic – colours. In
the case of the stork, the epitaph tradition enables Kirstein an interesting take
on the fate of dissected animals. In his poetry, Kirstein turns the memento mori
tradition on its head, showing his reader that the deaths of the monkey and the
stork are not natural processes, but violently inflicted acts. In both poems, he
uses ekphrastic descriptions to grapple with the afterlife of the animal.
Animal research and the ensuing poetic production in Copenhagen had
been enabled by William Harvey’s monumental physiological breakthrough in
early seventeenth-century London. Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the
blood was based on countless vivisection experiments. Comparative anatomy
played a crucial role in this research: in order to find out the function of the
heart, it was prudent to observe as many different hearts as possible. More
than fifty years after Harvey’s publication of his findings in De motu cordis
(1628), Richard Grove, later Bishop of Chichester, published a poem on the sub-
ject that includes long shots of the experimental animal spread on the table.
Entitled Carmen de sanguinis circuitu (1685), this Neo-Latin poem of almost
500 verses immerses the reader into a vital historical moment.
Grove was not an anatomist himself, but the technical detail suggests
that he might have witnessed vivisections at Cambridge University, his alma
mater.25 Grove took a great interest in matters medical. His library held one
of the greatest medical collections of the seventeenth century. Alongside the
expected theological works, the sales catalogue drawn after his death lists no
less than 1473 books of medical content.26 Among these are two editions of De
motu cordis. The ensuing poem was so successful that it was reprinted several
times and even included in the first volume of Musarum Anglicanarum ana-
lecta (1692/1699), a highly popular anthology of Neo-Latin verse in the period.
Like Kirstein, Grove drags the reader into the scene and creates an illusion of
presence. His verbal pyrotechnics offer an instant and immediate experience
of the dissecting room. The poem derives its kinetic force from the combina-
tion of third-person description of the experiment and Harvey’s monologue. A
partial translation was published in 1912 by Dr. Astley Paston Cooper Ashhurst,
an American surgeon and medical historian. Apart from L.R.C. Agnew’s article

25 For a discussion of this topic, see Agnew L.R.C., “DE SANGUINE EPISCOPOQUE: A Dis-
cussion of Bishop Robert Grove (1634–1696) and his Carmen de sanguinis circuitu, & c.
(1685)”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 34 (1960) 318–330.
26 Ibid. 329.
324 Bičak

from 1960,27 the poem has not received much scholarly attention, although it
vividly recreates one of the crucial moments in the history of medicine.
After invoking the ‘Muse of the Pulse’, and offering a brief survey of the his-
tory of anatomy, Harvey is shown preparing for the vivisection:

Arreptumque Canem obtorta cervice prehensum

Tollit, & in mensa resupinum ponit; at ille
Arrectis horret villis, & brachia morsu
Appetit, & magnis ululatibus omnia complet;
Et pedibus pugnat. Sed nulli obsistere fatis
Fas est. Harvæus validis complexibus urget;
Atque infelicem, & luctantem plurima frustra,
Per mediam extendit tabulam; tum fune reductos
Innectitque pedes, & vincla tenacia stringit.
Cumque ita porrectus metuens, pavitansque jaceret
Ille miser, trepidans artus, & pectus anhelum […] (49–59)28

Laying hold of the Dog, he lifts it up by squeezing its twisted

Neck, & places it on its back onto the table; and the dog’s
Fur bristles and stands erect, & the dog tries to bite his
Arms, & fills the room with its loud howls;
And kicks its legs. But the fate cannot be
Resisted. Harvey presses the dog with firm embrace;
And stretches the wretch that provides much resistance in vain
In the middle of the table; then he constrains its legs with
Rope, & ties them with taut fetters.
When the poor dog spread out like this lies in fear
And trepidation, with shuddering limbs, & a heaving chest […]

The detailed description places the reader in the same room as Harvey as s/
he witnesses the tying down of the struggling dog. The wealth of detail makes
the reader feel they are watching pictures in motion: Harvey squeezes the
dog’s neck, and puts the dog on the table. The dog’s hair stands up, and the
dog struggles and bites and howls and kicks its legs. Something which in real-
ity lasted a matter of seconds lasts a long time in verse, mimicking the relative

27 Ibid.
28 Grove Robert, Carmen de sanguinis circuitu (London, R.E. for Walter Kettilby: 1685).
VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 325

passing of time as experienced by both the anatomist and his hapless experi-
mental subject.
In order to justify his actions, Harvey claims that the dog has fared better by
becoming an experimental animal than if it had been left to its own devices.
He launches into a speech made of creative vignettes, each of which is a differ-
ent scenario of a possible canine fate. The reader leaves the anatomy room for
a moment on the wings of ekphrasis:

Tu, quanquam infandos miser experiare dolores,

Immeritamque feras pænam, solamen habeto
Mortis, quod fato non sis jugulatus iniquo;
Quod neque disruptus rabiosi dente Molossi
Occideris, nec te consumat pigra senectus.
Nam neque, per fossas, fœdamque ignobilis ulvam
Projiciere Canis, nec tabo membra liquescent;
Nec tu nocturnis raptus laniabere monstris,
Nec putrescentes corvus populabitur artus. (72–80)

You, although you are about to feel unspeakable pain,

And undergo undeserved suffering, take consolation
In your death, that you are not slain by an unjust fate;
Because you will not be torn asunder by the fierce tooth
Of a Molossian hound, nor will slow old age consume you.
Neither will you, in a ditch, be thrown into the foul sedge
Like a worthless cur, nor will your body parts melt with putrefaction;
Nor will you be kidnapped and mangled by the monsters of the night,
Nor will a raven ravage your rotting limbs.

Grove uses ekphrasis to cast the reader from one scenario to another six times,
in a matter of six lines. The descriptions of the bodily decadence are detailed
yet dense, and enable a clear visualisation of each of these versions of death.
Importantly, like Kirstein’s monkey and stork, Grove’s dog is about to suffer an
undeserved (immeritam) punishment.
The dog, of course, does not share Harvey’s sentiments that this kind of
death is the best one. The detailed description of the moment just before the
first cut is filled with anxiety. Again, although in real time this action happens
in an instant (signalled by coruscus and micans), the verses take a long time
to report it, reflecting the dog’s subjective experience of time in a moment of
utter panic:
326 Bičak

Talia narrabat surdo, dextraque curoscos

Cultellos effert, gladiisque micantibus instat.
Ut vero vulnus sensit fera, corpore toto
Contorquet sese, & fremitu gravis intonat acri;
Et simul infrendit nudatos spumea rictus,
Dente, oculoque minax frustra; tremor ilia pulsat;
Exercetque ferox vanam sine viribus iram. (87–93)

After speaking thus to the one that could not hear him, with his hand
he raises
The flashing knife, and approaches with the glittering weapon.
As if sensing the real wound, the beast contorts
Its whole body, & anxiously lets out a piercing moan;
And foams at the mouth and gnashes its exposed jaws,
Vainly threatens with its tooth and eye; its entrails shake;
The wild animal exercises its empty fury without strength.

This audio-visual vignette of a shrieking and spuming dog is conspicuously

absent from Harvey’s original text. The passage brims with plastic detail: the
dog contorts its body, foams at the mouth, gnashes its teeth, its entrails shake,
and it pierces Harvey with its look.
The furious resistance of the animal reverberates with the details of the bat-
tle between Cadmus and the dragon in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Cadmus sends his companions to a grove to fetch sacrificial water only to find
them slain by a ferocious dragon. A battle ensues and Cadmus overpowers
the beast:

totum descendit in ilia ferrum.

ille dolore ferox caput in sua terga retorsit
vulneraque adspexit fixumque hastile momordit,
idque, ubi vi multa partem labefecit in omnem,
vix tergo eripuit; ferrum tamen ossibus haesit.
tunc vero, postquam solitas accessit ad iras
causa recens, plenis tumuerunt guttura venis,
spumaque pestiferos circumfluit albida rictus (67–74)29

with the full length

Of iron buried in the serpent’s side.

29 Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books 1–5, ed. W.S. Anderson (Norman: 1997).

VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 327

In agony it twisted back its head

To see the wound, and bit the deep-sunk shaft,
And straining it from side to side at last
Wrenched it away – but still the iron stuck fast.
Now to its natural rage new source of rage
Was added. In its throat the arteries
Swelled huge; its poison fangs were flecked with foam30

Like Grove’s dog, Ovid’s dragon is confronted with a piece of metal: the ani-
mate (ilia) faces the inanimate ( ferrum). In Grove’s poem, the animate ilia is
assaulted by cultelli. Like the dragon, the dog is ferox (‘ferocious’) and exer-
cises empty iram (‘rage’), while foaming at the mouth (spumea, rictus). A simi-
lar helplessness overwhelms both animals as they vainly struggle against the
lethal weapon. Grove transplants the epic battle that takes place in a vast open
space onto the limited space of the anatomy table. The dog’s struggle thus gains
dignity and the scene achieves a heightened dramatic effect. Grove’s vignette
is dramatic in itself, but the overlap with the Ovidian episode enhances the
struggle that is going on before the reader’s eyes: this is a battle for survival.
Also, by alluding to Cadmus’s heroic battle, Grove emphasises the historic sig-
nificance of Harvey’s research.
Harvey’s feat in Grove’s poem is not free from irony, however. The dog lies
helpless namque illum summo conantem insurgere nisu/Intorti cohibent nodi,
clavique trabales (‘For contorted knots and beam-nails hold it down/As it
strives with all its might to lift itself’, 94–95). Clavi trabales were large nails that
joined great rafters in Roman buildings, but they were also applied as instru-
ments of torture. The most famous clavi trabales were those used in the cru-
cifixion of Jesus. As a scholar and divine, Grove was well aware of this fact.
The image of a spreadeagled dog nailed to the table was common enough in
anatomy textbooks of the period, as can be seen in Fig. 8.2, so the metaphor
was readily available. The two verses thus mimic a little ekphrastic panel of a
Christ-like canine.
The moment of the dog’s death exceeds the descriptions found in anatomi-
cal writings of the period:

Interea diris Animal cruciatibus ægrum,

Immanes patitur secto Thorace dolores.
Cor tamen ad solitum accingit sese usque laborem,
Et validis primum, & crebris micat ictibus; at mox

30 Trans. in Melville A.D., Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford: 1986).

328 Bičak

figure 8.2 Johannes Walaeus, Dissection of dog from W. Harvey, 1647. Woodcut
Image © Wellcome Collection

Segnius, & raro respondet verbere; Pulsu

Ancipiti tremit, atque incerta fluctuat unda;
Tum fatis victum cadit, immotumque quiescit.
Ferreus abscondit morientia lumina somnus,
Horrentesque rigent artus, calor ossa relinquit. (445–53)

In the meantime, the Animal, nauseous from the awful torments,

Suffers immense pain due to its slashed Thorax.
Still the heart takes to its usual work,
And at first throbs with strong & frequent beats: but soon
More slowly, & less often responds with a palpitation; it quivers
With an unsteady pulse, and doubtful blood hesitates;
Then life yields to fate, and stands still.
Deep sleep covers the dying eyes,
The bristling limbs stiffen, the heat leaves the bones.
VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 329

Ekphrasis is here used to describe the physiological changes that the dog is
going through owing to the invasiveness of vivisection. The sharpness of the
images that appear before the reader’s eyes is exquisite. We see inside the dog:
the slashed thorax reveals the still beating heart. Poignantly, the heart less-
ens its beats and the blood does not know where to go, echoing Lucan’s stetit
incertus flueret quo vulnere sanguis (‘the blood stood still, unsure from which
wound to flow’, 3.589) in his Civil War.31 Finally, rigor mortis takes over the dog’s
tormented body.
Towards the end of the poem, after the detailed mapping of the dog’s inte-
rior body, Harvey addresses the dog:

Quid nunc tibi tandem

Pro merito egregio, & vitæ pro munere reddam?
Nec tu defunctus planctu lætabere inani;
Nec tua solabor pretioso fata sepulchro.
Ista levem Culicem vano splendore coronent,
Quem brevis ingrati pastoris sustulit ira (461–66)

What should I give you now

For a distinguished service and the gift of life?
Dead, you will not rejoice in empty laments;
Nor will I console your ill fate with a costly tomb.
These surround the insignificant gnat with their vain splendour,
Built by the short-lived wrath of the ungrateful shepherd

The pseudo-Virgilian gnat found in Kirstein’s poem flies into Grove’s verse, too,
as Harvey contemplates the innocence of his research animal. The first two
lines are a reworking of the epitaph to the gnat: ‘Parue Culex, pecudum custos
tibi tale merenti/Funeris officium uitæ pro munere reddit’ (‘O TINY GNAT, A
SHEPHERD PAYS YOU, WHO MERIT IT,/RITE OF BURIAL IN RETURN
FOR THE GIFT OF LIFE’).32 Whereas Kirstein’s stork received a tomb worthy
of the gnat, material compensation is not a fit prize for Grove’s dog. Instead,

Major honos tibi debetur, tibi gloria major.

Namque tui generis Procyon, & Sirius ardens,

31 Lucan Marcus Annæus, Pharsalia, ed. P.A. Lemaire, 2 vols. (Paris: 1830–1832); Lucan, Civil
War, trans. S.H. Braund (Oxford: 1992) 57.
32 Scaliger, Publii Virgilii Maronis Appendix, in Virgil, Aeneid, Books 7–12; Appendix Vergiliana,
trans. H.R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: 2000).
330 Bičak

Inque domos Superum, & stellantia tecta recepti:

Quin tu etiam ætherias conscendas tertius arces. (469–72)

A greater honour, a greater glory you deserve.

For Procyon, and blazing Sirius, your own kind,
Were received into the home of the gods & under the starry roof:
So you might as well ascend the heavenly citadel as the third one.

In these shining verses, heavenly dogs adorn the celestial firmament: Procyon,
whose name means ‘before the dog’, precedes Sirius, the brightest star, as it
travels across the skies. Procyon is associated with Maera (‘Sparkler’), the
hound of Erigone, while Sirius is Orion’s dog. Harvey’s dog is invited to join
the two as it achieves mythological status through its noble contribution to
contemporary anatomy and physiology.
Kirstein’s and Grove’s verse exemplifies two important features of the ana-
tomical poetry of seventeenth-century Copenhagen and London: the use of
ekphrasis for painting the scene and the preoccupation with the animal after-
life. The poems’ verbal pictorialism constructs a spatial reality in verse: in all
three examples, the reader is arrested by a moving panorama of vivid panels.
All three animals are offered a compensation for being ripped open by the
anatomical knife. The monkey’s wrath will be appeased once its skeleton is
assembled and mounted. The stork will be given a tomb. The dog will join the
constellation of other famous dogs.
The focus on the traditional materials for the history of anatomy and medi-
cine has left this particular corpus in the shadow for a long time. The advan-
tage of this ekphrastic poetic production is that it affords a more instant and
immediate experience of the atmosphere of the contemporary anatomical
work than the much more practical and technically focused treatises and text-
books. Many more research animals lurk in the virtual reality of the forgotten
Neo-Latin anatomical poems of the early modern period. It is time for their
stories to be heard as well as seen.

Selective Bibliography

Agnew L.R.C., “DE SANGUINE EPISCOPOQUE: A Discussion of Bishop Robert Grove

(1634–1696) and his Carmen de sanguinis circuitu, &c. (1685)”, Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 34 (1960) 318–330.
Bartholin Thomas, “Modus dealbandi ossa pro Sceletopœia”, in Acta Medica & Philo-
sophica Hafniensia, Vol. 2 (Copenhagen, Georgius Gödianus: 1673) 42–46.
VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE ANATOMICAL POEM IN DENMARK AND ENGLAND 331

Bartholin Thomas, The Anatomy House in Copenhagen, Bruun N.W. (ed.), (Copenhagen:
2015).
Canalis R.F. – Ciavolella M. (eds.), Andreas Vesalius and the Fabrica in the Age of
Printing: Art, Anatomy, and Printing in the Italian Renaissance (Turnhout: 2018).
Cunningham A., The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment
Europe (Farnham: 2010).
Gotfredsen E., “Some Relations Between British and Danish Medicine in the Seven-
teenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences 8 (1953) 46–55.
Grove Robert, Carmen de sanguinis circuitu (London, R.E. for Walter Kettilby: 1685).
Guerrini A., “Experiments, Causation, and the Uses of Vivisection in the First Half of
the Seventeenth Century”, Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013) 227–254.
Kirstein Michael, Libelli III Epigrammatum (Copenhagen, Georgius Lamprecht: 1645?).
Knoeff R. – Zwijnenberg R. (eds.), The Fate of Anatomical Collections (Farnham: 2015).
Meli D.B., “Early Modern Experimentation on Live Animals”, Journal of the History of
Biology 46 (2013) 199–226.
O’Connell P.A., “Enargeia, Persuasion, and the Vividness Effect in Athenian Forensic
Oratory”, Advances in the History of Rhetoric 20 (2017) 225–51.
Preston C., “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words”, in Adamson S. – Alexander G. – Ettenhuber K.
(eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: 2007) 115–129.
Sawday J., The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture
(London: 1995).
Shotwell A., “The Revival of Vivisection in the Sixteenth Century”, Journal of the History
of Biology 46 (2013) 171–197.
 part 3
Sacred Ekphrasis

∵
 chapter 9

Robert Campin and Jan van Ruusbroec: Spiritual

Conflagrations and Ekphrastic Mysticism

Elliott D. Wise

The mystical tradition of the medieval and early modern Low Countries
marshaled ekphrastic rhetoric as a vehicle for describing the soul’s ineffable
encounter with God and holding out the possibility that that encounter could
be replicated by the votary. To this end, Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381), a tower-
ing figure in the mystical literature of Brabant, artfully manipulated ekphrasis
for its didactic, affective, and analogical potential. Ruusbroec lived to be nearly
ninety years of age, spending the bulk of his life in the Zonien Forest surround-
ing Brussels, where he composed treatises from his priory at Groenendaal.
Penned in Middle Dutch, these texts chart the soul’s “ladder of ascent” as it
straddles both the active and contemplative lives. The syncretism of active and
contemplative spirituality was common among fourteenth-century reform-
minded groups, such as the beguines, Devotio moderna, and Gottesfreunde.
Ruusbroec calls his iteration of this vocational compromise the “common life”,
and he enjoins his readers to carefully balance Christianity’s two traditional
approaches to discipleship: turning outward in service to others and then turn-
ing inward in prayer, actively climbing the rungs on the mystical ladder and
then passively receiving the gift of unification with the Trinity.*, 1
This essay will begin by identifying ekphrastic image making as an instru-
ment of Ruusbroec’s mysticism. I argue that the content and theory of his “word

* This essay was greatly improved by suggestions and critiques from colleagues at the tenth
Lovis Corinth Colloquium, held in 2019 at Emory University. I express my heartfelt gratitude
to them.
1 In Vanden blinkenden steen [On the Sparkling Stone], for instance, Ruusbroec describes mys-
tical experience thus: ‘And therefore he has a common life, for contemplation and action
come just as readily to him and he is perfect in both’. D948–949, E790–792, in Ruusbroec J.
van, Vanden blinkenden steen, Vanden vier becoringhen, Vanden kerstenen ghelove, Brieven, ed.
Baere G. de – Mertens T. – Noë H., trans. Lefevere A., in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van Ruusbroec
Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 110 (Turnhout: 1991) D183,
E182: ‘Ende hier omme heeft hi een ghemeyn leven, want hem es scouwen ende werken even
ghereet, ende in beyden es hi volcomen’. In quoting Ruusbroec’s texts, I will use an “E” to
indicate citations of the English translation and a “D” to refer to the original Middle Dutch.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

336 Wise

pictures” informed the devotional arguments of many Netherlandish paintings

in the fifteenth century. To demonstrate Ruusbroec’s reverberations in the pic-
torial register, I will track one of his most common rhetorical idioms – spiritual
conflagration – as it is retooled in a group of panel paintings associated with
Robert Campin (ca. 1375–1445): St. John the Baptist and the Franciscan Heinrich
von Werl and St. Barbara (1438) [Figs. 9.1 and 9.2], the Hermitage Trinity and
Virgin and Child by a Fireplace (1430s) [Fig. 9.3 and 9.4], the Virgin and Child
Before a Firescreen (ca. 1440) [Fig. 9.5], the London Portrait of a Franciscan
and Virgin and Child in an Interior (before 1432) [Figs. 9.6 and 9.7], and the
Mérode Triptych (ca. 1427–1432) [Fig. 9.8]. Often cited as homey examples of
“bourgeoisie” naturalism in Renaissance art, these compositions all foreground
fireplaces, usually with a crackling blaze.2 Their seemingly routine domestic-
ity, however, functions as a crucial “foothold” on the ladder of mystical ascent.
Campin’s hearths become analogies, drawn from the familiar vicissitudes of
the active life, which train the viewer for contemplative experience, in much
the way that Ruusbroec requires an active component in ‘common life’ mysti-
cism. It is at this juncture – between the active and the contemplative, the
created image and the uncreated reality, the material and the spiritual – that
ekphrasis mediates.
As a rhetorical device rooted in corporeal vision, observation, and empiri-
cal description, ekphrasis initially seem at odds with mysticism. Union with
the divine is, by nature, indefinable and indescribable. Its supreme sanctity
transcends the bodily senses in a rarified otherness that can only be perceived
with spiritual eyes and heard with spiritual ears. The only way to fully appre-
hend mystical unity is by experiencing it personally, as Ruusbroec explains:
‘For Scripture cannot teach the goodness and the bliss that God shows His
friends in this light, nor can one write about it as experientially or as perfectly

2 For key scholarship and criticism of the “secular” argument in Netherlandish naturalism, see
Robb D.M., “The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”,
The Art Bulletin 18, 4 (1936) 480–526, esp. 500–514; Schapiro M., “‘Muscipula Diaboli’, The
Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece”, The Art Bulletin 27, 3 (1945) 182–187, esp. 186–187;
Panofsky E., Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA:
1953), vol. 1, esp. 1–20; Coo J. de, “A Medieval Look at the Merode Annunciation”, Zeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte 44, 2 (1981) 114–132; Harbison C., “Realism and Symbolism in Early Flemish
Painting”, The Art Bulletin 66, 4 (1984) 588–602, esp. 591–595; Carrier D., “Naturalism and
Allegory in Flemish Painting”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, 3 (1987) 237–249;
Harbison C., “Religious Imagination and Art-Historical Method: A Reply to Barbara Lane’s
‘Sacred versus Profane’”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 19, 3 (1989)
198–205.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 337

figure 9.1
Robert Campin,
St. John the Baptist
and the Franciscan
Heinrich von Werl (left
panel in a triptych
with the Prado
St. Barbara) (1438).
Oil on oak panel,
101 × 47 cm. Madrid,
The Prado Museum
(inv. no. P001513)
Image © Erich
Lessing / Art
Resource, NY
338 Wise

figure 9.2
Robert Campin,
St. Barbara (right
panel in a triptych
with the Prado
St. John the Baptist
with the Franciscan
Heinrich von Werl)
(1438). Oil on oak
panel, 101 × 47 cm.
Madrid, The Prado
Museum (inv. no.
P001514)
Image © Erich
Lessing / Art
Resource, NY
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 339

figure 9.3 Robert Campin, Trinity (left wing of a diptych with the Hermitage Virgin and
Child by a Fireplace) (1430s). Oil on panel, 34.3 × 24.5 cm. Saint Petersburg, The
State Hermitage Museum (inv. no. GÉ-443)
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir
Terebenin
340 Wise

figure 9.4 Robert Campin, Virgin and Child by a Fireplace (right wing of a diptych with
the Hermitage Trinity) (1430s). Oil on panel, 34.3 × 24.5 cm. Saint Petersburg,
The State Hermitage Museum (inv. no. GÉ-442)
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by
Vladimir Terebenin
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 341

figure 9.5 Robert Campin or follower, Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen (ca. 1440). Oil with
egg tempera on oak with walnut additions, 63.4 × 48.5 cm. London, The National
Gallery (inv. no. NG2609)
Image © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY
342 Wise

figure 9.6 Workshop of Robert Campin (Jacques Daret?), Portrait of a

Franciscan (?) (left wing of a diptych with the London Virgin and
Child in an Interior) (before 1432). Oil on oak, 18.7 × 11.7 cm. London,
The National Gallery (inv. no. NG6377)
Image © National Gallery, London /Art Resource, NY
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 343

figure 9.7 Workshop of Robert Campin (Jacques Daret?), Virgin and Child in
an Interior (right wing of a diptych with the London Portrait of a
Franciscan) (before 1432). Oil on oak, 18.7 × 11.6 cm. London, The
National Gallery (inv. no. NG6514)
Image © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY
344 Wise

figure 9.8 Robert Campin, Mérode Triptych (central panel) (ca. 1427–1432). Oil on oak,
64.1 × 63.2 cm. New York City, The Cloisters Collection (inv. no. 56.70a–c)
By Courtesy of The Cloisters Collection, NY

as God shows it to the loving spirits’.3 Yet write about it Ruusbroec did – dense
treatises and epistles, transcribed in Carthusian scriptoria, collected by the
brethren of the Devotio moderna, and sometimes translated into Latin for audi-
ences beyond the Low Countries. Ruusbroec’s method for describing the inde-
scribable regularly takes the form of vibrantly visual ekphrasis. Since neither

3 D5:2660–2663, E5:2543–2545, in Ruusbroec J. van, Dat rijcke der ghelieven, ed. Alaerts J., trans.
Rolfson H., in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaevalis 104 (Turnhout: 2002) D409, E408: ‘Want dat goet ende de weelde
die god toent sinen vrienden in desen lichte, dat en mach de scriftuere niet leeren; noch men
maechs niet scriven also bevoellike noch alsoe volcomelike alst god toent den minnenden
gheesten’.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 345

word nor image can replicate the blinding vision of Ruusbroec’s spiritual
eyes, he sidesteps and leads his readers to that transcendent reality indirectly,
through analogy. These ekphrastic analogies use sensory language and images
to appeal to the quotidian lives of readers. They are not fictions fabricated
merely for didactic purposes but rather simulacra for real, albeit inaccessible,
spiritual experiences.
Essentially, this form of ekphrasis operates as a veil: it conceals the specif-
ics of the divine encounter while simultaneously outlining its contours. Like
the parables of the New Testament, it ensures that the votaries ‘seeing see not;
and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand’.4 And yet that tantaliz-
ing enigma also urges them to regard ekphrasis as a vicarious approximation
for that which is temporarily unreachable to corporeal eyes and ears. St. Paul
writes: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know
in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’, while Christ himself
declares: ‘But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear’.5
Ruusbroec’s ekphrastic contours give aspiring mystics a visual form to cher-
ish as the focus of their desire, an object for their meditation, and the impetus
for their affective piety. Moreover, when they finally scale the mystical moun-
tain for themselves and see ‘face to face’, the ekphrastic imagery – ‘dark glass’
though it is – ensures that they will recognize the pinnacle of those unknow-
able vistas and reconstitute Ruusbroec’s own indescribable experiences. Since
ekphrasis stops short of actually delineating the signified, however, full appre-
hension of those dizzying heights is only accessible to those with ‘ears to hear’
and ‘eyes which see’.6 To this end, Ruusbroec employs the image of a ‘onefold
eye’ to describe votaries who ultimately subvert their natural senses in favor of
divine perception:

And therefore, the eyes with which the spirit contemplates and gazes
upon its Bridegroom are so widely dilated that they will never again be
closed. For the gazing and contemplation of the spirit remain eternally
(fixed) on the hidden revelation of God, and the comprehension of the
spirit is so widely dilated for the coming of the Bridegroom that the spirit
itself has become the wideness which it apprehends.7

4 Matthew 13:13.
5 1 Corinthians 13:12, Matthew 13:16.
6 Matthew 13:9, Luke 10:23.
7 Dc103–108, Ec88–93, in Ruusbroec J. van, Die geestelike brulocht, ed. Alaerts J., trans.
Rolfson H., in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaevalis 103 (Turnhout: 1988) D585, E584: ‘Ende hier omme sijn die oghen
des gheests, daer hi met scouwet ende aenstaert sinen brudegom, soe wide ontploken datse
346 Wise

Ruusbroec cloaks the vision of his ‘onefold eye’ in various ekphrastic para-
digms. Some are intensely artisanal, such as his instructions for weaving and
embroidering allegorical veils for the “tabernacle” of the heart. Roses, to signify
obedience and purity, are to be stitched into the white cloth: ‘And these are
sweet-smelling red roses which go with the white color very well’.8 The birds
sewn into the blue cloth recall the saints, waterlilies on a purple ground sig-
nify generosity, and the contrast in color between embroidered stars and glow-
ing red fabric instigates a secondary ekphrastic meditation on the luminous
night sky:

Onto the scarlet color, that is, onto fiery love, we are to set bright stars,
that is, inner devout prayer for the benefit of our fellow-Christian, and
reverent exercises hidden between ourselves and God. These are stars
which illuminate heaven and earth with the brightness they have And
they make us bright and fruitful within, and fix us in the firmament of
eternal life.9

It is significant, given the woodland location of Ruusbroec’s hermitage, that

many of his ekphrastic analogies are rooted in the natural world. He cites bats
blinded by light and honeybees who flit from flower to flower in the warm
sunlight, never resting until they return to their hive with nectar.10 He is partial
to water imagery, with the ebb and flow of a divine current drawing the votary
into ‘the fathomless sea of the Godhead’.11 Often Scripture is the genesis for
ekphrasis, prompting detailed extrapolations on parables and biblical narra-
tives. Ruusbroec’s celebrated Die geestelike brulocht [The Spiritual Espousals]

nummermeer en werden gheloken. Want staren ende scouwen des gheests blivet eewich
in die verborghene oppenbaringhe gods, ende dat begrijp des gheests es soe wide ontplo-
ken jeghen die toecomst des brudegoms, dat die gheest selve die wijtheit worden es die
hi begrijpt’.
8 D4:599–600, E4:575–576, in Ruusbroec J. van, Van den geesteliken tabernakel, ed.
Mertens T., trans. Rolfson H., in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, Corpus
Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 105–106 (Turnhout: 2006), vol. 105, D389, E388:
‘Ende dat sijn rode rosen van suten gore die sere wel cleden in die witte varuwe’.
9 D4:646–651, E4:619–623, in ibidem D393, 395; E392, E394: ‘In die coccine varuwe, dat es
in der vireger minnen, daer inne sele wi setten clare sterren, dat es innech devoet gebet
omme orbore ons evenkerstens ende werdege verborgene ufenenge tusschen ons ende
gode. Dit sijn sterren die met claerheiden die si hebben, hemelrike ende erterike verlich-
ten. Ende si maken ons selven claer ende vrochbaer van binnen ende stadegen ons in dat
firmament dies ewechs levens’.
10 For Ruusbroec’s bat analogy, see Db1504–1507, Eb1292–1295, in Ruusbroec, Die geestelike
brulocht D457, 459; E456, 458. For the honeybees see Db439–459, Eb377–394, in ibidem
D335, 337; E334, 336.
11 Db1039, Eb894–895, in ibidem D407, E406: ‘inder grondeloser zee der godheit’.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 347

is an extended reinterpretation of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matthew

25:1–13), and his monumental Van den geesteliken tabernakel [On the Spiritual
Tabernacle] transforms the construction of the Mosaic tent-sanctuary into an
elaborate allegory on the mystical life.
Of special importance to the argument of this paper is Ruusbroec’s beloved
analogy of fire. Ekphrastic “conflagrations” punctuate his prose, and in his
apotheoses of mystical ascent votaries are frequently “burned up” in divine
light. In Van den geesteliken tabernakel, Christ is ‘fiery as a burning coal […]
and particularly in His passion and when He was crucified. And in His death,
He became so brightly flashing that all the darkness of sins cannot overcome
the splendor’.12 He is also the paschal lamb, ‘roasted for us on the cross, in the
fire of love and of martyrdom’.13 Die geestelike brulocht, enjoins the faithful to
‘cleave to God within by devoted intention and love, just like a kindled, blazing
fire that can no longer be extinguished’.14 Likened to burning logs in a hearth,
Ruusbroec’s flames of the Holy Spirit first ‘bur[n] in love’, with the votary and
God as separate and distinct from one another as the substance of wood is
from fire, and then ‘bur[n] up’, like kindling totally consumed and believers
so transformed into the Trinity that they are ‘onefold and there is no distinc-
tion left’.15
Ruusbroec was a well-educated priest. Before retiring to the Zonien Forest,
he had been a chaplain at the collegiate church of St. Gudula in Brussels, and
his treatises reveal an intimate familiarity with Scripture, liturgy, and the
patristics.16 Although many of his readers, especially female religious, widows,
and laymen, benefited from his choice to write in the vernacular, a sizeable

12 D5:1241–1245, E5:1177–1180, in Ruusbroec, Van den geesteliken tabernakel, vol. 106, D717,
E716: ‘Aldus was Cristus onse carbonkel steen, vierech alse een berrende cole […] ende
sunderlinghe in sire passien ende doe hi ghecruset wart. Ende in sire dooet es hi soe clare
blickende worden dat alle donkerheit der sunden die claerheit niet verwinnen en mach’.
13 D5:4235–4236, E5:3988–3989, in ibidem D1015, E1014: ‘dat ons ghebraden es ane den cruce
in dat vier der minnen ende der maertilien’.
14 Dc60–62, Ec50–51, in Ruusbroec, Die geestelike brulocht D581, E580: ‘hi moet van bin-
nen gode aenhanghen met toevoeghender meyninghen ende minnen, rechte alse een
onsteken gloeyende vier dat nummermeer gheblust en mach werden’.
15 D115, E98, in Ruusbroec, Vanden blinkenden steen D111, E110: ‘berrent in minnen’; D117–118,
E99–100, in ibidem D113, E112: ‘Maer daer hi verberent, daer es hi eenvoldich ende en heeft
gheen ondersceet’. For the stages of burning wood as an analogy for Ruusbroec’s under-
standing of unification with the divine, see Mommaers P., “Introduction”, in Ruusbroec J.
van, Vanden blinkenden steen, ed. Noë H., trans. Lefevere A., in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van
Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 110 (Turnhout:
1991) 11–40, esp. 15–16.
16 On Ruusbroec’s education and literary source, see Warnar G., Ruusbroec: Literature and
Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century, trans. Webb D., Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History
150 (Leiden – Boston: 2007) esp. 24–50.
348 Wise

portion of his intended audience was literate in Latin.17 His use of Middle
Dutch, then, seems to have been more purposeful than simply expanding
his readership. Ruusbroec’s vernacular contributed important stylistic ele-
ments to his approximations of mystical experience. His texts treat complex
and theologically sensitive subjects, yet he eschews the precision of vetted
Latin vocabulary and instead ventures into the slippery and untried lexicon
of Middle Dutch. This endeavor was occasionally greeted with hostility from
academicians, who worried that vernacular theology would drift toward mis-
construed doctrine and even outright heresy.18
The freshness of Ruusbroec’s language, with its unfamiliar terms, latent
meanings, and dissonant implications, only contributed to the texts’ ekphras-
tic quality. The “vulgar tongue” connoted subjects and spaces far removed from
the venerable circles of academic and ecclesiastical Latin. Most commonly
employed in intimate, familial, and informal settings, the vernacular – like
ekphrasis – tended to favor the sensory and emotive. Ruusbroec likely privi-
leged Middle Dutch precisely because it was detached from academic theol-
ogy, in much the way that mysticism remains ever beyond definition, outside
catechesis, and above the conjectures of even the most erudite scholastics.19
For Ruusbroec, perhaps the visceral experience of mystical vision called out for
the equally experiential, “lived” nature of quotidian language. This consonance
between mysticism and the vernacular echoes the symbiosis of active and
contemplative discipleship in Ruusbroec’s “common life”. That consonance
also applies to the relationship between mysticism and ekphrasis. Ruusbroec
manipulated the sensory flair of vernacular rhetoric to evoke mystical vision
in much the way that he bent the descriptive power of ekphrasis to impart
contour to otherwise indescribable experience.
Having outlined the role of ekphrastic images in Ruusbroec’s texts,
I will now consider mystical ekphrasis as an element in early Renaissance art.
Ruusbroec’s spirituality harmonizes with the meditative itineraries of many
Netherlandish devotional paintings. Readership of his treatises increased
substantially during the fifteenth century, fueled by the endorsement of the

17 On Ruusbroec’s female readership, see ibidem 244–270.

18 Watson N., “The Middle English Mystics”, in Wallace D. (ed.), The Cambridge History of
Medieval English Literature (Cambridge – New York: 1999) 539–565, esp. 544−545; Warnar,
Rusbroec 84. See also see McGinn B., The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in
the New Mysticism (1200−1350), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian
Mysticism 3 (New York: 1998) 19−23.
19 On mysticism’s relationship to ecclesiastical academics, see ibidem 19–21.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 349

Carthusians and Franciscans.20 I have argued elsewhere that the paintings

of Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1399–1464) – especially those with Carthusian
patronage – strongly suggest that Rogier personally read Ruusbroec’s work.21
The mystic’s highly visual language, stirring allegories, and affective theology –
arrestingly destabilized by the inventive usage of Middle Dutch – lend them-
selves well to the new naturalism and iconographic ingenuity of many of the
“Flemish primitives”.
Ruusbroec’s writings also resonate with several paintings connected to
Robert Campin, who employed Rogier as a journeyman in his Tournai work-
shop from 1427 to 1432. The two painters collaborated and imitated each other
to such an extent that it is difficult to disentangle their oeuvres.22 Many of

20 In particular, there is a marked increase in copies of Ruusbroec’s work after 1450. See
Warnar, Ruusbroec 197, 199; Mertens T., “Introduction”, in Ruusbroec, J. van, Van den
geesteliken tabernakel, ed. Mertens T., trans. Rolfson H., in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van
Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 105 (Turnhout:
2006) 13–85, esp. 69.
21 Wise E.D., “Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Ruusbroec: Reading, Rending, and
Re-Fashioning the ‘Twice-Dyed’ Veil of Blood in the Escorial Crucifixion”, in Melion W.S. –
Clifton J. – Weemans M. (eds.), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments,
1400–1700 (Leiden: 2014) 387–422. See also Bekaert E., “The Mystical Dimension in
Flemish Primitive Painting: Exploring the Spiritual Affinity between John of Ruusbroec
and Rogier van der Weyden”, Ons Geestelijk Erf 82, 4 (2011) 333–392; Rothstein B., “Vision,
Cognition, and Self-Reflection in Rogier van der Weyden’s Bladelin Triptych”, Zeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte 64, 1 (2001) 37–55. For another art historical study based in Ruusbroec’s
writings, see Falque I., “‘See the Bridegroom Cometh; Go Out and Meet Him’: On Spiritual
Progress and Mystical Union in Early Netherlandish Painting”, in Melion W.S. – Clifton J. –
Weemans M. (eds.), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700
(Leiden: 2014) 361–385.
22 The identity and oeuvre of Robert Campin (sometimes identified as the Master of
Flémalle) is a thorny battleground of connoisseurship and archival research. Some
of the most relevant literature follows: Loo G.H. de, “An Authentic Work by Jacques
Daret, Painted in 1434”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 15, 76 (1909) 202–203,
205–208; Loo G.H. de, “Jacques Daret’s Nativity of Our Lord”, The Burlington Magazine
for Connoisseurs 19, 100 (1911) 218, 220–221, 223–225; Loo G.H. de “Robert Campin or
Rogier van der Weyden? Some Portraits Painted Between 1432 and 1444”, The Burlington
Magazine for Connoisseurs 49, 285 (1926) 268–269, 272–274; Renders E. “The Riddle of
the Maître de Flémalle”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 54, 315 (1929) 285–287,
290–293, 296–299, 302–303, 305; Burroughs A., “Campin and Van der Weyden Again”,
Metropolitan Museum Studies 4, 2 (1933) 131–150; Michel E., “Unité ou dualité: A propos
du problème Maître de Flémalle – Rogier”, Oud Holland 50 (1933) 49–57; Renders E. –
Smet J. de – Beyaert-Carlier L., La solution du problème Van der Weyden – Flémalle – Campin
(Bruges: 1931); Friedländer M.J., Early Netherlandish Painting, trans. Norden H., 14 vols.
(English ed. New York – Washington, D.C.: 1967 [1924–1937]), vol. 2, Rogier van der
Weyden and the Master of Flémalle, 34–47; Campbell L., “Robert Campin, the Master of
Flémalle and the Master of Mérode”, The Burlington Magazine 116, 860 (1974) 634–646;
350 Wise

Campin’s works depict fireplaces, firescreens, or vigorous blazes. The compo-

sitional centrality of these hearths, combined with the fastidious rendering of
flaming logs, stray sparks, and smoldering embers, suggests that the fires func-
tion as much more than domestic backdrops. As emulations and reinventions
of Ruusbroec’s ekphrastic fires, these paintings prompt viewers to reassess and
reconfigure the image into a mystery of faith and foretaste of mystical vision.
Significantly, the mysteries propounded by Campin’s hearth paintings align
with the ultimate mystery in Ruusbroec’s writings: namely, unification with
the Trinity.
In contrast to Rogier’s career, it is difficult to establish a “paper trail” link-
ing Campin to Ruusbroec, in part because of unresolved questions about the
artist’s identity. The Werl panels, once part of a triptych commissioned by
Heinrich von Werl (d. 1463) in 1438, provide the closest thing to a historical
nexus between Campin and Ruusbroec [Figs. 9.1 and 9.2].23 Heinrich was
an eminent theologian at the University of Cologne who participated at the
Council of Basel and presided over the Cologne province of Franciscans for
thirty years. The affective piety of the Order of Friars Minor undergirds much
of Ruusbroec’s work, not to mention his direct borrowings from the great
Franciscan mystic, St. Bonaventure (1221–1274).24 Two of Ruusbroec’s treatises
and many letters were written for Franciscan nuns (Een spieghel der eeuwigher
salicheit [A Mirror of Eternal Blessedness] and Vanden seven sloten [On the
Seven Enclosures]), and the city of Cologne was one of the leading centers for
Ruusbroec readership outside the Low Countries.25 Not only is it likely that
Heinrich von Werl was familiar with Ruusbroec’s work, but his interest in

Kemperdick S. – Sander J. (eds.), The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden: An
Exhibition Organized by the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, and the Gemäldegalerie,
Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Ostfildern, Germany: 2009).
23 Ruusbroec’s texts have seldom been applied to Campin’s paintings. An exception is
Rothstein B., Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge – New
York: 2005) 20–48.
24 Warnar, Ruusbroec 44–46, 58–59, 99−100; Nieuwenhove R. van, “The Franciscan Inspi-
ration of Ruusbroec’s Mystical Theology: Ruusbroec in Dialogue with Bonaventure and
Thomas Aquinas”, Ons Geestelijk Erf 75 (2001) 102–115.
25 On Ruusbroec’s relationship with Clarissan nuns, particularly those in the Coudenklooster
in Brussels, see Warnar, Ruusbroec 242–253. On Ruusbroec’s ties to Cologne, see ibidem
22, 41–42, 137–138, 243–244, 265, 282; Faesen R., “Ruusbroec at the Charterhouse of Herne:
How Did the Carthusians React to the Eckhart Shock?”, in Molvarec S.J. – Gaens T. (eds.),
Arblaster J. (trans.), A Fish Out of Water? From Contemplative Solitude to Carthusian
Involvement in Pastoral Care and Reform Activity. Proceedings of the Symposium Ordo pre
ceteris commendatus Held in Zelem, Belgium, September 2008, in Hendrickx F. – Gaens T.
(eds.), Studia Cartusiana, Miscellanea Neerlandica 41 (Leuven: 2013) 107–125, esp. 117–118;
Bekaert, “The Mystical Dimension in Flemish Primitive Painting” 339.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 351

Netherlandish devotional art might even be explained by his admiration for

Brabant’s most renowned mystic. Vernacular spiritual texts had long occupied
an important place in the Order of Friars Minor with St. Francis (ca. 1181–1226)
being one of the first to compose canticles and prayers in Italian.
The donor wing, in which Heinrich kneels near St. John the Baptist, was
once the left-hand panel, most likely the exterior view. The St. Barbara panel,
featuring the virgin martyr reading in her solitary chamber, was originally the
right wing, probably the interior.26 It has been suggested that the lost center
might have depicted the Immaculate Conception, considering the Franciscan
patronage and the triptych’s inclusion of the virginal St. Barbara and St. John, a
“spotless mirror” (speculum sine macula), a vase of Marian irises, and a womb-
like vessel of oil.27 Moreover, St. Barbara’s iconographical attribute of a tower,
visible through the open window, might double for the Marian titles “Tower
of David” (Turris Davidica) and “Tower of Ivory” (Turris eburnea).28 Heinrich’s
education followed the legacy of John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308), one of the
greatest proponents of the Immaculate Conception, and whose tomb resided
in Cologne’s Franciscan church. Indeed, Heinrich himself was known for fer-
vent devotion to Mary Immaculate, as elucidated in his treatise, De immacu-
lata conceptione Beatae Mariae Virginis [On the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin Mary].29 Ruusbroec’s Franciscan sympathies convinced him to
endorse the dogma as well in his Een spieghel der eeuwigher salicheit.30
The blaze on St. Barbara’s hearth may augment the Werl triptych’s Immac-
ulist argument by recalling Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. The
Mother of God’s singular exception from original sin was likened to the bush
on Horeb that defied natural law as it “burned with fire, and […] was not
consumed”.31 The flames also make a fitting attribute for St. Barbara, who was
popularly invoked against hazards of fire and lightening. Campin’s hearth,

26 Jansen, D. von, “Der Kölner Provinzial des Minoritenordens Heinrich von Werl, der
Werl-Altar und Robert Campin”, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 45 (1984) 7−40, esp. 27–28.
27 Ibidem 8, 29–36.
28 Ibidem 22. Further evidence of the triptych’s Immaculist leaning includes the later depic-
tion of St. Anne on the reverse of the St. Barbara panel. See ibidem 35; Thürlemann F., Robert
Campin: A Monographic Study with Critical Catalogue (Munich: 2002) 303; Châtelet A.,
Robert Campin: Le Maître de Flémalle. La fascination du quotidien. (Antwerp: 1996) 228;
Garrido C., “The Campin Group Paintings in the Prado”, in Foister S. – Nash S. (eds.),
Robert Campin: New Directions in Scholarship (Turnhout: 1996) 55−76, esp. 60.
29 Jansen, “Der Kölner Provinzial des Minoritenordens Heinrich von Werl” 29–30.
30 Nieuwenhove, “The Franciscan Inspiration of Ruusbroec’s Mystical Theology” 114.
31 Exodus 3:2. On the burning bush as a type for the Immaculate Conception, see Harris E.,
“Mary in the Burning Bush: Nicolas Froment’s Triptych at Aix-en-Provence”, Journal of
the Warburg Institute 1, 4 (1938) 281–286. On divine presence evoked by St. Barbara’s fire
352 Wise

however, also engages Ruusbroec’s ekphrastic allegory of the divine furnace,

encouraging viewers to discern a mystical insistence in the panel’s composi-
tion. The painting catalogs various stages of ‘burning’ and ‘burnt up’ wood with
sensory detail: charred planks, glowing embers, logs wreathed in flame, and
un-singed pieces of kindling. Appropriately, a stone image of the Trinity pre-
sides over this “burnt offering” from a small podium on the mantle, and the
firelight casts a warm glow on the interior of the hearth and illuminates the
far arm of St. Barbara’s reversible-back bench. Combined with the bright red
coverlet and cushions, as well as the flickering quality of rose cloth and gold
thread in the saint’s dress, it seems that the wooden bench and St. Barbara
herself have caught flame in a spiritual conflagration of unity with the triune
God depicted above.
This accords well with the legendary account of the saint’s banishment to a
tower, in which she arranged for three windows to be constructed in order to
transform her site of imprisonment into a cloistered monument to the Trinity.
Depicted under construction outside her chamber, this tower foregrounds
active, artisanal labor, as if implementing Ruusbroec’s call for active and con-
templative balance in the “common life”. The saint demonstrates the contem-
plative side of this binary by withdrawing from the noisy building site to read
silently in her cell-like chamber. Interestingly, St. Barbara’s engagement with
Ruusbroec’s Trinitarian, “common life” mysticism has also been framed para-
bolically. Engrossed in thought, the saint enacts Christ’s parable of the tower:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and
children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot
be my disciple. And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after
me, cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower,
sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient
to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to
finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him.32

St. Barbara had indeed turned her back on Dioscorus, her embittered, pagan
father, and the cross she has vowed to bear as the Lord’s disciple and bride
appears prominently in the window frame behind her. The ‘cost’ to build her
tower – with its tripartite window modifications – was her life, for Dioscorus
flew into a rage at his daughter’s conversion to Christianity and beheaded her

in the Werl panels, see Meiss M., “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century
Paintings”, The Art Bulletin 27, 3 (1945) 175–181, esp. 176.
32 Luke 14:26−29.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 353

with his own sword.33 Yet the tower ultimately alludes to the construction
of St. Barbara’s soul, and the ‘cost’ of that steeply ascending edifice is also her
life, for mysticism requires the votary to ‘sin[k] away […] and di[e] in God’.34
Like a holocaustic offering to the Trinity over her mantel, St. Barbara joins the
wooden crossbeams of her window, the wooden scaffolding atop the distant
tower, and even her wooden bench – already rose-tinged in the hot firelight –
to become fuel for the mystical fire.
The annihilation of the mortal creature in the furnace of the Creator, like
wood becoming inseparable from the blaze that consumes it, is a grace that
in Ruusbroec’s mysticism may only be received passively. Despite ‘sitt[ing]
[…] down’ to ‘coun[t] the cost’, St. Barbara will only ‘have sufficient to finish it’
when she herself is consumed – burned into unity with the God she emulated
with her three windows. In his Vanden seven sloten, Ruusbroec writes that ‘the
Spirit of our Lord comes like a mighty fire that burns, consumes, and devours
all within Himself’, and he compares the ardor of divine love to ‘sparks from
gleaming metal and […] fiery lightning from heaven’.35 Ruusbroec’s Dat rijcke
der ghelieven [The Realm of Lovers] likens the process to different metals lique-
fying in the blistering heat of a smelting furnace:

The Holy Spirit is an infinite fire that has transformed and shone through
all inward turned spirits in grace and glory; and they have melted like
gold in the furnace of divine unity. Each one enjoys and savors according
to his state and worthiness. Nevertheless, this divine fire burns without
distinction; but here copper, lead, iron, tin, silver, gold, and many sorts of
metal are melted together in an incomprehensible fire.36

33 On the vita of St. Barbara, see Williams H.F., “Old French Lives of Saint Barbara”,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 119, 2 (1975) 156−185.
34 ‘And therefore, the spirit sinks away from itself in enjoyment and floats away into God
as into its eternal rest […] And likeness sinks away from itself every moment and dies in
God, and becomes one with God and remains one; for charity makes us become one with
God and remain and dwell in one(-ness).’ Db1972–1979, Eb1698–1704, in Ruusbroec, Die
geestelike brulocht D507, E506: ‘Ende hier omme ontsincket de gheest hem selven ghe-
brukelijcke, ende vervlietet in gode alse in sine eewighe raste […] Ende ghelijc ontsinct
hem selven alle uren, ende stervet in gode, ende wert met gode een, ende blivet een; want
karitate doet ons werden met gode een, ende bliven ende wonen in een’.
35 D812–813, E766–768, in Ruusbroec, J. van, Vanden seven sloten, ed. Baere G. de, trans.
Rolfson H., in Baere G. de (ed.), Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 102
(Turnhout: 1989) D185, E184: ‘die geest ons heren als .i. geweldech vier dat al verberrent
ende al verteert ende verslint in heme’; D737–738, E694–695, in ibidem D177, E176: ‘gen-
steren van blickenden metale, ende [alse] die vierege blixeme des hemels’.
36 D4:2338–2345, E4:2235–2241, in Ruusbroec, Dat rijcke der ghelieven D377, E376: ‘De hei-
lighe gheest es .i. onghemeten vier dat overformt ende doerclaert hevet alle inghekeerde
354 Wise

Vanden seven sloten is an exposition on the life of a Franciscans nun, mak-

ing it particularly relevant to the Werl panels. In the text, Ruusbroec invites his
Clarissan readers to ‘see the kingdom of God’ through pyrotechnic metaphor:

Imagine it this way: as if you saw a glow of fire, immensely great, wherein
all things were burnt away in a becalmed, glowing, motionless fire. This is
how it is to view becalmed, essential love, which is an enjoyment of God
and of all the saints, above all modes and above all activities and practice
of virtue.37

The language here takes a surprising turn, from an ‘immensely great’, destruc-
tive blaze to a paradoxically silent, even ‘motionless’, fire. This ekphrastic twist
transforms the vibrantly active flames into a contemplative ‘glow’, as if accli-
matizing readers to internal, mystical transcendence. In Campin’s pictorial
idiom, the carefully rendered descriptors of fire are likewise projected and par-
odied beyond the fireplace in order to generate more abstract meanings via the
flickering cloth of gold and flame-red pillows. These relocations of fire imagery
maintain the ‘becalmed’ silence of St. Barbara’s reclusive cell, even while its
occupant and her furniture are wreathed in consuming flames. For the Werl
panel, as for Ruusbroec, the enigma toward which these ekphrastic descriptors
point, without ever fully delineating, is Trinitarian union:

For where we are lifted up above reason and above all our activities in
naked vision, we are wrought by the Spirit of our Lord. There, too, we
undergo the inworking of God and are enlightened in divine light, just
as the air is enlightened by the sun’s light and as iron is permeated by
the strength and heat of fire. So we are transformed and penetrated from
splendor to splendor, in the very image of the Holy Trinity. […] There the
Father finds us and loves us in the Son, and the Son finds us and loves us

gheeste in gracie ende in glorien, ende si sijn versmolten ghelijc den goude in de forneise
godliker enicheit. Ende ieghelijc ghebruket ende smaect na staet ende na weerdicheit.
Nochtan brandet dit godlike vier sonder onderscheit. Maer hier es coper ende loet ende
yser ende ten ende silver ende gout ende menegherande motael te gadere ghesmolten in
enen onbegripeliken viere’.
37 D840–845, E793–797, in Ruusbroec, Vanden seven sloten D189, E188: ‘Ende dit ymagineert
aldus: alse ocht gi saecht ene gloet van viere sonder mate groet, daer alle dinc verber-
rent waren in een gestilt, gloeyende, onberuerleec vier. Alsoe es ane te siene die gestilde,
weseleke minne die een gebruken gods es ende alre heylegen, boven alle wisen ende
boven allen werken ende oefeninge van doechden’.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 355

with the self-same love in the Father. And the Father together with the
Son embrace us in the unity of the Holy Spirit.38

As Ruusbroec expands his fire analogies to include melting metals, red-hot

iron, and sun-soaked air, so Campin broadens his pictorial register to include a
chamber in which the air has been ‘so enlightened’ by sun and flame, that the
objects cast double shadows.
The Franciscan patronage of the Werl St. Barbara suggests another extrapo-
lation for ekphrastic fire. The crowning event in the vita of St. Francis of Assisi
is his stigmatization on Mount Laverna. The late fourteenth-century I fioretti
di S. Francesco [The Little Flowers of St. Francis] tell how the saint received the
five wounds of Christ in a fiery vision. ‘Inflamed’ from his meditation on the
Lord’s Passion, the poverello (“little poor man”) beheld ‘a seraph with six fiery
and resplendent wings’, which ‘had the form of a man crucified’ in ‘the gracious
aspect of Christ’.39 The text then compares the scorching quality of this vision
to martyrdom:

And being in this amazement, it was revealed to him, by the seraphic

spirit, that by Divine Providence the vision was shown to him in this
form, because God intended that by the inflaming of his mind, and not by
corporal martyrdom, he should be wholly transformed into the express
similitude of Christ Crucified.40

38 D682–696, E642–654, in ibidem D173, E172: ‘Want daer wi verhaven sijn boven redene
ende boven al onse werken in bloet gesichte, daer warden wi gewracht vanden geeste
ons heren. Ende daer gedoegen wi dat in werken gods, ende werden verclaert in godleker
claerheit, geliker wijs dat die locht werclaert wert met den lichte der sonnen, ende alse
dat yser dorgaen wert met crachte ende met hitten des viers. Alsoe werden wi ghetrans-
formeert ende dordragen van claerheiden in claerheiden, in dat selve beelde der hey-
leger drivoldicheit. […] Daer vint ons ende mint ons die vader inden sone; ende die sone
vint ons ende mint ons met derselver minnen inden vader; ende die vader met den sone
behelsen ons in enecheit des heylegen geestes’.
39 Arnaldo T. della (ed.), I fioretti di S. Francesco [Torino et al.: 1921?] 227: ‘E, istando così
ed infiammandosi in questa contemplazione, in quella medesima mattina e’ vide venire
dal cielo uno serafino con sei alie risplendenti e affocate; […] che avea in sè l’immagine
d’uomo crocifisso, […] nel grazioso aspetto di Cristo’. Translated in The Little Flowers of
St. Francis of Assisi (Boston: 1976) 219.
40 Arnaldo (ed.), I fioretti di S. Francesco 227–228: ‘E, istando in questa ammirazione, gli
fu rivelato da colui che gli apparia, che per divina provvidenzia quella visione gli era
mostrata in cotal forma, acciocchè egli intendesse che non per martirio corporale, ma
per incendio mentale, egli doveva essere tutto trasformato nella espressa similitudine di
Cristo crocifisso’. Translated in The Little Flowers 219.
356 Wise

The seraphic blaze – already visionary and mystical – becomes increasingly

abstract as the Fioretti describes a Pentecostal outpouring of flame on Mount
Laverna and the surrounding countryside, like Moses’s encounter with God on
Mount Sinai when the mountain ‘was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord
descended upon it in fire’:

The whole mountain of Alvernia then appeared burning with resplen-

dent flame, which shone forth and illumined all the mountain and the
valleys around, as though the sun were risen upon the earth; so that
the shepherds who were watching their flocks in the country, seeing all
the mountain as it were on fire, and so great light around it, had the great-
est fear, […] affirming that this illumination remained upon the moun-
tain of Alvernia for the space of an hour or more.41

Intriguingly, St. Bonaventure’s account of the stigmatization also uses heat to

comment on St. Francis’s transformation into a wounded alter-Christus. Like
warmed wax, the body of the poverello is “stamped” with God’s “seal”, endorsing
the Order of Friars Minor and its founder: ‘It left his heart ablaze with seraphic
eagerness and marked his body with the visible likeness of the Crucified. It
was as if the fire of love had first penetrated his whole being, so that the like-
ness of Christ might be impressed upon it like a seal’.42 St. Bonaventure’s con-
ception of the stigmatization is not dissimilar from Ruusbroec’s description
of ‘melt[ing]’ and ‘burn[ing] without distinction’, ‘transformed and pene-
trated […] in the very image of the Holy Trinity’. Both mystics resonate with
Campin’s pictorial conflagration, in which sun and firelight saturate the air,
reflect radiantly from the metal ewer and vase of irises, and seem to ignite the

41 Exodus 19:18. Arnaldo (ed.), I fioretti di S. Francesco 228: ‘Tutto il monte della Vernia parea
che ardesse di fiamma isplendidissima, la quale risplendeva e illuminava tutti i monit
e le valli d’intorno, come se fusse il sole sopra la terra: onde i pastori che vegliavano in
quelle contrade, veggendo il monte infiammato e tanta luce d’intorno, ebbono grandis-
sima paura, […] che quella fiamma era durata sopra il monte della Vernia per ispazio d’un
ora e più’. Translated in The Little Flowers 220.
42 St. Bonaventure, Legenda minor Sancti Francisci, section VI, lectio 2:4–5: ‘Disparens igitur
visio post arcanum ac familiare colloquium mentem ipsius seraphico interius inflam-
mavit ardore, carnem vero Crucifixo conformi exterius insignivit effigie, tamquam si
ad ignis liquefactivam virtutem praeambulam sigillativa quaedam esset impressio sub-
secuta’, quoted and translated in Wolff R., “The Sealed Saint: Representations of Saint
Francis of Assisi on Medieval Italian Seals”, in Adams N. – Cherry J. – Robinson J. (eds.),
Good Impressions: Image and Authority in Medieval Seals (London: 2008) 94, note 52. On
St. Bonaventure’s comparison between the stigmata and seals, see Wolff, “The Sealed
Saint” 91–99.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 357

cloth, ceiling beams, and cruciform windowpane. Like the bush on Horeb that
burned without visible affect, St. Barbara’s eventual martyrdom is anticipated
by an internal, holocaustic union with the Trinity in the “tower” of her mind.
One of the hallmarks of Ruusbroec’s mysticism is its profoundly Christologi-
cal focus. The mortal flesh of the Son is the medium through which humanity
is united to the Father. Thus Christ is both the archetype and artificer of mysti-
cism: his consubstantial nature in the Godhead embodies the apex of divine
unity, and his human nature proffers fellow mortals the grace to be ‘embraced
and encompassed by the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit’.43
That supernal grace is inextricably connected to the suffering of the mortal
Jesus. As the Bridegroom of humanity, Christ unites himself to the votary’s
soul; he is the Eucharistic loaf fed to the faithful after being roasted until it
is, in Ruusbroec’s words, ‘dried like a crust, or like a potsherd’ ‘upon the grill
of the cross’.44 Ruusbroec repeatedly emphasizes the vulnerability of Christ:
‘His foresakenness; […] His tenderness; […] the shame, […] His humiliation’.45
His ‘precious’ and ‘fragile’ body was rent and stained ‘bloody-red on account
of the strokes of the scourges’, and on Calvary ‘He endured shame, pain, and
cold before the whole world; for He was naked and it was cold, and the bit-
ing wind blew into His wounds’.46 The remaining paintings considered in this
essay all place similar emphasis on the fragile, abased Lord, whose “marriage”
with humanity opens the way to union with the Trinity. Indeed, the Virgin as
bride and Madonna of Humility, seated demurely on a stool or on the floor,
with the vulnerable and naked Christ Child in her arms, is one of the signature
motifs of Campin’s oeuvre.47

43 D2125–2126, E1981–1982, in Ruusbroec J. van, Een spieghel der eeuwigher salicheit, ed.
Baere G. de, trans. Lefevere A., in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, Corpus
Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 108 (Turnhout: 2001) D403, E402: ‘behelst ende
bevaen sijn met den vader ende met den sone in eenegheit des heileghs gheests’.
44 D5:3442–3443, E5:3243, in Ruusbroec, Van den geesteliken tabernakel, vol. 106, D937, E936:
‘verdroecht alse eene corste ochte alse een scerf’; D5:3446–3447, E5:3246, in ibidem:
‘op den roestere des crucen’. See also D5:3427–3452, E5:3229–3251, in ibidem D935, 937;
E934, 936.
45 D619–621, E525–527, in Ruusbroec, Die geestelike brulocht D229, E228: ‘sine ghelatentheit;
[…] sine teederheyt; […] die scaemte, […] sine versmaetheit’.
46 D5:4534–4536, E5:4270–4272, in Ruusbroec, Van den geesteliken tabernakel, vol. 106, E1042,
1044; D1043, 1045: ‘Ende in deser wijs offerde Cristus sinen eighenen lichame in die doet,
die precioes was ende teeder al selke martilie te doeghene, bloedich roet overmids die
slaghe der gheeselen’; D290–292, E251–252, in Ruusbroec, Die geestelike brulocht D185, 187;
E184: ‘Hi leet scaemte, smerte, coude vore alle de werelt, [want] hi was naect ende het was
cout, ende de hare vloech hem in sine wonden’.
47 Purtle C.J., “The Iconography of Campin’s Madonnas in Interiors: A Search for Common
Ground”, in Foister S. – Nash S. (eds.), Robert Campin: New Directions in Scholarship
358 Wise

In the St. Petersburg diptych of the Trinity and Virgin and Child by a Fireplace,
the right panel’s cell-like chamber, in which ‘a glow of fire, immensely great,
wherein all things were burnt away’, becomes the soul’s bridal chamber, suffused
with light, double shadows, and glowing embers in the grate [Figs. 9.3 and 9.4].
The child is stretched like a sacrificial animal over his mother’s knees, and her
hand, warmed by the blaze, draws attention to the excruciating heat that will
scorch the victim until, in the adjoining panel, he slumps dead over his Father’s
lap.48 The pairing of scenes is as emphatic as it is totally unprecedented.49 The
red robe and blue mantle of the Father are mirrored in the blue robe and red
mantle of the mother, and the white fabric beneath the child is repeated in the
cloth wrapped around the Lord’s waist. The Virgin’s tender care for her child
echoes the sculptures on God’s throne of a pelican reviving its young with its
own blood and a lion roaring life into its stillborn cubs. The gray, fur-lined dress
of the Virgin, turned outward to cushion her baby, seems to extend the child’s
shape to near adult size, like a prophecy of Christ’s deathly rest on his mother’s
lap at the Pietà, his body as gray and lifeless as in the Trinity panel.
The juxtaposition of scenes makes the human Christ – who ‘humbled and
annihilated Himself and took on the form of a slave’ – the model and mecha-
nism for accessing the Trinity, here rendered according to the “Mercy Seat”, or
Genadestoel (Gnadenstuhl) type.50 This late medieval configuration resembles
a Marian Pietà, but exchanges the mother for the Father. The broken body of
Christ mediates the viewer’s access to God, who sits on a Christianized version
of the Ark of the Covenant, or Mercy Seat. This throne was located behind a
veil in the Jewish Holy of Holies and was the site of the high priest’s yearly
blood sacrifice.51 Like many Genadestoel images, the dead Christ parts the

(Turnhout: 1996) 171–182; Polzer J. “Concerning the Origin of the Virgin of Humility
Theme”, RACAR: Revue d’Art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 27, 1/ 2 (2000) 1–31,
esp. 7. For a divergent perspective of these Madonnas, see Reynolds C., “Reality and
Image: Interpreting Three Paintings of the Virgin and Child in an Interior Associated
with Campin”, in Foister S. – Nash S. (eds.), Robert Campin: New Directions in Scholarship
(Turnhout: 1996) 183−191.
48 On the warming of the Virgin’s hand, presumably in preparation to care for the Christ
Child, see Châtelet, Robert Campin: Le Maître de Flémalle 127; Panofsky, Early Netherlandish
Painting, vol. 1, 172–173.
49 Hand J.O. – Metzger C.A. – Spronk R., Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish
Diptych (Washington, D.C. – New Haven – London: 2006) 62.
50 D16, E15–16, in Ruusbroec, Vanden seven sloten D103, E102: ‘moedeghede ende verniete,
ende nam ane eens knechts forme’; Philippians 2:7.
51 On the Genadestoel in art, see Ligtenberg R., O.F.M., Over den oorsprong en de eerste beteek-
enis van de Genadestoel, Collectanea franciscana neerlandica 3, 1 (‘s-Hertogenbosch: 1932);
Troescher G. “Die ‘Pitie-de-Nostre-Seigneur’ oder ‘Notgottes’”, Westdeutsches Jahrbuch für
Kunstgeschichte: Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 9 (1936) 148–168.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 359

skin of his side wound, a gesture aligned with the parting of the white tent
surrounding him, the spreading white wings of the dove of the Holy Spirit, and
the sympathetic touch of the Virgin’s left hand on the as-yet unscarred flank of
her baby. The rending of Christ’s side on Golgotha – nearly simultaneous with
the rending of the temple veil in the Holy of Holies – opens the way to mysti-
cal unity with God. St. Paul envisions Christ as the ‘high priest of good things
to come’, sacrificing himself at the Mercy Seat so that the faithful might ‘enter
into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath
consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh’.52
In Ruusbroec’s Van den geesteliken tabernakel, the loftiest stage of unity with
God is analogized to the golden cherubim flanking the Mercy Seat:

These two cherubim were two angels of gold, by which we are to under-
stand two things which are proper to the loving spirit in its highest
nobility, where it belongs entirely and totally to the love of God, in an
emptiness of itself. The first thing which we find in such elevated spir-
its is an eternal staring or contemplating without flinching in the divine,
simple light. The other is an eternal, enjoyable inclination in a divine
imageless bareness.53

St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum [The Soul’s Journey into God] also
ascribes mystical meaning to the Mercy Seat, associating the gazes of the two
cherubim with Christ’s human and Trinitarian natures, respectively.54 This
interpretation has special relevance to the Hermitage diptych, which pits the
Christ Child – naked and vulnerable in his humanity – against the mysterious
depiction of the triune Godhead.
For all of their compositional similarities, the Hermitage panels are strik-
ingly different images. The Virgin and Child by a Fireplace abounds with quo-
tidian detail: the brass ewer and bowl to wash the child, the warm fur of the
Virgin’s dress, the lead windowpanes, and the slightly rumpled towel hanging

52 Hebrews 9:11, 10:19–20.

53 D6:313–319, E6:297–302, in Ruusbroec, Van den geesteliken tabernakel, vol. 106, D1293,
1295; E1292, 1294: ‘Dese .ii. cherubynne dat waren .ii. inghele van goude, daer wi .ii. dinghe
mede verstaen die den minnenden gheeste eyghen sijn in sijnre hoechster edelheit, daer
hi der ewegher minnen gods gheheel es ende al in eenre ledicheit sijns selfs. Dat ierste dat
wi in al selke verhavene gheeste venden, dat es een ewech staren ochte scouwen sonder
falieren in enen godleken eenvuldeghen lichte. Dat ander es een ewech ghebrukeleec
neighen in eene godleeke onghebeelde bloetheit’. On the significance of the culminating
mystical encounter in the Holy of Holies, see Mertens, “Introduction” 24, 34–35.
54 Cousins E. (ed. and trans.), Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The
Life of St. Francis, The Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: 1978) 106–108.
360 Wise

from a rack, still bearing creases from being folded. It is a fleeting, transitory
scene with overlapping shadows, the infant in motion on his mother’s lap,
the Virgin’s hand temporarily absorbing heat from the fire, and a sunny land-
scape approximating the time of day. The Trinity, by contrast, is a timeless
Andachtsbild. The Godhead emerges from a shadowy, faux stone background,
with Christ mysteriously straddling life and death. His pallid body hangs
limply from the Father’s arms, eyelids drooping and pupils defocused. Yet his
right arm defies the stagnation of death and purposefully opens the wound in
his side. The dove likewise hovers between stillness and movement: at first it
seems perched on Christ’s shoulder, but closer inspection reveals that it is fly-
ing, mid-air, above him.55 Even the coordinated colours of God and the Virgin
jar in their tonalities. The Father wears a warm red and chilly blue, while the
Virgin’s red is cool and the blue of her dress more saturated.
In a way, the two images reiterate the active and contemplative balance
in “common life” mysticism. The right panel, with its focus on the human
Christ, favors movement and physical work in time and space, whereas the
left panel cleaves closer to Ruusbroec’s glimpses of the unknowable divine:
‘And this enjoyment is wild and waste as wandering, for there is no mode, no
trail, no path, no abode, no measure, no end, no beginning, or anything one
might be able to put into words or demonstrate’.56 True to the cyclical nature
of ascending and descending the mystical ladder, the divergent subjects in
the Hermitage diptych repeat and recapitulate each other. The hearth and its
flames play a key role in mediating between the representations of timeless
contemplation and fleeting domesticity. All of Campin’s paintings discussed
in this essay frame their hearths with bulky mantels that dominate the com-
position, often including metal utensils or firescreens to control the heat. Fire,
after all, was as dangerous as it was vital to fifteenth-century homes and cities.
The precious element needed to be carefully contained and used prudently to
avoid disaster and death.
Mystical unification of the creature with its Creator is also a dangerous
enterprise, to be approached humbly and cautiously.57 Ruusbroec’s ekphras-
tic allegories of consuming fire, annihilation, and the tidal pull of a vast sea make
the fearsome power of mysticism self-evident. Campin’s fires – smoldering,

55 Hand – Metzger – Spronk, Prayers and Portraits 62.

56 D847–849, E799–802, in Ruusbroec, Vanden seven sloten D189, E188: ‘Ende dit gebruken es
welt ende wuste alse een verdolen. Want daer en es wise noch wech, noch pat noch zate
noch mate, noch inde noch begin, ochte yet dat men gewaerden mach ochte getoenen’.
On this point, see also Châtelet, Robert Campin: Le Maître de Flémalle 126.
57 I am grateful to Christopher Heuer for drawing my attention to hearth construction, pro-
tection against fires, and mystical parallels.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 361

popping, and crackling with ekphrastic detail – are carefully contained in their
hearths in much the way that Christ’s divinity is contained in his fragile, human
body. ‘Through the veil, that is to say, his flesh’, the votary can safely access
the flickering, formless heat of Trinitarian unity, especially where that fleshy
veil is punctured with nails and spear to emit ‘the hot blood of His offering,
and a censer full of burning coals, namely, His heart full of burning love’.58 To
this end, the tabernacle-like tent parts above the Godhead, and the dead Lord
pushes back the skin surrounding his wounded side to admit the votary into a
Trinitarian blaze. The fiery red of God the Father’s robe, contained by the pro-
tective arms of his heavy, stone throne, mimics the flames in the Virgin’s stone
hearth, and the figure carved in relief on her mantel resembles the diminu-
tive Ecclesia and Synagoga chiseled into the throne. In fact, the Mother of God
might just as well be warming her hand before the Mercy Seat “hearth” in the
pendant panel as beside the fireplace in her room.
Campin tends to inflect Ruusbroec’s Christological mysticism with Mari-
ology. In the Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen, it is the Virgin herself who
mediates the blaze as her bulky, immaculate robes and white skin meld with
the pale firescreen [Fig. 9.5]. With the only visible flames appearing over her
head, her womb becomes the hearth that baked the ‘living bread which came
down from heaven’.59 Since Christ assumed human nature from the flesh of his
mother, her body and flesh-coloured dress become a firescreen in their own
right, protecting and containing the brilliant heat of Christ’s divinity. The blue-
gray church with white trim outside the window also recalls the Virgin’s bil-
lowing white dress with its silvery shadows, and the literature on this painting
notes the Trinitarian allusions contributed by the three-legged stool at the far
left.60 The distant ladder leaning up against a bank of houses leads over the
roofs and toward the city’s Marian edifice. In this position, it not only evokes
the Virgin under her epithet, Scala coeli (“Ladder of Heaven”), but also sug-
gests her intervention at the mystical “ladder of ascent”.61 Indeed, although she

58 D5:4563–4565, E5:4298–4299, in Ruusbroec, Van den geesteliken tabernakel, vol. 106,

D1047, E1046: ‘dat heete bloet van sijnre offeranden ende i. wieroec vat vol berrender
colen, dat was sijn herte vol berrender minnen’. On the Hermitage fireplace connected to
Christ’s Passion, see O’Meara C.F., “‘In the Hearth of the Virginal Womb’: The Iconography
of the Holocaust in Late Medieval Art”, The Art Bulletin 63, 1 (1981) 75–88, esp. 84.
59 John 6:51. On the Virgin’s womb as a mystical heart, see O’Meara, “‘In the Hearth of the
Virginal Womb’” esp. 82–84.
60 Thürlemann, Robert Campin 95; Purtle, “The Iconography of Campin’s Madonnas in
Interiors” 176.
61 On the Virgin as Scala coeli, see Balass G., “Five Hierarchies of Intercessors for Salvation:
The Decoration of the Angels’ Chapel in the Gesù”, Artibus et Historiae 24, 47 (2003) 177–
208, esp. 195–196. The Virgin’s role as “Celestial Ladder” has a particularly rich tradition
362 Wise

nurses her baby while humbly sitting in front of, rather than on, her bench
with its plush cushion, the Virgin’s lofty, white-swathed lap stills seems a for-
midable ascent to scale in order to reach her son.
The London diptych, with its Portrait of a Franciscan on the left and Virgin
and Child in an Interior on the right, is another commission from the Order
of Friars Minor [Figs. 9.6 and 9.7]. Often attributed to Campin’s apprentice,
Jacques Daret (ca. 1404–ca. 1470), it presents Christ and the Virgin as the
Bridegroom and bride, the infant affectionately holding his mother’s chin. The
snug interior evokes the thalamus (bridal chamber), and the child’s head is
positioned just below the window ledge, like the beloved in the Canticles who
‘standeth behind our wall’ and ‘looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself
through the lattice’.62 Nuptial imagery is a commonplace in mysticism, and
Ruusbroec’s treatises are no exception. In particular, his Die geestelike brulocht
is a vast, exegetical parsing of a single line from Matthew 25:26: ‘See, the bride-
groom cometh; go out to meet Him’.63 As the preeminent bride of Christ, the
Virgin Mary easily elides with the mystical sponsa.
Like many of his contemporaries, Ruusbroec configures Christ’s Incarnation
as a mystical marriage, facilitated by the Virgin: ‘There He espoused this bride,
our nature, and united it to His person out of the most pure blood of the noble
Virgin. The priest who married the bride was the Holy Spirit. The Angel Gabriel
announced the banns. The glorious Virgin gave (her) consent’.64 As mentioned
above, God’s union with humanity – as a tiny, naked baby – provides the cru-
cial, mystical hinge by which humanity can be united to God. The London dip-
tych is, itself, precious and tiny, the panels barely bigger than postcards. Like
the other Campin compositions in this essay, it contains a noticeably cruci-
form window, and, directly below the vertical beam, the baby’s right hand calls

in the Eastern Church. See Atanassova A., “The Theme of Marian Mediation in Cyril of
Alexandria’s Ephesian Writings”, in Peltomaa L.M. – Külzer A. – Allen P. (eds.), Presbeia
Theothokou: The Intercessory Role of Mary Across Times and Places in Byzantium (4th–
9th Century) (Vienna: 2015) 109–113.
62 Song of Solomon 2:9. On other marriage allusions in the room, particularly in connection
to Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, see Purtle, “The Iconography of Campin’s Madonnas
in Interiors” 179. Similar nuptial significance has been assigned to St. John the Baptist and
the Franciscan Heinrich von Werl. Jansen, “Der Kölner Provinzial des Minoritenordens
Heinrich von Werl” 9.
63 D1, E1, in Ruusbroec, Die geestelike brulocht D151, E150: ‘Siet, de brudegom comt; gaet ute
hem to ontmoete’.
64 D23–26, E19–22, in ibidem D153, E152: ‘Daer trouwede hi dese bruyt, onse natuere, ende
vereenichde met sinen persone vanden puersten bloede[n] der edelre maghet. Die pries-
ter die de bruyt trouwede, dat was die heylighe gheest. Die inghel Gabriel dede de ghe-
bode. Die gloriose maghet gaf dat consent’.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 363

attention to his first bloodshed at the Circumcision.65 The Franciscan patron

in the left panel gazes meditatively at the adjoining scene, as if projecting his
soul onto the Marian sponsa. In that miniature thalamus – a cubiculum cordis
(“chamber of the heart”) almost small enough to literally fit in the votary’s
heart – the friar could contemplate the cross and blood that enable the mysti-
cal kiss uniting the Bridegroom to his bride: in the words of the Canticles, ‘Let
him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’.66
It is significant that in this diptych, as in all of Campin’s hearth scenes, the
fireplace occupies the edge of the composition. In the London and Hermitage
diptychs, it even disappears off the edge, extending into the liminal space that
divides the minutely articulated worlds of the Virgin and Child from the time-
less world of the Genadestoel Trinity or the abstract, “window ledge” of the
Franciscan friar. Ironically, the heavy, protective mantels that contain and con-
trol the fires also transgress the confines of the diptych. Like portals, the yawn-
ing hearths enable the pendant panels to “catch fire” and mutually burn with
the ardor of affective piety and the mystical flames that unite all of the Lord’s
bridal votaries to the Trinity.67 Like its corollary in the Hermitage diptych, the
London Virgin and Child in an Interior diffuses the latent potential of mysti-
cal fire throughout the composition with a glowing mantel, burning candle,
double shadows, reflective fire irons, and scarlet cloth.
I will conclude with a final Marian composition by Campin containing a
hearth but one in which the absence of fire makes the implicit blaze all the
more pertinent to the mystery. In the central panel of the Mérode Triptych
all man-made light has been extinguished [Fig. 9.8]. Smoke drifts up from a
snuffed-out candle, while a bracket over the fireplace holds only cold wax and
a blackened wick. The empty hearth’s purpose in heating and lighting has been
further suppressed by the firescreen, the reversible-back bench, the heavy blue
cushion, and a cascading length of the Virgin’s mantle, all of which smother
and blockade it into the corner of the chamber. The hearth’s dramatic scorch
marks underscore that although this is a functioning fireplace, its use has been
suspended in deference to a supernatural fire. Indeed, the Virgin’s glowing red
dress identifies her as the substitute blaze, the oven, which will “bake” the soul
of the Christ Child, descending on radiant light through the window.68

65 Purtle, “The Iconography of Campin’s Madonnas in Interiors” 177–179.

66 Song of Solomon 1:2.
67 My interpretation of these liminal spaces draws on the theoretical paradigm outlined in
Jacobs L.F., Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385–1530), Visual
Culture in Early Modernity (London: 2018).
68 See O’Meara, “‘In the Hearth of the Virginal Womb’” esp. 84–86, including the Mérode
Triptych’s relationship to the blocked fireplace in Dieric Bouts’s Last Supper Altarpiece
364 Wise

In this guise, the smoke floating up from the candle could just as well be an
attribute of the Virgin, a byproduct of the fire articulated in the swirling, flame-
like folds of her rose-coloured dress and mirroring the smoke that rises from
Campin’s virtuosic rendering of sparks, red-hot wood, and ash in his other
Marian images. The ekphrastic potency of these implied flames construes
the Annunciation as another exemplum of mystical union, wherein the bride
conforms herself to the Bridegroom. The air currents that blew out the candle
leave a directional trail of smoke and may evoke the amorous winds in the
Canticles: ‘Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden,
that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden,
and eat his pleasant fruits’.69 Most of the paintings in this essay have included
visual echoes of fire imagery in cloth, light, or even the flickering orange-gold
of Gabriel’s wings in the Mérode panel. Nowhere, however, are the “accidentals”
of fire more forcefully relocated than in the burning red dress of the Mérode
Virgin Annunciate, for God is literally within her. The Marian sponsa is ‘burnt
up’, and so ‘onefold’ with God that ‘there is no distinction left’ between fuel
and fire, creature and Creator.70 The child “baking” within her will eventually
be immolated on the cross as Eucharistic bread, and in her Compassion, the
co-suffering Mother of God already bodies forth her share of Calvary’s excru-
ciating heat.71
Ruusbroec’s recommendation of Mary as a model for mysticism makes
a fitting summation for the Mérode Annunciation and for all of Campin’s

(1464–1467). The literature on the iconography of the Mérode Triptych, including its
extinguished candle and empty hearth, is vast. The classic studies include Schapiro,
“‘Muscipula Diaboli’”; Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 1, 127–129, 142–143,
164–166; Freeman M.B., “The Iconography of the Merode Altarpiece”, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin 16, 4 (1957) 130–139; Heckscher W.S., “The Annunciation of the
Merode Altarpiece: An Iconographic Study”, Miscellanea Jozef Duverger: Bijdragen tot
de Kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden 1 (Ghent: 1968) 37–65; Minott C.I. “The Theme
of the Mérode Altarpiece”, The Art Bulletin 51, 3 (1969) 267–271; Gottlieb C., “Respiciens
per Fenestras: The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece”, Oud Holland 85, 2 (1970) 65–84;
Coo, “A Medieval Look at the Merode Annunciation”; Hahn C., “‘Joseph Will Perfect,
Mary Enlighten and Jesus Save Thee’: The Holy Family as Marriage Model in the Mérode
Triptych”, The Art Bulletin 68, 1 (1986) 54–66; Falkenburg R.L., “The Household of the Soul:
Conformity in the Merode Triptych”, in Ainsworth M.W. (ed.), The Metropolitan Museum
of Art Symposia, Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at Current
Methodologies (New York: 2001) 2–17.
69 Song of Solomon 4:16.
70 D117–118, E99–100, in Ruusbroec, Vanden blinkenden steen D113, E112: ‘Maer daer hi ver-
berent, daer es hi eenvoldich ende en heeft gheen ondersceet’.
71 On Eucharistic and Passion allusions in the Mérode fire, see O’Meara, “‘In the Hearth of
the Virginal Womb’”, 85–86.
ROBERT CAMPIN AND JAN VAN RUUSBROEC: EKPHRASTIC MYSTICISM 365

compositions that utilize the flaming hearth as a figura for active and contem-
plative interventions in the ascent toward Trinitarian union:

And this is what Mary, the mother of God, teaches us. For when she had
said to the angel: ‘Behold here the handmaid of God; let it be done unto
me according to Thy word,’ that was a humble descent. And immediately
afterward, she said: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit doth
rejoice in God my salvation.’ That was a worthy ascent, and a blessed
offering wholly to be burned in love.72

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72 D5:3945–3950, E5:3709–3714, in Ruusbroec, Van den geesteliken tabernakel, vol. 106, D985,
E984: ‘Ende dit leert ons Maria, die moeder gods. Want doen si ghesproken hadde tote
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366 Wise

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 chapter 10

Transfiguring Raphael, Reforming Christ:

Ekphrastic Image-Making in Nicolas Poussin’s
The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier
Steffen Zierholz

How wise are they who gaze constantly into this mirror, and do all
they can to conform their lives to it, and so are transformed into dif-
ferent men, into heavenly, angelic, and Divine beings.1

∵
In 1641 Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) painted The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier for
the high altar of the Jesuit novitiate church in Paris [Fig. 10.1].2 The painting
was commissioned by François Sublet de Noyers (1589–1645), at that time sec-
retary of state, superintendent of the Bâtiments du Roi and a keen supporter of
the Jesuits. Sublet de Noyers further commissioned two other paintings for the
side chapels of the same church – Jacques Stella’s (1595–1657) Child Jesus in the
Temple Found by His Parents and Simon Vouet’s (1590–1649) now lost Madonna

1 Lapide Cornelius a, The Great Commentary of Cornelius à Lapide, ed. T.W. Mossman –
W.F. Cobb, 8 vols. (Edinburgh: 1908) vol. 8, 38.
2 The literature on Poussin is enormous, on this painting see Cousinié F., “Surgissement
et dynamogénie: Le Miracle de saint François Xavier (1641) de Nicolas Poussin”, in
Milovanovic N. – Szanto M. (eds.), Poussin et Dieu (Paris: 2015) 102–111; Rosenberg P., Nicolas
Poussin: Les tableaux du Louvre (Paris: 2015) 176–183; Forte J.C., “With a Critical Eye: Painting
and Theory in France, 1600–43; The Case of Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin”, in Bohn B. –
Saslow J.M. (eds.), A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art Wiley-Blackwell compan-
ions to art history 4 (Chichester: 2013) 541–560; Olson T., “‘Un Jupiter tonnant’: Poussin’s
‘Miracle of Saint François’, Japan, and antiquity”, in Bayard M. (ed.), Poussin et la construction
de l’Antique Collection d’histoire de l’art de l’Académie de France à Rome 14 (Paris: 2011) 389–
406; Wright C., Poussin: Paintings. A Catalogue raisonné (London: 1985) 193; Wild D., Nicolas
Poussin, 2 vols. (Zurich: 1980) vol. 2, 99; Thuillier J., L’opera completa di Poussin (Milan: 1974)
101; Badt K., Die Kunst des Nicolas Poussin 2 vols. (Cologne: 1969) vol. 1, 571–572; Blunt A., The
Paintings of Poussin, 3 vols. (London: 1966–1967) vol. 1, 70; Friedlaender W. Nicolas Poussin:
Die Entwicklung seiner Kunst (Munich: 1914) 75–76.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

figure 10.1 Nicolas Poussin, The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier (1641). Oil on
canvas, 444 × 234 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv. no. 7289)
Image © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) /
Stéphane Maréchalle
372 Zierholz

figure 10.2 Jacques Stella, Child Jesus in the Temple found by his parents (1640). Oil on
canvas, 323 × 200 cm. Les Andelys, Notre-Dame des Andelys
Image © Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo

taking Young Jesuits under her Protection [Figs. 10.2 & 10.3] – encouraging pro-
ductive competition, a paragone, between the three famous contemporary
French artists. The altar painting was not Poussin’s first commission for the
Jesuits. Before coming to Rome in 1624, he executed six paintings in tempera
with scenes from the lives of St. Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier for the
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 373

figure 10.3 Michel Dorigny after Simon Vouet, Madonna taking young Jesuits
under her protection (1642). Etching, 52.4 × 30 cm. London, The
British Museum (inv. no. 1841,1211.39.38)
Image © Trustees of the British Museum
374 Zierholz

celebration of the newly canonised Jesuit saints in Paris.3 They have not sur-
vived and we know the subjects of only four of the paintings, one of them
showing St. Ignatius and St. Francis and another with St. Francis Xavier tor-
mented by demons.4 However, we can safely assume that Poussin was already
familiar with the life of the first Jesuit missionary and most famous ‘Apostle of
the Indies’.5
Poussin’s largest ever painting – generally large-scale compositions are
the exception within his oeuvre – shows the resuscitation of a dead girl in
Kagoshima, Japan, a subject which is highly unusual in the iconography of
the saint and which may have been proposed by Sublet de Noyers himself.6

3 On Poussin and the Jesuits, see Santucci P., Poussin: Tradizione ermetica e classicismo
gesuita (Salerno: 1985); Vanuxem J., “Les ‘Tableaux sacrés’ de Richeome et l’iconographie de
l’eucharistie chez Poussin”, in Chastel A. (ed.), Nicolas Poussin, 2 vols. Colloques internation-
aux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: Sciences Humaines (Paris: 1960) vol. 1,
151–162; idem, “Les Jésuites et la peinture en XVIIe siècle à Paris”, La Revue des arts 8 (1958)
85–91.
4 Blunt, Nicolas Poussin vol. 1, 161.
5 Poussin is considered to be a very well-read painter and he prepared himself meticulously
for Sublet de Noyer’s commission. In a letter to Paul Fréart de Chantelou on June, 29 1641,
Poussin reports that he has read the lives of Ignatius and Francis Xavier in order to find a suit-
able subject: ‘employe quelque heure du soir à lire les vies de St Ignace et de St Xavier pour
i trouver quelque subiect pour le tableau du Novitiat’, Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin
Archives de l’art français: Nouvelle période 5, ed. Ch. Jouanny (Paris: 1911) 83. Poussin did not
mention his precise reading; however, the most important textual sources available to him
were the first published biography, the De Vita Francisci Xaverii by the Jesuit historian Orazio
Torsellini (1545–1599), translated into Italian and published in a French edition in 1608, João
de Lucena’s Historia da Vida do Padre Francisco Xavier from 1600, which was also soon trans-
lated into Italian and French, as well as Pierre du Jarric’s, Histoire de choses plus memorables
advenues tant ez Indes orientales, published in three volumes from 1608–1614; see Kimura S.,
“La source écrite du Miracle de St François-Xavier de Poussin”, Revue du Louvre 38 (1988)
394–398; Schurhammer G. “Xaveriusforschung im 16. Jahrhundert: Zum 300. Gedenktag der
Heiligsprechung (1622–1922)”, Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft
12 (1922) 129–165. For the full account of the miracle, see Appendix A.
6 Even though in a letter of 16 June 1641, Poussin asked Sublet de Noyers for suggestions on the
subject, it is not certain – as Wild, Nicolas Poussin 101 assumes – that it was in fact Sublet de
Noyers’ choice, cf. Thuillier, L’opera completa 101; As Henry Keazor has pointed out, the resus-
citation in Japan is absent in important pictorial cycles of the saint, see Keazor H., “‘Sentences,
pressées aux pieds nombreux de la poësie’? Pierre Le Moyne’s Poussin Sonnet of 1643 and
Its Context”, in Frangenberg T. (ed.), Poetry on Art: Renaissance to Romanticism (Donington:
2003) 147–176, here 166, n. 86; on the iconography of Francis Xavier, see Torres Olleta M.G.,
San Francisco Javier en la cultura visual del barrocco (Madrid: 2009); Fernández Garcia R.,
San Francisco Javier en las artes: El poder de la imagen (Pamplona: 2006); Osswald M.C., “Die
Entstehung einer Ikonographie des Franz Xaver im Kontext seiner kultischen Verehrung in
den Jahren von 1552 bis 1640”, in Haub R. (ed.), Franz Xaver: Patron der Missionen; Festschrift
zum 450. Todestag, Jesuitica 4 (Regensburg: 2002) 60–80; Schöller B., “Eine wiederentdeckte
‘Wundervita’ des Hl. Franz Xaver”, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 52 (1993) 313–318.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 375

The painting is bisected horizontally into two registers. The lower half depicts
Francis Xavier with a nimbus restoring to life a girl lying on her death bed in
front of him. He has turned his fervent gaze upwards, praying to Christ to bring
her back to life. He is accompanied by his Jesuit brother Juan Fernández who
kneels before the death bed, his gaze likewise lifted upwards and his arms open
in awe. A woman, whom Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) identified as the
mother, bends over the girl, her face is shaded and shown in profile.7 Her elu-
sive smile points to the return of the deceased daughter to the world of the
living. The faces of the family members and friends who surround the death
bed express a wide range of strong emotional responses, such as grief, grati-
tude, desperation, astonishment, and consternation.8 In the top half, Poussin
depicted a majestic, glorified Christ dominating the dramatic event below. He
floats in radiant glory in frontal view, clad in white, his arms outstretched, and
flanked by two angels. Poussin departed considerably from the source text:
Firstly, he painted the mother instead of the father. Secondly, the miracle is
performed at home and in the presence of Francis Xavier and Juan Fernández.
Most significantly, he added the figure of Christ and gave Him a dominant role,
even though He is only mentioned briefly at the end of the narrative when
Francis Xavier urged father and daughter not to thank him but ‘to give thankes
to Christ the sonne of God, and Author of men’s salvation.’9
As is well known, the figure of the glorified Christ was inspired by Raphael’s
(1483–1520) famous Transfiguration [Fig. 10.4].10 Oskar Bätschmann has shown

7 Bellori Giovanni Pietro, Le vite de pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni (Rome, Mascardi:
1672) 429.
8 These emotions were mentioned in Henri Sauval’s contemporary description of the
painting, see Sauval Henri, Histoire et recherche des antiquités de la ville de Paris (Paris,
Charles Moette, Jacques Chardon: 1724) vol. 1, 462.
9 I quote from the English edition Torsellini Orazio, The Admirable Life of S. Francis Xavier,
trans. Thomas Fitzherbert (Paris, English College Press: 1632) 296–298.
10 Poussin was likewise inspired by the figure of the thundering Jupiter of the Column
of Trajan which he blended with Raphael’s transfigured Christ; on such blending of
motives of antique art and of Raphael’s works during his stay in Paris, see Davidson G.S.,
“Nicolas Poussin, Jacques Stella, and the Classical Style in 1640: The Altar Paintings for
the Chapel of Saint Louis at Saint-Germain-en-Laye”, in Hargrove J. (ed.), The French
Academy: Classicism and Its Antagonists (London – Toronto: 1990) 37–67; Raphael’s influ-
ence on Poussin is particular frequent in this creative period. A year later, in 1643 Poussin
painted a Vision of Saint Paul as a pendant to Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel, a copy of which
his friend Fréart de Chantelou bought in Bologna, see Clifton J., “The Limits of ‘Mute
Theology’: Charles Le Brun’s Lecture on Nicolas Poussin’s ‘Ecstasy of Saint Paul’ revisited”,
in Melion W.S. – Carson Pastan E. – Palmer Wandel L. (eds.), Quid est sacramentum? On
the Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe and the Americas,
1400–1700, Intersections 65 (Leiden – Boston, MA: 2020) 580–605; on Raphael’s influence
on Poussin as well as on French art in general, see Oberhuber K., “Raphaël et Poussin”,
in Bonfait, O. – Frommel, C.L. (eds.), Poussin et Rome: Actes du colloque à l’Académie
376 Zierholz

figure 10.4 Raphael, Transfiguration (1516–1520). Tempera on wood, 405 × 278 cm. Vatican
City, Pinacotheca Vaticana (inv. no. 40333)
Image © Governatorato dello SCV – Direzione dei Musei
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 377

that singling out distinct figures and adapting them to a new pictorial and
narrative context is a characteristic feature of Poussin’s artistic working
process.11 However, the fact that he frequently cited motifs from antique and
Renaissance art touches upon methodological problems that have been dis-
cussed by Richard Neer.12 According to Neer, research usually tends to address
such iconographic incorporations merely in terms of connoisseurship and to
proclaim them to be entirely meaningless with regard to the pictorial subject.
In order to take such interpictorial references seriously, and to ask what mean-
ing they convey, I suggest using an exegetical approach, as outlined by Michel
Weemans for Herri met de Bles and Paolo Berdini for Jacopo Bassano.13 Berdini
has convincingly argued ‘that what the painter visualises is not the narrative
of the text but its expanded form as it emerges from the painter’s reading of
it’.14 In our case, the iconicity of the Transfiguration, in connection with the
unusual pictorial subject, makes the painting an important subimage, through
which Poussin’s contemporaries looked at his work. Following recent studies
on Poussin as an exegetical painter, I will explore the relationship between
the Miracle of St. Francis Xavier and Raphael’s Transfiguration, and the modes
of transformation and incorporation in the context of Jesuit visual culture.15
This means focusing on the early modern reception of Raphael’s work and the
theological issues arising from it that were renegotiated in Poussin’s altarpiece.
Finally, I will construe the practice of Jesuit mental prayer through which the

de France à Rome et à la Bibliotheca Hertziana 16–18 novembre 1994 (Paris: 1996) 67–74;
Cuzin J.P. – Cordellier D. (eds.), Raphaël et l’art français (Paris: 1983); Rosenberg M.I.,
Raphael in French Art Theory, Criticism and Practice (University Park, PA: 1979).
11 Bätschmann O., Dialektik der Malerei von Nicolas Poussin (Munich: 1982) esp. 23–38.
12 Neer R. “Poussin and the Ethics of Imitation”, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome
51/52 (2006/2007) 297–344.
13 Weemans M., “Herri met de Bles’s Sleeping Peddler: An Exegetical and Anthropomorphic
Landscape”, The Art Bulletin 88 (2006) 459–481; Berdini P., The Religious Art of Jacopo
Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis, Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism
(Cambridge: 1997); for recent literature on visual exegesis, see Eichberger D. – Perlove S.
(eds.), Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion (Turnhout: 2018);
Werner T., In Bildern Denken: Die Typologie in der Bildenden Kunst der Vormoderne
(Vienna – Cologne – Weimar: 2016); Melion W.S. – Clifton J. – Weemans M. (eds.), Imago
Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments 1400–1700, Intersections 33 (Leiden –
Boston, MA: 2014).
14 Berdini P., The Religious Art xi.
15 François W., “‘Mystery’ or ‘Sacrament’: Ephesians 5:32, the Sacrament of Marriage in Early
Modern Biblical Scholarship, and Nicolas Poussin’s Visual Exegesis”, in Melion W.S. –
Carson Pastan E. – Palmer Wandel L. (eds.), Quid est sacramentum 125–153; Milanovic N.,
“Poussin et l’exégèse”, in Milovanovic N. – Szanto M. (eds.), Poussin et Dieu (Paris: 2015)
56–65.
378 Zierholz

novices engaged imaginatively with the altar painting in terms of ekphrastic

image-making. I will argue that Poussin adopted the visio-devotional agenda
inherent in the Transfiguration in order to trigger trajectories of inner vision
which ultimately aimed at the reformation of the soul in the image and like-
ness of Christ.

Raphael’s Transfiguration as Subimage

Raphael’s Transfiguration was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de Medici

(1478–1534), later Pope Clement VII, around 1516 presumably for the Cathedral
in Narbonne, France.16 However, it never arrived there, but was installed on
the high altar of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome after the death of the art-
ist in 1523, where it remained until French troops took it to Paris in 1797. It
soon became Raphael’s most famous work as well as one of the most highly
esteemed paintings of early modernity. It was copied immediately after his
death and was widely disseminated through the engravings by Marcantonio
Raimondi (c. 1480–1534) and Cornelis Cort (1533–1578) [Fig. 10.5]. In his Vite,
Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) defined it as ‘the most glorious, the most lovely, and
the most divine’ of his paintings and it was described and admired as such in

16 The literature is vast. Important publications on the Transfiguration include

Dombrowski D., “Göttliches und Menschliches in Raffaels Transfiguration”, Internationale
katholische Zeitschrift Communio 37 (2008) 20–37; Bernhart-Königstein G., Raffaels
Weltverklärung: Das berühmteste Gemälde der Welt (Petersberg: 2007); Henning A., Raffaels
Transfiguration und der Wettstreit um die Farbe, Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien 125
(Munich: 2005); Meyer zur Capellen J., Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of the Paintings, vol. 2:
The Roman Religious Paintings ca. 1508–1520, trans. Stefan B. Polter (Landshut: 2005)
195–209; Cranston J., “Tropes of Revelation in Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’”, Renaissance
Quarterly 56 (2003) 1–25; Krüger M., Die Verklärung auf dem Berg: Erkenntnis und
Kunst (Hildesheim: 2003) 197–235; Schröer-Trambowsky S., “‘Refa’el-Heil von Gott’: Das
Vermächtnis von Raphaels Transfiguration. Heilungswirkung durch Malerei”, in Gnann A. –
Widauer H., (eds.), Festschrift für Konrad Oberhuber (Milan: 2000) 43–55; Oberhuber K.,
Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: 1999) 223–229; Preimesberger R., “Tragische Motive in
Raffaels ‘Transfiguration’”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50 (1987) 88–115; King C., “The
Liturgical and Commemorative Allusions in Raphael’s Transfiguration and Failure to Heal”,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982) 148–159; Oberhuber K., Raphaels
Transfiguration: Stil und Bedeutung (Stuttgart: 1982); Gombrich E., “The Ecclesiastical
Significance of Raphael’s Transfiguration”, in Chruscicki J. (ed.), Ars Auro Prior: Studia
loanni Bilostocki sexagenario dicata (Warsaw: 1981) 241–43; Dussler L., Raphael: A
Critical Catalogue of His Pictures, Wall-Paintings, and Tapestries (London: 1971) 52–55;
Pope-Hennessy J., Raphael (New York, NY: 1970) 71–78; Einem H. van, “Die Verklärung
Christi und die Heilung des Besessenen von Raffael”, Abhandlungen der Akademie der
Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz 5 (1966) 3–33.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 379

figure 10.5 Cornelis Cort after Raphael, Transfiguration (1573). Engraving, 61.8 × 39.5 cm.
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-P-OB-7146)
Image © Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
380 Zierholz

numerous treatises, diaries, travel reports, and guide literature.17 In 1577, the
Spanish humanist Pablo de Céspedes (1538–1608) wrote that it is regarded as
the ‘most famous oil painting in the world’.18 When Poussin started to paint
his altarpiece the Transfiguration had already consolidated its iconic status
as a ‘visual authority’ (Sebastian Dohe). Poussin must have studied it exten-
sively after his arrival in Rome, for, as Bellori wrote, he considered it as one of
the two best paintings in Rome along with Domenichino’s Last Communion
(1582–1641).19
The Transfiguration is similarly divided into two registers showing two dis-
tinct, but related, scenes from the Synoptic Gospels which Raphael was the
first to combine in a single work.20 The upper register shows the transfigura-
tion of Christ on Mount Tabor (Matthew 17:1–9; Mark 9:1–8; Luke 9:28–36) in
which the voice of God the Father reveals his Sonship, the divine nature of
Jesus: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.’ Christ
is shown floating in radiant glory, flanked by the prophets Moses, on the right,
and Elijah, on the left. Below Christ, the three apostles Peter, James and John
have fallen to the ground shading their eyes from the divine splendour. At the
back kneel two onlookers dressed as deacons and commonly identified as
Justus and Pastor, the martyred patron saints of the cathedral in Narbonne.21
The lower register shows the remaining apostles at the foot of the mountain
engaging with a distressed crowd which is gathered around a boy possessed by
a demon in search of healing (Matthew 17:14–21; Mark 9:14–29; Luke 9:37–45).
However, the puzzled and helpless expressions show that the apostles have
failed to cure the boy. They are waiting for their master to return who would

17 Vasari Giorgio, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. G. du
C. de Vere, 10 vols. (London: 1911–1914) vol. 4, 241.
18 Cited after Dohe S., Leitbild Raffael – Raffaels Leitbilder: Das Kunstwerk als visuelle
Autorität, Studien zur internationalen Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte 105 (Petersberg:
2014) 49; On the reception of the Transfiguration, see in particular Dohe S., Leitbild Raffael;
Lütgens H., Rafaels Transfiguration in der Kunstliteratur der letzten vier Jahrhunderte
(Göttingen: 1929).
19 Bellori, Le vite 309: ‘con ragione Niccolò Pussino rapito dalla sua bellezza soleva accompa-
gnarla unitamente con la Trasfiguratione di Rafaelle in San Pietro Montorio, come le due
più celebri tavole per gloria del penello’. On Poussin’s admiration for the Transfiguration,
see also Blunt A. (ed.), Nicolas Poussin: Lettres et propos sur l’art (Paris: 1989) 193, 196.
20 Henning, Raffaels Transfiguration 28.
21 For an overview of the various identification of the two saints, see Dombrowski D.,
“Raffaels Transfiguration – das erste Bild der Katholischen Reform?”, in Tacke A. (ed.),
Kunst und Konfession: Katholische Auftragswerke im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung
(Regensburg: 2008) 320–347, here 333 n. 29.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 381

then cast out the evil spirit. When his disciples asked Jesus why they were not
able to heal the boy, He replied (Matthew 17:20): ‘Because of your unbelief.’

Reforming Christ

The reason why Poussin incorporated the transfigured Christ into the resusci-
tation scene is because eschatology is already a latent subject in the narrative
of the Transfiguration. When returning from Mount Tabor (Matthew 17:9), Jesus
exhorted Peter, James and John ‘saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son
of man be risen again from the dead.’ When practising mental prayer, Novices
were encouraged to find correlations between mysteries. In the Instruttione
di meditare, a comprehensive prayer manual written in Rome in 1600 (a Latin
translation was published in 1605), Bartolomeo Ricci (1542–1613), the Roman
master of novices, exhorted the reader to look out for formal and visual (dis-)
similarities in their meditations on words, persons, or actions. For example,
the paleness which marked the face of Christ after the forty days of Lent can be
contrasted with His glory in the Transfiguration. This, in turn, can be compared
to His shining face on Judgement Day.22
Eschatology was an important issue in the patristic and scriptural exegesis
of the Transfiguration. In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274),
the theological authority of the Jesuits, argued that, as Christ foretold His
Passion and exhorted His disciples to follow Him in His suffering (Matthew
16:21–24), it was necessary to let them have some knowledge of the end. He
thus gave them proof of His divine nature and a promising glimpse of His and
their future glory.23 The influential Jesuit exegete Cornelius a Lapide (1567–
1637) made the same point when stating that Christ ‘wished to give a repre-
sentation of our resurrection glory, when He will re-fashion our bodies to be

22 Ricci Bartolomeo, Instruttione di meditare (Rome, Luigi Zannetti: 1600) 151: ‘che puoi
conferire le cose del misterio, che hai avanti con altre simili, o dissimili [my emphasis].
Exempli gratia, riguardando la pallidezza della faccia del Salvatore dopo quello digi-
uno quadragesimale, addure lo splendore dissimile, che ricevè nella Trasfiguratione: &
a questa apportarci la simile, che haverà nel giorni del Giuditio finale’; for a reversed
exegetical perspective in which formal and iconographic elements of the Transfiguration
were incorporated in the Last Judgement, see Greenstein J.M., “‘How Glorious the Second
Coming of Christ’: Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ and the Transfiguration”, Artibus et
Historiae 10, 20 (1989) 33–57.
23 Aquinas Thomas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Fathers of the English
Dominican Province (London: 1914) third part, q. 45, art. 1 [vol. 16., 254]: ‘Therefore it was
fitting that He should show His disciples the glory of His clarity (which is to be transfig-
ured), to which He will configure those who are His […].’
382 Zierholz

like unto the body of His glory.’24 According to the tropological reading, the
revealed glory should arouse men to a desire of it and prompt them to conform
themselves to the image and likeness of Christ:

Christ wished, in the first place, to give a type of the transfiguration of a

soul dark with sins into that light of grace by which we are made like unto
Christ. For our transfiguration standeth in likeness, or configuration unto
Christ; that we should be conformed unto Christ in all humility, charity
and obedience; that we should be living images of the life and holiness of
Christ; that we should think, speak, and act with such piety, gravity, and
zeal as Christ did; that whosoever sees us should think that he beholds
Christ in us.25

Such conformation into a living image of Christ was achieved by the practice
of Jesuit mental prayer. It can be considered to be an important technology of
the self (Foucault) that aimed at the production of a Jesuit moral subject.26
According to Alfonso Rodríguez (1526–1616), prayer in general is a principal
and effective means to compose and order one’s life well and to overcome all
difficulties that occur in the way of virtue.27 It is through prayer that one is
transformed, in a certain way, into God and becomes spiritual and holy.28 As
Christ was transfigured during prayer (Luke 9:28), the re-fashioning of the self
by means of prayer was a major issue in the spiritual and exegetical literature
in which the Transfiguration figures as a trope for spiritual transfiguration
and renewal in Christ. In his Considerationi sopra tutta la vita di N. S. Giesu
Christo, after describing the events on Mount Tabor Ricci urged the reader:
‘And if you desire that your soul should be transfigured by changing its cus-
toms (costumi), climb the mountain of myrrh, which is mortification, and
dedicate yourself to prayer, so that you will without doubt shine in such a way

24 A Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 2, 252.

25 A Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 2, 252–253.
26 Foucault M., “Technologies of the Self”, in Martin L.H. – Gutman H. – Hutton P.H.
(eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: 1988) 16–49;
Melion W.S. – Enenkel K.A.E. (eds.), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self. Theory and Practice
in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture, Intersections 17 (Leiden – Boston,
MA: 2011).
27 Rodríguez Alonso, Essercitio di perfettione e di virtu christiane (Brescia, Lodovico
Britannico: 1623) 288: ‘un mezzo molto principale, ed efficace per ben comporre, e ben
ordinar la vita nostra, e per vincere, e spianare tutte le difficoltà, che ci possono occorrere
nella via delle virtù.’.
28 Rodríguez, Essercitio di perfettione 69: ‘e in certo modo si trasforma in Dio, e si fa spiri-
tuale, e santo.’
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 383

to edify all.’29 Similarly, the Jesuit Thomas de Villacastin (1570–1649) encour-

aged his reader ‘to be a great lover of prayer, and to profit therein if thou desire
to be transfigured into the image of the Sonne of God, for by prayer our life is
transformed and changed from terrene and wordly into a celestiall and divine
consolation.’30 According to a Lapide, a transformation into Christ can only be
achieved by frequent meditation and prayer: ‘Prayer, then, is the transfigura-
tion of the soul.’31 By means of prayer the soul receives light to know God and
itself, to wipe out the vices by which it was deformed, it is lifted up to see the
transience of all earthly things, and finally, reunites with God.32 With regard
to this last point, it is telling that he quotes 2 Corinthians 3:18: ‘But we all, with
open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the
same image (in eandem imaginem transformamur) from glory to glory, even as
by the Spirit of the Lord.’33 Since Augustine’s comment in De Trinitate to which
a Lapide actually referred, it is one of the best known passages related to the
doctrine of men being created in the image of God and the reformation of the
imago Dei which was deformed by sin.34 By contemplating the glory of God

29 Ricci Bartolomeo, Considerationi sopra tutta la vita di N.S. Giesu Christo (Rome, Bartolomeo
Zannetti: 1610) cap. 78: ‘E tu se vuoi che l’anima tua si trasfiguri mutando costumi, sagli al
monte della mirra, ch’è la mortificatione, e datti all’oratione, che senza dubbio risplende-
rai si, che edificherai tutti.’
30 Villa-Castin Thomas de, A Manuall of Devout Meditations and Exercises, Instructing how to
Pray Mentally (Saint-Omer?, English College Press: 1618) 308.
31 A Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 2, 253.
32 A Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 2, 253–254.
33 Significantly, in his comment on 2 Corinthians 3:18, a Lapide referred back to the
Transfiguration, a Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 8, 38: ‘Tertullian (contra Marcion,
lib. v.) reads here, we are transfigured, as though Paul was alluding to the transfiguration
of Christ on Mount Tabor, when Christ, brilliant with the light of His glory, shed it over
Moses and Elias and the Apostles, and as it were transfigured them. In the same way,
by the Gospel and the grace and faith of Christ, we are transformed and transfigured,
inasmuch as we are made partaker of the truth, brightness, and glory of God, so that we
are able to communicate them to others, and at last we reflect them on God Himself,
from whom they first came.’ See also Lee S.S., Jesus’ Transfiguration and the Believers’
Transfiguration: A Study of the Transfiguration and Its Development in Early Christian
Writings, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe 265
(Tübingen: 2009) esp. 68–80.
34 Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity: Introduction, Translation, and Notes by Edmund Hill, The
works of Saint Augustine: A translation for the 21st Century, part 1/vol. 5, ed. J.E. Rotelle
(Hyde Park, NY: 1991) XV, 8, 14: ‘But where he says, We are transformed into the same
image, he assuredly means to speak of the image of God; and by calling it the same, he
means that very image which we see in the glass, because that same image is also the
glory of the Lord; […] He means, then, by We are transformed, that we are changed from
one form to another, and that we pass from a form that is obscure to a form that is bright:
since the obscure form, too, is the image of God; and if an image, then assuredly also glory,
384 Zierholz

and the life of Christ, which a Lapide considered to be a ‘most clearly polished
mirror’, and by conforming their own life to it, the faithful are transformed into
the same image of God and represent His glory in themselves.35
In the spiritual literature of the Jesuits, 2 Corinthians 3:18 was construed as
an act of artistic image-making and understood as a diligent exercise of vision.
Considering meditation and prayer to be an “art” of speculation, Ricci takes the
painter as an example, since in order to produce an image, he has to raise his
eyes repeatedly from the panel, look at his model, pause, check, re-check, and
double check any lines he has drawn:

The diligence that we should apply to contemplating and imitating the

episodes of the life of our Lord, I want us to learn from those who practise
the art of painting. They place the thing of which they want to make an
image before their eyes. At first they carefully observe the part where they
intend to start, observe it again and observe it several times; then they
finally begin to set the first brush stroke on the canvas; and in the middle
of the stroke they stop and observe again, to see if they set the stroke
down well, then continuing the brush stroke, they look again, and they
paint observing at the same time, and having finished the stroke they look
again to check if they have painted correctly: and so they go on and on,
until they have painted it all perfectly.36

Ricci’s wide-ranging use of verbs associated with the subject of vision shows
that his main concern was not so much the finished painting, but the accurate,

in which we are created as men, being better than the other animals.’ On the reformatio
animae, see Ladner G., The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in
the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA: 1959) and Trinkaus C.E., In our Image and Likeness:
Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London: 1970).
35 Hamburger J.F., “Speculations on Speculation: Vision and Perception in the Theory
and Practice of Mystical Devotions”, in Haug W. – Schneider-Lastin W. (eds.), Deutsche
Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang: Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische
Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte (Tübingen: 2002) 353–408; Largier N., “Spiegelungen:
Fragmente einer Geschichte der Spekulation”, Zeitschrift für Germanistik 9 (1999) 616–636.
36 Ricci, Instruttione 43: ‘La diligenza finalmente che dobbiamo mettere in considerare
gli andamenti di N. S.& imitarli, voglio, che la impariamo da quelli che fanno l’arte del
Dipingere, li quali postasi inanzi la cosa di che vogliono fare il Ritratto, mirano prima ben
bene la parte, dalla quale intendono di cominciare, e rimiratala, e tornati a rimirarla piu
volte, cominciano finalmente à tirar la prima pennellata nel loro quadro; e nel mezzo del
tirarla si fermano, e rimirano di nuouo, per vedere, se la tirano bene, e seguendo poi la
pennellata, tornano à guardare, & insieme mirando la tirano, e finita di tirare, ritornano a
riguardarla, per chiarirsi se l’habbiano tirata giusto: E cosi van facendo di mano in mano,
in fin che la ritraghino tutta perfettamente [my emphasis].’
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 385

scrutinizing eye of the painter – the act of beholding – which ultimately leads
to the perfect image. Significantly, he then connects the painter’s working
method with 2 Corinthians 3:18. As the painter has to constantly observe his
model and compare it with his representation of it on the canvas, so the reader
should contemplate the life of Christ. According to Ricci, we have to draw
the outlines of our works and deeds on the canvas of our person (‘nel quadro
della nostra persona’), in other words the soul, and consider if they conform
to those of the exemplary model.37 Referring again to 2 Corinthians 3:18, Ricci
describes the transformation of the self as a transformation into an image by
artistic means:

For he [Paul] could as well have said that we have continually the brush
of the will in our hand, which is sweet mortification, and with the fine
colours of impeccable virtue, we continuously improve our image. In
so doing, it is not sufficient to represent Christ as we choose. Rather, we
should aim at such a likeness as not merely to appear like Him, but to be
transformed into Him. We should not only be effigy, but form. And that is
why he said we are transformed into the same image.38

Such “art” of speculation can be generally considered as an essential context

to comprehend the Jesuit engagement with thinking and praying with images.
A prime example is Jan David’s (1543–1613) Duodecim specula Deum aliquando
videre desideranti concinnata (Twelve Mirrors Assembled for the Person Desirous

37 Ricci, Instruttione 43: ‘Come se dicesse [Paul] teniamo continuamente in mano il pen-
nello della voluntaria, e però suave, mortificatione, e la tavoletta con li colori fini delle
virtù perfette, & andiamo sempre ritoccando questo nostro Ritratto: e non ci conten-
tiamo, che in qualunque modo lo rappresenti, ma pretendiamo tanta somiglianza, che
non tanto pariamo lui, quanto che ci trasformiamo in esso: e non solo habbiamo l’effigie
di lui; ma anco l’istessa forma, e però dice In eandem imaginem TRANSFORMAMUR.’
38 Ricci, Instruttione 46–47; As trope for assimilating and conforming one’s soul into a living
image of Christ, the motif of the ‘picturing soul’ became popular in the illustrated spiritual
literature of the Order. As such, it had already been used by Theodor Galle (1571–1633) for
the frontispiece of the Orbita probitatis, a section in the Veridicus christianus written by
the Jesuit Jan David and published in Antwerp in 1601, see Zierholz S., Räume der Reform:
Kunst und Lebenskunst der Jesuiten in Rom, 1580–1700 (Berlin: 2019) 35–39; Göttler C., Last
Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform, Proteus: Studies in Early
Modern Identity Formation 2 (Turnhout: 2010) 201–203; Melion, W.S., The Meditative Art:
Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625, Early Modern Catholicism and the
Visual Arts Series 1 (Philadelphia, PA: 2009) 153–187; Dekoninck R., Ad imaginem: Status,
fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva:
2005) 194–196; Chipps Smith J., Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic
Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ: 2002) 27.
386 Zierholz

of One Day Seeing God) published in 1610 in Antwerp.39 The conceptual point
of departure is 2 Corinthians 3:18 to which David refers in the preface of the
book.40 The book consists of twelve chapters, each of them introduced with
an emblem which morally, theologically or epistemologically construes the
mirror as an instrument of self-observation, self-transformation, and self-
sanctification. A text in the form of a dialogue between Desiderius and Anima
instructs the reader on how to use these mirrors properly. Starting with the
Everyday Mirror (Speculum commune) and ending with the Mirror of Beatific
Vision (Speculum visionis beatificae), the book offers trajectories of vision that
help the reader-viewer to gain knowledge of themself and of God and to trans-
form themself into the image of Christ. The tenth emblem, titled Speculum
exemplare, is of particular relevance for our context, as it is not Christ Himself
that functions as a mirror, but a painted diptych showing Christ carrying the
cross on the left and Mary on the right [Fig. 10.6]. A man and a woman, anno-
tated as ‘Exemplaria virtutum contemplantes’, kneel in devout prayer in front
of the diptych. As the epitome of virtue, the reader must constantly contem-
plate the will of God, as in a mirror, and strive to conform to it.41
With its eschatological implications, Poussin’s incorporation of the transfig-
ured Christ was highly appropriate for the pictorial subject and was certainly
inspired by Torsellini’s description of Christ as ‘the sonne of God, and Author
of men’s saluation.’42 The two angels accompanying Christ stress the escha-
tological reading, since Christ is supposed to return ‘with all the holy angels’
(Matthew 25:31). However, the production of a Jesuit moral subject, that is,
the conformation of the novices to the image and likeness of Christ as true
head of the Society, was the primary concern for the Paris novitiate. In using

39 On the Duodecim Specula, see Melion W.S., “Introduction: Scriptural Authority in Word
and Image”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W.S. (eds.), The Authority of the Word:
Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections 40 (Leiden –
Boston, MA: 2011) 1–46, esp. 22–37; Sors A.-K., Religiöse Druckgrafik in Antwerpen um 1600:
Jan Davids Andachtsbücher und Theodoor Galles Illustrationen (Berlin: 2015) 116–138;
Bellot C., “Spiegel und Allegorie: Die ‘DUODECIM SPECULA’ des Jan David SJ”, in
Augustyn W. – Leuschner E. (eds.), Kunst und Humanismus: Festschrift für Gosbert Schüßler
zum 60. Geburtstag (Passau: 2007) 401–454; Dekoninck, Ad imaginem 347–349.
40 David Jan, Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp,
Plantin-Moretus: 1610) Preambulum: ‘Nos autem, inquit, reuelatam facie speculantes facie
gloriam Dei, in eandem imaginem transformamur, de claritate in claritatem, tamquam à
Domini spiritu. Transformari oportet, o anima mea, et purgare mentis oculum: vt, quò
magis Deo in puritate ac sanctitate similes futuri sumus, eò clariùs eum aliquando videre
possimus.’
41 David, Duodecim specula 128: ‘ut assidue in hoc speculo Dei voluntatem contemplemur;
nosque semper ad eam conformare studeamus’.
42 Torsellini, The Admirable Life 298.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 387

figure 10.6 Theodoor Galle, Speculum exemplare, in David Jan, Duodecim

specula (Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus: 1610) X. Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-P-OB-6761)
Image © Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
388 Zierholz

the Transfiguration as a template, it is most likely that Poussin was also refer-
ring to Raphael as a figura for the sanctification of the self as mediated and
poetically conceived in Vasari’s account of the painting, in order to stress the
transformation of the viewer into the image of Christ. According to Vasari,
the Transfiguration was Raphael’s last painting, and was produced, not by his
workshop, as it was custom in his last years, but by his own hand (‘by himself,
without assistance from others’).43 As Paul Barolsky has pointed out, Vasari’s
play between figuration and transfiguration (‘figuró … Christo trasfigurato’)
turns Raphael himself into a figura of Christ. Most significantly, he reports that
Raphael died after painting the face of Christ.44 This unusual episode evokes, as
Barolsky further suggested, 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass,
darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as
also I am known.’45 Taken together with 2 Corinthians 3:18 – since Augustine the
two biblical passages had been exegetically related – we can more fully grasp
the implications of Raphael’s death. When painting the Transfiguration, Vasari
stated that Raphael saw ‘the Essence and Godhead of all three Persons of the
Trinity’, that is, he participated in the glory of the beatific vision and therefore
had to die for nobody can see the face of God and live (Exodus 33:20). It was by
death that he was transfigured into the same image of Christ becoming him-
self a divine, Christ-like exemplum virtutis worthy of imitation.46 In this sense,
his very surname which is variously given as Sanzio, Santi, or Santo alludes to
the Italian “santo” or Latin “sanctus” meaning “saint”. He died on Good Friday,
evoking further biblical allusions that draw parallels with the death of Christ,
to such an extent that even his age of death was wrongly, but significantly,
stated as thirty-three.47 In addition, his appearance seemed to be very like that

43 Vasari, Lives vol. 4, 245.

44 Vasari, Lives vol. 4, 241: ‘He, clothed in snow-white raiment, with His arms outstretched
and His head raised, appears to reveal the Divine essence and nature of all the Three
Persons united and concentrated in Himself by the perfect art of Raffaello, who seems to
have summoned up all his powers in such a manner, in order to show the supreme force
of his art in the countenance of Christ, that, after finishing this, the last work he was to do,
he never again touched a brush, being overtaken by death.’
45 Barolsky P., Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park, PA: 1991)
38–39.
46 Vasari, Lives vol. 4, 249: ‘Truly happy mightest thou [the art of painting] call thyself, in that
thy disciples, following in the footsteps of so a great man, have seen how life should be
lived, and how important is the union of art and virtue […] wedded in Raffaello […].’
47 Agoston L.C., “Transfiguring Raphael: Identity, Authenticity, and the Persona of Christ”, in
Jones L.R. (ed.), Coming About …: A Festschrift for John Shearman (Cambridge, MA: 2001)
115–122; Weil-Garris Brandt K., “La morte di Raffaello e la ‘Trasfigurazione’”, in Fagiolo M.
(ed.), Raffaello e l’Europa: Atti del IV Corso Internazionale di Alta Cultura (Rome: 1990) 177–
187; This is best summarised in a letter from Pandolfo Pico to Isabella d’Este in Mantua, in
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 389

of Christ. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) wrote that ‘his face resembled
the one that all the greatest painters use to represent our Lord.’48
As in Raphael’s Transfiguration, Poussin’s Christ is the focal point of the
painting and the only figure who looks directly at the beholder [Fig. 10.1]. By
transgressing the aesthetic boundary, Christ’s piercing and knowing gaze stim-
ulates the beholder to reflect on their own death and resurrection at the Last
Judgement. The coincidence of gazes (visio facialis) must have evoked 1 John 3:2
(“when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is”) and
prompted the viewer to conform themself to the image of Christ. Even though
the novices saw Christ in a ‘face to face’ vision, they did not see Him directly,
but mediated by painting which was a well-known metaphor for the mirror.49
Francis Xavier and Juan Fernández figure as role models who behold Christ as
in a mirror and are changed into the same image.50 While Francis’s christofor-
mitas is visible by his halo, and expressed in the fact that he was able, as was
Christ, to resurrect a dead person, Juan Fernández’s striving to conform to the
image of Christ is indicated by his outspread arms almost mirroring the gesture
of Christ above. It is unusual that Poussin should have depicted both Jesuits as
priests in white garments and not in the black robes of the secular clergy. This
allowed him to link them visually to the figure of Christ, showing that their

Golzio V., Raffaello nei documenti, nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letteratura
del suo secolo (Vatican: 1936) 114–115: ‘Di questa morte li cieli hanno voluto mostrare uno
de li signi che mostrorno su la morte del Christo quando lapides scisi (sic) sunt; così il pala-
zzo del Papa si è aperto de sorte chel minaza ruina, et Sua Santità per paura è fugito dalle
sue stantie et è andato a stare in quelle che feze fare papa Innocentio. Qua d’altro non se
parla che de la morte de quest’huomo da bene, quale nel fine de li soi 33 anni ha finito la
vita sua prima; ma la seconda ch’è quella della fama la quale non è subietta a tempo nè
a morte serà perpetua, si per le opere sue quanto per le fatiche de li dotti che scriverano
in laude qua alli quali non gli mancharà subietto.’; see also Shearman J., Raphael in Early
Modern Sources 1483–1602, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT – London: 2003) vol. 1, 575.
48 Golzio V., Raffaello nei documenti 315: ‘et nobiltà della sua faccia, la qual si rassomigli-
aua a quella che tutti gli eccellenti pittori rappresentauano nel nostro Signore.’; see also
Shearman, Raphael vol. 2, 1367.
49 For example Da Vinci Leonardo, Treatise on Painting: (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1279), ed.
A.P. McMahon, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: 1956) vol. 1, §431, states that ‘the mirror with a plane
surface contains in itself the true picture […]; and the perfect picture […] is similar to the
surface of the mirror.’ On the relationship between mirror and painting, see Scherer J.,
“Der Maler als Spiegel: Zum Verhältnis von Malerei und Spiegel in der Renaissance”, in
Filippi E. – Schwaetzer H. (eds.), Spiegel der Seele: Reflexionen in Mystik und Malerei
(Münster: 2012) 71–85; Kacunk S., Spiegel, Medium, Kunst: Zur Geschichte des Spiegels im
Zeitalter des Bildes (Paderborn – Munich: 2010); Stoichita V.I., The Self-aware Image: An
Insight into Early Modern Meta-painting (Cambridge, MA: 1997) esp. 184–186.
50 On Christ as a source of meditative image-making, see Melion W.S., The Meditative
Art 1–37.
390 Zierholz

priestly authority and their healing powers were the direct result of divine
grace.51 Poussin was thus drawing on the exegesis of the Transfiguration which
pondered both on the colour white and the quality of light as visible signs for
the transformation of the soul (as a reference to Mark 9:3 ‘And his raiment
became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white
them.’). At the moment of the Transfiguration Christ’s garment was, according
to a Lapide, snow-white and additionally bestowed with supernatural splen-
dour by God. He even considered whiteness and brightness as identical: ‘For
brightness is white, but adds splendour to the whiteness.’52 Regarding the tro-
pological sense, the white garments stand for the saints who adorn Christ like
clothes with their chastity and purity.53 In his comment on 2 Corinthians 3:18,
a Lapide wrote that we are transformed by the rays of the light of Christ being
reflected on us as from a mirror. By participating in the brightness and glory of
God, we become bright with the light of the faith and grace of Christ, and we
ourselves become like mirrors flashing out the light of heaven, and like suns we
will illuminate others. Like Christ, we become clear and bright with grace and
wisdom, and we are changed from brightness of faith into brightness of sight,
from brightness of creation into brightness of justification, growing more and
more glorious, until we come to the glory of the beatific vision.54 This applies
in particular to Juan Fernández whose white robe reflects the divine light
brightly giving him a splendour that outshines even Christ. He is, so to speak,
the last link in the chain who, by participating in the glory of Christ, refashions
himself in His image and likeness. In addition, he instructs the novices on how
to become involved with the event depicted. He is the only person placed in
front of the death bed on the threshold consisting of a row of floor tiles that
allows access into the image – in Turner’s words he is ‘betwixt and between’.55
By mediating between the depicted event and the real space of the beholder,
he prompts the novices to engage in the Application of the Senses, that is, to
step into the scene, to experience it as if they are present and ultimately each
one to conform his image to that of Christ.

51 Wehnert M., Ein neues Geschlecht von Priestern: Tridentinische Klerikalkultur im franzö-
sischen Katholizismus 1620–1640 (Regensburg: 2016).
52 A Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 2, 254.
53 A Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 2, 255.
54 A Lapide, The Great Commentary vol. 8, 38.
55 Turner V.W., “Betwixt and Between. The Liminal Period in Rites de Passages”, in Spiro M.E.
(ed.), Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion, Proceedings of the annual
spring meeting of the American Ethnological Society 1964 (Seattle: 1964) 4–20.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 391

The Application of the Senses as Ekphrastic Image-Making

Significantly for Poussin, vision plays an important role in Raphael’s Trans-

figuration [Fig. 10.4]. As Christian Kleinbub has convincingly argued, Raphael
construed the struggle of the apostles to heal the lunatic boy as a struggle of
external and internal vision.56 The formal bisection of the composition and
the use of strong chiaroscuro express antithetical oppositions, such as of
heaven and earth, divine and human, consolation and suffering, but also of
sight and vision: ‘a confrontation between the empirically minded, who are
bent on external explanations, and those of higher spiritual wisdom, who
reject the material world of the senses.’57 In Scripture, vision through bodily
eyes is usually associated with incredulity, famously embodied by the Apostle
Thomas, whereas ‘faith is the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1). In
this sense, the wide-open stares of some of the apostles and individuals in the
crowd, make it clear that they are engaging with physical sight to understand
what is happening to the boy. This is the reason why they cannot recognise
the true nature of the boy’s affliction and ultimately fail to heal him. However,
the apostle in red is a key to understanding the painting as he shows the con-
version of the gaze as an alternative approach. His face is in shadow, but we
can still see that he has his eyes closed, his right hand is pressed on his heart,
and his left hand points to the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor. He does
not see Christ with his bodily eyes, but perceives Him as an inner vision.58 By
rejecting the sensory world, he offers a model for trajectories of introspective
vision that ultimately lead to the contemplation of the divine. In this sense,
the two kneeling martyrs, Justus and Pastor, act as models for spiritual vision.
In contrast to Peter, James and John, they are privileged to see Christ, as death
through martyrdom allows them to participate directly in the beatific vision.59
In the context of a Jesuit novitiate, such trajectories of vision prompted by
means of prayer are likewise important. However, as Kleinbub assumes with

56 Kleinbub C.K., “Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ as Visio-Devotional Program”, The Art Bulletin

90 (2008) 367–393 and idem, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (University Park, PA:
2011) 120–145.
57 Kleinbub, “Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’” 376.
58 This was already noted by Oberhuber, Raphaels “Transfiguration” 26; Preimesberger,
“Tragische Motive” 103; on darkness and shadow as visual metaphors of anthropological
self-reflection, see Wagner C., “Homo absconditus: Dunkelheit als Metapher im Porträt”,
Colloquia Academica/Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, G (1997) 39–95.
59 This narrative was recorded in the Acts of the Apostles when the protomartyr Saint
Stephen at the moment of his stoning saw Christ in the open heaven, see Henning A. –
Weber G.J.M. (eds.), “Der himmelnde Blick”: Zur Geschichte eines Bildmotivs von Raffael bis
Rotari, exh. cat. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, (Emsdetten – Dresden: 1998).
392 Zierholz

regard to the Transfiguration, the ultimate goal is not to achieve an image-

less contemplation.60 With the spiritual consolidation under the generalate
of Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615), such mystical experiences were foreign to
Jesuit spirituality.61 As mentioned above, Jesuit prayer aimed rather at the for-
mation of a Jesuit subject. Considering this moral fashioning of the self, inner
vision by means of ekphrasis came to play a crucial role.
Given their ministry of the Word, training in rhetoric was a constituent part
of the Jesuit curriculum.62 Ekphrasis and in particular enargeia, which was con-
sidered to be the defining quality of ekphrasis, was treated in Cyprian Soarez’s
(1524–1593) De arte rhetorica libri tres, the most influential Jesuit manual and
Jesuit schoolbook on rhetoric which draws very much on Aristotle, Cicero and
in particular Quintilian.63 The concept of enargeia, which Heinrich F. Plett
regards as a potentially ‘universal principle of representation’, is used as a tech-
nique by speakers and poets in order to depict a subject in the most vivid, lifelike
manner.64 Through inner images, the orator can make absent things and past
events present in such a way that the emotions of the listener will be stirred as
if present at the actual event.65 In this sense, ekphrastic image-making lies at

60 Kleinbub, “Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’” 387.

61 On Acquaviva’s generalate see most recently Fabre P.A. – Rurale F. (eds.), The Acquaviva
Project: Claudio Acquaviva’s Generalate (1581–1615) and the Emergence of Modern
Catholicism (Boston, MA: 2017); Broggio P. – Cantù F. – Fabre P.A. – Romano A. (eds.),
I Gesuiti ai tempi di Claudio Acquaviva: Strategie politiche, religiose e culturali tra Cinque e
Seicento (Brescia: 2007).
62 O’Malley J.W., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: 1993) esp. 91–134.
63 On Cyprian Soarez see Mack P., A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford: 2011)
177–182; Mahlmann-Bauer B., Jesuitische ‘ars rhetorica’ im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe
(Frankfurt – Bern – New York, NY: 1986) 138–240; Flynn L.J., “Sources and Influence of
Soarez’ De Arte Rhetorica”, Quarterly Journal of Speech 43 (1957) 257–265; idem, “The
De Arte Rhetorica of Cyprian Soarez, SJ”, Quarterly Journal of Speech 42 (1956) 367–374.
64 Plett H.F., Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of
Evidence, International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 4 (Leiden – Boston, MA: 2012)
2; a similar assessment was made by Eck C. van, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge – New York, et al.: 2007) 7.
65 The locus classicus is Quintilian, De institutione oratoria, ed. H.E. Butler 4 vols., The Loeb
Classical Library 124–127 (London – Cambridge: 1959–1963) vol. 2, VI, 2, 29–33 [433–437]:
‘There are certain experiences which the Greeks call φαντασίαι, and the Romans visiones,
whereby things absent are presented to our imagination [repraesentantur animo] with
such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes [ut eas cer-
nere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur]. It is the man who is really sensitive to such
impressions who will have the greatest power over the emotions [adfectis]. […] From
such impressions arises that εναργεια which Cicero calls illumination [illustratio] and
actuality [evidentia], which makes us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 393

the very core of Jesuit mental prayer. Even though in the meditation literature
the concept of enargeia is not named explicitly, paraphrases of the notion of
‘making present’ and ‘placing before one’s eyes’ are in evidence.66 Quintilian’s
fundamental combination of inner vision, presence, and emotional response
is reflected in the Jesuit literature in the context of the Application of the
Senses. Whereas the Composition of Place is a preliminary exercise in which
the practitioner sets the scene of a biblical episode by means of his imagina-
tion, in the Application of the Senses he inserts himself into the scene and
actively participates in his own salvation history.67 These senses must not be
confused with the Aristotelian faculties of the soul (sensus communis, phanta-
sia, memoria, intellectus), but rather go back to Origen’s teaching of the inner
senses which he developed in the context of exegetical issues. They define a
reading practice through which past events are transposed and brought back
to life in the reader’s imagination.68 This affective practice was particularly cul-
tivated in the Middle Ages and then systemised in Ignatius of Loyola’s highly
influential Spiritual Exercises. Ricci explains that since the events of salvation
history belong to the past, the practitioner of mental prayer must make them

scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the
actual occurrence.’
66 For a more detailed account see Zierholz S., “‘To Make Yourself Present’: Jesuit Sacred
Space as Enargetic Space”, in Boer W. de – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W.S. (eds.), Jesuit
Image Theory, Intersections 45 (Leiden – Boston, MA: 2016) 419–461; As Mary Carruthers
has shown, the theory of meditation has a decidedly rhetorical foundation as well, see
Carruthers M., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images (400–
1200) (Cambridge: 1998); Rabbow P., Seelenführung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike
(Munich: 1954).
67 On the Composition of Place see the seminal study by Fabre P.A., Ignace de Loyola: Le lieu
de l’image. Le problème de la composition de lieu dans les pratiques spirituelles et artistique
jésuites de la seconde moitié du XVIe Siècle (Paris: 1992); see also Boer W. de, “Invisible
Contemplation: A Paradox in the Spiritual Exercises”, in Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W.S.
(eds.), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Intellectual Culture, Intersections 17 (Leiden – Boston, MA: 2011) 233–256;
Göttler, Last Things 278–317; Standaert N., “The Composition of Place: Creating Space for
an Encounter”, The Way 46, 1, (2007) 7–20; Olphe-Galliard M., “Composition de lieu”, in
Dictionnaire de spiritualité II (1953), cols. 1321–26.
68 Largier N., “Die Applikation der Sinne: Mittelalterliche Ästhetik als Phänomenologie
rhetorischer Effekte”, in Braun M. – Young C. (eds.), Das fremde Schöne: Dimensionen des
Ästhetischen in der Literatur des Mittelalters, Trends in Medieval Philology 12 (Berlin: 2008)
43–60; idem, Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit und Askese (Munich: 2007)
esp. 34–50; idem, “Inner Senses – Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval
Mysticism”, in Jaeger C.S. – Kasten I. (eds.), Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter,
Trends in Medieval Philology 1 (Berlin: 2003) 3–15.
394 Zierholz

present to his mind through the inner senses of the imagination.69 He admits
that the most potent means to stimulate this emotion is through the physi-
cal presence of objects and people, however, the ‘presenza imaginaria’ has an
equivalent power to produce an emotional response.70 The imagination pos-
sesses inner senses – analogous to the physical senses, with which material
objects are perceived – which are employed to perceive the internal objects
that are only present in the imagination.71 Ricci gives detailed examples of
the Application of the Senses, in which he does not limit himself to the five
physical senses but also addresses the Aristotelian sensibili communi of size,
shape, number, rest, and motion.72 The care with which Ignatius discusses the
individual senses underscores the importance he assigned to this exercise. By
applying the inner senses, the practitioner overcomes the temporal distance
from biblical events and transports himself into an imaginary sensory realm.
The Application of the Senses fully aligns with Quintilian’s understanding of
enargeia, since visualising and experiencing the life of Christ was not an end
in itself, but was aimed at the affective involvement of the practitioner (‘gran-
demente aiuta à commovere gl’affetti corrispondenti alla materia’). According
to scholastic philosophy, the importance of affects lay in their connection to
the human faculty of the will (voluntas).73 As they stimulate the transforma-
tion of the will, affects had a direct impact on the formation and reformation
of a Jesuit self. The Application of the Senses can therefore be understood as a
Jesuit technique of ekphrastic image-making.
With regard to works of art, Valeska von Rosen’s, Mary Hazard’s and
Frederica Jacob’s studies have demonstrated the relevance of the concepts

69 Ricci, Instruttione 230–231: ‘Now, since the events of the Holy Scriptures, which constitute
the usual subject of our mediations, are in the past, and we therefore cannot bring our
corporeal senses to bear upon them, we do is, as already mentioned, by means of the
senses of the imagination […].’
70 Ricci, Instruttione 233: ‘Although the movements mentioned are induced chiefly and more
effectively through the corporeal presence of these objects, […] they are still brought
forth with great efficacy through imaginary presence […].’
71 Ricci, Instruttione 230: ‘Per intendere donque questa maniera di meditare, devi sapere,
che si come i sensi, alla presenza de loro oggetti materiali si esercitano intorno di essi;
cosi per virtù della Fantasia possiamo imaginarci d’adoprarli intorno all’istessi, anchorche
assenti: nel qual caso, si dice tal sensatione essere imaginaria.’
72 Ricci, Instruttione 237–254.
73 On the anthropological foundations, see Lundberg M., Jesuitische Anthropologie und
Erziehungslehre in der Frühzeit des Ordens ca. 1540–ca. 1650 (Uppsala: 1966) esp. 155–236;
see also Dekoninck R., Ad imaginem 339–373; Imorde J., Affektübertragung (Berlin: 2004)
esp. 83–139; Baumgarten J., Konfession, Bild und Macht: Visualisierung als katholisches
Herrschafts- und Disziplinierungsinstrument in Rom und im habsburgischen Schlesien
(1560–1740) (Munich – Hamburg: 2004) 95–102.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 395

of enargeia and liveliness for the pictorial understanding of the Quattro- and
Cinquecento.74 Like mental images in prayer, material images helped to cre-
ate the lifelike presence of past events which is necessary for an affective trans-
formation into a Christian moral subject. This aim fully corresponds to the
post-Tridentine theory of the sacred image as formulated by the Archbishop
of Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1695). With Paleotti at the latest, (sacred)
art and meditation converge in their primary aim of arousing an emotional
response in the viewer.75
Returning to Poussin, he did not simply quote the transfigured Christ, but
rather – as indicated by their shared function as an altar painting, their similar
dimensions, and their formal adoption of the two registers – used Raphael’s
painting as a conceptual template, a typological figura, for the Miracle of
St. Francis Xavier. However, Poussin’s work forms an antithesis to Raphael’s
Transfiguration. Whereas the apostles in Raphael’s painting were not able to
heal the boy for their lack of faith, Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the Indies,
shows himself strong in faith and can therefore, through the grace of the trans-
figured Christ, bring a dead girl back to life. Poussin likewise addressed the
inherent issues of faith in terms of vision and made use of a variety of pictorial
devices in order to prompt the viewer to engage in spiritual vision.
In contrast to the Transfiguration, we can discern different pictorial layers
of reality. Beate Fricke has called such conflation of various degrees of fiction-
ality a ‘vertical split’, that is a split within the representation, and a ‘horizon-
tal split’ which defines the split between the work of art and the beholder.76
Whereas the upper register of Raphael’s work shows Christ’s Transfiguration
as an actual historical event on earth, Poussin’s transfigured Christ belongs to
the spiritual realm. The representational split can thus be characterised as a
split between the corporeal and the incorporeal, the visual and the visionary,
between external and internal vision. Poussin subtly underscores the immate-
rial character of the top half by suggesting that the yellow drapery of the angel
on the left is formed out of pure light. The divine light shines on both Francis

74 Rosen V. von, “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes: Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Ut-pictura-
poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildverständnis”, Marburger Jahrbuch
für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000) 171–208; Jacobs F.H., The Living Image in Renaissance Art
(Cambridge: 2005); Hazard M.E., “The Anatomy of ‘Liveliness’ as a Concept in Renaissance
Aesthetics”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1975) 407–418.
75 Zierholz, “‘To Make Yourself Present’” esp. 431–443; Maarten Delbeke has pointed out the
importance of enargeia within the epistemological and art theoretical considerations of
the Jesuit Sforza Pallavacino, see Delbeke M., The Art of Religion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art
Theory in Bernini’s Rome (Aldershot: 2012).
76 Fricke B., “Presence through Absence: Thresholds and Mimesis in Painting”, Representa-
tions 130 (2015) 1–27, here 15.
396 Zierholz

Xavier and Juan Fernández who perceive Christ internally. In order to stress
their strong faith that made possible this spiritual vision, Poussin assimilated
them to Raphael’s two martyred deacons who are likewise privileged to see
the transfigured Christ. Both Jesuits are similarly dressed in liturgical robes,
they gaze upwards towards the transfigured Christ, and are depicted with
almost the same hand gestures. Francis Xavier is shown in prayer, whereas Juan
Fernández has his arms outspread [Figs. 10.7 & 10.8].
Poussin’s pictorial dramaturgy offered the best possible conditions to
engage imaginatively with the event depicted. As we know from the work of
Charles Dempsey, Sebastian Schütze, and Jonathan Unglaub, he composed his
paintings by drawing on poetic principles that were a commonplace in the
art theory of the seventeenth century.77 Whereas Torsellini’s account of the
miracle unfolds sequentially in time, Poussin’s Miracle of St. Francis Xavier is
condensed into a single moment that respects the Aristotelian unity of action,
time, and place. In order to keep the viewer focused on the main protagonists,
Poussin even forfeits the ideal of historical truth (veritas historica) by avoid-
ing filling the interior with too many exotic details. Only the hairstyles of the
Japanese men point to a non-European setting, the women, in contrast, are all
dressed all’antica. With regard to the imaginative involvement, the moment
Poussin chose to depict is most significant. As far as I am aware, no-one has
so far pointed out that the scene is highly ambiguous and at first glance can
be easily mistaken for a lamentation over the dead girl. For example, in the

77 On Poussin’s pictorial poetics see Unglaub J., Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial
Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge – New York, NY: 2006) 165–172; Dempsey C.,
“Nicolas Poussin between Italy and France: Poussin’s Death of Germanicus and the Inven-
tion of the Tableau”, in Seidel M. (ed.), L’Europa e l’arte italiana: Per cento anni dalla
fondazione del Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Venice: 2000) 321–335; Schütze S.,
“Tragedia antica e pittura moderna: alla ricerca di ‘una certa sublime forma di locuzione,
la quale penetra, commuove, rapisce gl’animi’”, in Blaauw S. de – Gijsbers P.-M. – Schütze S.
(eds.), Docere, Delectare, Movere. Affetti, Devozione e Retorica nel Linguaggio Artistico del
Primo Barocco Romano. Atti del Convegno organizzato dall’Istituto Olandese a Roma e dalla
Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut) in Collaborazione con l’Università Cattolica
di Nijmegen, Roma, 19–20 gennaio 1996, (Rome: 1998) 137–154; on the relation between
poetry and painting, see the classic study by Lee R.W., “Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic
Theory of Painting”, The Art Bulletin 4, 22 (1940) 197–269; on the early modern reception
of Aristotle’s Poetics, see Kappl B., Die Poetik des Aristoteles in der Dichtungstheorie des
Cinquecento, Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 83 (Berlin: 2012);
Buck A., Die Rezeption der Antike in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance (Berlin:
1976); Tigerstedt E.N., Observations on the Reception of the Aristotelian Poetics in the Latin
West, Studies in the Renaissance 15 (1968); Weinberg B., A History of Literary Criticism in
the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: 1961).
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 397

figure 10.7 Nicolas Poussin, The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier (1641). Oil on canvas, 444 ×
234 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv. no. 7289). Detail of Fig. 10.1: Francis Xavier
and Juan Fernández
398 Zierholz

figure 10.8 Raphael, Transfiguration (1516–1520). Tempera on wood, 410 × 279 cm. Vatican
City, Pinacotheca Vaticana (inv. no. 40333). Detail of Fig. 10.4: The martyred
patron saints

Lamentation over the Dead Christ, painted around 1604, Annibale Carracci
(1560–1609) used exactly the same pathosformeln to express the profound
grief of the three Marys [Fig. 10.9]. The older woman in dark green reaches out
towards the fainting Virgin Mary, while Mary Magdalene at Christ’s feet has
her hands raised and her mouth open in anguish. In his treatise De sculptura,
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 399

figure 10.9 Annibale Carracci, The Dead Christ Mourned (The Three Maries) (ca. 1604). Oil
on canvas, 92.8 × 103.2 cm. London, The National Gallery (inv. no. NG2923)
Image ©

published in 1504, the Italian humanist Pomponius Gauricus (1482–1530)

distinguished between three types of pictorial representation that are narra-
tively structured in such a way as to stir different kinds of imaginative vision.
According to Gauricus, enargeia implies what happened before the action
depicted, emphasis indicates its future course, the third type, amphibolia,
which corresponds to Poussin’s work, can bring before the eyes of the mind
both what was past and what will happen.78 Poussin depicted what Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) would later call the ‘fruitful moment’ which is not
the climax of the narration, but a more suggestive, pre-climactic moment that
allows free play to the imagination, since to show the eye the extremes means

78 Gauricus Pomponius, De Sculptura, ed. A. Chastel – R. Klein (Geneva: 1969) 196–201; see
also Michels N., Bewegung zwischen Ethos und Pathos: Zur Wirkungsästhetik italienischer
Kunsttheorie des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts Kunstgeschichte, Form und Interesse 11 (Münster:
1988) 78.
400 Zierholz

to clip the wings of the imagination.79 The beholder does not see the persons
rejoicing in wonder, but is stirred to inner vision in such a way that he can
imagine how joy and wonder will gradually affect all the friends and members
of the family.
The figure of the mother plays a crucial role in triggering the narrative
progress in the beholder’s imagination. She recognises with a smile that her
daughter has just returned to the world of the living. By dissolving the narra-
tive tension, she represents the reversal of action, peripeteia – a tragic motif
of Aristotelian poetics that indicates the transition from bad to good or vice
versa.80 She further embodies the moment of recognition, anagnorisis, that
is, a shift from ignorance to knowledge which, according to Aristotle, is most
effective in arousing emotions when combined with peripeteia. Like Raphael’s
apostle in red, Poussin addresses the actual act of seeing by shading the moth-
er’s facial expression [Figs. 10.10 & 10.11]. This requires an attentive beholder
who has to discern for themself that a miracle is happening before their eyes.
Only on recognising the mother’s faint smile, will the beholder’s imagination
be able to visualise the dramatic transition from misfortune to happiness. This
is why Henri Sauval (1623–1676) particularly admired the figure of the mother
as Poussin was able to express the struggle of opposing emotions in one and
the same person.81 Bellori similarly mentions the different emotions of the
bystanders, in particular mourning and wonder, that indicate the transition
of action.82
It is important not to understand ekphrastic image-making in terms of illu-
sion, as there was never a loss of awareness of reality. Ekphrasis was used to
create a feeling of presence and aimed at an “as if”-ness in which the audience
“seemed” to witness a past event.83 However, the ability of the imagination to
generate presence carried a certain risk of confusing imagination with reality.
Ricci warned that some readers might have an imagination powerful enough to
be able to represent things with such vividness that they might believe they are

79 Gombrich E.H., “Moment and Movement in Art”, in idem, The Image and the Eye: Further
Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Collected Essays 6 (Oxford: 1982)
40–62.
80 Thuillier J., “Temps et tableau: La théorie des ‘péripéties’ dans la peinture française
du XVIIe siècle”, in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes: Akten des 21.
Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte 3 vols. (Berlin: 1967) vol. 3, 191–206.
81 Sauval, Histoire et recherche vol. 1, 462: ‘Il n’y a que Poussin au monde capable d’exprimer
ce combat de passions si opposées dans une même personne.’
82 Bellori, Le vite 430: ‘Sonovi dietro altri che appariscono con la testa, e con la braccia in
senso di doglia, e di maraviglia….’
83 Webb, Ekphrasis 103–105.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 401

figure 10.10 Nicolas Poussin, The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier (1641). Oil on canvas, 444 ×
234 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv. no. 7289). Detail of Fig. 10.1: The mother
bending over her daughter

seeing them for real.84 Regarding the visual arts, the Jesuit Sforza Pallavacino
(1607–1667) explained to the reader that a painting of the tormented Christ is
not supposed to evoke an illusion of Christ, but to produce inner images which
have the power to stir the viewer emotionally.85 Nevertheless, in the spatial
context of a church, Jesuit art often aimed to blur the boundaries between

84 Ricci, Instruttione 233: ‘Anzi in alcuni la Fantasia è tanto forte, e potente ò sia dalla natura,
ò pure per qualch’accidente, e straordinaria passione, che rappresenta loro le cose tanto
gagliardamente, che si danno à credere, di vederle realmente con gl’occhi esterni. Tali
sono i molti malinconici, e le Donne; e pero anche, costoto sono esposti ad illusioni, e
visioni false, non solamente cagionate da Demonij; ma ancora dalla lora natura, quando
molto fissamente si mettono ad imaginarsi le cose: De quali n’ho avuto qualche volta
alcuni per le mani: e l’istesso cagionerà una vehemente paura.’
85 Pallavacino Sforza, Del bene libri quattro (Rome, Eredi di Francesco Corbelletti: 1644)
456–457; Pallavacino subsequently refers to Quintilian’s remarks on enargeia: In order
to emotionally involve the audience, the orator has to depict the event in a lively way by
accurately describing the exact circumstances close to the truth, see Delbeke M., “Art as
402 Zierholz

figure 10.11 Raphael, Transfiguration (1516–1520). Tempera on wood, 405 × 278 cm. Vatican
City, Pinacotheca Vaticana (inv. no. 40333). Detail of Fig. 10.4: The Apostle
dressed in red
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 403

presence and representation in order to maximise emotional response.86

Unfortunately, the church of the novitiate was destroyed in 1806 and we do
not know the painting’s original setting, nor any artistic devices that might
have mediated between the pictorial space and the space of the beholder.87
However, regarding Poussin’s altar painting, we have evidence in the form of a
French sonnet written by the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671) that tries to
unsettle the reader over the medial conditions of the painting.88 The sonnet is
one of thirteen poems from the slim folio booklet that praises the Paris novi-
tiate church dedicated to St. Francis Xavier:

Est-ce du grand XAVIER la personne, o l’image,

Qui force icy du Ciel les rigoureuses loix?
Oüy, c’est luy qui reuit, & qui tout à la fois
De sa foy sur vn mort fait vn illustre ouvrage.

Tout est miracle en luy, tout parle en sõ visage,

Ses yeux ont de l’ardeur, son geste a de la voix,
La merueille qu’il fait rauit ces Iaponnois,
Et le rauissment leur oste le langage.

Certes, qu’en ce Tableau par vn diuin effort

La priere d’vn Sainct fasse reuiure vn mort,
C’est bien vne merueille estrange à la Nature:

Mais l’effet qui replit tout noste estõnement,

C’est qu’vn Sainct, sãs quitter encore la sepulture,
Y ressuscite en gloire auant le Iugement.

Evidence, Evidence as Art: Bernini, Pallavacino, and the Paradoxes of Zeno”, in Schütze S.
(ed.), Estetica barocca (Rome: 2004) 343–359, here 347.
86 Zierholz, “‘To Make Yourself Present’” 443–457; see also idem, “Zwischen Präsenz und
Repräsentation: Zur Rekonstruktion eines jesuitischen Sehstils”, in Eberhardt R. –
Grave J. – Heyder J.C. – Hochkirchen B. (eds.), Vor dem Blick: Materiale, mediale und dis-
kursive Zurichtungen des Bildersehens (Bielefeld: forthcoming).
87 Gobillot R., “Le noviciat des Jésuites de la rue du Pot-de-fer”, Bulletin de la Société Historique
du VI arrondissement de Paris 36 (1930) 88–106, here 105.
88 On Pierre le Moyne, see Spica A.-E. (ed.), Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671), Oeuvres et cri-
tiques 35/2 (Tübingen: 2010); Dekoninck, Ad imaginem 82–88; Loskoutoff Y., L’armorial
de Calliope: L’oeuvre du Père Le Moyne S.J. (1602–1671). Littérature, héraldique, spiritualité
(Tübingen: 2000); Maber R.G., The Poetry of Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671) (Bern – Frankfurt:
1982); Chérot H., Études sur la vie et les oeuvres du P. Le Moyne (1602–1617) (Paris: 1887,
reprint Geneva: 1971).
404 Zierholz

Is it the person or the image of the great XAVIER,

who forces here heaven’s rigorous laws?
Yes, it is he who resuscitates, and at the same time
with his faith is doing a famous deed upon someone dead.

Everything in him is a miracle, all his face is telling,

His eyes have ardour, his gesture has voice,
The miracle he is performing enraptures the Japanese,
And the rapture makes them speechless.

Sure, that in this painting by a divine effort, the prayer of a saint is raising
someone from the dead –
This is a miracle, alien to nature.

But what astonishes us completely

Is the fact that a saint, without yet leaving his tomb,
Is here gloriously resuscitated before Judgment Day.89

In the first two lines, Le Moyne set up the problem: he asks if it is St. Francis
himself or the image of him performing a Miracle. He immediately answers
the question (‘Yes, it is he’) thus confusing the reader about the pictorial sta-
tus. What follows are four lines of vivid ekphrastic imagery that play around
Simonides of Ceos’s famous dictum of painting as silent poetry and poetry as
speaking painting.90 Francis Xavier’s face is described as ‘telling’, his gesture
as having ‘voice’. Le Moyne finishes the octave with an antithesis that char-
acterises the Japanese as ‘speechless’ – an adjective that points both to the
emotional state and to the mediality of the image. Subsequently, the first
tercet explicitly refers to the artificiality of the altar piece: it is the ‘painting’
that shows Francis Xavier raising someone from the dead. The second tercet

89 Basilica in honorem S. Francisci Xaverii a fundamentis extructa, Munificentia illustris-

simi viri Domini D. Francisci Sublet de Noyers, Baronis de Dangu, Regi ab intimis consiliis,
et secretis, et cetera. A collegii claromontani alumnis Societatis Iesu, laudata et descripta
(Paris, Sébastien Cramoisy, Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy: 1664); The translation is from
Keazor, “‘Sentences’” 154; on the differences and slight alterations of the poem, see idem,
“‘Sentences’” 154–156.
90 Barkan L., Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton, NJ: 2013); Puttfarken T., Titian and
Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and the Rise of the Modern Artists (New Haven: 2005);
Sprigath G., “Das Dictum des Simonides: Der Vergleich von Dichtung und Malerei”,
Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 36 (2004) 243–280.
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 405

immediately undermines the fictional character in stating that what should

astonish us completely – surpassing the return to life of the dead girl which
is ‘a miracle, alien to nature’ – is the fact that St. Francis himself is resurrected
before Judgement Day. The notion of a dead person brought back to life by
the painter is a common trope in the poetry of Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) and
Giambattista Marino (1569–1625).91 The latter admired Guido Reni’s (1575–1642)
Massacre of the Innocents for the fact that the artist, by breathing life back into
the murdered children, once again delivers them to death.92 This originates in
Leon Battista Alberti’s (1404–1472) praise for the artist’s divine power to make
absent things present and to make even the long dead seem alive.93 However,
given Le Moyne’s poetic agenda, by blurring the boundaries between presence
and representation he does not intend to praise Poussin’s skills as a painter, but
his ability to arouse an emotional response. In his Peintures morales, published
in two volumes in 1640 and 1643, Le Moyne, argued for a connection between
poetry and art in such a way that they would embellish each other.94 He envi-
sioned a new kind of ministry of the Word that fully aligned with the aims
of Jesuit rhetoric and mental prayer by emotionally stimulating the reader to
achieve virtuous perfection.95 In the Traité du Poeme Héroique, he claimed that
poetry should purify the passion of noble men, fashion and further improve

91 Keazor, “‘Sentences’” 156–157.

92 Marino Giambattista, La Galeria, 2 vols., ed. M. Pieri (Padua: 1979) vol. 1, 56: ‘Non vedi tu,
che mentre sanguinoso stuol de’ fanciulli ravivando vai / nova morte gli dài?’, see also
Cropper E., “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio”, Metropolitan Museum
Journal 26 (1991) 193–212, here 207.
93 Alberti Leon Battista, Della Pittura, in Grayson C. (ed.), Opere volgari, 3 vols., Scrittori
d’Italia 254 (Bari: 1973) vol. 3, 25 [44]: ‘Tiene in sè la pittura forza divina non solo quanto
si dice dell’amicizia, quali fa gli uomini assenti essere presenti, ma più i morti dopo molti
secoli essere quasi vivi, tale che con molta ammirazione dell’artefice e con molto voluttà
si riconoscono.’
94 Le Moyne Pierre, Les Peintures morales, où les passions sont representees par Tableaux,
par Charactere, et par Questions nouvelles et curieuses (Paris, Sébastien Cramoisy: 1640)
Advertissement necessaire à l’instruction du Lecteur, unpaginated: ‘I’ay ajousté la Poésie
à la Peinture; ce que personne n’a avoit entrepris avant moy: elles sont alliées, et se resem-
blent en beaucoup de choses; et i’ay crû que si elles sont treuvées si agreables, et si elles
donnent tant plaisirà l’esprit et à la veuë, quand elles sont separées, elles recreuroient un
nouveau lustre, et s’embelliroient mutuellement, et comme par contagion, quand elles
seroient mises l’une auprez l’autre …’
95 On Le Moyne’s view of the passions, see Levi A., French Moralists: The Theory of the
Passions, 1585 to 1649 (Oxford: 1964) esp. 170–176.
406 Zierholz

them in the path of virtue, and finally inspire souls to admire great virtues and
heroic uprightness.96

Conclusion

The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier is, as I hope to have shown, an instructive
example to argue for Nicolas Poussin as an exegetical painter. On the basis of
recent research, this does not seem to be an isolated (or a specifically Jesuit)
case. Additional in-depth analysis of his religious oeuvre is necessary in order
to make a more general statement. Nevertheless, it has become clear that
Poussin’s artistic exploration of Raphael’s Transfiguration, the most iconic
painting of the seventeenth century, was not only due to artistic admiration,
but aimed to amplify the thaumaturgy of one of the most important Jesuit
saints. By means of interpictorial references, such as the use of the same com-
positional formula and the adaptation of pictorial elements, most evidently
the transfigured Christ, Poussin conceived Francis Xavier’s successful resurrec-
tion of the dead girl as an antithesis to the apostles’ failure to heal the boy. In
addition, close readings of Jesuit spiritual and exegetical literature have uncov-
ered layers of theological meaning. The incorporation of the glorified Christ
renegotiated eschatological issues that were relevant for the pictorial subject
as well as for the formation of Jesuit novices. In order to participate in the
glory of Christ’s Second Coming, the young novices had to accomplish their
own spiritual transfiguration through prayer. Particularly in the Application
of the Senses, ekphrasis played a key role in the conformation of the soul to
the image of Christ. Similarly, Poussin’s pictorial dramaturgy, which rendered
imaginative engagement and emotional arousal highly effective, can be char-
acterised as ekphrastic image-making. In a Jesuit context, both forms mutually
enrich each other and create synergies ad maiorem Dei gloriam. By transfigur-
ing Raphael’s work, Poussin’s Miracle of St. Francis Xavier favoured the Jesuits’
effort to reform Christ within themselves.

96 Le Moyne Pierre, Saint Louys ou la sainte couronne reconquise (Paris, Augustin Courbé:
1658): Traité du Poeme Heroique, unpaginated: ‘Ce n’est donc pas assez qu’il (le poete)
purifie les Passions des Grands; il faut encore qu’il forme, il faut qu’il acheue en eux les
Vertus…. d’exciter en l’Ame des Grands, l’admiration des grandes Vertus et de l’Honneste
Heroique.’
TRANSFIGURING RAPHAEL, REFORMING CHRIST IN POUSSIN 407

Appendix

Torsellini Orazio, The Admirable Life of S. Francis Xavier, trans. Thomas Fitzherbert
(Paris, English College Press: 1632) 296–298.

Chapter III
He rayseth a dead Mayd to lyfe: and cureth another of the Leaprousy

After this, there happened a strange event, which augmented both the flocke of Christ
at Cangoxima and made Francis his name more famous also. There was in Cangoxima
an honest and substantiall Cittizen, yet no friend to Christian religion. He had a litle
daughter whome he loved most deerely, who by untimely death was suddainly taken
away. Whereupon falling out of wits with griefe, he sayd, and did many things unbe-
seeming a man of his ranke. Amongst others, there came unto him certaine Neophytes
of his kindred and friends, to condole with him, and to celebrate the funeralls of his
daughter; who being greatly moved with the wofull case of their kinsman, advise him
with all speed to go unto Xaverius, who was a holy man newly come out of another
world, and implore his ayde; for certainly he would restore his daughter to life. There
was no difficulty to perswade the afflicted Father therto. Wherfor being set on with
the desire of his daughters life, he runneth to Xaverius bedewed all with teares, and
declareth the matter unto him, humbly beseeching his help, who having lost his child,
was now left all alone. Francis pittying his case, presently betaketh himselfe to prayer,
togeather with Iohn Fernandez his companion. And after a while he riseth up cheer-
fully, and comforteth the man, willing him to be of good courage, and telling him
withall, that his daughter was alive. Upon which words the Barbarian began to be in
choller, who had but even now left her certainly dead. Wherfore either thinking to be
accounted a lyar, or else that Francis disdayned to come unto his house, he departed in
a chafe. As he was in the way homeward, one of his family meeteth him, and bringeth
him tydings that the mayd was alive, and in good health. Wherupon the man, feel-
ing his sorrow in an instant turned into ioy, hasteth home with great desire to see his
daughter whome he so dearly loved. When he entred into his house and beheld her
alive and in health, he could hardly believe his owne eyes; and with teares trickling
downe for ioy, asked her by what meanes she was restored againe to life? As soone,
quoth she, as I was dead, there stood ready at hand certaine cruel executioners, who
snatching me up, went to cast me headlong into an horrible pit of fire. But upon the
suddain there appeared two other singular men, by whose meanes I was delivered out
of those executioners hand, and restored to life againe. At this relation of the maid,
the father stood a while astonished through admiration. Then perceiving, manifestly,
that it was done by Xaverius help, he leadeth his daughter to him to give him thankes.
408 Zierholz

Assoone as she saw Francis and his companion, she stood at first amazed, then turning
to her father, she cryeth out: Behould, Father, these be the two men that rescued me
from Hell. Then he with the mayd falling downe at Xaverius feete, with aboundance of
teares gave him humble thanks: who presently taking them up with ioy of hart, willeth
them to give thankes to Christ the sonne of God, and Author of mans salvation.

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 chapter 11

Levels to Ekphrasis in the Tableaux de la Pénitence

Lars Cyril Nørgaard

How was ekphrasis deployed in the devotional literature of seventeenth-

century France?* How did this device operate in complex registers of time,
affective states, and imaginary processes? Les Tableaux de la Pénitence by
Antoine Godeau (1605–1672) provides intriguing answers to these questions.
The work consists of twenty-two engraved images accompanied by as many
descriptions. For eighteen plates, the inventio is attributed to François Chauveau
(1613–1676), while the actual process of engraving is ascribed to different art-
ists: Jean Boulanger (1608–1660), Jean Couvay (1622–?1680), Gabriel Le Brun
(1625–1660), Georges Tournier (1684†), René Lochon (1636–1675), and Jacques
Grignon (1640–1698). Following the frontispiece [Fig. 11.1], nine plates display
scenes from the Old Testament: “The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden”
[Fig. 11.2], “The Deluge” [Fig. 11.3], “The Crossing of the Red Sea” [Fig. 11.4], “The
penitent King David” [Fig. 11.5], “Manasseh in Chains” [Fig. 11.6], “Jonah preach-
ing to the people of Nineveh” [Fig. 11.7], “King Nebuchadnezzar” [Fig. 11.8],
“The Babylonian Exile” [Fig. 11.9], and “Antiochus on his deathbed” [Fig. 11.10].
Hereafter eleven plates depict scenes from the New Testament: “Saint John
the Baptist” [Fig. 11.11], “The Temptation of Christ in the Desert” [Fig. 11.12], “The
Raising of Lazarus” [Fig. 11.13], “The Salvation of Zacchaeus” [Fig. 11.14], “The
adulterous Woman” [Fig. 11.15], “The Good Samaritan” [Fig. 11.16], “The Prodigal
Son” [Fig. 11.17], “The Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda” [Fig. 11.18], “Saint
Peter Crying” [Fig. 11.19], “The Penitent Thief” [Fig. 11.20], and “Judas Returning
the Pieces of Silver” [Fig. 11.21]. This sequence of twenty plates takes the reader-
viewer from the Fall to the Passion, where Peter, at first, comes to terms with
his betrayal (Matthew 26:33–35, Mark 14:29–31, Luke 22:33–34, John 13:36–38),
before Christ on the Cross converts the thief (Luke 23:39–43), and Judas, finally,
attempts to return what he was awarded for his betrayal (Matthew 27:1–10).
Appended to this chronology are two images: “Saint Magdalene in her Cave”
[Fig. 11.22] and “Theodosius I kneeling at the feet of Saint Ambrose” [Fig. 11.23].

* This work draws from interdisciplinary research at the Danish National Research Foundation
Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF 138), based at the University of Copenhagen and directed
by prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 411

figure 11.1 Peter and David in front of a funeral monument. Frontispiece to Les
Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François Chauveau (designer)
and Réne Lochon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag.
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

Below, we shall briefly return to these appended images and the decision
to move beyond the chronology of biblical events. All plates are located on
a verso-page, while the following recto-pages contain the written texts that,
through different rhetorical figures, express what we see. Godeau’s ekphra-
sis both clarifies the visual representation, construes an argument about its
412 Nørgaard

figure 11.2 The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Les Tableaux de la
Pénitence (1656). Engraving, Anonymous, 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris,
BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [2]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

intended meaning, and intensifies the viewer-reader’s relation to the ‘tableau’.

Thus, each chapter constitutes an ekphrastic composition that interprets the
engraved image, placing it within a chronological development.
Antoine Godeau was born in Dreux and initially studied law. He passed the
bar at the age of twenty and thereafter settled in Paris. Soon, the young lawyer
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 413

figure 11.3 The Deluge. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by

François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Couvay (engraver)
21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [28]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

became part of the literary scene, and seven of his polished letters were pub-
lished in 1627.1 Like many others, the young poet was heavily influenced by
François de Malherbe (1555–1628) and his purist poetics. Godeau published

1 Faret Nicolas, Recveuil de Lettres Nouvelles (Paris, Toussaint Du Bray: 1627) 509–556.
414 Nørgaard

figure 11.4 The Crossing of the Red Sea. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Gabriel Le Brun
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [52]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

a treatise on the Norman poet in 1630,2 and that same year he wrote the pref-
ace to a translation of the Dialogus de oratoribus.3 These achievements made

2 Godeau Antoine, Discours sur les Œuvres de M. de Malherbe (s.l. – s.n.: 1630), cf. Venner C., “Le
Discours sur les œuvres de Mr de Malherbe, par Antoine Godeau: Creuset d’une définition du
‘Bon Goût’ classique?” Dix-septième siècle 260 (2013/3) 537–549.
3 Godeau Antoine, Des causes de la corruption de l’éloquence, dialogue attribué par quelques-
uns à Tacite, & par autres à Quintilien, trans. L. Giry (Paris, Charles Cappelain: 1630).
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 415

figure 11.5 The Penitent King David. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by
François Chauveau (designer) and Gabriel Le Brun (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm.
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [78]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France
416 Nørgaard

figure 11.6 Manasseh in Chains. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving

by François Chauveau (designer) and Réne Lochon (engraver)
21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [106]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

him a regular at Parisian salons and, more specifically, at the Rambouillet

salon, where he found special favour with the household’s oldest daughter,
Julie d’Angennes (1607–1671). From 1629, Godeau also took part in the weekly
meetings organized by his cousin, Valentin Conrart (1603–1675). The members
of this literary circle sought, actively, to distance themselves from the public
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 417

figure 11.7 Jonah Preaching to the People of Nineveh. Les Tableaux de la Péni-
tence (1656). Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Réne
Lochon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [134]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

sphere and, within the confines of a “secret” society, they worked to refine their
shared interest in language. This pursuit changed when Richelieu intervened
and began supporting the group. With the foundation of the Académie fran-
çaise in 1635, Conrart’s circle became the funding members of a political insti-
tution that, in Richelieu’s vision, should take control of the French language
418 Nørgaard

figure 11.8 King Nebuchadnezzar. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Gabriel Le Brun
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [162]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

and regulate the meaning of her words.4 Godeau was among these first mem-
bers of the Academy.5

4 See Fumaroli M., “Les intentions du cardinal de Richelieu, fondateur de l’Académie française”,
in Mousnier R. (ed.), Richelieu et la culture (Paris: 1987) 69–78; Merlin-Kajman H., “Langue
et souveraineté en France au XVIIe siècle. La production autonome d’un corps de langage”,
Annales (1994/2) 380–381.
5 See Pellisson-Fontainer Paul, Relation contenant l’histoire de l’Académie (Paris, Pierre Le Petit:
1653) 343.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 419

figure 11.9 The Babylonian Exile. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jacques Grignon
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [192]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

In the midst of all his worldly success, Godeau decided to pursue a life within
the clergy. We have little information about what motivated this decision,
but he climbed very fast through the episcopal ranks: he became an ordained
priest on 12 May 1636, and already a month later Richelieu secured for him
the see of Grasse, a poorly endowed bishopric in the Provence. It seems
that this appointment might have taken Godeau by surprise. However, his
turn towards religion was neither a sudden nor forced decision. With his
1630-treatise on Malherbe and its construction of a ‘bon goût’ (good taste),
420 Nørgaard

figure 11.10 Antiochus on his deathbed. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Boulanger
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [230]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

Godeau had interpreted poetic creation as pneumatic inspiration.6 Three years

later, the young poet published his first collection of Christian poetry that

6 See Venner, “Le Discours sur les œuvres de Mr de Malherbe” 548. Godeau also recalls how
Charles de Condren (1588–1641) had served as his spiritual director, see Letter from Godeau
to Jean Chapelain, 9 September 1639; Recueil Conart, Bibliothèque Nationale de France
(hereafter: BnF) Arsenal, Ms. 4113, 465–467. To my knowledge, this letter was first referenced
by Fournier-Plamondon A.-S., Pratiques d’écriture et exercice du pouvoir: du centre aux mar-
ges. Localiser Antoine Godeau (1605–1672) (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Laval: 2016). On
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 421

figure 11.11 Saint John the Baptist. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jacques Grignon
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [258]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

30 October 1629, Condren became the second superior of the French Oratorians, succeed-
ing its founder, Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629). After settling in Paris, the young lawyer had
also participated in the ‘Conférences des Mardis’ that Saint Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) orga-
nized. In a letter to the Oratorian Louis de Thomassin d’Eynac (1619–1695), Godeau elabo-
rates his close relation to the Lazarists and calls this Parisian community ‘l’Ecole que nôtre
Seigneur m’a ouverte pour y apprendre des maxims bien éloignées de celle que jusqu’alors
j’avois étudiées’ (the school that our Lord opened for me to learn about maxims that were
far removed from those [maxims] I until then had studied), Letter from Godeau to Monsieur
Abbé Thomassin, 19 August 1641; Godeau Antoine, Lettres de M. Godeau, Evesque de Vence, sur
divers sujets (Paris, Jacques et Estienne Ganeau: 1713) 202.
422 Nørgaard

figure 11.12 The Temptation of Christ in the Desert. Les Tableaux de la

Pénitence (1656). Engraving by Georges Tournier (engraver)
21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [276]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

reconfigured the genre and attempted to reconcile religious semantics with

literary tastes.7

7 Godeau Antoine, Œuvres chrestiennes. Vers et prose (Paris, Jean Camusat: 1633). The work
was dedicated to Richelieu and republished a number of times. Its prefatory statement takes
the form of an elaborate defence for Christian poetry, cf. Godeau Antoine, “DISCOVRS de
la Poésie Chrestienne” in Godeau, Œuvres chrestiennes 9–46. Godeau further elaborated
his Christian poetics in “DISCOVRS sur les ouvrages contenus en ce volume” in Godeau
Antoine, Œuvres chrestiennes. Seconde Partie (Paris, Jean Camusat: 1641) 11–46.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 423

figure 11.13 The Raising of Lazarus. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Boulanger
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [308]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

1 Speaking about Images

In the prefatory statement to the second edition of Les Tableaux de la Pénitence,8

Godeau evokes ‘les Tableaux de Philostrate’ as a source of inspiration for the

8 Godeau Antoine, “Preface” in Les Tableaux de la pénitence (Augustin Courbé, Paris: 21656)
Unpag. [1–18]. The first edition of 1654 sports Godeau’s name on its title page, but the
bishop had no time to proofread his manuscript before its publication. Accordingly, the
424 Nørgaard

figure 11.14 The Salvation of Zacchaeus. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jacques Grignon
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [334]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

work.9 Originally authored by Philostratus of Lemnos (c. 190–c. 230), the

Εἰκόνες ostensibly describes sixty-five paintings in a gallery in Naples. In 1578,

prefatory statement to the first edition was written by the publisher, see [Courbé Augustin],
“L’Imprimevr av Lectevr” in Godeau Antoine, Les Tableaux de la pénitence (Augustin Courbé,
Paris: 1654), Unpag. [1–3]. In the following, references are to the second edition of 1656 (BnF
Ms. D-7910).
9 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [8].
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 425

figure 11.15 The Adulterous Woman. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Georges Tournier
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [358]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596) published his translation and accommoda-

tion of this work.10 Adding comments and longer digressions to Philostratus’

10 Vigenère Blaise de, Les Images ou tableaux de platte-peinture de Philostrate Lemnien

(Paris, Nicolas Chesneau: 1578). To this translation, cf. Fumaroli M., “Blaise de Vigenère
et les débuts de la prose d’art française: sa doctrine d’après ses préfaces” in Lafond J. –
Stegman A. (eds.), L’Automne de la Renaissance 1580–1630, XIIe Colloque international
d’études humanistes (Paris: 1981) 31–51; Crescenzo R., Peintures D’Instruction. La postérité
426 Nørgaard

figure 11.16 The Good Samaritan. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving by Jean Couvay (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris,
BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [386]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

descriptions, Vigenère distinguishes between literal and allegorical levels of

meaning: attention to painted details is combined with an abstract elabora-
tion of motives and their meanings; commentaries transmit a specific way of

littéraire des Images de Philostrate en France de Blaise de Vigenère à l’époque Classique

(Geneva: 1999).
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 427

figure 11.17 The Prodigal Son. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving
by François Chauveau (designer) and Georges Tournier
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [408]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

contemplating images and appreciating their pictorial strategies. Similar to the

Iconologia by Cesare Ripa (1555–1622),11 the French translation of the Εἰκόνες
presents its reader-viewers with a repository of references, metaphors, and

11 Ripa Cesare, Iconologia overo Descrittione dell’imagini vniversali cavate dell’antichita e da

altri luoghi (Rome, G. Gigliotti: 1593).
428 Nørgaard

figure 11.18 The Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda. Les Tableaux de la

Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François Chauveau (designer)
and Réne Lochon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910
Unpag. [432]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

symbols. It also instructs readers about ancient fables and poetry. Vigenère
viewed his translation as offering examples of how correctly to write prose
in the vernacular.12 The descriptions relate the image-making powers of lan-
guage, which far exceeds the specifics of a physical image.

12 Vigenère, Les Images ou tableaux de platte-peinture 158–158v.

LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 429

figure 11.19 Saint Peter Crying. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François
Chauveau (designer) and Jean Couvay (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms.
D-7910 Unpag. [458]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France
430 Nørgaard

figure 11.20 The Penitent Thief. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).

Engraving, Anonymous, 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910
Unpag. [483]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

A similar ambition structures the Essay des Merveilles de Nature by the Jesuit
Étienne Binet (1569–1639), who also aimed to improve the ability of orators
when describing specific objects.13 The same attention to detail also permeated
the early modern discourse on hieroglyphics, which was initiated in 1419 with

13 Binet Étienne, Essay des merveilles de nature et des plus nobles artifices pièce très neces-
saire, à tous ceux qui font profession d’éloquence (Rouen, J. Osmon: 1621).
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 431

figure 11.21 Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence
(1656). Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Couvay
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [508]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

the discovery of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo.14 Here, the material sign of

the hieroglyph is more than the sacred language of the Egyptians: it facilitates

14 This manuscript was purchased by Cristoforo Buondelmonti (1386–?1430) on the

island of Andros in the Aegean Sea and was later placed in the Medicean library in
Florence. To the early work on this manuscript by, e.g., Cyriaco de´ Pizzicolli (1391–1452),
Niccolò de´ Niccoli (1364–1437) and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459),
see Giehlow K., Hieroglyphenkunde des Humanismus in der Allegorie der Renaissance
besonders der Ehrenpforte Kaisers Maximillian I (Vienna: 1915).
432 Nørgaard

figure 11.22 Saint Magdalene in her Cave. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and Jean Boulanger
(engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910 Unpag. [532]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

a vision of material objects that, as a vehicle of signification, transcends the

object’s features. Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558) elaborated such transcendence,15
and the material object thus became a placeholder for thinking about how to

15 Bolzani Dalle Fosse Giovanni Pietro, Hieroglyphica, seu De Sacris Aegyptorum, aliarumque
gentium litteris commentarii (Basel, s.n.: 1556).
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 433

figure 11.23 Theodosius I kneeling at the feet of Saint Ambrose. Les Tableaux de la
Pénitence (1656). Engraving by François Chauveau (designer) and
Jacques Grignon (engraver) 21.7 × 16.5 cm. Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910
Unpag. [566]
© Bibliothèque nationale de France

decode encoded messages.16 Following in the footsteps of Vigenère, ekphrastic

works of the seventeenth century engage with what we might call the silent

16 To this extension, see, e.g., L’Anglois Pierre, Discours des hiéroglyphes aegyptiens emblèmes,
devises et armoiries ensemble LIIII. Tableaux hieroglyphiques pour exprimer touvtes con-
ceptions, à la façon des Ægyptiens, par figures, & images des choses, au lieu de letters. (Paris,
434 Nørgaard

poetics of pictorial representations and make them come alive in description:

these works demonstrate what language, facing the work of art, is capable of
showing in words.17
With the foundation of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1648,
an institutional framework facilitated the further development of a vocabulary
for describing the material surface of paintings.18 According to Henri Testelin
(1616–1695), who became a member of the academy in 1650, the painter’s task
is ‘tellement assujettir toutes les parties qui entrent en la composition de son
tableau, qu’elles concourent ensemble à former une juste idée du sujet’ (to sub-
ordinate all the different parts, which go into the composition of his painting,
in such a manner that they, together, unite in shaping an appropriate idea of
the [painting’s] subject).19 However, this descriptive feature – the concurrent
or disparate relation between the elements of a painting’s composition – is
to be achieved not for its own sake, but rather to ensure that these ‘puissent
inspirer dans l’esprit des regardants des émotions convenables à cette idée’
(might be able to inspire the viewers’ spirit with emotions that are fitting to this
idea).20 Testelin continues by discussing the relation between the artist’s nar-
ration of the story, the source from which he draws his subject, and the artistic
licence to suppress certain details of the narrative in order fully to convey its
idea. Thus, the sacred stories of the Bible constitute a repository of subjects for
painters, but these same stories ‘sont décrites pour exciter en nous des pensées
et des émotions de piété, par les bons exemples qu’elles nous proposent, et
que ce doit aussi être l’effet de la peinture’ (are described in order to excite
pious thoughts and emotions in us by the good examples that they propose
for us: this should also be painting’s effect).21 Following a similar approach to

A. L’Angelier: 1583); Dinet Pierre, Cing livres des hiéroglyphiques, où sont contenus les plus
rares secrets de la nature et propriétés de toutes choses (Paris, J. de Heuqueville: 1614);
Caussin Nicolas, Symbolica Aegyptiorum sapientia (Paris, A. Taupinart: 1634).
17 Authors developed this ekphrastic style in different genres. We might mention Georges
de Scudéry (1601–1667), who, like Godeau, was active at the Rambouillet salon, and whose
Cabinet includes a written portrait of the bishop, see De Scudéry Georges, Le Cabinet de
Mr de Scudéry (Paris, Augustin Courbé: 1646) 176.
18 Félibien André, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens
et modernes, 5 Vols. (Paris, Pierre Le Petit/ Sébastian Mabre-Cramoisy/ Jean-Baptiste
Coignard: 1666–1688).
19 Testelin Henri, “Sur l’expression générale et particulière”, Conference on 6 June 1675, in
Mérot A. (ed.), Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe
siècle, Beaux-Arts Histoire (Paris: 22003) 328. The different ‘parties’ of a painting might
be identified as composition, design, and colours, see Félibien André, De l’origine de la
peinture et des plus excellens peintres de l’Antiquité (Paris, Pierre Le Petit: 1660) 1–8.
20 Testelin, “Sur l’expression générale et particulière” 328–329.
21 Testelin, “Sur l’expression générale et particulière” 330.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 435

painting, Godeau’s Tableaux de la Pénitence describes the engraved scenes: it

offers descriptions of their material surface and the artistic intentions that this
surface expresses.

2 Silent & Speaking Paintings

In order to understand how Godeau utilizes this description of the material

surface, it is important to note that he lists another source of inspiration:
Louis Richeome (1544–1625) and his work on the mystery of the Eucharist.22
Richeome’s book contains fourteen plates and complementary descriptions
of biblical scenes. However, the Jesuit maintains that the topic of his work –
the mystery of the Eucharist – transcends both human and angelic language.
Affirming this aporia, he famously proposes a multi-layered understanding of
the figura. First, he isolates the ‘peinture muette’ (silent painting) that lends
itself to the eyes and engages with human imagination.23 By its lines and
colours, paintings “speak” without making a sound: through the perception of
the external object and its material features, viewers create an internal, imagi-
nary reproduction of what they see. Thus, Richeome maintains the relative
identity of the depicted object and its mental representation. This immedi-
ate engagement with the object is seconded by another kind of painting ‘qui
donne à l’oreille’ (that lends itself to the ear), and which ‘nous pouvons dire
parlante’ (we could call “speaking”). Richeome refers this mode of painting to
that which poets and historians craft when they explicate a figure and, within
language, make it come alive to their readers.24

22 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [8], cf. Richeome Louis, Tableaux sacrez des figures mystiques
du très auguste sacrifice et sacrement de l’Eucharistie (Paris, Laurent Sonnius: 1601).
Within the rich research on Richeome’s work, I have consulted Crescenzo, Peintures
d’instruction 225–239; Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem. Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image
dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: 2005) 67–82; idem, “The Jesuit
Ars and Scientia Symbolica: From Richeome and Sandaeus to Masen and Ménestrier”
in De Boer W. – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W. (eds.), Jesuit Image Theory, Intersections 45
(Leiden: 2016) 74–88; Salliot N., “Les pouvoirs de l’image dans les discours apologétique:
les Tableaux sacrez de Louis Richeome”, in Coutton M. – Fernandes I. – Jérémie C. –
Vérnaut M. (eds.), Pouvoirs de l’image aux XV e, XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Clermont-Ferrand:
2009) 257–288; Weemans M., “The Smoke of Sacrifice: Anthropomorphism and Figure
in Karel van Mallery’s Sacrifice of Cain and Abel for Louis Richeome’s Tableaux Sacrez
(1601)” in Melion W. – Rothstein B. – Weemans M. (eds.), The Anthropomorphic Lens:
Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Art,
Intersections 34 (Leiden: 2014) 480–515.
23 Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 4.
24 Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 4.
436 Nørgaard

We need carefully to consider the difference between the silent figure and
the speaking figure: this is central to the genre of ekphrastic literature, and it
boils down to what we might call the position of the perceived object. On a
primary level, the image is physically present: it presents itself to the viewer,
and imagination facilitates a degree of identity between the idea behind the
painting – its subject – and the viewer’s perception of the painting’s composi-
tion. On a secondary level, the object is no longer physically present but some-
how becomes present to the mind. Here, Richeome invokes Philostratus and
states about the Εἰκόνες that ‘il n’y a ny couleur ny peinture, mais la seule parole
qui fait les images & figures, & dechifre les fantasies de l’autheur comme ayant
la peinture devant ses yeux’ (it holds neither colour nor painting but it is words
alone that create the images and figures, and which decipher the fantasies of
the author as if the painting was before his eyes).25 Thus, the speaking painting
is more than an interior representation of an exterior object: it creates a men-
tal image of what is not at hand but brought into the mind.
Richeome’s elaboration of the figura as silent and speaking is based on a
basic Augustinian understanding of vision. Thus, his notion of silent painting
corresponds to a first order of vision that, in Augustine’s analysis, combines
three elements. First, it refers to eyesight that perceives a ‘mind-independent’
thing – that is, a thing ‘quam videmus […] quod utique jam esse poterat, et
antequam videretur’ (we see, [and] which certainly was able already to exist
also before it was seen [by us]).26 Next comes the sense itself, visio, that must
exist ‘priusquam rem illam objectam sensui sentiremus’ (before we perceived
this thing as an object).27 Finally, the first order of vision includes a third ele-
ment, namely whatever keeps eyesight engaged with the thing and explains
why this thing is being seen – that is, the soul’s intentio or its voluntas,28 which
‘rei sensibili sensum admovet’ (moves the sense to the sensible thing).29 This
third element is also rendered as the soul’s ‘appetitus videndi’ (desire to see),30
which produces an imago (representation) and simililtudo (likeness) of the
mind-independent thing: it turns this material thing into an object of sight,
and the Augustinian framework allocates this kind of transformation to the
‘homo exterior’ (outer man).31 Richeome’s silent painting refers itself to this

25 Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 4.

26 Augustine, De Trinitate in Œuvres de saint Augustin, Bibliothèque Augustinienne 16
(Paris: 1955) XI.II,2, 162.
27 Augustine, De Trinitate XI.II,2, 162.
28 See Augustine, De Trinitate XI.II,2, 164; XI.II,5, 172.
29 Augustine, De Trinitate XI.II,5, 172.
30 See Augustine, De Trinitate XI.II,2, 164.
31 See Augustine, De Trinitate XI.I,1, 162.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 437

analysis of visual perception: as a mute object, the figura shows itself and
becomes an object of our perception. There is also a marked discrepancy,
however, between the Augustinian analysis of vision and Richeome’s notion
of silent paintings: the latter is not a material thing in the same sense as the
things discussed by Augustine; paintings are plastic objects that express artis-
tic intention. This entails that viewers be confronted in a different way; their
cognitive task is no longer centered on the transformation of a thing into an
object, but rather on recognizing the pattern of artistic intention.
Augustine grants the spiritus the power to produce images of absent objects.
In this higher-level process of seeing, ‘imaginamur ea quae per corpus senti-
mus’ (we imagine that which we sense through the body).32 Indeed, ‘multa
revelantur non per oculos coporis, aut aures, aliumve sensum carnalem, sed
tamen his similia’ (many things appear neither through the body’s eyes, its ears,
nor through another sense, but through the resemblances to [the things that
appear through] these [senses]).33 This resemblance results from the work-
ings of the phantasia: it is not the things themselves that enter into the mind
but rather perceptions reappearing and reworked into new images of absent
things. We shall return to the status of such recycled images, but Augustine
initially presents them as objects of ‘visio interna’ (an internal vision) that
unfolds in memoria, where they take a specific ‘forma’ (model) or ‘species’
(type). Drawn from the depths of memory, the model or type corresponds to
a physical thing as this earlier presented itself to eyesight: bits and pieces of
these imaginary objects are reworked and processed through ‘acies animi’ (an
inner gaze of the soul).34 Indeed, this gaze fixates on the ephemeral objects of
memory and joins them together, whereby something new comes into being.
Like the first order of vision, this second order is held together by ‘intentio
voluntatis’ (the will’s intention), and it hinges on a desire to see something.
In Richeome’s application, this inner gaze constitutes the speaking painting,
and it is important to stress that he, like Augustine, places memory not only in
relation to the past, but also in relation to cognition as such: we use memory
to combine and fuse objects together, thereby securing a coherency of every-
day experiences. As mentioned above, the Jesuit also displaces the framework
of Augustine’s analysis: Richeome has no interest in natural things and their
cognition, but rather investigates ‘une chose faicte ou dresse pour en repre-
senter ou signifier une autre, & ceste-cy est artificielle & s’appelle autrement

32 Cf. Augustine, “Contra Adimantum Manichaei Discipulum” in Œuvres de saint Augustin,

Bibliothèque Augustinienne 17 (Paris: 1961) XXVIII,2, 368.
33 Augustine, “Contra Adimantum” 370.
34 See Augustine, De Trinitate XI.VII,11,190; XI.IX,16, 204.
438 Nørgaard

peinture’ (a thing created or set forth in order to represent or signify another

[thing], and this kind of thing is artificial and is called painting).35

3 Seeing Together

In Godeau’s Tableaux de la penitence, linguistic markers signal the two

approaches that Richeome labels silent and speaking image-making. Put dif-
ferently, each engraved scene is subjected to both levels of description, and
these levels are carefully distinguished from each other. In all of Godeau’s
ekphrastic compositions, the voice of the implied author first calls attention to
specific features in the engraved scenes. The ‘Je’ (I) retraces what the implied
readers – the ‘Vous’ (Vous) – are meant to see. Accordingly, the chapter on
“Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver” [Fig. 11.21] begins with a short descrip-
tion of the engraved image,36 introduced by the statement: ‘[e]n ce Tableau le
Peintre a rendu visibles […]’ (in this image, the painter has made visible […]).37
Detailing this visibility, the author appeals directly to the reader-viewer: ‘[v]
oyez, ie vous prie, comme […]’ (I entice you to observe how).38 Throughout
all chapters, such deictic constructions initiate the process of ekphrastic: the
author seeks, first, to establish a shared field of vision; this vision fixates the
eyes on specific elements and, we might suggest, re-composes the engraved
image within the reader-viewer’s imagination.39 In this initial fixation, Godeau
often evokes ‘le peintre’ (the painter) and ‘l’art de la Peinture’ (the art of paint-
ing). Richeome makes similar references in his first chapters,40 but Godeau
seems to make a more deliberate effort: he targets the material surface – what
we see – by evoking specific artistic choices. About “The Temptation of Christ

35 Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 4.

36 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 509–511.
37 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 509.
38 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 509.
39 This appeal is often repeated in various forms such as ‘Voyez-vous comme […]’, ‘Voyez
comme […]’, and simply ‘Vous voyez’/ ‘Voyez’/ ‘Voyez-vous’, cf. Godeau, Les Tableaux de
la penitence 6, 29, 30, 31, 56, 135, 164, 166, 167, 260, 277, 278, 288, 309, 335, 359, 387, 483,
484, 509. Seemingly interchangeable in function are ‘Regardez comment […]’ (See how),
‘Regardez’ (See), ‘Observez’ (observe), and ‘Remarquez’ (note), see, e.g., Godeau, Les
Tableaux de la pénitence 4, 5, 29, 30, 54, 136, 165, 309, 335, 459. The presentative ‘Voilà’,
composed of the old indicative form ‘voi’ (see) and the adverb ‘là’ (there), serves the same
purpose, cf. Godeau, Les Tableaux de la penitence 5, 53, 55, 65, 135, 136, 165, 193, 194, 195, 232,
278, 359, 410. The construction ‘on y voit’ is also found, see, e.g., Godeau, Les Tableaux de la
pénitence 29, 108, 193, 232, 260, 261, 309.
40 See, e.g., Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 21, 24, 76, 78, 301, 375.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 439

in the Desert” [Fig. 11.12] we learn how its painter has situated the reader-
viewers within a nightmarish scenario: ‘De quelque costé que vous iettiez les
yeux sur ce Tableau, vous trouverez que le Peintre a eu soin d’y representer
toutes les choses qui peuvent composer vn lieu effroyable’ (No matter where
you let your eyes wander within his painting, you will find that the painter there
has taken great care to represent all things that can be included in a horrifying
place).41 In addition to evoking artistic strategies, Godeau refers to the differ-
ent interpretations that the images lend themselves to. About “The Expulsion
from the Garden of Eden” [Fig. 11.2] he states: ‘[o]n diroit que le Peintre a volu
representer la tristesse mesme en representant leurs visages’ (it seems like the
painter, in his representation of their faces, has sought to represent sadness
itself). The bishop, however, proposes a complementary interpretation accord-
ing to which it was the painter’s true vision to join suffering with wisdom,
whereby ‘cette tristesse les afflige sans leur donner l’impatience, les humilie
sans les abatre, & leur sert tout-ensemble de remede & de chastiment’ (this sad-
ness burdens them without making them grow impatient, it humiliates them
without destroying them and serves them, all together, as both aliment and
punishment).42 This reference to a discourse on the depicted scene can also be
found in “Manasseh in Chains” [Fig. 11.6], where we learn ‘[l]es fameuses nuits
du Bassan qui lui ont fait aquerir tant de reputation parmy les Peintres, n’ont
rien de si admirable que celle de ce Tableau’ (Although they have won him
quite a repute among the painters, there is nothing in Bassano’s famous nights
that appears nearly as remarkable as the night in this painting).43
Elucidating different kinds of artistic intentionality, the phenomenological
reality of the engraving – its presentation to the visio corporalis – turns into an
elaboration of the painter’s ‘voluntas’, whereby ekphrasis becomes a vehicle for
stimulating the viewer-readers’ desire to see. Godeau’s words elucidate what in
the engravings should keep out eyesight engage and not make eyes wander to
a different object. Moreover, the aim of ekphrasis is not for reader-viewers to
reproduce the described objects: to see the intention of the painter is not to
see everything eyes can take in; it is rather to align what eyes see with what the
painter intended us to see. Godeau’s first level of ekphrasis is not a representa-
tion of an image as an image. It is not about a thing turned into an object of

41 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 277.

42 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 6–7.
43 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 107. Jacopo Bassano (1510–1592) and his workshop
was widely recognized for their night scenes and use of artificial sources of light. Karel
Van Mander (1548–1606) lauds Bassano’s scenes from the Passion, small in size, dark as the
night, and shown to him by a Roman art dealer, cf. Van Mander Karel, Het Schilder-boeck
(Haerlem, Paschier van Wesbuch: 1604) f. 180–180v.
440 Nørgaard

perception. Rather, ekphrasis constitutes a mode of thinking about the image,

which involves an awareness of the image as an artifact.44 What in Richeome
is labeled as silent painting sets in motion an entire vocabulary, whereby the
signification of the visual program can be discussed – the author’s words pro-
duce a representation that does not fit the image itself but rather encapsulates
the artistic intention that guides its programme.

4 Speaking about the Object

Having fixated our eyes on the material surface, Godeau proceeds to engage
the ears and account for the depicted story. Within Richeome’s framework,
this engagement marks the transition from the art of silent painting to paint-
ing that speaks. In these transitions, Godeau constructs his reader-viewers as
eager to hear and learn about the stories that the engravings represent: a hier-
archy seems to privilege word over image. In the ekphrasis of “The Prodigal
Son” [Fig. 11.17], Godeau states: ‘en vous faisant remarquer tout ce qui est dans
ce Tableau, ie vous donne vne grandes (sic!) enuie de sçavoir l’histoire qu’il rep-
resente’ (by making you take notice of everything in this painting, I have made
you grow increasingly weary to learn about the story that it represents).45
Furthermore, the bishop states in “Saint Peter Crying” [Fig. 11.19]:

Mais je voy bien que vous avez plus d’envie d’en aprendre l’histoire que de
remarquer les merveilles de l’Art avec lequel il est fait. Ie veux contenter
voster desir, mais ie vous demande en mesmes temps que vos oreilles
soient plus patiente que vos yeux, & qu’encore que ie n’explique pas cette
Peinture, avec les mesmes graces que le Maistre luy a données, vous ne
laissiez pas toutefois de me donner vne audience favorable.46

However, I can see that you are more keen on learning the story than tak-
ing note of all the artistic beauty with which it is made. I shall accommo-
date your wish but hereby ask that your ears be more patient than your

44 Cf. Baxandall M., Patterns of intention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New
Haven – London: 1985) 1–11.
45 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 411.
46 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 460. In “The Babylonian Exile” [Fig. 11.9], we find
a similar construction of the reader-viewers and their impatience to learn the depicted
story, see Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 196.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 441

eyes. Since I do not explicate this painting in the same gracious man-
ner as the Master has styled it, I also ask that you grant me a favorable
audience.

Thus, the author ‘sees’ the reader-viewer and recognizes a desire to move past
the visual space of representation. However, he cautions that there is a differ-
ence between the efficacy of what eyes see and the efficacy of what ears hear.
While the first level of ekphrasis targets visual perception, the second level
enters through the ears and therefore moves at a slower pace. Accordingly, the
image, as a medium of communication, is more efficient than letters on paper,
but, as we shall see, a greater truth can be revealed by tarrying with the words.
Initially, the depicted figures remain anonymous, and the author focuses
the reader-viewer’s attention on the pictorial representation: as I have stated
above, this imaginative re-composition of the plates – the guided movement
from a physical image to a mental image – is the first step in ekphrasis. In “The
Crossing of the Red Sea” [Fig. 11.4], we see ‘vne troupe presque innombrable
d’hommes & de femmes, qui traversent vne Mer’ (an almost innumerable
group of men and women crossing a sea). This initial description fixates upon
what the reader-viewer surely sees, and Godeau hereafter proceeds by identi-
fying this anonymous group of individuals as ‘le Peuple d’Israël’ (the People
of Israel).47 Hereafter, he singles out ‘ces deux hommes qui paroissent sur le
rivage du costé du Desert’ (the two men that stand on the shore, on the side of
the desert) and shares their names: ‘Moïse, et son frère Aaron’ (Moses and his
brother Aaron).48 This marks the passage from the phenomenological domain,
where the engraved scene speaks without sound, to the domain of biblical nar-
rative. In “The Penitent King David” [Fig. 11.5], Godeau refers to the individu-
als that the painter ‘represente en ce Tableau’ (represents in this painting).49
Hereafter, he asks in almost a playful tone: ‘Voulez-vous sçavoir leurs noms,
l’vn s’appelle David, & l’autre Nathan. Celuy-là vn Grand Prince, & celuy-cy vn
plus Grand Prophet’ (Do you want to know their names? One is called David,
and the other Nathan. The first is a powerful prince, the latter an even more
powerful prophet).50 However, the relationship between the two levels of

47 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 54.

48 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 55.
49 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 79.
50 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 79–80. Similar rhetorical transitions take place in
“The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” [Fig. 11.2], in “Jonah preaching to the people
of Nineveh” [Fig. 11.7], in “Antiochus on his deathbed” [Fig. 11.10], in “The Prodigal Son”
[Fig. 11.17], in “The Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda” [Fig. 11.18], and, finally, in “Saint
Peter Crying” [Fig. 11.19].
442 Nørgaard

ekphrasis – between silent painting and painting that speaks – is not stable.
Godeau distinguishes between these different levels, but they are not a fixed
structure that his book blindly follows. Indeed, the levels completely entangle
in “The Adulterous Woman” [Fig. 11.15], in “The Penitent Thief” [Fig. 11.20], and
in “Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver” [Fig. 11.21]. In “King Nebuchadnezzar”
[Fig. 11.8], Godeau reverses their order: the ‘sujet de ce Tableau’ (topic of this
painting) is first narrated, before the painter’s composition is retraced.51

5 Explication

Godeau’s appeal to different levels of ekphrasis requires careful consideration.

In the preface to the second edition, the levels of silent and speaking painting
are clearly differentiated. However, these distinct levels are also said to accom-
plish a single operation, entitled an explication.52 What are we to make of
the fact that the author, in the actual chapters of his book, separates what the
prefatory statement brings together and posits as a unity? Famously, another
ekphrasis – the forging of the shield of Achilles – involves a conundrum that
might offer a way of answering this question:

Ἐν δ’ ἀγέλην ποίησε βοῶν ὀρθοκραιράων· αἳ δὲ βόες χρυσοῖο τετεύχατο κασ-

σιτέρου τε, μυκηθμῷ δ’ ἀπὸ κόπρου ἐπεσσεύοντο νομόνδε πὰρ ποταμὸν κελά-
δοντα, παρὰ ῥοδανὸν δονακῆα. χρύσειοι δὲ νομῆες ἅμ’ ἐστιχόωντο βόεσσι
τέσσαρες, ἐννέα δέ σφι κύνες πόδας ἀργοὶ ἕποντο. σμερδαλέω δὲ λέοντε δύ’ ἐν
πρώτῃσι βόεσσι ταῦρον ἐρύγμηλον ἐχέτην· ὃ δὲ μακρὰ μεμυκὼς ἕλκετο· τὸν δὲ
κύνες μετεκίαθον ἠδ’ αἰζηοί. τὼ μὲν ἀναρρήξαντε βοὸς μεγάλοιο βοείην ἔγκατα
καὶ μέλαν αἷμα λαφύσσετον· οἳ δὲ νομῆες αὔτως ἐνδίεσαν ταχέας κύνας ὀτρύ-
νοντες. οἳ δ’ ἤτοι δακέειν μὲν ἀπετρωπῶντο λεόντων, ἱστάμενοι δὲ μάλ’ ἐγγὺς
ὑλάκτεον ἔκ τ’ ἀλέοντο.53

On it [the shield], he [Hephaestus] also forged a herd of horned cattle

made in gold and tin. Bellowing, they hasted from the byre to the pas-
ture along the resounding stream, along the swaying thicket of reeds; four
herdsmen, also in gold, walked beside the cattle, and nine dogs, swift at
foot, followed them. Among the foremost cattle, two dreadful lions had

51 Cf. Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 163–166.

52 See Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [11].
53 Homer, Iliad, trans. A.T. Murray – W.F. Wyatt., Loeb Classical Library 170–171, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: 1924–1925) vol. 2 (1925) Book 18:573–586, 330–331. Translation modified.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 443

taken a loud-bellowing bull that, while roaring, was being dragged far
away: the dogs and young men gave chase after it, [but] the two [lions]
tore open the bull’s thick hide and were [already] devouring its innards
and black blood. Afraid to do anything, the herdsmen just hounded on
their dogs that dared not fasten on the lions but stood by barking and
keeping out of harm’s way.

In these verses, we learn about a specific phase in the process of forging a

physical object. Within the narrated world, where a shield is forged (ποιέω),
the narrator describes the metals used for this specific task: tin and gold refer
to the physical object and to the conditions of its production (τεύχω). In the
following lines, however, the perspective shifts, and we learn that cows moved
from one location to another location (ἐπισεύω). In acoustic terms, the narra-
tor poetically describes the waters towards which the cows move, evoking also
the sound that they make (μυκηθμός) while traversing the distance from the
byre. Suddenly, two lions drag away a roaring bull: the herdsmen and their dogs
give chase but in vain; the lions are seen, abruptly, to be gorging on blood and
bowels. Should we understand this as a description of the panel on the shield?
Are depicted lions attacking the herd; are the same lions also consuming their
prey? Alternatively, this could be a narration of a past event, the image of an
event visualized on the shield. No alternative is definitive, and it seems that the
shield-ekphrasis utilizes both elements, stipulating a hybrid space of presence
and absence within representation.
In its late-antique context, ekphrasis had a rather narrow definition. It con-
cerned the different ways of bringing a subject matter vividly before the eyes
of the listener; ekphrasis was closely tied to ‘ἐνάργεια’ (vividness or liveliness),
which activates the mind’s eye and thereby initiates the mental process of
making verbal representations come alive.54 This capacity of language can be
exercised independently of visual representations: language has the power to
place the object of discourse before the eyes of listeners; ekphrasis allows them
to enter into imaginary contact with an object, be it animate or inanimate. As
such, ekphrasis was used in epideictic rhetoric that derives from the complex
genre of ‘ἐπιτάφιοι λόγοι’ (funeral orations) combining various kinds of eulogy

54 For examples from the “Progymnasmata”, see, e.g., Dubel S., “Ekphrasis et enargeia: La
description antique comme parcours” in Lévy C. – Pernot L. (eds.), Dire l’évidence (Paris:
1997) 249–264; Webb R., “Ekphrasis ancient and Modern: The invention of a Genre”
Word and Image 15 (1999/1) 7–18; idem, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient
Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham: 2009) 29–59.
444 Nørgaard

of the deceased with exhortation, consolation, and lamentation.55 The earli-

est of such orations dates to the fifth century before Christ, and they deploy
‘topoi’ (templates) that organize the conferral of praise. Over time, these tech-
nics were extended from the praise of an individual to the praise of animals
or objects – such as a shield. Epideictic rhetoric was also extended to concep-
tual realities like cities and gods. Unlike forensic and deliberative speeches,
the function of such descriptions is not immediately obvious, however. They
do not explicitly serve to change the listeners’ minds or to elicit a specific deci-
sion. Instead, the verb ‘ἐπιδεικνῠ́ναι’ and its middle-voice ‘επιδείκνῠσθαι’ appeal
to an operation encapsulated in ‘δεικνῠ́ναι’, from the Indo-European root *deik
and denoting ‘to show, to show off, bring to light, to put forth, to point out, to
portray, and to represent’. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, this ostensive function was
viewed as inferior to the functions of the forensic and deliberative genera that
pronounce about the past and the future: these speeches engage the listener
about what happened and what should happen, turning them into judges of
what is said: is it just or unjust, useful or harmful? Epideictic listeners pass
no such judgement; instead, they are primarily observers of the orator’s skill
and pass judgement on the quality of his speech. Unlike the forensic speech
and the deliberative speech, which engage in debate and attempt, in differ-
ent ways, to settle disputed issues, the epideictic speech therefore requires a
level of undisputed agreement between the speaker and the listener: it uses
amplification to emphasize the positive qualities of its subject. This process of
emphasizing involves different types of arguments and rhetorical devices, and
‘ἐκφράζειν’ thus plays a role in the description of a city, a place or a building.
From a purely morphological point of view, the literal rendering of ‘ἐκφράζειν’ is
‘explicare’, maintaining the intensive force of the prefix ‘ek-’.56 On this transla-
tion, an ekphrastic composition constitutes an act of telling something in full,
of supplying all the details, and conveying the complete picture. Consequently,
a technique prescribed in Ancient rhetorical treatises to describe a monument
becomes the narration of the process of its construction. Below, we shall return
to the nature of this narration, but Godeau’s two levels of ekphrasis clearly cor-
respond to this ambition of telling in full and showing all details. His ekphrasis
both engages with the plates as silent paintings and as speaking paintings –
as objects that, phenomenologically, present themselves and as objects that

55 To the following discussion of the epideictic genus, see. Pernot L., La rhétorique de l’éloge
dans le monde gréco-romain, Collection des Études augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 137–
138, 2 vols. (Paris: 1993); Pernot L., Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient
Praise, Ashley and Peter Larkin Series in Greek and Roman Culture (Austin: 2015).
56 Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion 74–75.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 445

must be narrated. In Augustinian terms, his method of ekphrasis combines

two kinds of vision: the first forges an imago of the object, while the second
recasts the object by way of resemblance.

6 Epideictic Devices

Within the epideictic genus, amplification is key: the genus builds arguments
by way of comparison, through superlatives, and by reference to quality and
quantity, and also involves an appeal to uniqueness, authority, anteriority,
and totality. While such speeches are not restricted to amplifying arguments,
early modern ekphrasis utilizes these notions in its engagement with visual-
ity. These arguments, then, lends themselves to what in Godeau’s Tableaux de
la penitence constitutes the first level of ekphrasis: the arguments provide a
framework for amplifying the experience of seeing something as an object, for
emphasizing artistic choices, and thereby enhancing the immediate engage-
ment with the engravings. This first-order process paints a mental image of a
physical image, but the argumentative devices of amplification also structure
the second-order of ekphrasis – that is, the narration of the engraved scenes.
To ensure vividness, this mode of retelling cannot limit itself to neutral con-
textualization of what we see: it is no statement of facts, not simply a ‘διήγησις’
or ‘narratio’, but rather a narration with ‘ἐνάργεια’. This art of vivid storytelling
is remarked by Erasmus in his De copia (1512), where, in the craft of ekphra-
sis, ‘non summatim aut tenuiter exponimus, sed omnibus fucatum coloribus
ob oculos ponimus vt auditorem sive lectorem iam extra se positum, velut in
theatrum avocet’ (we do not set forth [a thing] in a brief or narrow manner
but, embellished with all colours, we place [it] before the eyes, so that [the
thing] summons the listener or the reader, displaced from himself, to what
seems a theatre).57 To produce such theatricality, ekphrasis operates […] cir-
cumstantiarum explicatione, earum praesertim, quae rem oculis maxime subi-
iciunt, ac moratam reddunt narrationem (by the explication of circumstances,
especially those that make the thing particularly vivid, and give [it] narrative
distinctiveness).58
Let us illustrate this mode of narrating by taking a closer look at Godeau’s
description of the depicted figures in “The Penitent King David” [Fig. 11.5].
After identifying the figures, Godeau remarks that Nathan’s left arm and hand

57 Erasmus, De copia verborum ac rerum in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi IX Ordines (Brill:
1969–2014) Ordinis 1, vol. 6 (1988) Book 2, 202.
58 Erasmus, De copia verborum ac rerum Book 2, 202.
446 Nørgaard

clearly visualize an act of reproach.59 Accordingly, we see the moment, when

‘il luy manifeste le secret de sa Parole, & lui dit hardiment: Tu és cet homme
qui merite la mort’ (he discloses to him the secret of his speech, and boldly
tells him: you are this man who deserves to die).60 We do not see David’s profes-
sion of guilt (cf. 2 Samuel 12:13), but Godeau nevertheless inscribes this second
speech-act within the frame of pictorial representation:

La Prince tient la veüe basse, & monster qu’il demeure d’accord de ce qu’il
entend. Sa Couronne panche à demy; on diroit qu’il laisse son Sceptre, &
qu’il va luy-mesme tombe de son Siege, tant il paroist surpris et affligé.

The prince looks down and shows that he agrees with what he hears. His
crown is half-way tilted: it looks like he lets go of his scepter and will let
himself fall from his seat; he appears so surprised and troubled.

Suspended between reproach and confession, the engraved scene captures a

composite moment in the process of penitence. Indeed, the depicted objects –
the crown and the scepter – materialize a movement that Godeau also recog-
nizes in the bodily posture of the seated figure: it is as if David is motioning
towards the ground, falling in alignment with his downward gaze. This re-
composition of what we see calls attention to what is about to happen – the
royal confession of wrongdoings. Thus, we see the moment when the king
gains a horrifying insight that has to do with his past actions and marks him
as deserving of death. This cognitive realization is captured in spatio-temporal
terms or, better, Godeau’s words make us see this and thereby amplify the
scene. This scene, then, shows David remembering past actions, but Godeau’s
ekphrasis offers a further context to be taken into consideration when seeing
the distress of the king:

Mais ne pensez pas que ce Saint Pénitent se contente de la confession de

son crime devant le Prophete. Il a péché, c’est ce que les Rois ont accous-
tumé de faire: il a commis vn adultere, c’est dequoy plusieurs se glorifient;
il a fait tuër vn de ses plus fideles serviteurs, c’est ce qu’ils comptent pour
fort peu de chose. Mais il a publié son crime, il a voulu en éterniser la
memoire dans ses Psaumes, il a, ce semble, convoqué tous les hommes de

59 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 89.

60 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 87, cf. 2 Samuel 12:7.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 447

tous les siècles comme a vn Theatre, pour y voir representer l’histoire de

ses amours detestables, & celle de son cuisant repentir.61

But do not think that this saintly penitent merely confessed his crime
before the prophet. He sinned, but this is what kings are accustomed to
doing: he committed an act of adultery about which many just boast; he
had one of his most trusted servants murdered, which is something they
[the kings] would count as a minor thing. No, he publicly disclosed his
crime and wanted to eternalize its memory through his Psalms: it is as
if he summoned all men from all the ages to what seems a theatre; there
they could see the staging of the history of his abominable loves and
burning repentance.

The writing of The Book of Psalms manifests a willingness, publicly, to profess

sins, but this public act is not immediately inferable from the depicted story:
Godeau offers the reader-viewer with the means whereby to reconsider what
they see and thereby to see in David a holy desire to compose himself by com-
posing sacred songs about repentance. Returning to the plate, the depicted
event actually unfolds in an interior setting; the royal bed stands behind
Nathan, evoking sinful desire and carnal intimacy. This interior, however, opens
onto a built environment. Behind the king, a thick curtain has been partially
drawn to reveal an outside view; the length of rope, just visible, is an artistic
prop that calls attention to the threshold between inside and outside, private
and public. Thus, Godeau’s ekphrasis moves from visual display to narration of
the depicted scene, but the latter level of ekphrasis constructs another kind of
visibility: it creates a complex layering that reader-viewers must take into con-
sideration. Furthermore, Godeau insists that something escapes the register of
visual representation:

Le Peintre n’a pû representer des choses si saintes avec son pinceau; mais
David en a fait l’image dans ses Pseaumes qu’on appelle Pénitentiaux.
Tous les traits en sont merveilleux, & l’on voit clairement que le cœur con-
duisoit sa main, ou pour mieux dire, que l’esprit de Dieu éschausoit l’vn
de ses ardeurs les plus violentes, & que l’autre suivoit son mouvement.62

The painter has not been able, with his brush, to represent these saintly
things. David, however, has created an image of them in his Psalms that

61 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 89.

62 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 100–101.
448 Nørgaard

one calls penitential. Therein, all traits are wonderful, and we clearly see
how the heart moved his hand, or to put it in better words: the spirit of
God enflamed one of the most violent of his desires, and [the hand] fol-
lowed its movement.

Where the physical image falls short, Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143 por-
tray the fire of penitential desire. This subordination of the silent figure to the
speaking figure – of the silent art of painting to images that speak in the bib-
lical voice of David – links to what takes place inside the figures portrayed:
words, by making these interior states come alive, refigure the engravings,
placing them anew before the reader-viewer’s eyes.
Such vividness also comes to the fore in the ekphrasis of “Saint Peter Crying”
[Fig. 11.19], where Godeau, first, fixates our eyes on elements in the plate, before
he narrates the story of Peter’s profession of faith in Jesus (Matthew 16:13–20)
and the prophecy of his betrayal (Matthew 26:31–35).63 This narrative frame
supports the depicted event: the bishop proceeds by recounting the three
stages of betrayal (Matthew 26:69–74).64 The sound of the cock crowing is
fixed in Peter’s memory, as his heart recalls what had been foretold (Matthew
26:75a). The plate visualizes the next statement in the biblical account: ‘And he
went out and wept bitterly’ (Matthew 26:75b).65 Integrating Luke 22:54, Godeau
adds how Jesus Christ turned and looked at Peter at the very moment when
the betrayal, having been foretold, now became fact. On the following pages,
the author moves beyond what we can read in the biblical texts.66 Indeed, he
describes the effect of Christ’s gaze that, within Peter’s soul, produced ‘vne
lumiere si vive, qu’en vn moment il connut l’horreur de la perfidie qu’il venoit
de commettre’ (a light so lively that, in an instance, he understood the horror
of the treachery that he had done).67 The divine ‘coup d’œil’ (glance) brings a
spiritual clarity to Peter, which in his heart ignites a fire. His first thought is to
throw himself at the knees of the Son of God, but the heavenly light stops the
Apostle in his tracks: it causes him to realize the severity of his fault worthy of
the Father’s righteous wrath. This realization increases rather than decreases
his sense of sin. Instead of rushing to place himself before his judge, the
depicted figure pauses and, before asking for forgiveness, attempts ‘effacer son

63 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 460–464.

64 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 465.
65 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 466.
66 Cf. Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 466–470.
67 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 466.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 449

crime par les larmes’ (to efface his crime through tears). His action or, better,
anticipatory pause opens a space between crime and confession, which allows
him to cry a river of bitter tears, and ‘son infidelité y fut tout à fait noyée’ (his
infidelity was completely drowned therein).68 Godeau further explains that it
is the grace of penitence that transforms Peter’s heart into ‘vn profond basin’
(a deep pool) of penitential tears, and the Apostle, like David, ‘fait nager son
lit dans ses larmes’ (makes his bed swim in his tears).69 This interpretation
obviously moves beyond what we see. It describes an illumination within the
depicted figure: words display inner thoughts; Godeau amplifies the images by
narrating what cannot be seen. Indeed, the illumination of Peter is opposed
to what nature allows man to know: ‘La lumière dont son corps étinceloit,
luy reprochoit à son advis l’aveuglement de sa perfidie; & plus il y voyoit de
majesté & de gloire, plus il se sentoit coupable de l’avoir abandonné’ (The more
the light that shined from his body made him take issue with the blindness
of his treachery – the more he there [in the light] saw of [Christ’s] majesty
and glory – the more he felt himself guilty of having abandoned him).70 The
tension between seeing and blindness, between light and darkness, remains
unresolved: Peter in penitence bodies forth a state of grace and punishment,
insight and fear.
In “Manasseh in Chains” [Fig. 11.6], we learn that the enchained king was
preoccupied with prayer. Now, the biblical account mentions Manasseh’s
penitential prayer (2 Chronicles 33:12–13; 18–19), included as “The Prayer of
Manasseh” in Jerome’s Vulgate. After the Council of Trent, this Latin text was
no longer included among the canonical books. It did nonetheless feature as
an appendix in the Sixto-Clementine edition of 1592. The original prayer is just
fifteen lines, while Godeau’s version of the prayer runs five pages.71 In his ekph-
rasis of “The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” [Fig. 11.2], God’s question to
Adam (Genesis 3:9) and the first man’s answer (Genesis 3:10) are also elaborated
into longer speeches.72 A fictitious speech is also found in “Antiochus on his
deathbed” [Fig. 11.10], where the supplication of the dying king is much ampli-
fied (cf. 2 Maccabees 9:19–27).73 We might label these features of amplification

68 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 467.

69 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 468. The figure of David is explicitly evoked, and in
“The penitent King David” [Fig. 11.5] we find the exact same formulation, see Godeau, Les
Tableaux de la pénitence 89.
70 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 470.
71 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 115–120.
72 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 13–18.
73 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 238–242.
450 Nørgaard

as a rewriting of scripture, since they expand what is already part of the bibli-
cal account; they are hyperbolic but not pure inventions. Now we also ‘hear’
what Jonah preached to the Ninevites. Based on Jonah 3:4, Godeau extends a
single verse to a twelve-page discourse.74 Indeed, this speech is visualized on
the printed page, as quotation marks make it stand out: this spatialization of
words on the printed page makes us see words that were never spoken in but
are reconstructed from the biblical texts.75
To further appreciate this device, the ekphrasis of “John the Baptist”
[Fig. 11.11] is instructive. About the Vox Clamantis, we learn that the Baptist
‘n’ignore pas qu’il s’expose sur vne mer périlleuse […] il prevoit les combats
qu’il aura à soûtenir […] il connoist les mauvaises dispositions des auditeurs
ausquels il doit parler’ (was aware that he was exposing himself to a danger-
ous sea […] he foresaw the struggles that he would have to endure […] he
understood the bad dispositions of the listeners to whom he had to speak).76
Thus, Godeau highlights the cognitive operations that together spring from the
decision ‘d’estre la voix de son Maistre’ (to be the voice of his Master). Prior
to this interior ‘view’ into the depicted figure, Godeau’s ekphrasis had fixed
our eyes on the plate.77 Hereafter, it samples biblical texts and hagiographical
accounts, achieving amplification by a narrative rearticulation of the depicted
scene.78 This process allows Godeau to evoke another kind of visibility: we see
in and through the engraved scene to the interior dispositions that brought
John the Baptist to the banks of the river Jordan, and which manifest them-
selves in ‘vn discours qui surprend ses auditeurs aussi bien que l’austerité de
sa personne’ (a discourse that surprises his listeners as much as the austerity
of his appearance).79 Here, the effect of the figure’s visual appearance and the
effect of his words converge: the plate grants us access to an experience that
resembles how it was to listen to the Baptist’s words. When Godeau then pro-
ceeds to reproduce the Baptist’s preaching at the riverbank [Fig. 11.24],80 the
spatialization of these words on the printed page produces an image that, like
the engraved scene, demonstrates an interior state.

74 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 143–154.

75 This stylistic feature is also utilized in Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 111–115; 259–261.
76 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 267.
77 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 259–261.
78 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 261–266.
79 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 267.
80 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 268–274.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 451

figure 11.24 Visualization of Saint John the Baptist’s

words. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence (1656).
Paris, BnF Ms. D-7910, 268
© Bibliothèque nationale de
France

7 Exhortation

As we have seen, the distinction between silent image and speaking image is
fundamental to Godeau’s Tableaux. His method of ekphrasis convolutes the
logics of these two modes of image-making, and the imaging process unfolds
as a function of this convolution. However, the process itself is not Godeau’s
aim. Rather, his explication of the images is a steeping-stone towards another
mode of image-making. This mode is named an explication, which serves ‘les
porter à imiter, ou à fuyr l’exemple de ceux dont j’ay representé l’Histoire’ (to
452 Nørgaard

bring them [the readers] to imitate or avoid the example of those whose his-
tory I have represented).81 Here the epideictic focus seems clear: not limited
to its Aristotelian framework, this genus transcends the mere display of rhe-
torical skill; it facilitates a staging of the common good that binds individuals
together. In Godeau, this exemplarity absorbs the previous levels of descrip-
tion: ‘j’ai meslé de faux Penitents avec les bons, pour découvrir mieux la nature,
la cause, & les effects de la mauvaise Penitence, qui est bien plus commune
que la bonne’ (to better disclose the nature, the cause, and the consequences
of a flawed penitence – much more common than correct [penitence] – I have
mixed the false Penitents together with the true [Penitents]).82 The figure of
the penitent, true or false, embodies different responses to the virtues asso-
ciated with penitence: the depicted figurae cover a wide range of emotions,
which Godeau presents as exempla to the reader-viewer.
It is worth noticing how Godeau, in his initial explication of the plates,
remarks upon the ability of painters to imitate physical objects. Indeed, this
mimetic process constitutes the ‘charme secret’ (secret charme) of silent
painting and its signification.83 On the first level of ekphrasis, the plastic art
imitates physical objects, and the bishop’s words reproduce this imitative
function. The third level of ekphrasis facilitates a different kind of imitation,
where the figurae function as exempla. Accordingly, the bishop, in a sudden
turn of the narration, addresses the reader-viewers as ‘Pecheurs’ (sinners).84 In
“John the Baptist” [Fig. 11.11], this is followed by a long sequence of questions,85
the first of which asks: ‘Pécheurs, qui l’avez renié mille fois plus criminellement
que Saint Pierre, ne voulez-vous pas l’imiter en sa Pénitence?’ (Sinners, who
have denied him [Christ] in a manner one thousand times more criminal than
Saint Peter, do you not want to imitate him [Saint Peter] in his penitence?).86
This sudden shift or mode of turning away is a thought-figure, known as apos-
trophe and often used in epideictic discourse. This can also be found in “The
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” [Fig. 11.2]:

Enfans d’Adam, c’est vostre Père qui parle. Il ne se contente pas que vous
admiriez la main du Peintre dans le Tableau […] Il veut que vous profitiez

81 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [11].

82 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [10–11].
83 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 29.
84 See, e.g., Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 120, 186, 322, 338, 522.
85 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 470–478.
86 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 470.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 453

de ses conseils, & que vous les graviez si profondement dans vostre cœur
que iamais ils ne s’en effacent.87

Children of Adam, it is your father who speaks. It is not enough for him
that you should admire the hand of the painter in this image […] He
wants that you should profit from its teachings, and that these would be
so deeply engraved in your heart that they never fade away from it.

A similar operation is found in “The Deluge” [Fig. 11.3], where the construc-
tion ‘pourquoi voulez-vous’ (why do you want) engages the reader-viewers and
confronts them, as if face-to-face, with that which the image teaches.88 These
teachings, however, are not readily or immediately available. We cannot easily
see what the images teach: this instructive level lies beyond what the brush
paints and requires a further verbal amplification. Godeau’s exhortative mode
presupposes that access has been granted to the interior domain of the depicted
figures; the direct appeal to the viewer-reader is mimetically dynamic, in that
the figurae are transformed into exempla. Accordingly, Godeau remarks about
“Saint Peter Crying” [Fig. 11.19] that, when the cock crowed, the depicted figure
would recall his treachery and pray that this sound might one day no longer
afflict his heart and compel him to cry.89 This statement about the depicted
figure is then transposed into the scene where the reader-viewer is situated:

La voix des Coqs retentit tous les iours à vos oreilles. On vous parle inces-
sament de l’horreur de l’enfer, & de la severité des Iugemens de Dieu.
Mais ce n’est pas assez de ces voix, ou plutost de ces soudres que vous
entendrez; pour les entendre trop souvent, ils ne font point d’impression
sur vos esprits. Il faut donc que Iesus vous regarde […].90

Every day, the crow of the cocks retains in your ears: one constantly speaks
to you about the horror of hell and the severity of God’s Judgement, but
no voices, not even lighting-strikes, can make you listen; listened to too
often, they no longer make any impression upon your spirits. Accordingly,
it is necessary for Jesus to look at you.

87 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 24.

88 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 39.
89 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 469.
90 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 472.
454 Nørgaard

The hyperbolic comparison to lighting amplifies the process of seeing in

“Saint Peter Crying” [Fig. 11.19]: the Saint is seen at the very moment of betrayal,
when Christ observed him; the reader-viewer then ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ the interior
light that Peter bodies forth. Through explication of the plate, this illumination
is reconfigured and converted into a more generalized account of the experi-
ence of being seen by Christ. Detached from Saint Peter, the gaze of Christ
comes more fully alive:

Si vous recevez vn de ses regards, vous verrez en mesme temps l’horreur

de vos ingratitudes, l’abomination de vos plaisirs, le déreglement de
vostre conduite, l’erreur de vos anciennes Maximes, le peril de vostre
estat present, & le Malheur dont vn avenir infaillible vous menace.91

If you receive one glance, you will see, at the same time, the horror of
your ingratitude, the abomination of your pleasures, the disorder of your
behaviour, the mistake of your past maxims, the danger of your present
state, and the unhappiness with which a certain future threatens you.

In an instant, Christ freezes time. Past maxims, the pitfalls of a present state,
and the unhappy future come together in a single perception. Christ’s gaze,
elaborated by Godeau, allows the reader-viewer to see himself as a figura:
Saint Peter, as exemplum, becomes the instrument through which the spec-
tator turns into something that is seen by the image – by the eyes of Christ
who, in that instant, glanced at Peter in his betrayal. While the explication of
the engraved scene privileges word over image – the speaking painting over
the silent painting – the exhortation returns to the theme of visibility and,
seemingly, reverses the established sensorial hierarchy. It would seem that see-
ing and listening are found prefatory to a more pregnant moment of vision:
Christ must see the reader-viewer; the observer of the image must become the
observed.
The analogy between Saint Peter and the reader-viewer involves the imita-
tion of specific actions. We learn about the Saint that fearing the impulse to
dissimulate he decided to forestall speech. Words can be deceptive, but ‘le lan-
gage des larmes ne peut ester accusé de déguisement, il est plus fort que celuy
des prières’ (the language of tears cannot be accused of hiding something, it is
stronger than [the language] of prayers).92 Now, the ascription of salvific virtue

91 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 472–473.

92 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 474.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 455

to tears is well-known.93 In Godeau, however, tears amount to something more

than a passive manifestation of an affect. Crying constitutes a language, and
tears are visual signs that true penitents is utilized when expressing remorse;
to cry every day, instead of burning for an eternity, this is the cost-benefit anal-
ysis of the penitent sinner.94 Indeed, the reader-viewer is asked to consider the
following questions:

Pouvez-vous regarder le Ciel, & ne pleurer pas d’avoir perdu vne si belle
demeure? Pouvez-vous comtempler la luminere du Soleil, & ne pleurer
pas les tenebres où vous estes ensevelis? Pouves-vous observer le mouve-
ment si reglé de tous les Astres, & ne pleurer pas les desordres de vostre
vie? Pouvez-vous ietter les yeux sur la terre, & ne pleurer pas de ce que par
vos crimes vous y attirez la malediction de Dieu? Pouvez-vous arrester la
veuë sur la beauté mortelle d’vne femme, & ne pleurer pas de ce que vous
la preferez à la beauté immortelle de vostre Souverain?

Can you look at the sky, and not cry for having lost such a beautiful rest-
ing place? Can you contemplate the light of the sun, and not cry about
the shadows in which you are buried? Are you able to observe the move-
ment of all the stars that are so ordered, and not cry over your life’s dis-
order? Can you set your sight on earth, and not cry because your crimes
there make you attract the curse of God? Can you place your gaze upon
the timely beauty of a woman, and not cry because you prefer this over
the immortal beauty of our Lord?

Constructing the gaze of Christ, the reader-viewer discovers that nature has
become a broken mirror. In the spectacle the natural world offers up, the true
penitent finds no macrocosmic harmony but rather his microcosmos out of joint.

8 The Paradox of Vision

Returning to Richeome, his adaptation of the Augustinian framework allows

the engraved scene to speak in visual terms, before the narration of the
depicted story shows what the engraving is about, making it into a speaking
image. However, a third level of visuality must also be considered, a mode of

93 See, e.g., Nagy P., Le Don des larmes au Moyen Âge. Un instrument spirituel en quête
d’institution, V e–XIIIe siècle (Paris: 2000).
94 Cf. Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 477.
456 Nørgaard

seeing which no language, visual or verbal, can represent. Accordingly, the

figura in Richeome is also the receptacle of a more profound level of significa-
tion: it functions as a means of access to divine truth; a gateway to the ‘visio
intellectualis’. This move beyond both the phenomenological domain and the
historical domain must be seen in light of the theory of signs that Augustine
outlines in the De doctrina christiana.95 This theory views sign-making as a
voluntary operation that unfolds between ‘res propria’ (a thing, strictly speak-
ing) and ‘signum proprium’ (a sign, strictly speaking).96 First, Augustine distin-
guishes ‘signa naturalia’ (natural signs) from ‘res propriae’ – that is, from things
that, by themselves, do not signify. Natural signs exceed the delimited scope of
brute materiality; they consist of objects about which inferences can be and
are made. Smoke is a sign of fire, and animal tracks are a sign of animals. These
signs – smoke in the sky and tracks on the ground – are natural things and, as
such, do not inherently or intentionally signify anything: the ‘visio corpora-
lis’ sees something as something, and thereby likeness is created. This kind of
natural signification, an integral part of everyday cognition, is distinguished
from, on the one hand, the silent world of things and, on the other hand, the
world of ‘signa propria’. The latter type of signs has lost almost all connection
to the natural world: they are pure conventions and function solely to signify
something. In this regard, a ‘visio imaginaria’ is created out of memory and
reconfigures past perceptions into something new.
Mediating between these extremes, the ‘signum translatum’ maintains its
nature as an object – it is a material trace of something – but it also signifies
something that has no material expression. Thus, the transferred or transferring
sign is a hinge between the world of things – what our senses perceive – and
the signification of things – what our mind sees and understands. Augustine
also defines this as a third ‘genus visionis’ (kind of vision), which operates
‘secumdum mentis intuitum’ (according to a gaze of the mind), and through
which ‘intellecta conspiciuntur veritas atque sapientia’ (truth and wisdom are
observed and thereby understood).97 This ‘visio intellectualis’ is different from
both the ‘visio corporalis’ and the ‘visio imaginaria’, and Richeome labels it
a mystery. To approach the invisible and the unsayable, the Jesuit invites the
reader-viewer first to see and to listen; through the interplay of seen and heard
descriptions, the reader-viewer penetrates to what is implicitly, not explicitly,

95 To the following outline, see Gramigna R., Augustine’s theory of signs, signification, and
lying, Semiotics of Religion 3 (Berlin: 2020) 98–142.
96 The ‘signum’ is a kind of ‘res’ that causes us to move beyond the impression that the
‘res’ makes upon the senses. It follows that all signs are things, but not all things, within
Augustine’s framework, are signs.
97 Augustine, “Contra Adimantum” 370.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 457

signified by means of simile, metaphor, and analogy. Ekphrasis, on this inter-

pretation, is about ‘sacrée peinture non de couleurs ou de paroles, mais de
signification’ (sacred painting not of colours or words but of signification).98
This level of image-making ‘est autrement nommee Allegorie, peinture &
exposition mystique, contenant en soy un sens spirituel, cogneu aux gens spi-
rituels, & caché aux grossiers’ (is also called allegory, a mystical painting or
exposition, and it contains in itself a spiritual sense known to spiritual men
and hidden to the crude).99 Here, the Jesuit evokes the distinction between the
literal meaning and the spiritual sense, identifying the latter with an allegorical
interpretation: the third level of ekphrasis penetrates the literal or corporeal
level of meaning, disclosing an object’s spiritual sense; as such the object is
seen merely to capture a small portion of an infinite space, making this infinity
apprehensible.
Richeome’s appeal to allegory is chiefly apologetic: it enables him to defend
the use of images and to maintain the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist
through the mystery of transubstantiation. In this regard, he evokes Augustine’s
sign-theory with a clear focus on its tendency towards neo-platonic idealism:
the spiritual sense is the idea or interior form, which reveals the truth and
thereby confirms the material world of images; the literal meaning of a figura
is the pathway to its spiritual sense. We might therefore speak of three ways of
understanding one and the same image: a thing can be described as a painting
in three senses, because it presents itself as an object to our perception (the
phenomenological level), as an object that belongs to a historical situation (the
narrative level), and as an object that moves beyond what we can know and
points towards spiritual realities (the symbolic level). The latter type of objec-
tivation facilitates understanding, wherefore Augustine maintains that ‘visio
corporalis’ and ‘visio imaginaria’ presupposes ‘visio intellectualis’. This holds
true even in those instances when the viewer cannot explicate what principle
lies behind his perceptions and memories: disparate and temporary construc-
tions imply a global unity and an eternal harmony. Godeau’s Tableaux de la
penitence clearly evokes this three-pronged approach to images, but refrains
from any attempt to expound sacred mysteries: it does not engage in allegori-
cal constructions or anagogical speculations. Instead, Godeau aims to exhort
sinners, and his ekphrasis thus remains within the limits of tropology. What
does this entail with regard to the ‘visio intellectualis’? If not a mystery, if not a
suspension of all physical reality, then what does Godeau’s exhortation imply
about the function of images?

98 Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 5–6.

99 Richeome, Tableaux sacrez 5.
458 Nørgaard

In his prefatory statement, Godeau highlights that his ekphrastic design

has a quality of ‘douceur’ (sweetness). Moreover, ekphrasis constitutes a
way of communicating a difficult message by penetrating the soul of viewer-
readers: instead of rehearsing ‘raisonnemens qui eussent trop attaché l’esprit
des Lecteurs’ (arguments that would have been too attached to the spirit of
readers), this stylistic feature allows Godeau to persuade without making his
reader-viewers ‘apercevoir que ie les vueille (sic!) convaincre’ (aware that I want
to convince them).100 About this flowering style that constitues the genus of
epideictic speech, Godeau further remarks that it:

[…] est plus fleurissant, qu’il ne semble que la sévérité de mon sujet le
demande. Mais j’ay essayé de détremper dans cette douceur l’amertume
des Percepts que ie donne; et j’ay parfumé, s’il m’est permis de parler
ainsi, la lancette que ie veux enfoncer bien avant dans la conscience des
percheurs.101

is more ornate than what, given the severity of my topic, seems appropri-
ate. For I have tried, by all this sweetness, to water down the bitter taste of
the precepts that I present, and, if it be allowed for me to speak like this,
I have sprayed perfume on the lancet that I want to plunge deep into the
conscience of sinners.

About such ‘delectio’, Godeau further remarks that ‘le Diable pour pousser les
hommes dans le precipice du Peche, le couvre de fleurs agreables’ (the Devil,
to push man down the precipice of sin, covers [sin] with beautiful flowers).102
Rhetorically, Godeau asks ‘pourquoy ne nous sera-t-il pas permis couvrir de
mesme le Tombeau de la Penitence, où nous voulons enfermer les pecheurs,
afin de les faire revivre d’une vie qu’ils ne perdent iamais’ (why, then, would it
not be allowed for us, in like manner, to cover the tomb of penitence, where we
want to enclose the sinners and from there resurrect them to a life that they
will never lose).103 The images and their engagement with eyesight are flow-
ers on a tomb; they are the means whereby to lure readers by turning them
into viewers. As such, Godeau’s book, though it shines a light on the process
of image-making, endeavours to put this process to strategic use: it targets
the reasons behind different kinds of actions, which it aims to visualize. With

100 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [14].

101 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [12].
102 See Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [15].
103 See Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [15].
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 459

certain reservations, Michel de Marolles (1600–1681) pursued similar goals in

his Tableaux du Temple de Muses.104 Moreover, Godeau’s epideictic approach
comes close to works by Jesuit authors: the Peintures morales by Pierre Le
Moyen (1602–1670) was one of several important forerunners,105 while Antoine
Girard (1604–1679) in his Peintures sacrées sur la Bible follows a path strikingly
similar to Godeau’s.106 These works use ekphrasis not to reveal and dwell on
the sacramental mystery of forgiveness, but to penetrate and puncture the
heart of sinners.
The title page of the Tableaux de la pénitence depicts an architectural memo-
rial [Fig. 11.1], upon which two cherubs sit one on each side. In their hands, they
hold what appear to be flagella, a stem of hyssop (cf. John 19:29), and nails;
these instruments are part of the ‘Arma Christi’ (Weapons of Christ) and evoke
the suffering and victory of Jesus. Between the two cherubs, a laurel skull sits
on an elevated platform, which again connects death with victory. Seated in
front of the architectural edifice, the figures of Peter and David gaze towards
the banderole that unfolds from the cherubs’ hands. Inscribed on the cloth is
the title of the book, the name of its author, and, in the shape of drops, the
nine fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23). Next to Peter rest a book and
a key, while a harp stands next to David, whose scepter and crown lie on the
ground. The unfurling banderole covers the tomb and, in one possible reading,
screens or liberates Peter and David from the experiential horrors of the peni-
tence they have undergone. Moreover, they appear to delight in the display of
the banderole. Their line of sight is directed neither towards the instruments
of the Passion nor the skull. Indeed, the King and the Apostle, rather than gaz-
ing at the tomb, take pleasure in the covering over of the grave of penitence:
the ekphrastic compositions of the Tableaux de la pénitence likewise aim to
delight the reader-viewer, mediating access to the horrors of sin and the ardu-
ousness of penitence ekphrasis covers over what is ultimately revealed. Word
and image enclose reader-viewers within a grave, helping them to understand
that, without divine assistance, there is no escape, and that heavenly aid is the
source of true delight.

104 De Marolles Michel, Tableaux du Temple de Muses tirez du cabinet de feu Mr Favereau
(Paris, A. de Sommaville: 1655).
105 Le Moyen Pierre, Les Peintures morales, où les passions sont representees par tableaux, par
characteres, et par questions nouvelles et curieuses (Paris, Sebastien Cramoisy: 1640); idem,
Les Peintures morales, second partie de la doctrine des passions où il est traitté de l’Amour
naturel et de l’Amour divin, et les plus belles matieres de la Morale Chrestienne sont expli-
quées (Paris, Sebastien Cramoisy: 1643).
106 Girard Antoine, Les Peintures sacrées sur la Bible (Paris, A. de Sommaville: 1653).
460 Nørgaard

In “King Nebuchadnezzar” [Fig. 11.8], Godeau draws attention to the golden

statue in the background (cf. Daniel 3:1–7), describing it as the figure of the king
who kneels in the foreground.107 Following this identification, we are asked to
consider the facial features of the statue ‘sur qui l’orgueil semble ester visible’
(upon which pride seems to be visible).108 Joining the crowd that surrounds
the colossus and adores it, the reader-viewer sees something different: we are
positioned with the viewers in the image but yet given a different perspec-
tive. We are told that members of the king’s court chased him into the wilder-
ness (cf. Daniel 4:28–33), because he, after God revealed his ferocious nature,
became unrecognizable to them: the satraps and the domestics drove him off,
taking the king for ‘vn bæuf comme il en a la figure à leurs yeux’ (an ox, as he
appeared to their eyes).109 The first kind of seeing, which involves adoration of
a golden statue, is an act of idolatry, where the sinner worships his own image.
The second version of the king, not a statue, to be sure, but more animal than a
person, is presented as ‘le premier degré de la Pénitence Chrétienne’ (the first
degree of Christian penitence). By withdrawing from the worldly sphere, the
penitent becomes unrecognizable to the world. In this state of withdrawal, a
third kind of image-making unfolds:

Les images du passé sont pour luy des spectres effroyables qui glacent
son song dans ses veines, qui luy font hérisser les cheveux […] qui trou-
blent son imagination, qui confondent son raisonment, & qui le feroient
mourir de frayeur & de desespoir; si en mesme temps l’esperence, en la
misericorde de son Iuge ne les soûtenoit.110

To him, the images of the past are horrifying specters that make the blood
in his veins freeze and his hairs stand up […] they trouble his imagination
and confound his reasoning: [these images of the past] could make him
die of fear and despair, if, at the same time, the hope in his judge’s mercy
had not sustained them.

Penitence results from engagement with the past and from the visualization of
mortifying events in the ‘phantasia’. The first order of self-image is public – it is
the public persona of the individual – while self-negation, in Godeau, requires
a second-order process of image-making. Here penitence is described,

107 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 165.

108 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 165.
109 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 176.
110 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 183.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 461

metaphorically, as a house, where the penitent ‘voit rien qui content la veuë’
(sees nothing that pleases the gaze).111 Indeed, the eyes find no beautiful fur-
niture, rare curiosities, or other kinds of luxury: the ‘tableaux qui s’y trouvent
ne representent que des tombeaux, des ossements de morts, le Tribunal d’vn
Iuge en colere […]’ (paintings that are found there represent only tombs, the
bones of the dead, the court of an angry Judge).112 Such meta-pictorial refer-
ences make penitence contingent on the production of mental images. Indeed,
the reader-viewer is inscribed into a process of image-making: he sees himself
in the light of the depicted figures that are brought alive through ekphrasis.
The ‘visio intellectualis’, then, directs the eye not towards what it does not
see – a higher mode of seeing – but towards that which the eye, while seeing,
cannot actually see: it dissociates the eye from itself; it sees nothing in all the
splendour of the world that is actually splendid; the self finds nothing in itself
that is worthy of positive affirmation. Although the human desire to see, the
appetite for the world of images, is not in itself sinful, it can become a locus
of perversion: the corrupted ‘spiritus’ can conjure up all kinds of desires that
correspond to objects in the physical world. The eye of penitence sees these
machinations for what they are – illusions. The vision of the compunctive man
pierces the surface of objects and sees that they are nothing.113

9 The Process of Image-Building

Imaginary vividness, phantasmatic in character, is opposed to a kind of picto-

rial liveliness that Godeau also evokes. In “The Expulsion from the Garden of
Eden” [Fig. 11.2], he isolates many key elements and remarks upon their dis-
tribution and relations: he states that ‘le Peintre’ (the painter) has deployed
‘tous les secrets de son art’ (all the secrets of his art form), presenting this loca-
tion as ‘le plus agreeable objet du monde à la veuë’ (as the object in the world
most agreeable to the gaze).114 About “The Crossing of the Red Sea” [Fig. 11.4],
the bishop states: ‘L’art y a fait tous ses efforts, & il y trompe les yeux si par-
faitement, qu’ils croyent voir les choses mesme, & non pas leur representation’
(Here, art has deployed all its efforts and so perfectly deceives the eye that it
believes to see the things themselves and not their representation).115 In “The

111 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 401.

112 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 402.
113 To this image of vision as oriented towards the eternal unity and earthly nothingness, see
Didi-Huberman G., Phasmes. Essais sur l’apparition I (Paris: 1998) 121–136.
114 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 3–4.
115 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 53.
462 Nørgaard

Babylonian Exile” [Fig. 11.8], the author states: ‘Il ne se peut rien voir de plus
agréable que ce païsage, l’herbe de ces prez est si verte & si fraiche, qu’elle
semble plutost croistre dans ce Tableau qu’y ester representée’ (There is noth-
ing more enjoyable to see than this landscape: in the foreground, the grass is
so green and so fresh that it seems rather to be growing than being represented
within this painting).116 This notion of living presence conveys how the art-
work comes alive for the viewer. Godeau communicates this liveliness to his
viewer-readers, but we, facing the engravings, have no direct access to visual
qualities such as the greenness of grass. Indeed, Godeau often evokes ele-
ments that cannot be seen in the actual plates. This absence holds true for his
description of “The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” [Fig. 11.2] and about
“The Penitent Thief” [Fig. 11.19] Godeau makes the general remark that: ‘[t]out
ce que l’art de la Peinture peut faire de plus achevé, parait en la posture du
corps de notre Seigneur, attaché sur la Croix’ (everything that the art of paint-
ing can accomplish appears in the posture of our Lord, fixed to the cross).117
More specifically, he asks us to notice how:

Les veines ne paroissent pas fort grosses, à cause que tout le sang en
est presque sorty dans la flagellation. L’estomach est enflé & les costes
qu’on pourroit aisément compter sont hors de leur place. Le visage est
d’vn homme mourant, & qui soufre des douleurs estranges. Il est presque
tout couvert de poussiere meslée de sang, & toutefois on ne laisse pas
d’y découvrir vne douceur si majestueuse, & un air si triste & si haut
tout-ensemble, qu’on ne peut le regarder sans ester touché de pitié, &
de respect. Les yeux sont à demy fermez, la bouche entr’ouverte, la teste
pend un peu sur vne espaule, & l’on iuge aisément qu’il est prest à rendre
l’esprit.118

The veins do not stand out too much, because almost all blood had left
[the body] after [its] flagellation; the stomach is swollen; the ribs, easily
enumerable, are out of place; the face is the face of a man dying and suf-
fering unknown pains; he is almost totally covered in dust mixed with
blood. Nevertheless, one cannot find a sweetness more majestic, [one
cannot find] any such air that is both sad and elevated: one cannot see
him without being touched by piety and respect. The eyes are half-closed,

116 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 193.

117 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 485.
118 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 485–486.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 463

mouth ajar, head slightly resting on a shoulder: it is easily recognizable

that he is about to give up the spirit.

This description of the suffering body of Christ fits poorly with what we see in
the actual plate: the crucified Lord’s arms and legs are not bound; the body is
not covered in a mix of dust and blood; his eyes are not half-closed; his mouth,
on the other hand, seems completely closed; the head is turned to the right but
not in a resting position. As a matter of fact, the depicted face shows little pain.
In the prefatory statement, Godeau engages with such apparent flaws:

[…] comme i’en ay fait les desseins aussi bien que les discours, il ne faut
pas s’estonner si les Graveurs ont oublié beaucoup de choses en ceux-là,
qui se trouvent en ceux-cy, n’ayant pû, ou n’ayant pas creu devoir mettre
dans leurs planches, toutes les particularites que j’avois observées.119

[…] since I have created the designs as well as the discourses, it can come
as no surprise if the engravers have forgotten many things in the former
[the designs], which are in the latter [the discourses]: they were either
unable, or they did not find it necessary to include all the specific ele-
ments that I had observed [in the paintings].

Preemptively, the author counters a critic of his work. Godeau acknowledges

that the content of some of his descriptions might match poorly with the
engraved scenes. Ascribing this discrepancy to a mistake of the engraver, we
should nevertheless consider a more subtle interpretation. The first level of
ekphrasis retraces what we see in the plates, and, more specifically, Godeau
makes us see the painter’s intention: he elucidates a hidden set of choices that
makes what we see come to life as an artifact. By enhancing the reader-viewer’s
experience of the work of art as something inanimate that, suddenly, becomes
animate, he makes painterly skill all the more apparent. Godeau now claims
to have provided the designs used by the engravers to make their plates. Now,
it lies beyond our focus to attempt a reconstruction of the paintings upon
which the bishop based his designs. Nevertheless, it is important to maintain
that the ekphrases in the Tableaux de la penitence originated in their author’s
experience of a series of paintings: the plates substitute for these works of art.
Accordingly, one further image-making exercise lies at the heart of the bish-
op’s book. What we see is based upon Godeau’s past perception of paintings,
and it is this mnemonic trace that informed the designs which were in turn

119 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [11].

464 Nørgaard

transmitted to the engravers and, as engraved images, were put on display for
the reader-viewer.
In conjunction with the various stages of ekphrastic image-making, Godeau
often entices the reader-viewer to consider particular elements in the engraved
scenes. For example, he invites us to consider the depicted tulips, anemones,
buttercups, and roses in “The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” [Fig. 11.2].120
About the golden statue of Nabuchadnezzer, he states how that painter has
represented all the king’s facial features and urges the reader-viewer to con-
sider this face and how it shows overweening pride.121 Such direct appeals
form part and parcel of the construction of the visual field: spatial deixis assists
in the re-composition of the engraved scene.122 However, such appeals are also
issued with reference to the second level of ekphrasis. In his treatment of “The
Good Samaritan” [Fig. 11.16], the author remarks:

Après avoir contenté vos yeux par la veüe des merveilles de la main du
Peintre en cet admirable Tableau, il faut que vous arrestiez vos esprits à la
considération des veritez qu’il vous enseigne. Vous y avec plus d’interest
que vous ne pensez, puis que c’est vostre histoire que le Saint Esprit a
déguisée sous cette admirable Parabole.123

Having feasted your eyes on the display of wonders from the painter’s
hand, you have to settle your spirits and consider the truths that it [the
image] teaches. In this, you will have more to gain than you think, because
it is your story that the Holy Spirit has disguised in this admirable parable.

Here, consideration moves beyond the visual field and de- or further recom-
poses what we see. As a physical object, the plate speaks to the eyes: the painter’s
hand has created something for the ‘visio corporalis’ to behold and represent
as an object of perception. In a second engagement, the reader-viewer must
reconsider what has just been seen, moving beyond the pictorial composition

120 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 5.

121 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 165.
122 For such uses of ‘considérer’/ ‘considération’, see, e.g., Godeau, Les Tableaux de la péni-
tence 193, 278, 335. In the Dictionaire universel, the first entry on the verb matches this
usage: ‘S’attacher à regarder avec attention, à examiner quelque chose’ (to focus on, care-
fully looking at or examining something), Furetière Antoine, “CONSIDERER”, Dictionaire
universel, contenant généralement tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes, et les
termes de toutes les sciences et des arts 3 vols. (La Haye – Rotterdam, Arnout & Renier
Leers: 1690) vol. 1, Unpag. [319] col. 1.
123 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 388.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 465

and turning towards the depicted story. This story, however, takes the form of a
parabolic image in the image, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Godeau
therefore invites the reader-viewer to penetrate the surface of what has just
been seen and to instead ‘see’ what is implicit rather than explicit. About “The
Crossing of the Red Sea” [Fig. 11.4], Godeau further elaborates upon this punc-
tuation of the visual field: ‘C’est tout ce qu’il [le Peintre] nous peut dire; Mais
l’Historie Sainte en fait un Tableau vivant, qui merite beaucoup mieux d’estre
observé que le sien’ (This is everything that [the painter] can tell us, while the
sacred history here creates a living painting which, much more than the former
[painting], merits to be observed).124 Like Richeome, Godeau completes what
appears as a reversal of the senses. The painter’s artifact speaks to and engages
with the auditive sense, but, as such, it can only say so much. Returned to its
original context, the represented scene becomes a living painting: sacred his-
tory paints images that merit special attention. About “Saint John the Baptist”
[Fig. 11.11], we thus learn that ‘la parole vivante’ (living language) must support
‘les couleurs mortes’ (the lifeless colours). Without such a system of support,
the spirit might esteem the depicted figure as such, while failing truly to know
what the eyes have seen. Indeed, considered attention allows the reader-viewer
to see past the Baptist’s superficial features, to understand his figurative place
within a larger constellation of themes.
The Latin considerare connotes both a first-order meaning – that is, carefully
looking at something – and a second-order meaning that signifies ‘to reflect
upon’ something.125 In his immensely popular Libro de la oración y meditación,
Luis de Granada (1504–1588) had also utilized ‘consideracion’ as a specific
operation of the spirit.126 This book supplies fourteen exercises, allocated to
the mornings and evenings of every weekday. Each day, the votary moves from
fear of punishment to introspection: the penitential prayers of the evening are
a medium, an apparatus, whereby to see oneself as another and better man.127

124 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 62.

125 In the Dictionaire universel, the second and third entries on “CONSIDERER” encapsulate
the latter sense of the term: ‘signifie aussi, faire reflexion […] signifie encore, Estimer une
chose pour sa valeur, pour son merite’ (also means, to reflect upon something […] further-
more it means, to estime the value and merit of something), Furetière, “CONSIDERER”,
Dictionaire universel Vol. 1, Unpag. [319] col. 1.
126 De Granada Luis, Libro de la oración y meditacion: en el qual se trata de la Consideracion de
los principals mysterios de nuestra Fe, con otras cosas provechosas (Salamanca, Andrea de
Portonariis: 1554).
127 To these exercises, see Granada, Libro de la oración y meditacion 17–233, cf. Melion W.S.,
The Meditative Art. Studies in Northern Devotional Print 1550–1625 (Philadelphia: 2009)
265; De Boer W., “Figments of the Imagination: Medical and Moral Discourses on Love in
the Counter-Reformation” in Melion W.S. – Zell M. – Woondall J. (eds.), Ut pictura amor:
466 Nørgaard

In these exercises, the Dominican friar distinguishes imaginary from intellec-

tual meditation: the former targets ‘cosas que se pueden figurar con la imagina-
cion’ (things that may be figured with the imagination), while the latter focuses
on ‘cosas que pertenescen mas al entendimiento que á la imaginacion’ (things
that pertain more to understanding than to the imagination).128 These differ-
ent things, however, are integrated into each exercise: the perceptual abilities
of the votary combine both efforts in meditation: ‘Y de la vna y de la otra sol-
emos vsar en estos ejercicios, segun que la materia de las cosas lo requiere’
(and we often use both in these exercises according to the matter of the things
that [the exercise] requires).129 Consideration unfolds when the meditative
process utilizes an object like a pictorial image or a gathering of bound texts,
transgresses this object’s physical features or literal meaning; a more complex
mental image is substituted for these features. In later editions of the Libro de
la oración y meditación, an expanded version of the opening chapter has the
title ‘De la utilidad y necessidad de la Consideracion’ (On the usefulness and
necessity of consideration).130 Luis de Granada first shows how the intellec-
tual act of consideration incorporates faith, hope, and charity.131 For instance,
faith ‘nos enseña, cómo hay otra vida despues desta, y juicio vniversal de todas
nuestras obras […]’ (teaches us how there is another life after this and a Final
Judgment of all our actions). These teachings leave believers ‘vivir en temor de
Dios’ (to live in the fear of God),132 but the Dominican invites believers also to
reconfigure this passionate state of fear:

Mas para que esta fe obre en nosotros este efecto, es menester que algu-
nas veces nos pongamos á rumiar y considerar con vn poco de atencion y
devocion eso que nos enseña la fe. Porque no habiendo esto, parece que
la fe nos sería come vna carta cerrada y sellada, que vengan en ella nue-
vas de grandisima pena ó alegria: no nos mauve à lo uno ni à lo otro mas

The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, Intersections 48 (Leiden:
2017) 28–56 (48–52).
128 Granada, Libro de la oración y meditacion 240–240v.
129 Granada, Libro de la oración y meditacion 240v.
130 See, e.g., De Granada Luis, Libro de la oración y meditacion: en el qual se trata de la
Consideracion de los principals mysterios de nuestra Fe, con otras cosas provechosas
(Salamanca, Por les herederos de Mathias Gast: 1579) 1–13. In the first edition, this chap-
ter is entitled ‘De la virtud y excelencias de la Oracion’ (On the virtue and excellence of
prayer), Granada Louis, Libro de la oración y meditacion (1554) 8v–13v.
131 See Granadas, Libro de la oración y meditacion (1579) 2–6.
132 See Granada, Libro de la oración y meditacion (1579) 2, col. II.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 467

que si nada hubiésemos recebido; porque no habemos abierto la carta, ni

mirado lo que viene en ella.133

However, and since faith produces such an effect in us, we must some-
times ruminate and consider with some attention and devotion what
faith teaches us. Because without [such rumination and consideration],
it seems faith would be to us like a closed and sealed letter from which
might come great sorrow or joy: yet neither one moves us any more or any
less than if we had received no letter at all; we have neither opened the
letter nor looked at what things are contained in it.

In early modern France, many spiritual authors utilized this notion of consid-
eration as an act of understanding that redirects the perceptive apparatus.134
Moreover, this intellectual effort potentially turns the image and its depicted
story into merely accessory circumstances: consideration privileges the hidden
levels of spiritual meaning that can be discerned but are not readily available.
French authors systematically avoided granting too much attention to mate-
rial details in images or to the stories that they evoke: intellectual aspirations
reduce the complex overlaying of text and image to condensed points of con-
tact, which guide the reader-viewer’s engagement with the image. This is cer-
tainly true for Richeome’s Tableaux sacrez, and a similar displacement is found
in Godeau’s Tableaux de la pénitence. As we have seen, however, the initial re-
composition of the engraved plates moves from what eyes see – the object – to
a reconstruction of what the painter wants us to see – the intention. As he
negotiates between object and intention, the bishop transitions to narrating
the story that the plates depict. The next stage of his ekphrasis, however, is not
confined to a specific subsection of the biblical text. Rather than simply nar-
rating facts, he treats the depicted scenes as fragments of a much larger whole:
the notion of fragmentation or decomposition situates the visual particulars
in a relation to the overarching narrative from which they derive; moreover,
these particulars are used to evoke interior states and motivations, and confer
vividness on them. Finally, explication or exposition leads to exhortation of
the reader-viewer: in a meta-figura, the nothingness of all human figurations

133 See Granada, Libro de la oración y meditacion (1579) 2–3, col. I.

134 Thus, François de Sales (1567–1622) discusses the ‘Seconde Partie de la Méditation’ (the
second part of meditation) under the heading of ‘Des Considérations’ (On consider-
ations), cf. De Sales François, “Introduction à la Vie Dévote” in Œuvres, ed. A. Ravier (Paris:
1969) 86–87. The Salisian framework for consideration is further elaborated in Camus
Jean-Pierre, Direction à l’oraison mentale (Paris, Claude Chappelet: 1617) 397–478.
468 Nørgaard

becomes apparent, and this apparency serves as an exemplum: it is this interior

realization that Godeau’s ekphrasis paints before our eyes.

10 Epilogue

Allow me to elaborate upon this focus on interiority by addressing the penul-

timate plate in Godeau’s book, “Saint Magdalene in her Cave” [Fig. 11.22]. The
preceding twenty engravings depict biblical figures, and within this chronol-
ogy the depiction of the Magdalene moves the reader-viewer beyond biblical
events. The Saint’s arrival at Sainte-Baume is difficult to corroborate histori-
cally, but it certainly took place after the timeline of the Gospels; this site of
intense penitence and contemplation is a matter of hagiography.135 Of course,
Godeau is well aware of this:

Ne voyant plus sur la terre celuy qui faisoit toutes ses ioyes par sa présence,
elle eust bien desire d’en sortir ; mais n’ayant pas obtenu cette grace, elle
voulut demeurer dans le monde, & le quitter en mesme temps ; conserver
sa vie, & toutefois estre morte.136

When no longer able to see him that, on earth, gave her all her joys by
his presence, she very much had the desire to die, but, having not been
awarded with this grace, she preferred both to remain in and to leave
behind the world: to conserve her life and always be dead.

Godeau proceeds to argue, first, that the Gospel of Luke narrates all the reasons
behind the depicted figure’s conversion.137 On a blanket, partially covered by
her long hair and contemplating the cross, Godeau refers Magdalene back to
the biblical account, because the biblical authors corroborate the Saint’s peni-
tential exercises.138 As a second argument, Godeau mentions how the Church
and many illustrious authors have confirmed that the Saint withdrew to the

135 See, e.g., Voragine Jacobus de, Legenda Aurea vulgo Historia Lombardica dicta, ed. T. Grässe
(Dresden: 1846) XCII, 407–417.
136 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 551.
137 Cf. Godeau “Preface”, Unpag. [9–10].
138 The reference is to Luke 7:36–50 and, specifically, to the answer to Simon: ‘Therefore,
I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love’
(Luke 7:47), cf. Godeau, Tableaux 549.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 469

mountain ridge in Southern France, where she lived in stern penitence.139

Within the overall chronology of ekphrastic compositions, the visualization
of Mary Magdalene moves beyond the first sequence of twenty engravings,
but the author attempts strategically to keep a chronological order intact. Why
such an attempt?

L’Histoire des Peres du desert escrite par divers Autheurs, fournit des
exemples de Penitence plutost admirables qu’imitables, & qui par les
choses extraordinaires qu’ils contiennent sont devenus plus propre pour
exciter la risée des gens du monde, que pour les toucher, & pour les con-
vaincre : Mais l’authorité des livres Canoniques est respectée de tous ceux
qui se disent Chrestiens, & on ne peut sans impieté accuser de foiblesse,
ou de folie, ceux que le Sainct Esprit pousse à faire des choses extraordi-
naires pour expier les désordres de leur vie passée.140

The history of the desert fathers, as recounted by many authors, supplies

examples of a mode of penitence that is easier to admire than to imitate.
For these stories contain extraordinary things that have made them [the
desert fathers] more suited to make people laugh than to touch and per-
suade individuals in the world. However, everybody who calls themselves
Christian respect the canonical books, and it would be impious to impute
weakness or foolishness to those individuals whom the Holy Spirit com-
pels to accomplish extraordinary things and thereby atone for the unruli-
ness of their past life.141

After the Reformation, the Tridentine Council actively sought to redefine the
cult of Saints, converting their heroic deeds into pious models for imitation.142

139 In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Magdalene was the topic of numerous,
devotional works. To mention but a few of such works: De Nostredame César, Les Perles
ou les larmes de Sainte Madeleine (Aix, Jean Tholosan: 1601); Balin Jean, Poème héroïque
de Sainte Madeleine (Paris, Étienne Prévosteau: 1607); id., Les Amours de la Magdeleine
où l’amour divin triomphe de celuy du monde (Paris, Nicolas Rousset: 1618); D’Arbaud de
Porcheres François, La Madeleine pénitente (Paris, Toussaint du Bray: 1627); Cotin Charles,
La Magdeleine qui cherche Jésus Christ au sépulchre (Paris, Jacques du Gast: 1635).
140 Godeau “Preface”, Unpag. [8–9].
141 The implicit reference is to 1 Corinthians 1:25.
142 To this, see Burke P., The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception
and Communication (Cambridge: 1987) 48–62. To the increasing importance of heroic val-
ues during the pontificate of Urban VII (1623–1644), see also De Maio R., “L’ideal eroico
nei processi di canonizzazione della Controriforma”, Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa
(1972) 799–822.
470 Nørgaard

Superhuman acts of sainthood were enshrined as exemplary. However, Godeau

informs us that the desert fathers, as ideal models of penitence, had fallen prey
to the criticism of his contemporaries: their extraordinary deeds had lost the
power to persuade and had instead become a laughing matter. It is to counter
such ridicule that the author focuses on canonical texts. Thus, the first twenty
engravings in the Tableaux show scenes from Scripture, and the twenty-first
engraving, while clearly depicting an extra-biblical event, anchors it to biblical
narrative. This strong focus on canonical texts tells us something important
about Godeau’s intended reader-viewers: they are ‘les gens du monde’ (the peo-
ple of the world) to whom the desert fathers no longer appeal. Furthermore,
Godeau reminds us:

Les malheureuses contestations qui depuis quelques années troublent

l’Eglise, sont cause qu’aussi tost qu’en Chaire on parle l’ancien langage
des Saincts Peres sur ce sujet, le Peuple qui veut marcher par une voye
large & aisée, crie à la nouveauté, & à l’erreur, & marque d’un nom odieux
de Secte, ceux qui en sont tres-esloignes […].

For some years, the unfortunate debates that continue to trouble the
Church have been the cause why, as soon as anyone speaks from the pul-
pit about this topic [penitence] in the old language of the Fathers, people
cry out ‘novelty’ and ‘error’, because they want to follow a path wide and
easy: they use the awful name of ‘sect’ about those individuals that are so
very far from this […]

This historical reference connects to the debate over penitence that arose
after Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) published De la fréquente communion.143 In
response, the Jesuit Denis Pétau (1583–1652) wrote a treatise on public penance,
which argued for the historical contingent nature of this practice.144 Arnauld
retaliated by rehearsing what we might call a rigorist stance: all Christians,
in acts of penitence, were to follow the standards of the Saints.145 During an

143 Arnauld Antoine, De la fréquent communion, où les sentiments des Pères, des Papes et des
Conciles, touchant l’usage des Sacrements de Pénitence & d’Eucharistie, sont fidèlement
exposez : pour servir d’adressé aux personnes qui pensent sérieusement à se convertir à
DIEU ; & aux Pasteurs et Confesseurs zelez pour le bien des Ames (Paris, Antoine Vitré:
1643).
144 Pétau Denis, De la Penitence Publique et de la préparation à la communion (Paris, Gabriel
Cramoisy: 1644).
145 Arnauld Antoine, La Tradition de l’Eglise sur le sujet de la pénitence et de la communion:
representée dans les plus excellens Ouvrages des SS. Peres Grecs & Latins, Et des auteurs
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 471

earlier configuration of these debates, Godeau had been involved in the so-
called ‘affaire of Séguenot’.146 The prefatory statement to the 1656-edition
should thus be situated within the context of the papal bull Cum occasione
(31 May 1653), wherein Pope Innocent X (r. 1644–1655) condemned five propo-
sitions of the Augustinus (1640) by Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638). In this situ-
ation, Godeau’s ekphrastic apparatus focuses on the sacramental sense of
penitence and displaces its meaning from the social world to an interior, psy-
chological realm – from public to private. Further specifying the context of his
book, Godeau relates it to a particular experience:

En l’année 1652, je l’ouvris [le chemin royal de la pénitence] aux Parisiens

dans les sermons que je fis durant le Carême, en l’Église des Prêtres de
l’Oratoire, & j’accommodai à ce sujet tous les Evangiles de la Semaine.
C’était un temps où la Justice de Dieu paraissait si visiblement allu-
mée contre la France, & particulièrement contre la Ville de Paris, par la
calamité de la guerre civile qui en avait chassé le Roi ; que si jamais le dis-
cours de la Pénitence avait été nécessaire, & dû être agréablement reçu,
c’était sans doute en cette malheureuse conjoncture. Dieu me donna un
grand nombre d’Auditeurs, mais je ne vis pas le fruit de mes exhortations
que je pouvais souhaiter. Les malheurs qui devaient porter les hommes à
s’humilier devant leur Juge, les portèrent aux murmures & aux Satyres.147

In 1652, the sermons that I gave during Lent within the church of the
Oratorians presented [the royal road of penitence] to the Parisians.
Indeed, I accommodated all weekly readings to this topic. Now, this was
a time when the calamity of the civil war, having already chased away
the king, seemed very clearly to have ignited [the flame of] God’s justice
against France and, especially, against the city of Paris. If the discourse
on penitence had ever before been necessary and should readily have
been received, it was, without a doubt, in this unfortunate situation. God
granted me a large number of listeners, but I did not see the expected

celebres de ces derniers Siecles (Paris, Antoine Vitré: 1644).

146 In his translation of Augustine’s De Virginitate, the Oratorian Claude Séguenot (1596–
1676) had added commentaries that questioned the value of religious vows and argued
against attrition as sufficient reason for absolution, cf. Augustine, De la sainte Virginité,
tr. C. Séguenot (Paris, J. Camuset: 1638). The Sorbonne immediately censured this work,
and the translator spent almost four years imprisoned in the Bastille. To Godeau’s reports
on this debate, see Armogathe J.-R., Études sur Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Univers
Port-Royal 31 (Paris: 2018) 45–63 (61–62).
147 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [6–7].
472 Nørgaard

result of my exhortations: miseries that ought to have driven people to

humiliate themselves before their Judge drove them, instead, to murmu-
rations and to satires.

On 5 September 1651, Louis XIV celebrated his thirteenth birthday, and Par-
liament declared him of age and fit to rule. On paper, this put an end to the
Regency of the boy-king’s mother, Anne of Austria (1601–1666), and, more pre-
cisely, to the influence of her first minister, Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661). Par-
liament declared the Cardinal an enemy of the state, and he had to flee Paris.
In early 1652, Mazarin returned to the city, supported by thousands of troops.
Coming out to greet him was the young Louis and his brother, who, since
September 1651, had relocated to Poitiers. This show of force did not put a stop
to the violent confrontations: on the contrary, they intensified. Indeed, an alli-
ance between Louis XIII’s brother, Gaston d’Orléans (1608–1660), and Louis II
de Bourbon, the prince of Condé (1621–1686), seemed momentarily to shift the
balance of power. In April 1652, Condé descended on Paris, and bloody scenes
of urban warfare unfolded throughout the spring and summer. Godeau dates
his Parisian sermons to the Quadragesima of 1652, which lasted from 4 March
until 14 April: it is during these forty, violent days that he preached at the
Church of the Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus and Mary Immaculate in
Paris.148 The parishioners, even in the midst of urban warfare, resisted and gave
no mind to penitence: instead of listening to the preacher, parishioners busied
themselves with the latest rumors; the Mazarinades attracted avid readership,
while words from the pulpit fell on deaf ears.
The final image in the Tableaux de la pénitence shows “Theodosius I kneel-
ing at the feet of saint Ambrose” [Fig. 11.23]. Unlike the Magdalene, this scene
unfolds in a crowded, social space. Moreover, it depicts a historical event
that dates to the late fourth century, when the bishop of Milan learned about
the horrors of the Massacre of Thessalonica. In response to this wholesale

148 In January 1616, Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629) decided to relocate his congregation from
the Faubourg de Saint-Jacques on the left bank to the rue Saint-Honoré on the right bank,
close to the Louvre. The new structure soon proved too small, and work on a new church
began during the summer of 1621. From December 1623, when work halted due to finan-
cial issues, Louis XIII began actively to support the congregation and sponsor its place of
worship. More specifically, the king attempted to integrate this space into the palace of
the Louvre, and he provided the Oratory with titles and gifts fitting for a Maison du Roi.
Oratorian preachers were to be recognized as chaplains ordinaires of the king. By 1627, the
congregation had been granted an annual donation of ten thousand livres to complete the
construction of their church. A shortage of state funds put an end to this in 1634.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 473

slaughter, he decided to leave his episcopal seat and excommunicate the

emperor. Initially, the Roman Emperor resisted and would not perform pub-
lic penitence: according to Theodoret of Cyrus (c. 393–466), the bishop there-
fore blocked the ruler when he tried to enter his church, not allowing him to
cross the threshold from secular to sacred. In 1603, a depiction of the kneel-
ing Emperor was installed in the cathedral of Milan: this altar painting had
been commissioned from the workshop of Federico Barocci (1535–1612) and it
shows the bishop sitting in the portal to the cathedral.149 The upper part of the
composition is reserved for men of the clergy, while the lower register shows
soldiers and, in the right foreground, children and noblewomen. In front of
the elevated platform, constituting a threshold between these two parts of the
composition, the emperor kneels: next to his right knee and red cape sits the
crown, while a scepter lies behind him and extends beyond the step. Assisted
by a deacon, Saint Ambrose motions down from his episcopal throne towards
the kneeling ruler. The engraving in Godeau’s book transposes this vertical dis-
tribution to a horizontal axis [Fig. 11.23]. The left side of the engraving shows
the portal packed with clergymen in intense conversation: Saint Ambrose
stands in front of this group, while a young boy gazes directly at the reader-
viewer, keeping the episcopal vestments from touching the ground. To the
right stand soldiers armed with spears: pointing skyward, these weapons cor-
respond to the bishop’s crosier; together these objects reinforce the composi-
tion’s vertical elements, such as the four columns that distinguish the events
in the foreground from the background view of the city. The emperor kneels
before the portal, scepter and crown displayed beside him close to the thin
line that separates the engraved scene from the paper on which it is printed.
We also see the emperor’s consul, who commanded his army: seeing his mas-
ter paralyzed by guilt, constantly weeping and unable to find rest, Rufinus
had advised him to ask forgiveness from Ambrose. Convinced that the bishop
would deny such a request, Theodosius sent Rufinus in his place: indeed, Saint
Ambrose accused the consul of having propagated the massacre of seven thou-
sand souls and called him ‘impudentiam canum’ (an impudent dog).150 In the
Barocci painting, a dog in the foreground refers to this epithet, whereas the
engraving, though it includes no dog, portrays Rufinus, armed with his officer’s
baton, attempting to lift the Emperor from his kneeling position [Fig. 11.23].

149 Rosci M., “La fascinazione cromoluministica di Barrocci in Lombardia”, in Giannotti A. –

Pizzorusso C. (eds.), Federico Barrocci 1535–1612. L’incanto del colore. Una lezione per duo
secoli (Milan: 2009) 166–171 (170).
150 Voragine, Legenda Aurea LVII, 258.
474 Nørgaard

Godeau relates this scene to public penitence. The reader-viewer is to iden-

tify Rufinus with a false and sinful understanding of Christianity, which can-
not stomach ‘les amertumes de l’ancienne Penitence’ (the bitterness of the
old mode of penitence) after having ‘gousté les plaisirs du péché’ (tasted sin’s
pleasures).151 The kneeling Emperor, on the other hand, bodies forth an image
of the ideal ruler, well aware

[…] qu’il n’estoit pas sujet aux Loix civiles qui défendent de répandre
le sang innocent; mais il sçavoit encore mieux, que les Loix divines qui
punissent ce crime de la mort éternelle, le comprenoient aussi bien que
les moindre de ses sujets. Les flateurs excusoient sa faute ; mais sa con-
science la luy representoit comme inexcusable.152

[…] that he was not subject to civil laws, which forbid the spilling of inno-
cent blood. However, he knew even better that divine laws, which punish
such an offence by an eternal death, were equally applicable to him as to
the lowest of his subjects. Sycophants excused his mistake, but his con-
science depicted it to him as inexcusable.

This vision of ideal rulership has strong political implications. As we have

already seen, Godeau’s book sprang from his experience of the violent con-
frontations that took place in 1652, when he mounted a Parisian pulpit. The
author informs us that he was unable to proofread his manuscript because of
episcopal commitments during the year 1654. More specifically, Godeau men-
tions that he participated in an ‘Assemblée generale du Clergé’.153 During these
years the clergy disputed over the imprisonment of Jean-François Paul de
Gondi (1613–1679). Coadjutor bishop of Paris, Gondi was closely affiliated with
Louis XIII’s brother, Gaston d’Orléans, and took an active stance against the
Regency and against Mazarin. Despite the first minister’s efforts to prevent it,
and while Condé prepared to descend on Paris, Pope Innocent X raised Gondi
to the rank of cardinal (19 February 1652). Gondi’s newfound prominence
within the ecclesiastical hierarchy did little to abate Mazarin’s anger towards
him. When Condé’s siege of Paris ended in the fall of 1652, the king and his
court returned, and Mazarin soon had the newly appointed Cardinal de Retz
imprisoned at Vincennes. This prompted a reaction from Rome and, even-
tually, from the French Church that had hitherto leaned towards the Crown

151 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 577–578.

152 Godeau, Les Tableaux de la pénitence 569.
153 Godeau, “Preface”, Unpag. [2].
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 475

or sought neutral ground in the highly unstable political situation. With the
arrest of the Cardinal, the balance between temporal authority and spiritual
authority was upset: the Church could no longer remain neutral.
From his prefatory statement, we can infer that Godeau composed the
Tableaux de la Pénitence in March and April 1652, after he had preached in
the Oratorians’ church. The royal privilege specifies that the first copies could
be purchased on the last day of July 1654.154 Cardinal de Retz was captured
in December 1652, and the depiction of “Theodosius I kneeling at the feet of
saint Ambrose” [Fig. 11.22] speaks to the ensuing state of affairs.155 The the-
matic focus on ideal rulership extends to at least another four engravings and
their textual explications: “The penitent King David” [Fig. 11.4], “Manasseh in
Chains” [Fig. 11.5], “King Nebuchadnezzar” [Fig. 11.7], and “Antiochus on his
deathbed” [Fig. 11.9].156 Taken together with the debates over Jansenism, which
reached a first culmination in May 1653, these historical circumstances provide
a raison d’être for the distinctive character of Godeau’s ekphrastic usage: the
bishop attempted to maintain a firm sense of penitence as contrition and con-
fession, but, communicating it to a broad audience, he adjusted its focus from
a social act to an interior state.

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Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa (1972) 799–822.
Marolles Michel de, Tableaux du Temple de Muses tirez du cabinet de feu Mr Favereau
(Paris, A. de Sommaville: 1655).
Melion Walter S., The Meditative Art. Studies in Northern Devotional Print 1550–1625
(Philadelphia: 2009).
Merlin-Kajman Hélène, “Langue et souveraineté en France au XVIIe siècle. La produc-
tion autonome d’un corps de langage”, Annales (1994/2) 369–394.
Nagy Piroska, Le Don des larmes au Moyen Âge. Un instrument spirituel en quête
d’institution, V e–XIIIe siècle (Paris: 2000).
De Nostredame César, Les Perles ou les larmes de Sainte Madeleine (Aix, Jean Tholosan:
1601).
Pellisson-Fontainer Paul, Relation contenant l’histoire de l’Académie (Paris, Pierre Le
Petit: 1653).
Pernot L., La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain, Collection des Études
augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 137–138, 2 vols. (Paris: 1993).
Pernot L., Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Ashley and Peter
Larkin Series in Greek and Roman Culture (Austin: 2015).
Pétau Denis, S.J., De la Pénitence Publique et de la préparation à la communion (Paris,
Gabriel Cramoisy: 1644).
Poquelin Jean-Baptiste, La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce (Paris, s.n.: 1669).
Richeome Louis, Tableaux sacrez des figures mystiques du très auguste sacrifice et sacre-
ment de l’Eucharistie (Paris, Laurent Sonnius: 1601).
Ripa Cesare, Iconologia overo Descrittione dell’imagini vniversali cavate dell’antichita e
da altri luoghi (Rome, G. Gigliotti: 1593).
Rosci M., “La fascinazione cromoluministica di Barrocci in Lombardia”, in Giannotti A. –
Pizzorusso C. (eds.), Federico Barrocci 1535–1612. L’incanto del colore. Una lezione per
duo secoli (Milan: 2009) 166–171.
De Sales François Œuvres, ed. A. Ravier (Paris: 1969).
Salliot N., “Les pouvoirs de l’image dans les discours apologétique: les Tableaux sacrez
de Louis Richeome”, in Coutton M. – Fernandes I. – Jérémie C. – Vérnaut M. (eds.),
Pouvoirs de l’image aux XVe, XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Clermont-Ferrand: 2009) 257–288.
Scott Paul, “La spiritualité d’un ancien mondain. Les Tableaux de la Pénitence d’Antoine
Godeau”, Cahiers Tristan L’Hermite 32 (2010) 110–123.
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(Paris: 1996).
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livre-galerie”, Études littéraires 34 (2002/1–2) 71–101.
LEVELS TO EKPHRASIS IN THE TABLEAUX DE LA PÉNITENCE 479

Van Eck C., Art, Agency and Living Presence. From the Animated Image to the Excessive
Object (Leiden: 2015).
Van Mander Karel, Het Schilder-boeck (Haerlem, Paschier van Wesbuch: 1604).
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 part 4
Ekphrastic Images

∵
 Chapter 12

Art between Fact and Fantasy: Tracing the Afterlife

of Ekphrastic Architecture in Renaissance Italy

Femke Speelberg

The Historia Indiae Orientalis, published by the De Bry firm in Frankfurt-am-

Main between 1598 and 1601, contains a curious depiction of an African
zebra [Fig. 12.1]. Its likeness was not based on first-hand observation, but had
been copied from the published travel accounts of the Portuguese merchant
Odoardo Lopez (Duarte Lopes, born 1550).1, 2 In his chapter on the region
‘Bamba’, Lopez describes the animal’s characteristics, focusing predominantly
on its unique pattern of stripes, which he deemed ‘peculiar from all other crea-
tures’. To give an overall impression of the zebra, however, Lopez used a set of
comparisons, likening the tail, feet and hoofs to a mule, and its general char-
acter and stride to those of a horse.3 Despite, or perhaps because of Lopez’s
attempt at an accurate description, the corresponding illustration, fashioned
by Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604), presents a rather strange hybrid creature.
While the example of the zebra does not strictly fall into the category of
ekphrastic art – understood in the context of this essay as the artistic act of
(re)creating from a verbal description a visual and/or tangible version of an
image, object or building – it is referenced here because it emphasizes clearly
that the result of this process engages equally with the words it attempts
to visualize, and the ones that were not written to begin with. By necessity,
Pigafetta’s zebra represents a negotiation between the facts he received from
Lopez, and his ability to fill in the blanks through a combination of fantasy and
rational association.

1 This essay is based on a paper presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the Renaissance
Society of America. I have benefitted greatly from research that has been published since.
In particular, I am greatly indebted to Aleksander Konev (State Hermitage Museum, Saint
Petersburg) and Dr. Peter Fuhring (Fondation Custodia, Paris) for sharing their research and
insights with me.
2 Odoardo Lopez, Relatione del reame di Congo, Rome [Bartolomeo Grassi] 1591. The De Bry
firm published direct translations of this work in Latin and German in 1597. They re-used the
copperplate and description of the zebra in the miscellany Historia Indiae Orientalis.
3 See for a full description in English translation: Lopes D., A report of the kingdome of Congo
[…] Drawen out of the writinges and discourses of Odoardo Lopez a Portingall, by Philippo
Pigafetta. Translated out of Italian by Abraham Hartwell (London: 1597), 73.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

484 Speelberg

Figure 12.1 After Filippo Pigafetta, “Dem Thier [sic] Zebra”, in Regnum Congo hoc est
warhaffte und eigentliche Beschreibung des Königreichs Congo in Africa, und
deren angrenzenden Länder. Frankfurt-am-Main 1609. University Library
Heidelberg. A 6022-2 Folio RES
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 485

Michiel van Groesen has argued that Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) and his
sons took full advantage of the resultant hybridity, and made little effort to cor-
rect the illustrations of exotic fauna, because the more fantastical depictions
greatly increased the popularity of their books. As long as the majority of their
readership was unlikely to ever encounter a zebra in real life, Pigafetta’s version
satisfied the public’s curiosity. Fantasy, thus, served the publishers’ commercial
purposes better than fact.4 For the modern reader, this approach serves as a
potent reminder that, even in publications of a semi-scientific nature, “objec-
tive truth” was not always the main motivator for the creation, inclusion or
consumption of images.
But what befalls an ekphrastic work of art when fact does catch up with fan-
tasy? This question is raised here in the context of a little-studied print series
depicting buildings from Roman Antiquity, of which some were reconstructed
more from fantasy than fact. The series likely dates from the second quarter of
the Cinquecento: a period in which such imagery is generally thought to have
become outmoded by the increasingly sophisticated approach to archaeology
taken by artists, architects, collectors and scholars alike. Yet, their continued
printing and collecting over the next decades implies an ongoing apprecia-
tion for their subject matter. As this essay will argue, the making and afterlife
of these prints is closely tied to the reception and resonance of the archi-
tecture they represent, which changed over time in concert with the impor-
tance assigned to fact and fantasy within the production and consumption of
(Italian) art during the Renaissance and early Baroque.

1 Roma Quanta Fuit Ipsa Ruina Docet?

The print series in question consists of twenty-five engravings, none of which

were signed or dated by a printmaker, printer or publisher. However, close
examination suggests that they all derive from the same, somewhat inexpe-
rienced hand.5 Johann David Passavant (1787–1861) attributed the prints to
the Master (Monogrammist) GA with the Caltrop (active ca. 1530–40),6 but

4 Inversely, the rich tradition of botanical studies in Northern Europe forced them to great
accuracy in their depiction of the exotic flora. See: Groesen M. van, The Representation of the
Overseas Word in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden: 2008), 140.
5 The prints display various problems in the draftsmanship, the proper use of printmaking
tools, and in the placement and/or scaling of the compositions on the copper plates.
6 Passavant J.D., Le Peintre-Gaveur par J.D. Passavant, VI (Leipzig: 1864), 162, nos 5–23; In the
past, various attempts have been made to identify the Master GA. The identification with
Giovanni Agucchi (active 16th century) is most often cited, although the anonymous artist
486 Speelberg

Figure 12.2 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Aerarii Publici Rome (ca. 1535–1540).
Engraving, 10 × 13.4 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(120b))
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

this attribution was rejected as early as 1934.7 Since no satisfactory alternative

has been proposed, the false association still lingers in most museum
catalogues.
The buildings represented in the series are arranged in typological groups
(triumphal arches, bath houses, temples and palaces), identified through
inscriptions, written in Roman majuscules along the bottom of the plates,
or in small tablets on or near the structures [Fig. 12.2; appendix 1].8 Despite
these inscriptions, not all of the buildings can be successfully identified within

was more recently tentatively linked to the architect Galeazzo Alessi (1512–1572). For the
Alessi attribution, see: Balestri I. “Dettagli dall’antico del quarto decennio del XVI secolo.
I Maestri “PS” e “GA col Tribolo” alla Biblioteca Ambrosiana”, Lexicon. Storie e Architettura in
Sicilia e nel Mediterraneo, 14/15 (2012), pp. 25–32. For a general overview of the various his-
toric identifications, see: Waters M., “A Renaissance without Order. Ornament, Single-sheet
Engravings and the Mutability of Architectural Prints”, Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, 71 (2012:4) 516, n. 22.
7 Donati L., “Monogrammisti G.A. G.P.”, Maso Finiguerra V, (1940), 168.
8 See Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 26.50.1(110–122).
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 487

Figure 12.3 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Pantheon Rome (ca. 1535–1540). Engraving,
11.4 × 15.8 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(115a))
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

the canon of Roman architecture. For example, alongside somewhat archaic

depictions of monuments such as the Pantheon [Fig. 12.3] and the Mausoleum
of Hadrian, the series includes a ‘TEMPLVM SATVRNI’ and an ‘ARCVS IN
HISPANIA’, which, due to their generic names have thus far escaped identi-
fication. While it is tempting to attribute such buildings to the printmaker’s
imagination, the contemporary print series Temples à la manière antique,
à Rome et ailleurs (Orléans, 1550) by the French artist Jacques Androuet du
Cerceau (1510-20–1585/86) indicates that the unidentified Italian artist used
specific sources for his engravings.
Du Cerceau’s series consists of thirty-five etchings, eighteen of which were
the product of his own imagination, while he reproduced the remaining sev-
enteen from pre-existing models. Du Cerceau differentiates between the two
types by providing names for the buildings that he had copied (and presum-
ably considered examples of historic architecture), while leaving his own
inventions untitled.9 Several of the buildings in Du Cerceau’s etchings ­overlap

9 Guillaume J., Fuhring P. et al., Jacques Androuet du Cerceau. Une des plus grands architectes
qui se soient jamais trouvés en France, exh. cat. Musée des Monuments français (Paris: 2010),
488 Speelberg

with the Italian series, but a striking difference can be noted in their presen-
tation. The most remarkable discrepancy is the fact that the buildings are
invariably shown from other viewpoints. For example, while the Italian print
of the Temple of Mercury shows its façade, Du Cerceau reproduces a side view
[Figs. 12.4 and 12.5]. Another significant deviation is the fact that the Italian
prints present all buildings in perspective, set in (abstract) landscape settings,
while Du Cerceau opted for a clean orthographic rendering. Du Cerceau also
consistently depicted the buildings in their entirety, while the Italian print-
maker settled for half, in most of the symmetrical elevations.
The overlap in subject matter and deviation in presentation between the
two series suggest that their familial relationship is not direct, but that they
were nevertheless derived from related source material.10 The identification
of this material has played a significant role in past Du Cerceau scholarship,
particularly in relation to the question of whether or not the French artist ever
visited Italy. Heinrich von Geymüller (1839–1909) tried to make a substantial
claim for such a journey, but never found conclusive evidence.11 In the context
of his work on Du Cerceau, Geymüller also studied the Italian prints, which
similarly proved a lifelong frustration as he tried – in vain – to tease out exactly
which (un-) known buildings they represented.12 Neither Du Cerceau nor the
Italian printmaker based their prints on personal study of (formerly unknown)
Roman buildings, however. Instead, it appears that they each had access to
the same, or similar intermediary sources in the form of architectural draw-
ings made in Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century, of which
many have proven to be ekphrastic in nature.13 Gustina Scaglia has suggested
that they should be understood as visualizations of descriptions in early travel
guides and reconstructions of the Eternal City, such as the Mirabilia Urbis

294, n. 313; Fuhring P., “RVINARVM VARIARVM FABRICARVM: The Final Flowering of
Roma Antica Fantasy Architecture in European Printmaking”, Reibungspunkte. Ordnung
und Umbruch in Architektur und Kunst. Festschrift für Hubertus Günther (Petersberg:
2008), 91.
10 Among the numerous drawings attributed to Du Cerceau and his workshop, several direct
parallels to the Italian print series can be found, supporting the idea that his source mate-
rial was indeed closely related to that of the Italian printmaker. I thank Aleksander Konev
for bringing these drawings to my attention.
11 Günther H., “Du Cerceau et l’Antiquité”, Guillaume – Fuhring, Jacques Androuet du
Cerceau, 75–90, n. 2.
12 Geymüller’s research material, kept in the archive of the Institute of Art History at the
university of Graz, contains an incomplete list of possible identifications for the indi-
vidual buildings. I am indebted to Peter Fuhring for sharing this material with me at an
early stage of my research.
13 Günther H., “Du Cerceau et l’Antiquité”, 76.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 489

Figure 12.4 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Mercurii Templum (ca. 1535–1540). Engraving,
13.8 × 9.4 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(117a))
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
490 Speelberg

Figure 12.5 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Templum Mercurii (1550). Etching (bound in
miscellany). Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA)
(Num 4 Res 85)
Open License Image

Romae (12th century AD) and Flavio Biondo’s De Roma Instaurata (1444–46).14
Such references were often extremely brief in nature. Rather than providing an
extensive account of a monument’s physical properties or historical implica-
tions, the texts took the form of lists, itineraries and anecdotes that facilitated a
pilgrimage to seek them out in situ. In his Narratio de Mirabilibus Urbis Romae,
Master Gregory explained that he learned about the sites he visited during his
late-twelfth or early thirteenth-century trip to Rome from “the cardinals”, indi-
cating that in addition to physical observation, much of the transfer of knowl-
edge happened orally, rather than through (preliminary) reading.15

14 Scaglia G., “Fantasy Architecture of Roma Antica” Arte Lombarda, 15 (1970, no. 2), 12; None
of these sources contains all references to the buildings represented in the prints and
drawings suggesting that an unidentified text or, more likely, a collection of texts was used
to inform the corpus.
15 Blennow A., “Wanderers and Wonders. The Medieval Guidebooks to Rome”, Rome and the
guidebook tradition (Berlin: 2019), 58, 70, 80.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 491

If indeed inspired by the summary literature, for those monuments that had
fallen to ruin, the fifteenth-century draftsmen had virtually no information to
turn to. Scaglia points out that this problem was dealt with by using contem-
porary elements found in quattrocento Lombardy and the Veneto to fill in the
unknown compositional structure of the buildings. Based on this architec-
tural vocabulary, she surmised that an original (since lost) set of drawings was
created in Northern Italy sometime before 1470. Over the following decades,
this body of drawings was studied by several artists who created copies.16 As a
result, various groups of “variant copies” survive today, but their scattered and
incomplete nature greatly complicates research pertaining to their chronol-
ogy, authorship and exact familial relationships.
The modes of rendering of both Du Cerceau and the Italian printmaker are
represented in the surviving drawings. The partial representation of the Italian
engravings relates closely to drawings in Buonaccorso Ghiberti’s Zibaldone,17
and direct parallels can be found in a number of interrelated albums and
codices, including the Codex Clumczansky,18 the Codex Destailleur B,19 and
the albums Kaufman20 and Rawlinson.21 Notably, none of these collections of

16 Scaglia, “Fantasy Architecture of Roma Antica”, 9–24; Peter Fuhring has stressed that
their spread and availability throughout Italy and beyond, was likely much more exten-
sive than we can currently comprehend. See: Fuhring, “RVINARVM VARIARVM
FABRICARVM” 94.
17 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Codex B.R. 228.
18 Prague, Narodni Galerie XVII A 6, fol. 90: “Aerarii Publici”; fol. 92 Tenplus Veneris; The
codex was compiled over several decades, from the beginning of the sixteenth century
until the late 1540s. It appears to have resided in Mantua for most of this period. See:
Juren V., “Le « Codex Chlumczansky »”, Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène
Piot, 68 (1986) 105–205.
19 Saint Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, inv. no. 14742, Fol. 119r (116r) “Termae
Deocletiani”; fol. 124r (121r) “Arcus S. Georgii”; 127r (124r); “Porta Antonae”; fol. 129r.
“Palatium Caesaris Parisiis”; fol. 130r. “Aerarii Publici”.
20 London, private collection. The album contains no less than 17 parallels with the print
series. In some cases, the half representation of the buildings have been completed, and
the buildings are identified differently in the inscriptions. For clarity in concordance,
I refer to them here with the names as shown on the Italian prints. Included are: “Tem-
plum Isaiae Prophetae”; “Templum Idor(um). Egito”; “Tenplus Veneris”; “Tenplum Iovis
Ultoris”; “Porta Antonae”; “Sepulchrum Adriani”; “Palatium M. Agrippa”; “Termae Deo-
cletiani”; “Palatium Maius. Ro.”; “Piñaculũ Termar.(um)”; “Teatrum Bordeos”; “Palatium
.Se. Lugduni”; “Palatium Caesaris Parisiis”; “Palatium Claudie Inperatoris”; “Palatium
Valerianũ”; “Tem˜. Ro. Penatibus Dicatũ.”; “Templum Saturni”. I owe my knowledge of the
contents of the Kaufman album to Aleksander Konev, who kindly shared a reconstructed
concordance with me.
21 Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Rawlinson D. 1923. “Arcus Lutii Septimii”; “Tenplus Veneris”;
“Tenplum Iovis Ultoris”; “Porta Antonae”; “Sepulchrum Adriani”; ““Piñaculũ Termar.(um)”;
492 Speelberg

drawings contain all twenty-five buildings represented in the prints, and there-
fore cannot be considered as the direct source for the printmaker. In addi-
tion, much is still unclear about the exact genealogy and chronology of these
surviving collections of drawings, which means that they currently offer little
information to help elucidate the genesis of the engravings, but nevertheless
hold promise for future research.22 The case of the Codex Destailleur B, for
example, is telling. While originally attributed to Fra Giocondo (1433–1515),23
its attribution and dating have since shifted significantly. The album is now
thought to have been created around the middle of the sixteenth century, most
likely in Rome,24 and, as will be shown, therefore post-dates the creation of the
Italian engravings.
Du Cerceau’s Temples à la manière antique relate more closely to a set of
architectural drawings found among the Santarelli collection in the Uffizi.25
Over time, their attribution has shifted from Donato Bramante (1444–1514)
and Il Cronaca (Simone del Pollaiuolo, 1457–1508) to the circle of Francesco di
Giorgio Martini (1439–1502),26 and the young Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536).

“Pantheon Rome”; “Arcus in Hispania”; “Arcus S. Georgii”; “Palatium Valerianũ”; “Tem˜.

Ro. Penatibus Dicatũ.”. Information obtained through the above-mentioned concordance
reconstructed by Aleksander Konev.
22 Access to many of these materials is restricted to onsite investigation. Their various loca-
tions across Europe, and current travel restrictions due to the global outbreak of the Covid-
19 virus, have prevented the author from accessing all relevant collections. In addition, in
preparation of facsimile editions of the three Destailleur albums in Saint Petersburg, The
State Hermitage Museum has currently restricted all access to the objects, and all existing
photographic reproductions thereof.
23 Geymüller H. von, “Trois Albums de Dessins de Fra Giocondo”, Mélanges de l’école fran-
çaise de Rome (1891: 11), 133–158; Heinrich von Geymüller revisited his attribution to
Fra Giocondo after the publication of this article, in a letter to Jakob Buckhardt. See:
Fuhring, “RVINARVM VARIARVM FABRICARVM” 94; For Geymüller’s original letter,
see: Neumann C., Jakob Burckhardt. Briefwechsel mit Heinrich von Geymüller (Munich:
1914) 143.
24 Kulawik B., ‘Wer ist der “Anonymus Destailleur?”’, Scholion, (2016: 10) 230; For a discus-
sion of the complexities of tracing the origins and dating of the album, see: Efimova E.,
“Antiquity in the Eyes of an Antiquarian, Architect and Engraver: State Hermitage Albums
and the Development of Architectural Drawings of Antiquity in the 16th Century”. Actual
Problems of Theory and History of Art: Collection of articles. Vol. 6 (St. Petersburg: 2016),
836–859.
25 Du Cerceau’s Vues d’Optique (Orléans 1551) also draws inspiration from these drawings.
See: Leutrat E., “Le Vues d’Optique. Une poétique de l’espace”, Guillaume – Fuhring,
Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, 183–195, n. 8.
26 Günther H., Das Studium der Antiken Architektur in den Zeihnungen der Hochrenaissance
(Tübingen: 1988) 32, 33.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 493

Figure 12.6 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Templa Pacis (1550). Etching (bound in
miscellany). Paris, Bibliothèque de l’INHA (Num 4 Res 85)
Open License Image

The latter suggestion is based predominantly on inscriptions, however, and

may sooner speak to their collecting history than their original conception.27
While their attribution remains open-ended, a dating towards the end of the
fifteenth century is generally accepted.28
Among the Santarelli drawings is a depiction of The Temple of Peace in
Rome, there left unnamed, but identified as such in Du Cerceau’s print of the
same structure [Fig. 12.6]. Strikingly, the French print reconstructs the front
elevation of the building, while the Santarelli drawing shows a side view. That
Du Cerceau’s model was originally also among these or related circulating

27 Frommel Ch., “«ala maniera e uso delj bonj antiquj» Baldassare Peruzzi e la sua quar-
antennale ricerca dell’antico”, Baldassare Peruzzi 1481–1536 (Vicenza and Venice: 2005)
6; Scaglia G., “Fantasy Architecture of Roma Antica” 15; Bartoli A., I monumenti antichi
di Roma dei disegni degli Uffizi 1914–22, 1 (Rome: 1914) 8 and onwards; Frommel, Ch.,
“Peruzzis romische Anfange. Von der Pseudo-Cronaca-Gruppe zu Bramante”, Romisches
Jahrbuch der Biblioteca Hertziana, 27/28 (1991–92) 137–182.
28 Godoli A., “11.2 Anonimo Fiorentino”, Il Disegno Fiorerntino del Tempo di Lorenzo Il
Magnifico, Exh. Cat. Galleria degli Uffizi (Milan: 1992) 220–221.
494 Speelberg

Figure 12.7 Attributed to Francesco Rosselli, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba
(ca. 1470–1490). Engraving, 29.3 × 43.4 cm. London, The British Museum
(1845,0825.477)
Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, London

drawings is proven, however, by a print made by Francesco Rosselli (1445–

ca. 1513), who used the same elevation to represent the Temple of Salomon
[Fig. 12.7].29

2 From Heterotopia to Syncretic Restoration

Rosselli’s appropriation of the ekphrastic structure befits fifteenth-century

practices with regards to the depiction of ancient architecture, which often
combined ubiquitous motifs that signal antiquity, with modern structural
solutions. Lorenzo Pericolo has suggested that this hybridization of architec-
tural settings triggered a process of estrangement by transporting the scene
to an alternate liminal space, which he locates in the realm of fantasy rather
than the tangible reality of the quattrocento viewer. Within this liminal space

29 London, British Museum, 1845,0825.477; While Hubertus Günther has suggested that Du
Cerceau may have copied the elevation from Rosselli rather than from the group of archi-
tectural drawings (Günther H., “Du Cerceau et l’Antiquité” 78), this sequence of events
seems contrived, and is otherwise unprecedented in Du Cerceau’s practice.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 495

or heterotopia, absolved from the constraints of realism, artists could explore

endless creative solutions to convey the intended meaning of their work.30
That the latter phenomenon of fertile license was imbedded in the fifteenth-
century hybrid reconstructions of Antique architecture, is an aspect that will
be addressed briefly in the closing of this essay. The process of estrangement
that Pericolo signals as a consequence of the juxtaposition of antiquities and
modern architecture is more contentious, however, and warrants reconsidera-
tion. Rather than transporting the observer to an alternate dimension that was
difficult to reconcile with the known world, the combination of old and new
would have more likely facilitated a process of recognition and familiarization,
not unlike the strategy applied by Odoardo Lopez in describing his zebra. By
presenting exotic elements in the context of others that are readily familiar,
the overall mise en scene becomes one with which the viewer can identify. The
moment of alienation, as described by Pericolo, only occurs when the average
viewer has become familiar with the factual laws of both ancient and modern
architecture to such an extent as to understand their pairing as a chronologi-
cal disjunction. For most of the fifteenth century, this was neither the case
nor the intention.31 This would change in the following century through the
ubiquitous study of Vitruvius’ De Architectura Libri Decem, and the archaeo-
logical fieldwork done in Rome and elsewhere. Victor Tschudi has pointed to
Francesco Albertini’s Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris Urbis Romae
(Rome 1510) as a definitive marker of this transition, because the book intro-
duces a conscious divide between modern-day Rome and its past. No longer
“blurredly fused with the present”, Roma vetus became a component of history
that could be objectively measured, studied and analysed by artists, architects
and antiquarians.32 This growing historic awareness is reflected in Raphael’s
1519 letter to Pope Leo X, for example, when he details how to distinguish
between buildings erected during the glory days of the Roman emperors, and
those built in the following centuries.33 Anna Blennow describes this moment
as the conscious replacement of the “idea of Rome” with its reality. Earlier

30 Pericolo L., “Heterotopia in the Renaissance: Modern Hybrids as Antiques in Bramante,

Cima da Conegliano, and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” Getty Research Journal,
(2009: 1), 1, 11.
31 Hubertus Günther likens the fifteenth-century architectural reconstructions to poetry,
principally meant to inspire and delight. See: Günther H., “Fantasie Scritte e Disegnate a
Confronto. La Rappresentazione di Edifici Antichi nei Disegni della Collezione Santarelli”,
Linea I: Grafie di Immagini tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento (Venice: 2008) 123.
32 Tschudi V., “Two Sixteenth-Century Guidebooks and the Bibliotopography of Rome”, Rome
and the guidebook tradition (Berlin: 2019), 92.
33 A copy of the letter is preserved in Mantua, Archivio Privato Castiglione. It is available in
transcription online through the Italian Renaissance Document Site: http://irds-project.
org/doc/2559/3356/.
496 Speelberg

descriptions of the city represented Rome as a symbolic place that was open to
a certain level of fantasy and interpretation.34 This kind of license is demon-
strated in the ekphrastic drawings, for instance, and also allowed for the prac-
tice of altering the appearance of existing structures (on paper) to make them
adhere to the Albertian notion of “good” architecture; a method practiced by
architects such as Giuliano da Sangallo (1443–1516).35 Albertini’s Opusculum
was the first (published) answer to the new desire to part with these fantas-
tical interpretations and to reconstruct an “accurate” account of the past. In
defence of his publication, Albertini quotes (then) Cardinal Giuliano della
Rovere (1443–1513) as having exclaimed in frustration: “Why is it that the
Wonders of Rome (Mirabilia), so imperfect and full of fables and fabrications,
is not corrected?”36 This, thus seemingly, was the moment when fact began to
decidedly overrule fantasy in the Renaissance study of Antiquity. It is within
this context that Raphael and his circle set out to create a comprehensive sur-
vey of the visible remains of Ancient Rome. In line with the desire for accuracy
and objectivity, this survey was limited to “those buildings that are sufficiently
well preserved such that they can be drawn out as they were, without error”,
omitting ones that were largely ruined, or known by name only.37
Raphael’s approach thus stands in stark contrast to the ekphrastic draw-
ings of the Quattrocento, and could have easily rendered them worthless to
sixteenth-century artists and collectors. Yet, the creation of the two print series
by the unidentified Italian engraver and Du Cerceau, as well as the inclusion of
drawn copies in the above-mentioned codices and albums – which all date to
the decades following this apparent sea change – form proof of the contrary.
To this effect, Anna Bartolozzi’s recent essay on the antiquarian studies of vari-
ous architects in the wake of Raphael’s project has made a strong case for the
idea that, while generally deemed highly influential, an approach built solely
on the documentation of facts did not serve everyone’s purpose in a satisfac-
tory manner. While Raphael’s surveying efforts were continued by architects
such as Baldassare Peruzzi and Antonio Sangallo the Younger (1484–1546), the
method of strict observation was gradually displaced, or rather enriched, by

34 Blennow, “Wanderers and Wonders” 83.

35 See: Brown B., Kleiner D., “Giuliano da Sangallo’s Drawings after Ciriaco d’Ancona:
Transformations of Greek and Roman Antiquities in Athens”, Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, 42 (1983:4), 321–335; Bedon A., “Architettura e archeologia nella
Roma del Cinquecento: Giovan Battista Montano”, Arte Lombarda, Nuova Serie, No. 65
(1983:2), Atti del Convegno: Umanesimo problemi aperti 6, 112.
36 Tschudi “Two Sixteenth-Century Guidebooks” 93.
37 Bartolozzi A., “Architects, Antiquarians, and the Rise of the Image in Renaissance
Guidebooks of Ancient Rome”, Rome and the guidebook tradition (Berlin: 2019) 123.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 497

other strategies that, once again, attempted to engage with lost elements. This
is illustrated, amongst others, by the reconstructions of Pirro Ligorio (1514–
1583) and Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), both of whom, although in different
ways, tried to represent Rome’s ancient monuments in their original guise. For
example, in a process not dissimilar to Pigafetta’s zebra, Ligorio explained that
his reconstruction of the Circus Flaminius was based on personal investiga-
tion of the site, but where the ruins were no longer extent he took as his model
other circuses whose structures were better preserved. Even in the case of a
relatively well-preserved building like the Pantheon, Ligorio went through the
exercise of thinking away later additions and replacing them with elements
which, to his mind, reflected the original state of the monument.38 Mandowsky
and Mitchell have described Ligorio’s process as so-called ‘syncretic restora-
tions’, based on his ‘adventitious use of analogously related material’.39 Palladio,
instead, opted to reconstruct ruined monuments in accordance with a norma-
tive view of ancient architecture, seeking to conform to the “rules” outlined by
Vitruvius.40 Thus, while the reconstructions of both architects were informed
to a much greater degree by recent archaeological advancements, they were
still – each in their own way – part fiction, and part fact. Rooted in standardiza-
tion rather than creation, the fantastical elements in their work took a differ-
ent form from their quattrocento predecessors, but they nevertheless shared
the aspiration to show Rome’s monuments in the glory of times long gone,
rather than through Raphael’s documentary lens alone.
In their recent introduction to Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds, Fernando Loffredo and
Ginette Vagenheim rightfully stress that modern-day scholars educated in the
tradition of twentieth-century classical archaeology often struggle to identify
(with) the early-modern audiences for works that blurred the lines between
fact and fantasy in this manner.41 Yet, to avoid the anachronistic exercise of
equating such sixteenth-century publications with modern history books,
their audience(s), and closely-related matters such as genre and authors intent,
are important filters through which to study this material. Needless to say, the
expansive growth in the production and consumption of drawings, prints
and books in the sixteenth century makes this a thorny line of questioning.

38 Emphasis added by the author. See: Bartolozzi A., “Architects, Antiquarians, and the Rise
of the Image”, 116, 120, 139.
39 Mandowsky E., Mitchell Ch., Pirro Ligorio’s Roman Antiquities. The Drawings in MS XIII. B.
7 in the National Library in Naples (London: 1963) 43, 44.
40 Bartolozzi, “Architects, Antiquarians, and the Rise of the Image” 139.
41 Loffredo F., Vagenheim G., “Pirro Ligoro’s Worlds, or, an Invitation to Navigate the
Boundaries of Truth” Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds. Antiquarianism, Classical Erudition and the
Visual Arts in the Late Renaissance (Leiden: 2019) 18.
498 Speelberg

Especially in the first half of the century, graphic interactions with the archi-
tecture of Ancient Rome evolved rapidly. A host of different publications were
issued, each with their own approach to text and illustrations. Particularly
notable for antiquarian studies is the separation of the traditional guidebook
to Rome, and architectural treatises focused on the reconstruction of its monu-
ments. Even within the latter group, however, distinctions in intent should be
considered carefully. For example, while Bartolozzi criticises Sebastiano Serlio
(1475–1554) for a somewhat retardataire approach in his Terzo Libro because he
included several modern buildings among his typological overview of ancient
architecture – thereby in her eyes adhering to the tradition of Flavio Biondo
and Andrea Fulvio (ca. 1470–1527) – it is important to remember that Serlio’s
overriding intent was to inform the architectural practice of his contempo-
raries, not to offer a comprehensive and objective survey of Roman architec-
ture. Hence, Serlio himself comments after a summary anecdote about the
Pantheon: ‘but leaving aside these narrations, which have little importance to
the architect, I shall come to the particular measurements of all the parts.’42 His
inclusion of buildings such as Bramante’s Tempietto should thus be understood
to illustrate the successful application of the lessons offered by Roman archi-
tecture, rather than an undiscerning equation of the antique and the modern.

3 Preservation in Print

In order to better understand where the Italian print series falls within these
developments, a more precise dating is crucial. Because material analysis has so
far not yielded helpful insights in this respect, a closer approximation depends
predominantly on comparison with other works of related subject matter.43
Their kinship to (more-closely) dated objects such as the Codex Destailleur B
and Du Cerceau’s etchings would indicate a general dating around the middle

42 Emphasis added by the author. See: Bartolozzi, “Architects, Antiquarians, and the Rise of
the Image” 129.
43 Research is based on two distinct sets of the prints at The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, see: acc. nos. 26.50.1(110–122) and acc. nos. 2016.684.1–12, and compara-
tive study of prints in the collections of the Avery Library at Columbia University, New
York; Biblioteca di Archeologia and Storia dell’Arte (BIASA), Rome (accessed through the
Rodolfo Lanciani Digital Archive, Stanford University); The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles; The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; Herzog Anton Ulrich Muzeum,
Wolfenbüttel; The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Musée d’histoire urbaine et sociale,
Suresnes (France). None of the examined prints yielded early watermarks. This research
is complicated by the fact that many of the early impressions of these relatively small
prints were cut within the platemark, and/or pasted down onto album sheets.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 499

of the century. A definitive terminus ante quem is formed by the print series
Ruinarum Variarum Fabricarum, published in Antwerp by Gerard de Jode
(1509–1591) in 1554. Fifteen of the thirty-three etchings attributed to Lambert
Zutman (also known as Suavius, ca. 1510–1576) are copies after the Italian
prints [Fig. 12.8].44 While 1554 therefore represents the absolute latest year of
publication, other sources point to an earlier date of creation. Several French
etchings, made by the Master of Story of Cadmus and other printmakers active
in the print workshop located at or near the castle of Fontainebleau, incorpo-
rate close copies of the ruins in their all’antica landscape backgrounds.45 As a
monument signalling their personal claim on Antiquity, the amphitheatre of
Bordeaux proved a favourite among the Fontainebleau etchers [Figs. 12.9 and
12.10].46 Since the French workshop was active between 1542 and 1547 only,
the production of their Italian models must be situated more decidedly in the
second quarter of the century.
This period is marked by a series of events that would prove crucial for the
study of Antiquity over the following decades. The Sack of Rome (1527) had
left its citizens with an acute awareness of the fragile nature of its ancient
treasures. While a sense of loss had pervaded the study of Roman monuments
from early on, their state of decay was long perceived as an irreversible fact. For
example, in one of the poems by Hildebert of Lavardin (ca. 1055–1153), the city
confesses: “I hardly know who I was; hardly Rome remembers Rome”. A genera-
tion later, Master Gregory lamented the destruction of ancient marble statues
by Pope Gregory the Great (590–604 AD) in his Narratio.47 Nowhere, however,
is the urgency of the matter felt more strongly than in Raphael’s address to
Pope Leo X. Describing the city as a cadaver of its former self, he methodically
listed the causes for Rome’s state of ruin, ranging from the natural process of
erosion, and historic invasions of the Goths, Vandals and Ostrogoths, to the
neglect by the city’s Holy keepers. A significant difference between Raphael’s
letter and the works of his predecessors is the fact that he signals the present
as a moment of change, and proclaims loss to be an actionable item.48 Rather

44 The De Jode Dynasty, nrs. 927–959, 202–241; Fuhring, “RVINARVM VARIARVM

FABRICARVM” 92–93.
45 See: Jenkins C., Studies in Prints and Printmaking – Prints at the Court of Fontainebleau, c.
1542–47, I–III (Ouderkerk aan den IJssel: 2017). See: I. fig. 2.6. School of Fontainebleau after
Jean Cousin, Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist, etching. Whereabouts
unknown; II. JM 43 (308, 313); III. MCS 14 (150–151); Anon. 42 (282–283).
46 Jenkins, Studies in Prints and Printmaking, III. MCS 14 (150–151); Anon. 42 (282–283).
47 Blennow, “Wanderers and Wonders” 72, 80.
48 See for an online transcription the letter the Italian Renaissance Document Site: http://
irds-project.org/doc/2559/3356/.
500 Speelberg

Figure 12.8 Lambert Suavius after an unidentified Italian printmaker, Ruin of a Round
Temple [Templum Idor(um). Egito] (1554). Etching, 17.2 × 12.4 cm. New York,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 48.13.4(65))
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 501

Figure 12.9 Unidentified Italian printmaker, Teatrum Bordeos (ca. 1535–1540). Engraving,
13.6 × 9.9 cm [uneven plate edges]. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(116a))
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Figure 12.10 Master of Story of Cadmus after Giulio Romano, The Contest of Marsyas and
Apollo (ca. 1542–1545). Etching, 32.4 cm (diameter). London, The British
Museum (1835,0711.16)
Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, London
502 Speelberg

than simply noting the inevitable, he proposed to take action by documenting

the remains of the Ancient city in drawings.49
While he was not the first to undertake such a project per se, Raphael’s com-
prehensive approach elevated the endeavour to the level of visual preservation,
striving for objectivity and accuracy, both in the physical act of on-site mea-
suring, and the pictorial documentation of architectural information. Even
though only a few of Raphael’s drawings after the Antique have survived, his
method can be traced in the works of his pupils and followers, among whom
Baldassare Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.50 Both artists sur-
vived the Sack of Rome, and played a role of great significance in the renewed
efforts to document the city’s ancient remains in its wake. These efforts gained
momentum, in particular, after the appointment of Pope Paul III (1534–1549),
whose ascension to the papacy heralded an extremely fertile period for artistic
and intellectual pursuits, in which the study of Antiquity took pride of place.51
Arthur DiFuria has pointed out that the city’s monuments formed an integral
parts of Pope Paul’s rhetoric of post-Sack regeneration as important bearers
of Rome’s cultural memory.52 A significant step to support this claim was the
installation of a new Papal Commissario delle Antichità, which proclaimed
archaeology and the preservation of monuments an official concern of the
State and its retinue.53
The period saw the formation of a veritable paper archive of antiquities.
Not only did drawing after the antique become an important aspect of an art-
ist’s training,54 there are also clear indications that collections of drawings
began to serve a role of significance in the context of several more ambitious
research projects, intended to fulfil the promise of Raphael’s comprehensive
scheme. Possibly the most ambitious plan to emerge, was the critical edition
of Vitruvius’ treatise as described by the Sienese humanist Claudio Tolomei
(1492–1556). In his 1542 letter to Count Agostino Landi (1500–1555), he outlined
a publication of encyclopaedic scope in which all knowledge was to be aggre-
gated that could help to interpret or broaden the implications of Vitruvius’s

49 DiFuria A., Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory and the Cult of Ruins
(Leiden: 2019) 99.
50 Bartolozzi, “Architects, Antiquarians, and the Rise of the Image” 124.
51 Procaccioli P., “Dionigi Atanagi e le Accademie della Roma Farnesiana”, Intrecci Virtuosi.
Letterati, Artisti e Accademie tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Rome: 2017) 77.
52 DiFuria, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome 86.
53 Laureys M., “Bartolomeo Marliano (1488–1566). Ein Antiquar des 16. Jahrhunderts”,
Antiquarische Gelehrsamkeit und die Bildende Kunst: Die Gegenwart der Antike in der
Renaissance (Cologne 1996) 156; DiFuria, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome 86.
54 DiFuria, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome 103, 104.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 503

writings. He hoped the project could be achieved within a three-year timespan

through the efforts of a network of scholars. Previously often equated with the
Accademia della Virtù, more recently Bernd Kulawik and others have argued
for a link to the Accademia de lo Studio de l’Architettura” (described by Dionigi
Atanagi in 1565) or a more informal and fluctuating body of people, referred
to as the Accademia Romana.55 Michela Corso has further suggested that the
Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon may have come into being in 1543 with
the express intention to support the research of ancient architecture.56 Much
is still unclear about the functioning of these societies, their relationship to
one another, and to other, seemingly unassociated scholars, artists and archi-
tects. Similarly, the extent to which Tolomei’s ambitions were realized remains
a matter of ongoing research.57 What is clear, however, is that this and simi-
lar endeavours generated a heightened interest in, and a voracious collect-
ing of research materials in the form of old and newly commissioned works
on paper.58
Particularly significant is the fact that while previous generations had vig-
orously collected their research in drawings, the years following the Sack of
Rome are marked by a so-called “graphic turn” in which a conscious effort was
made to translate such records into the more permanent and widely acces-
sible medium of print.59 As such, various printed works of the period contain
important information about the drawing collections present in Rome at the

55 Kulawik B., “Tolomei’s Project for a Planned Renaissance of Roman Architecture –

Unfinished?”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 21 (2018: 2), 275–276; Kulawik B.,
“Establishing Norms for a New Architecture: The Project of the Accademia Romana, its
Goals and Results”, Modello, regola, ordine. Parcours normatifs dans l’Italie du Cinquecento
(Rennes: 2018), 311–322.
56 Corso notes that many of its principal members were architects, or artists invested in
antiquarian research, and that most had prior affiliations with other orders to fulfill their
religious engagements. See: Corso M., “In Virtù dell’Antico. La Compagnia dei Virtuosi del
Pantheon nel Cinquecento” Intrecci Virtuosi. Letterati, Artisti e Accademie tra Cinquecento
e Seicento (Rome: 2017) 111, 116–117.
57 A tentative reconstruction and further leads for investigation are proposed in: Kulawik
“Establishing Norms for a New Architecture”, 311–322.
58 Günther H., ‘Gli Studi Antiquari per l’“Accademia della Virtù”’, Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola
(Milan: 2002) 126–128; Kulawik, “Tolomei’s Project for a Planned Renaissance” 275–297.
59 Mario Carpo has described this period as “the crossroad where antiquarian interest,
mechanical images, and architectural theory meet”, and situates it more broadly in
the period between 1515 and 1537. See: Carpo M., “How Do You Imitate a Building That
You Have Never Seen? Printed Images, Ancient Models, and Handmade Drawings in
Renaissance Architectural Theory”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2001:2), 228.
504 Speelberg

time.60 For example, while since dispersed or transferred elsewhere, recur-

ring citations make clear that the personal collections of Baldassare Peruzzi61
and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger62 were frequently accessed for study
throughout the 1540s and 1550s. One of Peruzzi’s drawings of the Pantheon,
for instance, served as a model for Serlio’s Terzo Libro, but was also used by
Pirro Ligorio.63 In addition, architects such as Antonio Labacco (1495–1570)64
and Jacopo Vignola (1507–1573)65 made active use of Peruzzi’s and Sangallo’s

60 Arnold Nesselrath has hinted at the relationship between early sixteenth-century archi-
tectural prints and circulating drawings, codices and taccuini in his overview of extent
albums of architectural drawings, but this subject deserves further scholarly exploration.
See: Nesselrath A., “I libri di disegni di antichità. Tentativo di una tipologia”, Salvatore
Settis (ed), Memoria dell’Antico nell’Arte Italiana. Dalla Tradizione all’archeologia (Turin:
1986) 89–147.
61 While Peruzzi had died in 1536, his graphic collections which consisted of a substantial
number of the quattrocento drawings as well as his own drawings after the Antique,
remained in Rome. Through inheritance, they came into the possession of a discreet and
like-minded group of people among whom his son Salustio (1512–1573), Jacopo Meleghino
(ca. 1480–1549), and Pirro Ligorio. See: Günther, Das Studium der Antiken Architektur, 244,
245; Quednau R., “Aemulatio veterum. Lo studio e la recezione dell’antichità in Peruzzi e
Raffaello”, Fagiolo M., Madonna M. (ed.), Baldassare Peruzzi. Pittura Scena e Architettura
nel Cinquecento (Rome: 1987) 401.
62 At the time of his death in 1546, Antonio left twenty-one albums of drawings to his son
Orazio. The latter turned down an offer of purchase by Pierluigi Farnese that same year,
and passed the collection on to his son Antonio, from whose possession it eventually
went to the Medici. See: Günther, Das Studium der Antiken Architektur 244, 245; Elena
Efimova posits the idea that the combined drawing archives of several generations of the
Sangallo family formed a core collection for studies into, and copies of Roman monu-
ments. See: Efimova, “Antiquity in the Eyes of an Antiquarian, Architect and Engraver:
State Hermitage Albums and the Development of Architectural Drawings of Antiquity in
the 16th Century” 850, 851.
63 Bartolozzi, “Architects, Antiquarians, and the Rise of the Image” 116, 129, 138.
64 The engravings in Antonio Labacco’s Libro d’Antonio Labacco appartenente a l’architettura
(1547) follow drawings by these two artists. (See: Günther, Das Studium der Antiken
Architektur 248–249). Labacco worked directly with Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in
the fabbrica of St. Peter’s. In 1546, the year of Sangallo’s death, Labacco initiated a project
to publish in print the wooden model of Sangallo’s design for Saint Peter’s as part of an
effort to further the architect’s influence on the execution of the building. See: Witcombe
Ch., Copyright in the Renaissance. Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-Century Venice and
Rome (Leiden and Boston: 2004) 257–264.
65 Vignola demonstrably made use of drawings by both Peruzzi and Sangallo to inform
his rendering of the Temple of Portumno in Porto, published in his Le due regole della
prospettiva pratica 1583 by Ignazio Danti (1536–1586). Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini
d’architettura (1562) draws heavily from pre-existing renderings of antique buildings
as well. (See: Günther, “Gli Studi Antiquari” 126–128); The earlier publication is closely
related to Labacco’s Libro in its model and format. Elizabeth Miller has shown that
the two books were often sold together, bound in specialty albums with a preselected
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 505

drawings to inform their publications on Roman architecture.66 Both were

directly connected with the above-mentioned Roman academies, and Kulawik
has even suggested that Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (1562)
might have been the product of his work for the Accademia Romana.67
Peruzzi and his generation stood at the cradle of this “graphic turn”. While
the architect never published under his own name during his lifetime, Peruzzi
actively propagated for the preservation of architectural knowledge through
graphic media.68 His ambitions were instilled firmly in Sebastiano Serlio
whom, from 1537 onwards, published much of Peruzzi’s legacy in his six books
of architecture and the Libro Extraordinario. His endeavours in the world of
print had begun about a decade earlier, however, with the publication of a set
of engravings of capitals, entablatures and bases after the antique.69 The series,
published in 1528 shortly after the Sack, was created in collaboration with the
printmaker Agostino Veneziano (ca. 1490–after 1536) and marks an important
watershed moment for the serial production of prints with architectural sub-
jects after the Antique. In the years following the election of Pope Paul III, the
same Veneziano appears to have worked in tandem with the Master GA with the
Caltrop and the Master PS (fl. 1530s) to expand upon the 1528 “Serlio-project”
with several print series dedicated to a range of architectural subjects.70 While
the exact models for the prints have not yet been identified, it is clear that
their subjects relate closely to various architectural codices and taccuini.71
Such paper collections offered a plethora of variations on themes, sometimes
recorded methodically and meticulously to serve an analysis of form, order
and proportions, while others contain a seemingly random collection of motifs
that were of interest to their authors. The different modes of representation
found in the prints by the three printmakers suggests that several such codices,
or related paper collections were at their disposal. The prints by the Master
PS are the most consistent, showing entablatures, pedestals and capitals with
extensive inscriptions and measurements. Several of his prints and those by

combination of prints of similar subject matter. See: Miller E., “Antonio Lafreri’s architec-
ture and ornament volumes: Crossing the boundary between books and volumes of prints
in late-sixteenth century Rome”, Renaissance Studies, 33 (2018: 5), 761–788.
66 Günther, “Gli Studi Antiquari” 126–128.
67 See: Kulawik, “Tolomei’s Project for a Planned Renaissance” 284–285.
68 Quednau “Aemulatio veterum” 401.
69 Oberhuber K., The Works of Marcantonio Raimondi and of His School. The Illustrated
Bartsch, 27 (14–2), New York 1978, nrs. 525–533, 199–216.
70 Ibid; Miller E., 16th-Century Ornament Prints in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
1999, cat. nrs. 52, 55, 56, 178–181, 184–200.
71 Waters, “A Renaissance without Order. Ornament, Single-sheet Engravings and the
Mutability of Architectural Prints”, 494–496.
506 Speelberg

the Master GA with Caltrop even depict the plumb lines used by architects for
on-site measuring; an element also seen, for example, in the Codex Coner.72
Alongside the above-mentioned, somewhat modest prints of architectural
elements, Veneziano and the Master GA with the Caltrop also began to create
larger compositions, which present architectural elements and ruins in land-
scape settings. These compositions answered to what Tschudi has described
as a desire for a more anthropocentric experience of the city, a phenomenon
which first manifested itself in the Antiquae Romae topographia (Rome 1534),
written by Bartolomeo Marliano (1488–1566). The book formed a crucial break
from many of its predecessors, most of all Albertini’s Opusculum, by no longer
presenting an abstraction of the city based on typologies or other scholarly
devices, but by describing it through seven perambulations which situated
the monuments in the city, as they would be experienced by visitors. In this
respect, Marliano’s publication formed the (unillustrated) predecessor to later
souvenir books and print series, which replaced words almost entirely with
such vistas in etching and engraving.73 A similar approach can be noted in the
many drawings Maarten van Heemskerck made during his stay in Rome in this
period, aptly described by DiFuria as: ‘A veritable school of archaeologists walks
through his ruin landscapes […]’.74 The prints by Veneziano and the Master
GA are among the first engraved representations of this new genre, and may
have been inspired directly by Marliano’s interactions with publishers such as
Antonio Salamanca (1479–1562) and Michele Tramezzino (fl. 1526–1571).75 In
addition, some of the elaborate pen and ink drawings in the Vatican “sketch-
book” of Giuliano da Sangallo,76 or drawings of similar nature, may have served
as more concrete models for the printmakers. The earliest examples of these
prints contained modest indications of place, through the generic addition
of scenic grass overgrowth, flora, and flowing hills indicated by simple lines
[Fig. 12.11]. Quickly, however, the abstract backgrounds expanded into the fully
developed cityscapes for which many of the prints that were later collected
under the title Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae are known.

72 London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, vol. 115.

73 Tschudi, “Two Sixteenth-Century Guidebooks” 105–112.
74 DiFuria, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome, 97.
75 Tschudi, “Two Sixteenth-Century Guidebooks” 105.
76 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica, Barb. Lat. 4424.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 507

Figure 12.11 Attributed to Agostino Veneziano, The Arch of Constantine (ca. 1535–1540).
Engraving 28.7 × 22.6 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no.
41.72(1.82))
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
508 Speelberg

4 Changing the Facts

The compositions of the anonymous Italian prints compare closely to the ear-
liest scenic prints by Veneziano and others.77 In addition, their relationship to
quattrocento drawings also indicates a date of creation between ca. 1535 and
1540. During this period, the ekphrastic nature of some of the buildings would
not have discouraged their consumption, as elaborations on ancient motifs still
held great currency alongside identifiable archaeological remains for contem-
porary artists working all’antica. In the years following, however, the ground-
ing of monuments within history, and the physical parameters of the city of
Rome gradually became a more significant factor in the saleability of such
prints. This is evidenced in archaeological imagery by the increased addition
of inscriptions which expressly (sometimes falsely) indicate Antique and/or
Roman origins. That such inscriptions became virtually obligatory towards the
middle of the century, is exemplified by the addition of phrases such as ‘fecit
dal antico’ to the second state of almost all of the prints by Battista Franco
(1510–1561) with subjects after the Antique.78
While at first sight an almost negligible element within the composition of
the anonymous Italian prints, the Latin inscriptions thus quickly became their
raison d’être.79 What did soon proof problematic, however, is the fact that the
inscriptions indicated that several buildings were located outside the Italian
peninsula. Alongside the amphitheatre of Bordeaux, three more structures
were to be found in France, while one of the triumphal arches stood in Spain.
This more international orientation of antiquarianism befits the quattrocento
origins of their subject matter, and can be traced in the architectural drawings
of individuals such as Ciriaco d’Ancona (1391–1452) and Giuliano da Sangallo.80
It is also mirrored in Benvenuto Cellini’s account of Peruzzi’s endeavours to
identify the most beautiful specimens of ancient architecture: ‘[…] si sot-
tomesse a ritrarre tutte le belle maniere, ch’egli vedeva, delle cose antiche in
Roma, e non tanto in Roma, ch’ei cercò per tutto il mondo dove fusse delle cose

77 Notably, the related drawings in the Kaufman album are characterized by more elaborate
landscape settings, and occasional additions of human figures. These features are indica-
tive of a subsequent phase in the appreciation and consumption of this type of imagery.
78 Zerner H., Italian Artists of the Sixteenth Century, School of Fontainebleau. The Illustrated
Bartsch, 32(16) 1978.
79 The situation in Antwerp was reversed. De Jode published the copies after the Italian
prints without inscriptions to offer his clients a set of generic structures in the manner of
the antique, rather than specific buildings.
80 Gudelj J., “The Triumph and the Threshold. Ciraco d’Ancona and the Renaissance
Discovery of the Ancient Arch”, Roma moderna e contemporanea, XXII (2014: 2), 159–176.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 509

antiche […]’.81 The second half of the sixteenth century, instead, is marked
by trends that were largely national or even regional in focus, exemplified by
publications such as Torello Sarayna’s De origine et amplitudine civitatis Veronæ
(Verona 1540) and the Discours Historial de l’Antique et Illustre Cité de Nismes
by Jean Poldo d’Albenas (Lyon 1560). Roman publishers naturally considered
Rome primus inter pares, and the anonymous prints did not comfortably fit
this new model. Rather than take them out of commission, however, another
solution was found to keep them in circulation. Without the slightest change
to their compositions, the inscriptions were altered to give the foreign struc-
tures new, exclusively Italian provenances.82 The amphitheatre in Bordeaux
was renamed the ‘TRANSITORIVM CAESARIS’; the ruins of the Monastery
of Cluny became the Thermal baths of Emperor Antoninus; and the ruin of a
Parisian palace was given new life as the palace of emperor Hadrian. The ‘Arcus
in Hispania’ was not renamed, as it appears that after this moment, the trium-
phal arches were no longer included (see appendix I).83
There are several reasons to assume that we can attribute this astute
response to evolving antiquarian sensibilities to the Salamanca-Lafreri work-
shop, and situate the state change soon after the two entrepreneurs merged
their businesses in December 1553.84 At some point during the previous
decade, the entire series had been copied by an another unidentified Italian
printmaker.85 The copied prints represented the buildings in reverse, but with
their original names, indicating that they were made prior to their reinter-
pretation. The practice of duplicating popular prints was typical for the brief
period during the 1540s and early 1550s when the Frenchman Antonio Lafreri

81 ‘[…] he applied himself to record all the beautiful things that he saw of the ancient
remains in Rome, and not only in Rome, but all over the world where ancient remains
were to be found […]’. Quoted from: Quednau “Aemulatio veterum” 401, 402.
82 Inscription on surviving drawings in the Kaufman and Rawlinson albums, as well as vari-
ous sheets created in the circle of Androuet du Cerceau confirm that the identification of
the buildings was fluid.
83 See for the series before state change at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: acc. nos.
26.50.1(110–122); after state change: acc. nos. 2016.684.1–12. The absence of the arches may
be explained by their great popularity in treatises and prints, which quickly turned exist-
ing structures into icons, and rendered ekphrastic, or even slightly inaccurate representa-
tions worthless.
84 Rubach B., Ant. Lafreri Formis Romae. Der Verleger Antonio Lafreri und seine
Druckgraphikproduction (Berlin: 2009) 49.
85 Toulouse, Bibliothèque d’étude et du patrimoine, Res. B. XVI. 375; another set can be
found pasted into an album of inscriptions assembled by Maximilian van Waelscapple
and dated 1554 (Berlin, Stattsbibliothek, Ms. lat. fol. 61s). I thank Dr. Michael Waters
(Columbia University, New York), who will discuss the album more extensively in a forth-
coming publication, for bringing it to my attention.
510 Speelberg

(fr. Antoine Lafréry, 1512–1577) entered the Roman print market as a competi-
tor to Salamanca and other publishers.86 While neither publisher inscribed
their name into the plates, the context and dating of their creation, as well
as the precedent of similar plates by Veneziano and others, suggest that the
copperplates passed from their original maker into Salamanca’s stock, and
that Lafreri, in turn, commissioned the copies. That both publishers must have
owned a set is suggested by the fact that the copies in reverse soon became
redundant, which would have been the logical outcome of their merger.87
The original plates remained in circulation over the next few decades, and
were integrated into the subset of prints used for the Rome-oriented albums
that became known as the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae.88 In addition,
(remnants of) smaller albums in several museum collections attest to the fact
that they were also sold as part of a specific subset of other prints from among
the publishers’ stock.89 The group contains studies in perspective, such as the
series Prospettive et Antichità di Roma by Michele Lucchese (fl. 1534–1564), and
several other reconstructions of Antique buildings.90 In addition to architec-
tural subjects, the subset of prints also includes three, otherwise unknown
engravings of mills.91 They can be identified as faithful copies of illustrations
found on three consecutive pages of Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s Trattato I.92
The letters A, B, and C on the plates suggest that they were conceived as illus-
trations for an unidentified publication. They predate Agostino Ramelli’s Le

86 Rubach, Ant. Lafreri Formis Romae, 28–38.

87 At least one of the plates from the canceled series was later used by someone to prac-
tice their hand at incising copper by adding “doodles” to the landscape background. See:
Unidentified Italian Arist, Tenplum Iovis Ultoris, ca. 1540–50. Engraving. New York, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Herbert Mitchell, 2008 (2018.839.52.2).
88 Fuhring, “RVINARVM VARIARVM FABRICARVM” 96; a late example of this practice
can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 26.50.1(1–168).
89 Elizabeth Miller has recently written about a number of similar specialty albums with
a preset selection of related prints. See: Miller, “Antonio Lafreri’s architecture and orna-
ment volumes” 761–788.
90 See at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. nos. 2016.684.13–.15; At the Getty Research
Institute in Los Angeles, Special Collections, no. 1518-095; State Hermitage Museums,
Saint Petersburg, no. OG-345551-34597.
91 In particular, GRI Special Collections, no. 1518-095.
92 Francesco di Giorgio’s Trattato I survives in two copies. The Codice Ashburnham 361, in
the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana in Florence, and the Codice Saluzziano 148, in the
Biblioteca Reale di Torino. All three illustrations can be found in the latter, on folios 37v
(Mulino per via d’animellati secchioni alzata l’acqua per le lieve sopra della rota viene
a macinare), 38r (Mulino per via di contrapeso) and 38v (Mulino che per via di pozzo
ell’acqua a cchatene e tagliere per lo chanale sopra la ruota lieve fa). See: Maltese C.(ed),
Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Trattati di Architettura Ingegneria e Arte Militare, I, Milan
1967, 266, tav. 70–72.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 511

Diverse et Artificiose Machine (1588), which is considered one of the first books
on machines in the Italian vernacular.93 It is tempting to think that these plates
might have been intended for the book of machines envisioned as part of
Tolomei’s encyclopaedic project, which was to treat all ancient machines pow-
ered by water, wind, and the use of counterweights.94 Francesco di Giorgio’s
numerous drawings of machines would have served as an important vantage
point for such a study.95 While no such publication was issued at the time,
efforts to collect and scrutinize source material would undoubtedly have been
initiated in the 1540s.96
The conscious pairing of all these prints may hint at the fact that some
awareness remained on the part of their publisher(s) that they were all based
on related source material, in the form of a group of (older) drawings from
which various authors saw fit to cherry pick for their individual publications.97
This idea is substantiated by the repetition of compositions from various of
these series and single leaf prints in the Codex Destailleur B, and the oeuvre of
Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau.98

93 Reti L.,“Francesco Di Giorgio Martini’s Treatise on Engineering and Its Plagiarists.”

Technology and Culture, 4 (1963:3), 291.
94 Kulawik, “Tolomei’s Project for a Planned Renaissance” 294.
95 Gustina Scaglia has pointed out that Tolomei’s circle of Vitruvian scholars in Rome
contained a large number of individuals of Sienese descent, which may suggest that
Francesco’s work was held in particularly high regard. See: Scaglia G., “A Vitruvianist’s
«Thermae» Plan and the Vitruvianists in Roma and Siena”, Arte Lomabarda, nuova serie,
84/85 (1988:1–2), 93.
96 Bernd Kulawik hints at the possibility that Ottavio Strada the Younger’s Kiinstlicher Abriss
allerhand Wasser-Wind, Ross-und-Hand- muhlen (Frankfurt-am-Main 1617) may have been
the delayed result of the work done by his grandfather Jacopo Strada (1507–1588). See:
Kulawik, “Tolomei’s Project for a Planned Renaissance” 289, 294.
97 Notably, Elena Effimova points out that drawings related to the Destailleur albums in the
Hermitage, now kept in the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea in Ferrara (Inv. Nr. MS Cl. I,
217), were previously in the possession of the publishers Nicholas van Aelst and Pietro di
Nobile, both successors to the publishing house(s) of Salamanca and Lafreri. See: Efimova,
“Antiquity in the Eyes of an Antiquarian, Architect and Engraver: State Hermitage Albums
and the Development of Architectural Drawings of Antiquity in the 16th Century” 838,
839.
98 Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau, Vues d’optique (Orléans 1551). See: Leutrat, “Le Vues
d’Optique. Une poétique de l’espace” 183–195. While it has previously been suggested
that Du Cerceau’s Vues d’optique served as a source for the Italian drawings and prints
(Lanzarini O., Martinis R., “Questo libro fu di Andrea Palladio”: Il codice Destailleur B
dell’Ermitage (Rome: 2015), 49–51) the reverse scenario in which he had access to (copies
of) the same body of drawings appears increasingly more likely.
512 Speelberg

5 Form Favours Fantasy

It is unclear how long the Italian ekphrastic print series remained in active
circulation, but surviving impressions illustrate that printing continued until
the plates were fully worn,99 and they were collected across Europe over the
following centuries.100 It is difficult to ascertain with any certainty what sta-
tus was assigned to their subject matter by their respective owners – whether
they were believed to be ancient buildings; understood to represent a form
of ekphrastic archaeology; or had been completely ‘unmasked’ as fantasy
architecture – but even in the latter form, they proved their merit. This is
illustrated by the architectural drawings of the Lombardian woodcarver and
architect Giovanni Battista Montano (1534–1621). In 1624, Montano’s close
collaborator Giovanni Battista Soria (1581–1651) posthumously published the
series Scielta di Varii Tempietti Antichi. Libro Primo [Fig. 12.12], which was fol-
lowed by Architettura Con Diversi Ornamenti Cavati Dall’Antico (1636) and
Raccolta de’ Tempij, et Sepolcri disegnati Dall’Antico (1638), both issued by
Bartolomeo de’ Rossi (fl. first half seventeenth century).101 While the titles sug-
gest that these prints represent illustrations of Roman architecture, carefully
assembled by Montano who was considered a great specialist of Antiquity, the
majority are examples of so-called ‘fantasy architecture’. Long thought to have
been the product of Montano’s own imagination, Anna Bedon has pointed out
that the prints and the even larger body of Montano’s architectural drawings
were copied from pre-existing models, noting that he seemingly had access
to ‘tutti i taccuini archeologici presenti a Roma (all the archaeological draw-
ing albums present in Rome)’.102 Many go back to published and unpublished
work by Andrea Palladio, Antonio Labacco, Sebastiano Serlio, Baldassare and/
or Sallustio Peruzzi, and various members of the Sangallo family, most of
which, in turn, were copied from quattrocento models such as those in the
Santarelli collection.103

99 See for reference the prints in the collection of the archeologist Rodolfo Lanciani (1845–
1929. Biblioteca di Archeologia and Storia dell’Arte (BIASA), Rome.
100 They are found, amongst others, in the print collections of Michiel Hinloopen (1619–1708),
the antiquarian Thomas Hearne (1678–1735), and in the above-cited nineteenth-century
image archive of Rodolfo Lanciani.
101 Dallaj A., “L’Architettura ‘antica’ di Montano nei Metodi degli Editori Giovanni Battista
Soria e Bartolomeo de Rossi e qualche Nota per Jerome David”, Horti Hesperidem, VII
(2017: 2), 74, 80.
102 Bedon, “Architettura e archeologia nella Roma del Cinquecento” 119.
103 Bedon, “Architettura e archeologia nella Roma del Cinquecento” 120–121; Montano had
become a member of the Virtuosi al Pantheon in 1579, which may have provided him
with access to the paper archive(s) assembled by its members earlier in the century.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 513

Figure 12.12 After Giovanni Battista Montano, “Ancient Temple with a Centralized Plan”,
in Scielta di Varii Tempietti Antichi (Rome, Giovanni Battista Soria: 1624).
Engraving (bound in miscellany). Rome, Biblioteca Herziana (Ca-MON 820–
2910 gr raro)
514 Speelberg

What is most important about Montano’s work in the context of this essay,
however, is the decisive shift it brought about in the balance between fact and
fantasy. Bedon underlines that Montano cared little about what his drawings
factually represented. Instead, he used his pseudo-historic sources to serve in
an exercise of form for form’s sake. The thin veil of a grounding in Antiquity
legitimized his endeavour to encourage creativity and innovation in an archi-
tectural world that had increasingly been governed by Vitruvian principles, fil-
tered through Palladian typologies.104 Montano’s work proposed a separation
between the scholarship and practice of architecture,105 presenting form as
an autonomous entity that did not have to be ruled by the word. In doing
so, he opened up ‘innumerable, unpredictable, and blissfully divergent pos-
sibilities of invention’, thereby not only fulfilling the creative promise of the
quattrocento heterotopiae,106 but simultaneously heralding the onset of the
Baroque movement in Rome.

See: Campbell I., The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Series A: Antiquities and
Architecture. Ancient Roman Topography and Architecture, 2 (London: 2004) 30.
104 Bedon, “Architettura e archeologia nella Roma del Cinquecento” 123, 124; Pagliara P.,
“Vitruvio da testa a canone”, Salvatore Settis (ed), Memoria dell’Antico nell’Arte Italiana.
Dalla Tradizione all’archeologia (Turin: 1986) 81.
105 Bedon, “Architettura e archeologia nella Roma del Cinquecento” 123, 124.
106 Pericolo, “Heterotopia in the Renaissance” 11.
THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 515

Appendix

Overview print series, states and plate matchesa

First State Second State

Plate A Tenplum Isaiae Prophetae Tenplum Isaiae Prophetae

(Untitled) Templum Saturni
Plate B Palatium .Se. Lugduni Termae Antoniane Imp. (Renamed)
Templum Idor(um). Egito Templum Idor(um). Egito
Plate C Palatium Caesaris Parisiis Palatium Hadriani Imp. Tiburi
(Renamed)
Termae Deocletiani Termae Deocletiani
Plate D Pantheon Rome Pantheon Rome
Palatium Maius. Ro. Palatium Maius. Ro.
Plate E Aerarii Publici Rome Aerarii Publici Rome
Piñaculũ Termar.(um) Piñaculũ Termar.(um)
Plate F Arcus in Hispania X
Porta Antonae X
Plate G Arcus in Provincia X
Arcus Vespasiani X
Plate H Tenplum Iovis Ultoris Tenplum Iovis Ultoris
Arcus Lutii Septimii X
Plate I Tem˜. Ro. Penatibus Dicatũ. Tem˜. Ro. Penatibus Dicatũ.
Arcus S. Georgii X
Plate J Sepulchrum Adriani Sepulchrum Adriani
Mercurii Templum Mercurii Templum
Plate K Teatrum Bordeos Transitorium Caesaris (Renamed)
Tenplus Veneris Tenplus Veneris
Plate L Palatium Valerianũ Palatium Valerianũ
Plate M Palatium M. Agrippa Palatium M. Agrippa
Plate N Palatium Claudie Inperatoris Palatium Claudie Inperatoris

a Research has shown that most plates in this series were engraved on both sides. The 25 prints
in the series were thus printed from a total of 14 plates.
516 Speelberg

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Miller E., “Antonio Lafreri’s architecture and ornament volumes: Crossing the boundary
between books and volumes of prints in late-sixteenth century Rome”, Renaissance
Studies, 33 (2018: 5) 761–788.
Nesselrath A., “I libri di disegni di antichità. Tentativo di una tipologia”, Salvatore Settis
(ed), Memoria dell’Antico nell’Arte Italiana. Dalla Tradizione all’archeologia (Turin:
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nell’Arte Italiana. Dalla Tradizione all’archeologia (Turin: 1986) 46–55.
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Virtuosi. Letterati, Artisti e Accademie tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Rome: 2017) 77–90.
Quednau R., “Aemulatio veterum. Lo studio e la recezione dell’antichità in Peruzzi
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THE AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ARCHITECTURE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY 519

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 Chapter 13

Ekphrasis and Ovidian Poetics in Hendrick

Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and Adonis
of ca. 1598
Walter S. Melion

Executed in pen and various shades of brown ink on brown-tinted paper, mono-
grammed and dated 1596 (or 1598), and measuring 634 × 484 mm, Landscape
with Venus and Adonis is one of Hendrick Goltzius’s grandest ekphrastic draw-
ings [Fig. 13.1].1 A large tree consisting of two trunks, one blasted, the other
listing but overtopped by thick branches and verdant foliage, constitutes the
drawing’s focal point. Just behind this tree, a second one rises straight upward,
its crown mingling with that of the first tree. A jagged stump projects from
beneath the second tree’s large righthand root, its edges mingling with the
greenery perhaps growing from it. Upon closer inspection, these three speci-
mens can be identified as arboreal amplificationes of the three figures seated
at their base: Adonis in whose lap nestles Venus; and beside them, fitting
an arrow to his bow, Cupid. Adonis, gazing into Venus’s eyes, leaning in to
exchange a kiss, while intently listening to the goddess, duplicates in small the
position or, more precisely, the attitude of the first tree. Venus, her legs splayed
to the right, her torso, neck, and head rising vertically, her face on the verge of
touching Adonis’s, is a match for the second tree, whose top coalesces with the
first. Cupid, seated beside Venus, inclining to the right, and fiddling with a
sharp arrow, resembles the cuspate stump; its acicular edge articulates with
his weaponry, and its one living branch (at lower right) duplicates the upward
curve of his bow. That all three trees are conspicuously serpentine, coiling

1 See Reznicek E.K.J., Die Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1961) I 432–433,
cat. nr. 407. Ovid’s version of the fable of Venus and Adonis may have seized the attention
of Goltzius and his humanist collaborators because the goddess is explicitly portrayed as a
maker of performative images, in Metamorphoses 10:725–727: ‘[…] dixit. ‘luctus monimenta
manebunt / semper, Adoni, mei, repetitaque mortis imago / annua plangoris peraget simu-
lamina nostri’. Colin Burrow, in an important article on Ovid’s use of the terms imitamen and
simulamen, as they relate to this passage, translates it, ‘every year, Adonis, the repeated image
of [your] death will perform an imitation of my grief’; see Burrow C., “‘Full of the maker’s
guile’: Ovid on Imitating and on the Imitation of Ovid”, in Hardie P. – Barchiesi A. – Hinds S.
(eds.), Ovidian Transformation: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its Reception, Cambridge
Philological Society Supplementary Volume 23 (Cambridge: 1999) 271–284.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 521

Figure 13.1 Hendrick Goltzius, Landscape with Venus and Adonis, 1596 [or 1598]. Pen and
brown ink on brown-tinted paper, 635 × 484 mm
Albertina, Vienna

around their axes, much like Venus, Adonis, and Cupid, further enhances the
obvious analogies that Goltzius urges upon the beholder. Underlying these
parallelisms of tree and person were the canons of beautiful motion soon bril-
liantly to be codified by Karel van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck – specifically, in
522 Melion

the linked chapters on history and on landscape that anchor Book I, the Grondt
der edel vry Schilder-const (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting). Like
Van Mander, Goltzius, by bringing trees and persons into alignment, implies
that landscape can be mobilized to tell stories and communicate affects, no
less effectively than human bodies.
As I have argued elsewhere, Goltzius explored the narrative and affective
value of ekphrastic landscape in the lyrical landscape drawings he designed
concurrently for Van Mander’s translation of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, and
in his Ovidian Portrait of Frederick de Vries of 1597 [Fig. 13.2].2 In the Landscape
with Venus and Adonis, he ingeniously utilizes landscape to convey the poetics
of his source text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as it was being newly construed by
humanists such as Gulielmus Canterus (Willem Canter) of Utrecht and Leuven,
author of the Ratio emendandi and editor of the Eclogues of Stobaeus and the
tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. In his Novarum lectionum
libri quatuor (Basel, Johannes Oporinus: 1564), Canterus argues for the inte-
gral construction of the Metamorphoses: its beauty and meaning, he argues,
arise from the way in which the text itself undergoes constant metamorphosis,
seamlessly transforming from one story into the next, each story appearing to
grow organically from the story wherein it is embedded and out of which, in its
telling, it is seen to grow [Fig. 13.1]:

I truly reckon that for many, when they read Ovid’s Transformationes, the
same thing occurs which often befalls me: they cannot admire enough
the perpetual and uninterrupted chain of varied stories that the poet
most skilfully spins out in this opus – the perpetual poem so well adapted
to his theme, from the first origins of the world up to his own time. A
thing that has always delighted me to such an extent, that finally, having
once read through the whole work, I could not restrain myself from giv-
ing thought to the method of ordering the individual fables, and further,
from distilling the whole into a kind of abridgement: that having formerly
taken pleasure in the individual parts, I might at length draw fuller plea-
sure from having now briefly placed the whole poem before the eyes: and
might discern that the poet’s ingenuity, as in so many other things, now
chiefly in this, was of no common strain. That we might communicate

2 See Melion W.S., “The Trope of Anthropomorphosis in Hendrick Goltzius Venus and Cupid
(1590), Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres (1593), and Portrait of Frederick de Vries (1597)”, in Melion –
Woodall J. – Zell M. (eds.), Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory
and Practice, 1500–1700, Intersections 48 (Leiden – Boston: 2017) 158–228.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 523

Figure 13.2 Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Frederick de Vries, 1597. Engraving, 361 × 267 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
524 Melion

the fruit of this pleasure, and other pleasures as well, perchance not dis-
pleasing, it seemed good in this place to display for the viewing, as if in a
picture, the Transformationes of Ovid, excerpted in as brief a manner as
possible, and fully to show the reader the method of these [transforma-
tions] as by pointing with the index finger.3

3 Canterus Gulielmus, Gulielmi Canteri Ultraiectini novarum lectionum libri quatuor.

In quibus, praeter variorum autorum, tam Graecorum quam Latinorum, explicationes &
emendationes: Athenaei, Gelij, & aliorum fragmenta quaedam nunc primum in lucem profer-
untur (Basileae, per Ioannem Oporinum: 1564) 58: ‘Existimo equidem multis, cum Ovidij
Transformationes legunt, idem, quod mihi saepe, contingere: ut perpetuam illam & nun-
quam interruptam narrationum tam variarum connexionem satis mirari nequeant: quodque
in hoc Opere Poeta tam convenienter proposito suo, a prima mundi origine ad sua usque
tempora, perpetuum carmen artificiosissime deducat. Quae quidem res ita me semper delec-
tavit, ut temperare mihi tandem non potuerim, quin Opere toto semel pervoluto, ordinis
rationem per singulas fabellas considerarem, atque adeo totum Opus quasi in Epitomem
quandam redigerem: ut quam ex partibus singulis olim voluptatem ceperam, eam tunc e
toto poëmate breviter sub oculos posito, longe pleniorem perciperem: & poëtae ingenium
cum in alijs rebus multis, tum in hac praecipue, non vulgare fuisse deprehenderem. Huius
porro voluptatis fructum ut cum alijs etiam, nec invitis fortasse, communicemus: visum est
hoc loco Transformationes Ovidij, quam brevissime fieri potuit excerptas, Lectori tanquam
in tabella spectandas proponere, earumque methodum omnem velut digito commonstrare’.
The statement prefaces chapter 20, “Transformationum Ovidij series compendio excerpta”,
an integral digest of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. On Canterus as a reader of Ovid, see Moss A.,
Latin Commentaries on Ovid from the Renaissance, Library of Renaissance Humanism (Signal
Mountain, TN: 1998) 137. Canterus’s emphasis on Ovid’s dispositio – the poet’s ability to con-
federate disjunct elements into a coherent, unified structure – typifies one strand of the
humanist response to the Metamorphoses; Moss, in Ovid in Renaissance France: A Survey of
the Latin Editions of Ovid and Commentaries Printed in France before 1600 (London: 1982) 39,
compares his reading of the poem to that of Peletier du Mans: ‘Meintenant, pour montrer
combien la Disposicion donne de lustre a un Poeme: prenons garde a la grande industrie
dont a usé Ovide an sa Meattamorfose (car ses autres Euvres ne sont pas dines de haute
louange) quand lui voyant que la matiere e la principale invancion n’etoet point siennes; il a
invanté la maniere de lier tant de diverses Fables ansemble, e de donner a toutes leur place si
propre, qui’il samble que ce soet une narracion perpetuele’ [L’art poëtique, ed. A. Boulanger
(Paris: 1930) 90–91]. Further on rhetorical disposition in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the trope
of the perpetual poem, see Moss, Ovid in Renaissance France 39–43. Underlying the human-
ist appreciation for Ovid’s integrative poetics was the literary practice of commonplacing,
which excerpts passages from texts, construing them as epitomes of truth, then searches
for the ‘common ground’ between them. This method of storing and producing knowledge
proved crucial to poets of the Pléiade such as Pierre Ronsard, whose imitative poetics was
based on contaminatio, the interpolation of fables into fables, and tropical layering of allu-
sions onto allusions. On contaminatio and its source in the commonplace book system, with
specific reference to Ronsard, see Moss A., Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative
in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge – London – New York et al.: 1984) 118–150, esp. 118–
122, 128–132. On the analogy of poetry to painting, that richly informs Ronsard’s poetics, see
ibid. 120–127. Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and Adonis might well be seen as an instance
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 525

Goltzius attempts to do precisely this by weaving a connotative web that

embeds the sequence of imbricated stories in Book X of the Metamorphoses,
the last of which is the tale of Venus and Adonis. His drawing emulates Ovid’s
densely entwined ekphrastic intertext comprising multiple episodes brought
to poetic life by his mythic forebear Orpheus who, at the start of Book X, having
lost Eurydice a second time, climbs a steep Thracian hillside and, seated on its
summit, sings a series of elegies about love lost.4 These elegiac ekphrases cen-
ter on the transformation of human persons into trees and flowers: Cyparissus
into the cypress, Hyacinth into his eponymous blossom, Myrrha into the myrrh
tree, and Adonis into the anemone poppy.5 The tilting tree set beside and in
analogy to Adonis in Goltzius’s drawing, its rough surface cloven to reveal the
shiny sap- or heartwood beneath, alludes to his birth from the torn bark of
his incestuous mother Myrrha, who was metamorphosed into the myrrh tree.
The anthropomorphic face that projects from the heart of the fissure, eye and
stub nose pointed skyward, mouth open wide in a scream, recalls the pain of
his arboreal mother: weeping tears of myrrh, she would have screamed ‘in
the voice of a woman in labour’, as Ovid puts it, had she not lost the power
of speech; and yet she ‘groan[ed] constantly’, ‘straining […]’ to ‘g[i]ve up her
living burden’.6 The grotesque woody face further calls to mind that Myrrha,
again to quote Ovid, ‘sank down against the wood, to meet it, and plunged her
face into the bark’. Goltzius surely positioned Cupid at the base of this tree to
advert ironically to the similarity between the newborn Adonis, seductively
beautiful even at birth, and love-inducing Amor: ‘Even Envy would praise his
beauty, being so like one of the torsos of naked Amor painted on boards. But to
stop them differing in attributes, you must add a light quiver, for him, or take
theirs away from them’.7

of contaminatio, but whereas Ronsard views his poetic practice through the metaphor of
painting, Goltzius views his pictorial practice through the metaphor of poetic composition.
4 Ovid, Ovid in Six Volumes: Metamorphoses, trans. F.J. Miller – ed. G.P. Goold, Loeb Classical
Library 42, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA – London: 1916; reprint ed. 1984) II 68–71.
5 Ibid. 70–79 (Cyparissus, Hyacinth), 82–103 (Myrrha, Venus and Adonis), 114–117 (conclusion
of the tale of Venus and Adonis).
6 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. A.S. Kline, available at https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/
Metamorph10.htm [accessed 17 May 2020]. English translations taken from this source
unless otherwise indicated. Metamorphoses, trans. Miller, 100: ‘nitenti tamen est similis cur-
vatque crebros / dat gemitus arbor lacrimisque cadentibus umet / […] / arbor agit rimas et
fissa cortice vivum / reddit onus, vagitque puer […]’.
7 Ibid.: ‘laudaret faciem Livor quoque; qualia namque / corpora nudorum tabula pinguntur
Amorum, / talis erat, sed, ne faciat discrimina cultus, aut huic adde leves, / aut illis deme
pharetras’.
526 Melion

If Goltzius thus uses landscape to evoke the story that begets the story of
Venus and Adonis, he also relies upon it to show how radically Venus, having
been wounded by Cupid’s arrow, has been transformed by love. She appears
at upper left, fleetly sketched with wisps of line that cause her to merge with
the heavenly air through which her swan-drawn chariot glides. The distance
between heaven and earth, enhanced by the distinction between light, sketchy
hatches above and darker, more finished hatches below, drives home Ovid’s
half-ironic, half-regretful assertion that ‘captured by mortal beauty’, Venus
‘foregoes the heavens, preferring Adonis to heaven’.8 The distant seaside town at
left, and the many cavities, hollows, and recesses that pock the mountainsides
around Venus and Adonis implicitly refer to the places love has impelled Venus
to abandon: enraptured by Adonis, ‘she cares no more for Cythera’s shores, nor
revisits Paphos, surrounded by its deep waters, not Cnidos, the haunt of fish,
nor Amathus, rich in mines’.9 On the contrary, she now roams the Sabaean ter-
rain Goltzius describes: ‘mountain ridges, and forests, and thorny cliff-sides’.10
Half-reclining on a turfy bed, shaded by a large tree, Venus addresses Adonis,
presumably telling the tale of Atlanta and Hippomenes, which likewise takes
place within a forest setting: as the story of Atlanta and Hippomenes is shown
to issue from that of Venus and Adonis, so their story is shown to have issued
from that of Myrrha and Cinyras. And the catena does not end there, for the
setting redounds upon the earlier story of Apollo and Hyacinthus, also from
Book X, that predicts the equally ill-fated love of Venus and Adonis:

My father, Phoebus, loved you above all others: and Delphi, at the centre
of the world, lost its presiding deity, while the god frequented Eurotas,
and Sparta without its walls, doing no honour to the zither or the bow.
Forgetting his usual pursuits, he did not object to carrying the nets, han-
dling the dogs, or travelling as a companion, over the rough mountain
ridges, and by constant partnership feeding the flames.11

8 Ibid. 100–102: ‘capta viri forma […] / abstinet et caelo: caelo praefertur Adonis’.
9 Ibid.: ‘[…] non iam Cythereia curat / litora, non alto repetit Paphon aequore cinctam /
piscosamque Cnidon gravidamve Amathunta metallis’.
10 Ibid. 102: ‘per iuga, per silvas dumosaque saxa vagatur’.
11 Metamorphoses, trans. Miller: ‘Te meus ante omnes genitor dilexit, et orbe / in medio pos-
iti caruerunt praeside Delphi, / dum deus Eurotan inmunitamque frequentat / Sparten,
nec citharae nec sunt in honore sagittae: / inmemor ipse sui non retia ferre recusat, /
non tenuisse canes, non per iuga montis iniqui / ire comes, longaque alit adsuetudine
flammas’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 527

The person speaking is the half-god Orpheus, whose lyric song, as we have
just seen, conjures Book X into existence from within Ovid’s poem. Goltzius’s
rough-hewn peaks, the foremost one in particular, which forms part of a moun-
tain chain of precipices, their summits touching storm-tossed clouds, stand
proxy for ‘lofty Mount Rhodope, and Haemus, swept by the winds’, whither
Orpheus took himself to sing his songs of metamorphosis, analogues to the
transformation of life into living death, both his and Eurydice’s, that he ulti-
mately commemorates, after losing Eurydice a second time.12 Seen in this light,
the trees that populate the foreground, their bark riddled with anthropomor-
phic faces (most prominently, the face midway up the tilted tree, with beetling
brows, splenetic gaze, protuberant nose, and gaping, downturned mouth), can
be identified as specimens of that community of trees which, brought to life
by Orpheus’s lyre, journeyed to the hilltop where he sat, and, listening to his
songs, bore witness to their origins, in the song of Cyparissus and the cypress,
and of Myrrha and the myrrh:

There was a hill, and, on the hill, a wide area of level ground, turfed with
fresh blades of grass: shade was absent there: but when the poet, born
of the god, sounded the string of his lyre, shade gathered there. Jupiter’s
Chaonian oak-tree came; and Phaethon’s sisters, the Heliades, the pop-
lars: the durmast oak with its deep foliage; the soft lime-tree; the beech;
the virgin sweet-bay, laurel […]; and you, the shaggy-topped pine tree,
armed with needles, sacred to Cybele, mother of the gods, since Attis
exchanged his human form for you, and hardened in your trunk.13

And finally, the shadowy abyss at the center of the picture takes the viewer
back to Book X’s point of origin: it stands for the fearful place, the ‘immense
abyss’ of Hades, visited by Orpheus in a desperate attempt to revive Eurydice.
The vapors rising from one of the distant mountaintops at left likewise points
to the still, silent, ‘steep and dark’ land, ‘shadowy with dense fog’, where
Orpheus sang to Pluto and Persephone.14 The presence of Cupid strengthens

12 Ibid. 70: ‘[…] in altam / se recipit Rhodopen pulsumque aquilonibus Haemum’.

13 Ibid.: ‘Collis erat collemque super planissima campi / area, quam viridem faciebant
graminis herbae: / umbra loco deerat; qua postquam parte resedit / dis genitus vates et
fila sonantia movit, / umbra loco venit: non Chaonis afuit arbor, / non nemus Heliadum,
non frondibus aesculus altis, / nec tiliae molles, nec fagus et innuba laurus, / […] / et suc-
cincta comas hirsutaque vertice pinus, grata deum matri, siquidem Cybeleius Attis exuit
hac hominem truncoque induruit illo’.
14 Ibid. 66: ‘per Chaos hoc ingens vastique silentia regni, / […] / carpitur adclivis per muta
silentia trames, arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca’.
528 Melion

the allusion to this story whence Book X’s other stories originate: at the heart
of his song of supplication, Orpheus invokes Cupid, placing embodied love at
the song’s center: ‘He is a god well known in the world above, though I do not
know if that is so here: though I imagine him to be here, as well, and if the story
of that rape in ancient times is not a lie, you also were wedded by Amor’.15 In
sum, the temporal lability of Goltzius’s landscape, its multiple storied identi-
ties, associated now with this tale, now with that, changes as well the possible
identities of the personae featured at the front of the drawing. Are they Venus
and Adonis, or Orpheus and Eurydice, or, for that matter, are they Atalanta
and Hippomenes who conjoined while ‘hidden in the deep woods’?16 As the
poem, to quote Canterus, is ‘perpetual’ and ‘uninterrupted’, so too, the land-
scape, its parts knit into a variegated yet seamless whole, licenses this simul-
taneity of possibilities, revealing how the transformationes in Book X originate
from out of each other, as inflected iterations of the poet Orpheus’s love for
his lost muse. Goltzius insists upon this point by depicting leaves and sky with
such energetic dots, dashes, and strokes, that they seem to be moving – one is
tempted to say, ‘in perpetual motion’. His handelinghe (handling, rendering), to
use Van Mander’s term, is evocative of this windy place, and the image of mov-
ing air is how Book X both starts and ends: in the opening verses, Hymen flies
through the ‘vast skies to the Ciconian coast’, drawn from the marriage of Iphis
and Ianthe on Crete to the inauspicious wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice;
and in the closing verses, Adonis turns into the anemone, the ‘windflower’, its
petals, as Ovid laments, ‘too easily fallen’, ‘deflower[ed]’ by the winds, ‘which
are likewise responsible for its name’.17 Landscape, then, allows Goltzius to
comment on the unified construction of Book X: its start is as linked to its fin-
ish, as the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, Myrrha and Cinyras, and Venus and
Adonis are successively linked. And this enchainment, leading from Orpheus
and Eurydice to Venus and Adonis, provides the basis for the portrayal of love’s
manner and meaning in Book X.
Landscape, in that its constituent elements, howsoever various, exist within
a temporal present, as if here and now, provided the perfect vehicle for the
embedment of the story of Venus and Adonis amongst clusteral allusions to
mutually contingent stories all enclosed by the here and now of Orpheus’s

15 Ibid.: ‘[…] supera deus hic bene notus in ora est; an sit et hic, dubito: sed et hic tamen
auguror esse, famaque si veteris non est mentita rapinae, vos quoque iunxit Amor’.
16 Ibid. 112: ‘templa, deum Matri quae quondam clarus Echion / fecerat ex voto, nemorosis
abdita silvis, transibant […]’.
17 Ibid. 64: ‘Inde per inmensum croceo velatus amictu / aethera digreditur Ciconumque
Hymenaeus ad oras / tendit […]’. Ibid. 116: ‘brevis est tamen usus in illo; / namque male
haerentem et nimia levitate caducum / excutiunt idem, qui praestant nomina, venti’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 529

ekphrastic song. Goltzius’s emphasis on landscape, the interpretative weight he

grants it, typifies a phenomenon increasingly widespread in the later sixteenth
century, when the efflorescence of landscape as a pictorial type went hand in
hand with the literary and rhetorical exploration of landscape’s affective and
signifying effects. Countless lyric poems and cycles visualize landscape as the
place whither one goes in search of the poetic source; in heptameral poetry,
it epitomizes the divine potency of the Creator; in epic poetry, it is the place
through which one journeys to achieve a goal; in sacred literature, it marks
the stages of the soul’s journey toward God. The visual evocation of place also
constitutes one of the chief topics of treatises on rhetoric and poetics, wherein
ekphrasis was occasionally construed as the vividly affective description of
place. How then, we may ask, was ekphrasis understood by Goltzius and his
contemporaries; what notion or, better, notions of description does Goltzius’s
bring to light? In what follows, I shall pay special attention to the account of
the rederijker Matthijs de Castelein, which comes closest to form and function
of the Landscape with Venus and Adonis.
The term ekphrasis and its cognates descriptio and hypotyposis would have
had a dual purchase in Antwerp and Haarlem, as three popular rhetorical trea-
tises, Jan van Mussem’s Rhetorica of 1553, Matthijs de Castelein’s De const van
rhetoriken of 1555, and Cyprian Soarez’s De arte rhetorica libri tres of 1560, make
amply evident.18 Written for the classroom, Van Mussem’s humanist text was

18 On Van Mussem and the Rhetorica, see Vanderheyden J.F., “Jan van Mussem I”, Verslagen en
mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (1952) 289–306;
idem, “Jan van Mussem II”, ibidem 923–948; Vanderheyden, “De Rhetorica van Jan van
Mussem ‘ghecolligiert wt […]’”, Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse acad-
emie voor taal- en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1975) 173–233; idem, “De status van Jan van
Mussem en zijn Rhetorica”, ibidem (1977) 13–54; and Spies M., Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and
Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics, ed. H. Duits – T. van Strien (Amsterdam:
1999) 40–44. On De Castelein and De const van rhetoriken, see Stuiveling G., “Schaken met
De Castelein”, Spiegel der Letteren 7 (1963–64) 161–184; Iansen S.A.P.J.H., “Speurtocht naar
het leven van Matthijs Castelein. Archivalia en onzekerheden”, Verslagen en mededelingen
der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1970) 321–446;
Coigneau D., “Matthijs de Castelein (1485?–1550)”, Jaarboek De Fonteine (1985–86) 7–13;
and Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and Poets 40–44. On Soarez’s De arte rhetorica, see
Flynn L.J., S.J., “The De arte rhetorica of Cyprian Soarez, S.J.”, Quarterly Journal of Speech
42 (1956) 367–374; Flynn, “Sources and Influence of Soarez’s De arte rhetorica’,” ibidem 43
(1957): 257–265; Fumaroli M., “Définition et description: scolastique et rhétorique chez
les Jésuites des XVIe et XVIIe siècles”, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 18 (1980)
37–48; Bauer B., Jesuitische ars rhetorica im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Frankfurt am
Main – Bern – New York: 1986) 138–240; Conley T.M., Rhetoric in the European Tradition
(Chicago – London: 1990) 153–155; Fernandes Pereira B., Retórica e eloquencia em Portugal
na época do Rinacimento (Coimbra: 2005) 550–584; and Mack P., A History of Renaissance
Rhetoric, 1380–1625 (Oxford: 2011) 177–183.
530 Melion

the first classical rhetorical handbook composed in Dutch. Largely based on the
Pseudo-Cicero’s Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De inventione, Quintilian’s Institutio
oratoria, and Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis and De copia rerum ac verbo-
rum, as Jan Vanderheyden and Marijke Spies have demonstrated, the Rhetorica
focuses on the principles of première rhétorique, which is to say, on questions
of affective and persuasive argumentation, and its chief constituents – inven-
tion, disposition, and selected figures of eloquence. Widely circulated within
the Jesuit school network, Soarez’s De arte rhetorica adapts and reconciles the
rhetorics of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian; the five parts of rhetoric – inven-
tion, disposition, eloquence, memory, and pronunciation – are discussed in the
book’s three major subsections, with invention comprising the three rhetorical
modes – epideictic, judicial, and deliberative – and eloquence subtending the
chapters on memory and pronunciation. Unlike Van Mussem and Soarez, De
Castelein appropriates classical sources for a treatise centered on the arts de
seconde rhétorique – not the formal and structural principles of argumenta-
tion, but rather, the techniques of prosody, especially rhyme, rhythm, equiso-
nance, and, of course, colorful elocution. Whereas Van Mussem and Soarez
subsume descriptio or hypotyposis under the rubric of ornate diction, with Van
Mussem attaching it to exornatio (exornatie, verchierene, i.e., ornamentation),
and Soarez treating it as an instrument of demonstrative oratory, De Castelein
gives description pride of place not by defining but, rather, by exemplifying it:
his treatise opens with an extended ekphrasis of the fictional place and circum-
stances wherein his poem cum poetic treatise arose.19 For all three authors,
description is an affective device that marshals verbally produced images to
stir the emotions.
Soarez succinctly defines the two forms ekphrasis could take: it focuses
either on describing action, as in Cicero’s In Verrem II, 5, 161, or on circum-
stances, as in Cicero’s Pro Milone, cited in Institutio oratoria IX, 2:

Hypotyposis, which Cicero calls description, is a certain image of things

exposed to view and expressed in words, such as seems rather to be seen
than heard, or demonstration of things to sight as if they were taking

19 On descriptio and its kinds, as species of ‘chierlijck, statelijc, ende heerlijck spreken’,
see Mussem Jan van, Rhetorica, dye edele const van welsegghene (Antwerp, Weduwe van
Henric Peetersen: 1553), fols. 54v–55r. On descriptio or hypotyposis, see Soarez Cyprian,
De arte rhetorica libri tres ex Aristotele, Cicerone et Quinctiliano praecipue deprompti
(Coimbra, Ioannes Barrerius: 1562; reprint Cologne, Gosvinus Cholinus: 1581) 121–122. For
the descriptive excursus that inaugurates the first part of De Const van rhetoriken, the
“Theoriestrofen”, see Castelein Matthijs de, De const van rhetoriken (Ghent, Jan Cauwel:
1555) 1–4.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 531

place here and now, as is done, for example, in the seventh speech against
Verres [i.e., In Verrem II, 5, 161]: ‘Inflamed by viciousness and fury, he
entered the forum, his eyes ablaze, and cruelty flaring from the whole of
his face’. […] In his Pro Milone, Cicero demonstrates marvelously what
Clodius would have done, had he seized the praetorship. This transfer
into present events will be more worthy of admiration if we introduce
it with, for example: ‘Suppose that you see […]’ – as Cicero does: ‘These
things which you see not with your eyes, you may discern in your minds’.20

Van Mussem’s functional understanding of ekphrasis complements Soarez’s,

but since his emphasis falls on argumentation, he favors action over circum-
stance. The manner of descriptive ornamentation (‘maniere van verchierene’)
he advocates consists in using ‘forceful words to narrate and demonstrate
what will be the result of such and such things’.21 He addresses his preliminary
example to judges: they must consider the repercussions of a death sentence
before issuing so dire a verdict. The cause of justice requires them first to visu-
alize its deleterious effects on the condemned man’s parents and children.22
He directs his second example toward military leaders: if the orator wishes to
curb their belligerent impulses, he must describe to the best of his ability a city
brutally conquered by an enemy army, its children and elders slain, its youths
enslaved, its women violated, the scenes of devastation so numerous and dis-
turbing that ‘noone could convey in words or fully express the catastrophe of
such events’.23 Instead, one must rely on the efficacy of pregnant images, imag-
ined but triggered verbally.
De Castelein justifies his descriptive engagement differently. The pleasure
and potency of his poem on the poetics of rhetoric lie in its pastoral imagery of
a locus amoenus, set in the countryside outside Oudenaarde, whither he goes

20 Soarez, De arte rhetorica 121–122: ‘Hypotyposis, quam descriptionem Cicero appellat, est
proposita quaedam forma rerum ita expressa verbis, ut cerni potius videatur quam audiri.
Vel est rerum, quasi gerantur, sub aspectum pene subiectio, ut actione in Verrem septima:
“Ipse inflammatus scelere ac furore in forum venit, ardebant oculi, toto ex ore crudelitas
emicabat” [Cicero, In Verrem II, 5, 161]. […] Mire tractat haec Cicero Pro Milone, quae
facturus fuerit Clodius, si praeturam invasisset [Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria IX, 2, 41].
Haec translatio temporum erit verecundior, si proponamus talia: “Credite vos intueri”, ut
Cicero: “Haec, quae non vidistis oculis, animis cernere potestis”. [ibidem 42]’.
21 Van Mussem, Rhetorika, fol. 554v: ‘Noch een schoone maniere van verchierene, te weten
alsmen claerlijck met stercken woorden verhaelt ende openbaert, wat van sulcken of
sulcken saken naervolgen moet’.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., fol. 55r: ‘[…] niemant en soude met woorden connen vertellen, noch te vulle
wtspreken het groote onmenschelijcke iamere’.
532 Melion

to draw poetic inspiration from nature; this hilly, well-watered place, replete
with greenery and birdsong, and the panoramic vista opening out from it, are
portrayed as sources of refreshment that engender positive lyrical sentiments
and, more particularly, give rise to the melodious strophes, stanzas, and verses,
and the vivacious, ornate, and equisonant diction that De Castelein so ardently
espouses. Furthermore, it is here that he claims to have encountered Mercury,
the god of eloquence, face to face, which is to say that it is in and through
his poem that he comes to know, at first hand, his poem’s divine source. The
Const’s first ten stanzas, a tour de force of ekphrastic writing, describe the set-
ting and circumstances leading to this generative encounter that animates the
poet and poem. Indeed, in a curious reversal, it is as if the brilliance with which
De Castelein evokes the landscape is what conjures up the god whose presence
ostensibly animates the poem. Here is a brief selection from these anticipatory
verses:

To Edelaerd’s Wood I wend my way,

Strolling along the green plain;
Through Wolf’s Pass I went, as was my custom,
To that serpentine pool, that lovely font.

This gushing stream well met,

Delicious to many a taste,
Broidered not by artifice,
But by Nature herself adorned,
Rejoicing every heart bravely
Well resembles Creusa’s splendid fountain
[…].

Guarded round about by a mountain,

To the west many fine, alluring valleys,
Even Pyramus’s fountain compares not at all.
A tree crooked and tall, by God’s grace,
Its canopy watered by this sweet source,
Which makes its home amongst the roots,
About three bowshots distant from Oudenaarde.

Bright as silver is [the water’s] color,

Pure its fragrance; standing in its shade,
One looks past the watery source, seeing all that lies below,
Without anyone’s help, without effort,
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 533

It assists all who see it, be they man or woman:

Here I found myself, beside this beautiful landscape (landauwe)
As one freshly desirous of giving himself over to poetry.
Free from sorrow, I drew forth my tablet,
And went to sit under the accustomed ash tree.

Here was I abstract from men or beasts,

Full with joy, free from all care.
With small birds singing, all atwitter,
[…].24

Suddenly emerging from this landscape, almost as if born from it, Mercury
heaves into view, approaches the would-be poet, and, striking him with his

24 De Castelein, De const van rhetoriken, 1–2:

‘Dit sprutende water zeer wel gheraeckt
Twelck menighen smaeckt delicieuslick,
Niet by artificien ommestaeckt,
Maer by rechter Naturen toe-gemaeckt,
Elcks herte verblydende couraieuselick
Ghelijckt wel Creusis de fonteyne pompeuselick
[…]

En rondomme met eenen beergh bewaerd,

An tweste veel schoone valleyen vermaerd,
Piraems fonteyne en waerds gheen comparatie,
Eenen boom crom ende hooghe, byder Gods gratie,
Beschaud van dezen zoeten borre de baudegaerde,
Inde wortels van dien haudt hy zijn statie,
Omtrent twee stalen boeghscheuten van Audenaerde.

Claer als een zelver es hy van coleure,

Zuvere van gheure, staende al ind schauwe,
Den grond hier af zietmen al den putte deure
Zonder iemans toedoen, vry van labeure,
Thelpt hem diet ziet, tzij man oft vrauwe:
Hier vand ick my langhs des schooder landauwe
Als die hem tot dichtene wilde al versch vitten,
Mijn schaelge reeckte ick, vry vranck van rauwe,
En ghijngh onder den ghecostumeerden Hersch zitten.

Hier was ick abstract van meynschen en beesten,

Om svreughts vulleesten, los alder quale,
De voghelkins zonghen alle ten zeesten,
[…]’
534 Melion

wand, the caduceus, inspires this very poem whose divine origin and form De
Castelein now reveals to be his true subject:

Lost in thought, valiant and stout of heart,

Sitting here thus, while reaching for my paper
I saw in the beautiful valley below,
A manly creature coming toward me,
Who unsettled my heart and every limb,
[…].

It was Mercury, in whose power lies the art [of poetry]:

I was filled with earnest expectation, in my senses and my will,
Like one who pleads for solace, fortune, and good favor;
Having reached me, he struck me with his wand
Wherefrom he bears the name Caducifer.25

Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and Adonis is implicitly ekphrastic in the sense
specified by Soarez and Van Mussem, in that it incorporates condensed allu-
sions to violent events and circumstances charged with intense feeling. The
weather-beaten trees, rutted ground, and shattered clifftops, and the forceful
stream colliding with rocks and boulders, serve as analogues, in a landscape

25 Ibid. 3–4:
‘In alzulck ghepeins coraieus ende fier
Dus zittende hier, in tschoon dal beneden,
Te wilen dat ic reeckte mijn pappier
Zagh te my waerd commen zulck mannelick dier
Dat therte verschickte ende alle myn leden,
[…]

Het was Mercurius, die de const wel can,

Diemen niet en coopt met gheld ofte goede:
My verlanghde zeere, met zinne met moede
Als een, die naer troost, gheluc, oft vrame vraeghd,
By my zynde, slouch my met zijnder roede
Daer hy Caducifer af den name draeghd.’
On the meta-poetics of De const van rhetoriken, see Leeuwen J. van, Matthijs de Castelein
en zijne Const van rhetoriken (Utrecht: 1894) 32–74, esp. 43, on the way De Castelein folds
every species of art and craft – tapestry, painting, sculpture, carpentry – into poesis;
and Ramakers B., “As Many Lands, As Many Customs: Vernacular Self-Awareness among
the Netherlandish Rhetoricians”, in Keizer J. – Richardson T.M., The Transformation of
Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, Intersections 19 (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 123–
178. Ramakers points out that De Castelein construes nature as the ultimate source of
poetry, and this observation jibes with the imagery of Mercury emergent from the enliv-
ening Flemish countryside.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 535

mode, to these passionate, metamorphic, often catastrophic occurrences to

which Goltzius, paraphrasing Ovid’s Book X, covertly alludes. In formal terms,
his drawing conforms to De Castelein’s epitome of ekphrastic image-making;
indeed, it appears exactingly to assimilate the main components of the poet’s
landscape seen from a high vantage point: the conspicuous tree, ‘crooked
and tall’, its gnarled roots well-watered by a gushing stream, the distant vista
stretching out beyond it, the mountain pass and looming peak, the absence
of men or beasts (the hunter’s two hounds excepted), and, most importantly,
the freedom from care bodied forth by the lovemaking of Venus and Adonis.
Equally significant is the sense Goltzius confers that the viewer’s privileged
access to this private, solitary place, the haunt of a divine lover and her mor-
tal beloved, involved a long, circuitous trek to higher ground untouched by
herdsmen or the plough, where like Ovid-Orpheus we become undiscovered
witnesses of an otherwise secret tryst. And as De Castelein’s poem purports to
disclose its poetic source, so Goltzius’s picture, upon close inspection, proves
to be a paragon of metamorphic fiction-making in the manner of Ovid.

1 Goltzius’s Ovidian Poetics and Nikolaus Reusner’s

Picta poesis Ovidiana

The notion that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an integral poem, its mutationes

mutually generative, and the kind of concatenated image-making that this
notion entails, provide common ground between Goltzius’s drawing and the
new Ovidian poetics that would have been familiar to members of his human-
ist circle – poet scholars such as Franco Estius, and Cornelis Schonaeus, for
example. Their fictiones (mythic poetry) and, in particular, the practice of
fiction-making exemplified by their Ovidian poetry, can best be sampled by
reference to an exceptionally popular collection of Latin epigrams based on
the Metamorphoses – Nikolaus Reusner’s Picta poesis Ovidiana: Thesaurus
propemodum omnium fabularum poeticarum, Fausti Sabaei Brixiani, aliorum
clarorum virorum […] tam veterum quam recentium epigrammatis expositarum
(Painted Ovidian Poetry: Treasury of Nearly All the Poetic Fables Expounded
in Epigrams by Faustus Sabaeus Brixianus and other Illustrious Men […]
both Ancient and Modern), compiled and published in Frankfurt in 1580 as
a kind of memorial to Sabaeus, who had died two decades earlier, in 1559
[Figs. 13.3a & 13.3b].26 The dedicatory preface written by Reusner’s brother Elias,

26 On Nikolaus Reusner, see Ritter von Eisenart J.A., “Reusner, Nikolaus von”, Allge-
meine Deutsche Biographie 28 (Leipzig: 1889) 299–303; and Wiegand H., “Reus-
ner, Nikolaus von”, in Killy W. (ed.), Literaturlexikon. Autoren und Werke deutscher
536 Melion

Figure 13.3a Title-page of Nikolaus Reusner, Picta poesis Ovidiana. Thesaurus

propemodum omnium fabularum poeticarum, Fausti Sabaei
Brixiani, aliorumque clarorum virorum (quorum nomenclatura
Dedicationem proxime sequitur) tam Veterum, quam Recentium,
Epigrammatis expositarum. Opus sane lepidum, et argutum,
lectuque in primis utile, ac iucundum. Ex recensione Nicolai
Reusneri, Iurisconsulti, & Poëtae Laureati (Frankfurt am Main,
I. Spies [impensis S. Feyerabent]: 1580)
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 537

Figure 13.3b Virgil Solis, Venus and Adonis, 1563, from Nikolaus Reusner, Picta poesis
Ovidiana (Frankfurt am Main, I. Spies [impensis S. Feyerabent]: 1580),
fol. 103r. Woodcut and letterpress, octavo
538 Melion

a distinguished physician-historian, claims that the book’s woodcut images

by Virgil Solis are as consequential as its texts.27 They were excerpted either
from Johannes Sprengius’s Metamorphoses Ovidii, argumentis quidem soluta
oratione, enarrationibus autem et allegoriis elegiaco versu accuratissime exposi-
tae (Metamorphoses of Ovid, most Carefully Expounded with Arguments in
the Epistolary Style, but also with Commentaries and Allegories in Elegiac
Verse), copiously illustrated by Virgil Solis, whose woodcuts emulate Bernard
Salomon’s earlier series of 1557, and published by Georgius Corvinus (Georg
Rab), Sigismund Feyerabent, and the heirs of Wigandus Gallus (Weigand
Han) in Frankfurt in 1563,28 or from Johannes Posthius von Germersheim’s

Sprache 9 (Berlin: 1988–1991) 400–401. On Reusner’s practice of literary invention as

exemplified in the Picta poesis Ovidiana, see Guthmüller B., “Picta poesis ovidiana”, in
Heitmann I. – Schroeder E. (eds.), Renatae Litterae. Studien zum Nachleben der Antike
und zur europäischen Renaissance A. Buck […] dargebracht (Frankfurt am Main: 1973)
171–192; Brockstieger S., Sprachpatriotismus und Wettstreit der Künste. Johann Fischart in
Kontext der Offizin Bernhard Jobin (Berlin – Boston: 2018) 144–146; and Enenkel K.A.E.,
“Ovid – Emblematik als Scherenschnitt und Montage. Aneaus Picta poesis in Reusners
Picta poesis Ovidiana”, in Van Vaeck M. – Brens H. – Claassens H.M. (eds.), The Stone of
Alciato: Literature and Visual Culture in the Low Countries, Essays in Honour of Karel Porte-
man (Leuven: 2003) 729–749. On Faustus Sabaeus, curator of the Vatican Library, collator
of Nicolao de Maioranis’s indices to the library’s Latin and Greek books, and editor of the
editio princeps of Arnobius’s Adversus nationes (Rome: 1543), see Maurach G. – Echinger-
Maurach C. – Töns U., Faustus Sabaeus, Epigrammata. Studien zu Faustus Sabaeus, Epi-
grammatum Fausti Sabaei Brixiani custodis bibliothecae Vaticanae libri quinque, Rom 1556,
mit Auszügen aus dem Text, Fontes 31 [1 May 2009], at http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/
artdok/volltexte/2009/706 [urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-artdok-7065, accessed 21 May 2020] 3–5.
27 The quatrain “Ad lectorem” that prefaces Elias Reusner’s dedication of the book to Marcus
and Johann Fugger underscores the mutual eloquence of painting and poetry, which
respectively nourish the eyes and ears; see Reusner Nikolaus, Picta poesis Ovidiana.
Thesaurus propemodum omnium fabularum poeticarum, Fausti Sabaei Brixiani, alio-
rumque clarorum virorum (quorum nomenclatura Dedicationem proxime sequitur) tam
Veterum, quam Recentium, Epigrammatis expositarum. Opus sane lepidum, et argutum,
lectuque in primis utile, ac iucundum. Ex recensione Nicolai Reusneri, Iurisconsulti, & Poëtae
Laureati (Frankfurt am Main, I. Spies [impensis S. Feyerabent]: 1580), fol. [1v]: ‘Picturam
vocitas Poëma mutum? / Sit pictura loquens, Poëma rursus. / Pingit, quae loquitur Poëta,
pictor: / Visum hic pascit, et ille pascit aures’. [Are you wont to call Painting mute Poetry? /
Let painting be eloquent, and likewise Poetry. / The painter paints what the Poet speaks: /
The one nourishes vision, and the other nourishes the ears.]
28 On Johannes Spreng, an artium magister at the Paedagogium in Heidelberg and close
acquaintance of the humanists Wilhelm Xylander, Sigmund Melanchthon, and Johannes
Posthius von Germersheim, see Pfeiffer R., Die Meistersingerschule in Augsburg und
der Homerübersetzer Johannes Spreng (Munich – Leipzig: 1919) 44–49, esp. 46–49; and
Garland H.B. – Garland M. (eds.), The Oxford Companion to German Literature (New
York – Oxford: 1986) 852. Spreng’s book was published at the initiative of Sigismund
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 539

epigrammatic Latin-German edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Tetrasticha

in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Tetrastichs on Ovid’s Fifteen Books of the Metamor-
phoses), illustrated with the same prints and issued by Corvinus and Gallus,
again in Frankfurt in 1563 [Figs. 13.4 & 13.5].29 Imagining his reader-viewers as
scholar-artisans, he insists that they will find themselves turning their hand
diligently to the joint tasks of reading and viewing, writing and picturing, that
the Picta poesis Ovidiana will undoubtedly inspire:

For so shall be the case, I reckon, that not only for its Poetry, but also for
its Pictorial Art, and for the singular artifice and acumen of both, and
then truly, for the delight of its fables, and the recondite elegance of its
moral teaching, this little book will be found pleasing and acceptable to
all: let studious youths turn it over night and day, nor let them ever allow
any aversion to it to steal upon them.

Feyerabent, who commissioned Solis’s woodcuts, which he proceeded to use three times
in 1563: as illustrations for a text edition of the Metamorphoses (recension of Jacobus
Micyllus), for Spreng’s book, and for the edition of Solis’s images combined with distichs
in Latin and German by Johannes Posthius, on which see note 29 infra. Spreng states in
his preface that he followed the order of presentation in Bernard Salomon’s illustrated
Dutch edition of 1557; see Sprengius Johannes, Metamorphoses Ovidii, argumentis quidem
soluta oratione, Enarrationibus autem et Allegorijs Elegiaco versu accuratissime expositae,
summaque diligentia ac studio illustratae (Frankfurt am Main, Sigmund Feyerabent –
Georg Rab – Weigand Han (haeredes): 1563), fol. 6r: ‘Primum, ordo ac distributio fabula-
rum, secundum libelli cuiusdam Belgica lingua editi, picturas et imagines est constituta’.
On the Metamorphoses Ovidii and its allegorical and narrative paraphrases of selected
Ovidian fables, see Moss, Ovid in Renaissance France 44–48. On Virgil Solis’s woodcut
illustrations for the Metamorphoses Ovidii, see Beaujean D. (comp.) – Bartrum G. (ed.),
Hollstein’s German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, 1400–1700: Virgil Solis, Book
Illustrations, 5 vols. (Rotterdam: 2006) II 89–131. More generally, on Solis as an illustra-
tor, see Ubisch E. von, Virgil Solis und seine biblischen Illustrationen für den Holzschnitt
(Leipzig: 1889); O’Dell-Franke I., Kupferstiche und Radierungen aus der Werkstatt des Virgil
Solis (Wiesbaden: 1977); and Beaujean (comp.) – Bartrum (ed.), Virgil Solis I vii–xv.
29 On Johannes Posthius, see Wegele F.X. von – Holstein H., “Posthius, Johannes”, in
Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 26 (Leipzig: 1888) 473–477; Karrer K., Johannes Posthius
(1537–1597). Verzeichnis der Briefe und Werke mit Regesten und Posthius-Biographie,
Gratia 23 (Wiesbaden: 1993) 55–59; and idem, “Posthius, Johannes”, in Kraus H.-C. (ed.),
Neue Deutsche Biographie 20 (Berlin: 2001) 656–658. As Karrer notes, in Johannes Posthius
56, Feyerabent issued two editions in 1563, the most popular of which took the form
of a Stammbuch. Both versions were intended for the use of painters, goldsmiths, and
sculptors, and Karrer, in ibid. 56–59, gives numerous examples of works in various media
drawn from Solis’s images. On Virgil Solis’s woodcut illustrations for the Tetrasticha, see
Beaujean (comp.) – Bartrum (ed.), Virgil Solis II 142–151.
540 Melion

Figure 13.4 Title-page of Sprengius Johannes, Metamorphoses Ovidii, argumentis quidem

soluta oratione, Enarrationibus autem et Allegorijs Elegiaco versu accuratissime
expositae, summaque diligentia ac studio illustratae (Frankfurt am Main,
Sigmund Feyerabent – Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus
[Weigand Han] (haeredes): 1563)
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 541

Figure 13.5 Title-page of Johannes Posthius, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt
am Main, Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus [Weigand Han]
(haeredes): 1563).

Inspired by Canterus’s reading of the Metamorphoses, the contributors explore

how Ovid’s fables can be made to intersect, or indeed to meld; they purport to
discover how closely the myths intertwine, and they bring unseen connections
to the lambent surface of their newly composed epigrams, very much in the
manner that Goltzius layers myths in his drawing. In Sabaeus’s satirical epi-
gram “On Venus and Adonis”, for instance, Pan appears to have wandered out
of Book I:689–721, the story of Pan and Syrinx told by Mercury to Argus, into
Book X:503–559; it is now he, the most lustful of rural divinities, who, unex-
pectedly espying Venus and Adonis, finds himself perplexed, if not overcome,
by the unwonted, fearsome sight of their lovemaking; the goddess for her part
is nonplussed so to have been discovered:

Panopaeus saw Adonis resting on the bosom of Venus,

And blushed: but more so did Venus herself.
For what mortal eyes are not allowed to see,
Nor mortal mouths to speak: he saw, greatly fearing the embraces.
542 Melion

And putting his hand to his head, not touching his horns:
He says, how different [from her] is the goddess of groves and of the
marriage-bed.30

Shocked by what he descries, rendered so timid that he dare not touch his phal-
lic horns, Pan contrasts this Venus to herself in another guise – recalling how
she elsewhere appears as the goddess who presides over the fertility of gar-
dens, and of the marriage-bed. The clever epigram accompanies Solis’s print
of Venus and Adonis reclining at the base of a shady tree, dogs at their side,
hunters chasing a stag in the netted enclosure just beyond. Sabaeus invites the
reader-viewer to layer the Mercurian ekphrasis onto the Orphic one, grafting
them in so surprising a way that the effect, which points up the lustfulness of
Venus, verges on catechresis.
In a follow-up poem, Sabaeus interpolates an implicit allusion to the story
of Diana and Actaeon from Book III:138–252: as Diana splashed Actaeon with
droplets from the Gargaphian pool, so Venus laves Adonis with water from the
Acidalian spring, but whereas the former action put Actaeon to flight and led
to his violent death, the latter propels Adonis into the loving arms of Venus,
heightening his bodily senses. The tacit comparison between the two events
hints at the undercurrent of erotic violence latent in the encounter between
Venus and Adonis: the epigram insinuates that Venus, like Diana, is a hunt-
ress, that Adonis is her prey, and, as the closing couplet further intimates, that
coitus is the hidden snare that entraps her target.

As Adonis passed by, Venus splashed him with water:

While bathing her limbs in the Acidalian stream.
He perceived the fragrant springs, the wonted heat [of summer]:
Seeing [her] bright splendor, [her] ambrosial sweetness:
The boy threw himself into her rosy embraces, her snow-white breasts[,]
And at length bestowed a thousand kisses.
As for the rest, when he demanded it: the Naiads kept silent:
The virginal cheeks of the selfsame Graces blushed.31

30 Reusner, Picta poesis Ovidiana, fol. 103v:

‘Infusum gremio Veneris Panopaeus Adonin
Vidit, & erubuit: sed magis ipsa Venus.
Nam quae mortales oculos nec cernere, nec fas
Ora loqui: inspexit, pertimuitque sinus:
Apponensque manus capiti, nec cornua tangens:
Sylvarum, & thalami quam Dea distat, ait’.
31 Ibid.: ‘Praetereuntem undis sparsit Venus aurea Adonim:
Dum sua Acidalijs membra lavaret aquis.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 543

The brief epigram that comes between this poem and the one on Pan,
Venus, and Adonis, sensitizes the reader-viewer to the hunting theme’s many
ironies, by implicitly comparing Adonis to Meleager as he appears in Book
VIII:425–450: the trophy there bestowed on Atalanta becomes here an attri-
bute of triumphant Venus, even as it portends the dark fate that awaits Adonis.
Playing on the pun Venus/venatus (hunt), Sabaeus analogizes Adonis’s mastery
over the boar to Venus’s mastery over Adonis: in turning away from his for-
mer pursuits as a hunter of game, and instead focusing on Venus, Adonis also
comes to resemble the ivory statue which Venus brings to life in Book X:243–
297. Vanquished by obdurate Cupid, his formerly stony heart is softened as he
is now made to see Venus, and catching fire, blazes with newfound love.

For who is this great beauty? The beloved of Paphian [Venus].

What signifies this boar’s head, this hound?
They are signs of the hunt (‘venatus’), of his bloody slaughter [of animals]:
Upon whom does he turn his eyes? She whom he desires, upon Venus,
So great a love (Amor) has conquered the youth: because hard as stone
He searches out that marble-like [youth], who lovingly sees and burns.32

This epigram demonstrates in particular how deeply, intricately imbricated

the Ovidian stories could become when recast by inventive readers of the
Metamorphoses who were simultaneously receptive viewers of Virgil Solis’s
(and Salomon’s) innovative images. Notable is the degree to which Sabaeus’s
epigrams, like Goltzius’s drawing (though in a lesser degree), rely upon setting
to intercalate the fables: the mountain wilds of Pan, the Acidalian stream of
Venus, the place, presumably a glade, where the spoils of the hunt are piled
high and finally displaced by those of love.

Sensit odoratos latices, solitumque calorem:

Purpureumque iubar, ambrosiamque videns:
Iecit in amplexus roseos, niveasque papillas
Se puer: & tandem basia mille de dit.
Caetera cum peterem: tacuerunt Naiades: ipsae
Virgineis Charites erubuere genis’.
32 Ibid., fol. 103v:
‘Quis nam hic tam pulcer? Paphiae dilectus Adonis
Quid caput istud apri, quid canis iste notat?
Venatus, caedisque suae sunt signa cruentae:
In quem oculos vertit? quam cupit, in Venerem,
Tantus amor vicit iuvenem: quod saxeus illum
Marmoreum inquirit, respicit, ardet, amans’.
544 Melion

Responding to the many similarities between Solis’s illustrations of Venus

and Adonis and Apollo and the Slain Hyacinth (as well as Venus Mourning the
Death of Adonis), Sabaeus’s epigrams on the latter image model the ekphrastic
process of embedding Orphic myth within myth that Goltzius explores pic-
torially in his summa of Book X [Fig. 13.1]. In one of these, Apollo addresses
Venus, comparing the Orphic tale of Venus and Adonis to that of himself and
Hyacinth, and then adding, by way of analogy, the story of his ill-fated pur-
suit of Daphne from Book I:473–567. He suffers twice as much as the goddess,
for she ultimately lost her lover Adonis, whereas he lost both Daphne and
Hyacinth.

Precious Venus was weeping over the dead Adonis:

When fair Apollo approached from on high, and said:
One care distresses you, sister: a double one torments me:
To so great an extent that though I rejoice, I sorrow.
Dear lovers, I say, you shall always live with me:
Daphne, too hard: Hyacinth, too unfortunate.33

Sabaeus imagines two key protagonists of Book X conversing about the ties
that bind their stories one to the other, as if discovering them to us.
A second poem translates the parallel stories of Adonis and Hyacinth more
fully into landscape: Venus, roaming through Cyprus, and Apollo, wandering
through flower-strewn meadows, chance to see that abounding with bright
hyacinths and anemones, they resemble the starry firmament. These ‘painted
stars’, mere sidereal images, cause them to relive the pain of lost love, and to
discern how Hyacinth and Adonis are one with the settings the god and god-
dess now traverse.

While Venus rambles through Cyprus, and Phoebus through richly

flowering
Meadows: they see the earth furnished with painted stars:
And while Hyacinth is there, rubicund Adonis presents himself [here]:
Both beautiful in death. Phoebus says:

33 Ibid., fol. 105v:

‘Extinctum preciosa Venus plorabat Adonim:
Quum super accessit pulcer Apollo, & ait:
Una, soror, te cura angit: me bina remordet:
Usque adeo, laetus sim licet, ut doleam.
Cari, inquam, semper mecum vivetis amores:
Dura nimis Daphne: fauste Hyacinthe parum’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 545

Speak, sister; does the earth rejoice in these our lovers?

Or does she groan in grief and sorrow?
This sorrow mine, that one yours, and most dear the fire [of passion]:
That was Hyacinth; the other was Adonis.34

A final poem on Solis’s Apollo and the Slain Hyacinth pairs it with the story of
Venus and Adonis, recalling the inadvertent wounding of Venus by Cupid, in
Book X:525–528, the causal event that engenders her love of Adonis. However,
in chiding Amor for the many sorrows he has wrought, Venus appears to lay
charges against him for all the mishaps sung by Orpheus throughout Book X.
Sabaeus transfers the plaintive avowal of irresistible love, voiced by Orpheus
in verses 525–528, to Venus, so that her love of Adonis is seen to rehearse, and
also to originate in, the sway Amor exercises over all persons and things, not
least Orpheus, whose songs about love lost attest his enthrallment to Love. As
Orpheus puts it: ‘Love won. He is a god well known in the world above, though
I do not know if that is so here [in Hades]: though I imagine him to be here, as
well’.35 Sabaeus renders this in the form of an acknowledgment by Venus that
her lost love is but one in a chain of sorrows brought about by Cupid.

Drying the tears of Venus mournful of Adonis,

Amor, weeping, with a caressing and solicitous hand,
Though but a boy, by eloquent speech was mitigating violent death:
When that parent, thus sighing, replied:
(Take your hand away) this wound, these sorrows, your hands have
caused.36

34 Ibid., fol. 106r:

‘Dum Venus in Cypro, & Phoebus per prata vagantes
Florida: habere solum sidera picta vident:
Dumque Hyacinthus ibi. Atque rubens occurrit Adonis:
Pulcer uterque suo funere, Phoebus ait:
Dic soror, haec nostris num exultat amoribus istis?
An luctu, & nostro terra dolore gemit?
Hic meus, iste tuus dolor, & gratissimus ignis:
Ille Hyacinthus erat: alter Adonis erat’.
35 See note 15 supra.
36 Ibid., fol. 106r:
‘Siccabat Veneris lacrymas plorantis Adonim,
Flens & Amor, blanda sollicitaque manu:
Lenibatque necem, quamvis puer ore diserto:
Quum sic suspirans rettulit ista parens:
Hanc plagam, hos luctus, & causam caedis acerbam,
(Tolle manum) ista tuae cuncta dedere manus’.
546 Melion

Sabaeus makes the same case more expansively in a complementary poem

on Solis’s Venus Mourning the Death of Adonis.

Golden Cythera was preparing for finely formed Love

A floral wreath: gathering flowers from Idalian hillsides:
None but mournful blossoms tinged with blood: they were the poppy
anemone,
And the moist Narcissus, and the hyacinth.
Not yet forgetful of the recent wound,
She applied the floral wreath, wet with dew, to her lips, and says:
O sweet youth, and you, O most lovely Adonis:
Sweet, as yet you breathe; sweet, as yet you are scented.37

Here he combines the story of Narcissus, in Book III:339–510, with the sto-
ries of Apollo and Hyacinth and Venus and Adonis. Venus is found plaiting a
wreath composed of the floral vestiges of beloved young men who died before
their time – the poppy anemone, the narcissus, the hyacinth. Pressing the
wreath to her lips, in particular breathing in the anemone’s redolent fragrance,
she reminisces about bloody wounds metamorphosed into dewy blossoms.
Sabaeus identifies the wreath as a gift for Amor, which is to say, a memorial
to love, and he sets the wistful scene of gathering in a specific place – the hills
of Idalion, home to Venus. The short poem is a meta-allegory on the nature of
Ovidian love, as distilled in the Metamorphoses, wherein each transformation
forms a link in a mutative chain – a serta (wreath or garland of flowers) – to
be recollected, as a whole, in a sequence of relation. The recollective action
of plaiting, layering, concatenating requires the reader-viewer to join part to
part, fictio to fictio, mutatio to mutatio, as if s/he were wandering through a
landscape, plucking choice blooms, each one bittersweet, delightfully fragrant
yet evocative of death. A better description of the web of allusion whereof
Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and Adonis is constructed could hardly be
found [Fig. 13.1].

37 Ibid., fol. 104v:

‘Aurea formoso Cytherea parabat Amori
Serta: legens flores collibus Idalijs:
Non nisi lugubres, tinctosque cruore: papaver,
Narcissusque madens, atque hyacinthus erat.
Rosciduli, plagae nondumque oblita recentis,
Applicuit labris humida serta, et ait:
O dulces pueri, tuque ô pulcerrime Adoni:
Suave et adhuc spiras, dulce et adhuc redoles’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 547

2 Goltzius’s Integral Ovidian Series of ca. 1588–ca. 1591

Just before he drew Landscape with Venus and Adonis, Goltzius, in his capacity
as designer and publisher, set about the task of illustrating the fifteen books of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses [Fig. 13.1]. The engravers were masters variously affili-
ated with his publishing house: Jacob Matham, Jan Saenredam, Jan Muller,
Jacques de Gheyn, and Pieter de Jode. Goltzius completed only two sets, leaving
two others incomplete: Book I in twenty plates, from The Untangling of Chaos
to Clymene Avows to Phaëthon that the Sun Is his Father [Figs. 13.6–13.20]; Book
II in twenty plates, from Phaëthon Requesting Leave to Pilot the Chariot of the
Sun to The Rape of Europa; Book III (incomplete) in eight plates, from Cadmus,
in Search of his Sister Europa, Consulting the Oracle at Delphi to Teiresias Strikes
the Conjoined Serpents; and Book IV (likewise incomplete) in four plates, from
Thisbe Affrighted by the Lion to Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.38 His series,
though emulative of Virgil Solis’s, especially in the composition of selected
episodes, also diverges from it in significant respects, most crucially in the
attention Goltzius pays to previously unillustrated scenes that function as
mediating links in the Ovidian catena of metamorphoses.39 To see how this
works, I want to track through the sequence of fourteen plates leading from
the Gigantomachy, Jupiter Convenes the Gods to Discuss the Destruction of the
World, and Jupiter Transforms Lycaon into a Wolf, to Pan and Syrinx, Mercury
Slays Argus, and Clymene Avows to Phaëthon [Figs. 13.7–13.20].

38 On the form, function, and context of Goltzius’s Ovidian series, see Sluijter E.J.,
“‘Metamorphoses’ in Prints by Hendrick Goltzius and his Circle”, in idem, Seductress of
Sight: Dutch Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle: 2000) 23–69; also see Michels N. (ed.), Hendrick
Goltzius (1558–1617). Mythos, Macht und Menschlichkeit, aus den Dessauer Beständen,
exh. cat. Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie Dessau (Petersberg: 2017) 186–197. On Goltzius’s
plates from Book I, see Leesberg M. (comp.) – Leeflang H. (ed.), The New Hollstein Dutch
and Flemish Etching, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Hendrick Goltzius, 4 vols.
(Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel – Amsterdam: 2012) III 226–241, cat. nrs. 532–551; on the plates
from Book II, see ibid. III 242–257, cat. nrs. 552–571; on the plates from Book III, see ibid.
III 258–260, 262–265, cat. nrs. 572–579; on the plates from Book IV, see ibid. III 260–261,
266–267, cat. nrs. 580–583. Goltzius’s avid interest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses was likely
fueled by his close friend and collaborator Karel van Mander, whose Judgment of Midas of
1588, co-painted with Gillis van Coninxloo, is the earliest Dutch painting of this subject,
and whose Judgment of Midas with Minerva and the Muses of 1589, engraved by Nicholas
Clock, was published by Goltzius in that year. Van Mander may have been working on his
Ovidian commentary, Wtlegghingh op den Metamorphosis, as early as the late 1580s; it was
published as Book IV of his compendious treatise on art, Het Schilder-Boeck, in 1604, on
which see subsection 3 of this essay, “Goltzius’s Art of Landscape and Karel van Mander’s
Grondt”, infra. On Van Mander as a Haarlem-based propagator of interest in Ovid, see
Leesberg M., “Karel van Mander as a Painter”, Simiolus 22.1/2 (1993–1994) 5–57, esp. 25, 43.
39 On Goltzius’s emulation of Solis, as well as his occasionally radical divergences from
him and from Solis’s model Barnard Salomon, see Sluijter, “‘Metamorphoses’ in Prints by
Hendrick Goltzius” 28–47, 298–300.
548 Melion

Figure 13.6 Hendrick Goltzius, The Age of Iron from the Metamorphoses, 1589. Engraving,
176 × 253 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.7 Hendrick Goltzius, Gigantomachy from Metamorphoses, 1589. Engraving,

176 × 253 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 549

Figure 13.8 Hendrick Goltzius, Jupiter Convenes the Gods to Discuss the Destruction of the
World, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 255 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.9 Hendrick Goltzius, Jupiter Transforms Lycaon into a Wolf, 1589. Engraving,
176 × 255 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
550 Melion

Figure 13.10 Hendrick Goltzius, Neptune Calls Forth the Waters, 1589. Engraving,
176 × 252 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.11 Hendrick Goltzius, The Destruction of the World by Flood, 1589. Engraving,
177 × 255 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 551

Figure 13.12 Hendrick Goltzius, Deucalion and Pyrrha Seeding the Earth with Stones, 1589.
Engraving, 176 × 253 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.13 Hendrick Goltzius, Apollo Slays Python, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 252 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
552 Melion

Figure 13.14 Hendrick Goltzius, Apollo Slays Python, and Apollo and Seizing Daphne as she
Transforms into a Laurel, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 252 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.15 Hendrick Goltzius, The Rivers Come to Visit the Bereaved Peneus, 1589.
Engraving, 176 × 253 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 553

Figure 13.16 Hendrick Goltzius, Jupiter and Io, 1589. Engraving, 177 × 252 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.17 Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury and Argus, 177 × 255 mm

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
554 Melion

Figure 13.18 Hendrick Goltzius, Pan and Syrinx, 177 × 254 mm

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.19 Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury Slays Argus, 176 × 252 mm

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 555

Figure 13.20 Hendrick Gotlzius, Clymene Avows to Phaëthon that the Sun Is his Father, 1589.
Engraving, 176 × 252 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Goltzius would have closely consulted with the humanist adviser – a scholar-
poet such as Franco Estius, G. Rijckius, Cornelis Schonaeus, or Theodorus
Schrevelius – whom, as publisher of the series, he retained to supply the ele-
gant Latin subscriptions engraved at the base of each print.40 These quatrains

40 He commissioned forty Latin quatrains from Franco Estius for the plates from Books I
and II, and twenty-two from G. Rijkius for the plates from Books III and IV. On Estius, who
provided Latin texts for numerous prints produced in Haarlem, none later than 1594, see
Leesberg M., “Introduction”, in Leesberg (comp.) – Schuckman C. – Leeflang H. (eds.), The
New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Karel van
Mander (Rotterdam – Amsterdam: 1999) xlvi; and Venne H. van de, “Zu den Kupferstichen
von Hendrick Goltzius mit Epigrammen von Cornelius Schonaeus”, in Michels (ed.),
Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) 103–107, esp. 106. On Rijckius, see ibid. 106–107. On the
intertextual character of the serial inscriptions, which often incorporate Ovidian clauses
and phrases to signal the epigram’s dialogic relation with the Metamorphoses, see
Wolkenhauer A. et al., “Die übersehene Hälfte: Ein Werkstattberich zur Erchliessung
der Bildepigramme in der frühneuzeitlichen Druckgraphik”, in ibid. 108–117, esp. 112–115,
186–197. Goltzius began working closely with Schonaeus as early as 1581: he composed
most if not all of the unsigned Latin inscriptions on prints engraved and/or published by
Goltzius between 1581 and 1594; after Estius’s death in 1594, Schonaeus became Goltzius’s
556 Melion

cleverly condense the web of stories within stories comprised by Books I,

II, and III of the Metamorphoses. The Latinist, whoever he was, must have
familiarized him with the Ovidian poetics of the integral poem, but Goltzius
undoubtedly also knew Johannes Florianus’s Dutch prose translation first pub-
lished in 1552, and reissued in 1566 and 1580.41 These later editions include a
series of 178 woodcuts copied after the slightly earlier set designed and cut by
Virgil Solis for the two German editions of Ovidian-inspired poetry (Frankfurt,
1563). Solis’s prints derive in turn from the 178 woodcuts designed and cut by
Bernard Salomon for his two abridged editions of the Metamorphoses (Lyon,
1557), respectively issued in French and Dutch verse, with which Goltzius was
likewise familiar, as Eric Jan Sluijter has convincingly argued.42 Florianus,
unlike Salomon, adheres punctiliously to the densely interwoven texture of
Ovid’s poem. Take his translation of the extended passage in Book I leading
from the Gigantomachy to the Transformation of Lycaon into a Wolf, thence
to the Destruction of the World by Flood: the story of King Lycaon of Arcadia
is the hinge that links these consecutive episodes. His cruelty, rapacity, and
contempt for the gods, which Jupiter execrates as symptomatic of all mortal
life, causes him to summon the gods and announce his decision to destroy
the world:

And, so men say, the earth became very wet with the blood of the Giants:
and to prevent the entire race from being lost, she brought forth other
humans [from that gore], who were not very unlike their forefathers.
For they were fierce, cruel, and contemptuous of the gods, whereby one
might easily know the seed from which they sprang.
Seeing this again to be the case, Jupiter was deeply troubled, and recall-
ing a deed as yet unknown, that is, the great excess, luxury, and voracity

sole supplier of Latin inscriptions, the majority of which he also signed. On Goltzius’s
collaborative relationship with Schonaeus, see Leesberg (comp.), New Hollstein: Karel van
Mander, xlviii–xlix.
41 On Johannes Florianus’s prose translation of the Metamorphoses and especially on the later
editions of his Metamorphoses ofte Herscheppinghe that incorporate copies after Solis’s
woodcuts, see Sluijter, “‘Metamorphoses’ in Prints by Hendrick Goltzius” 25, 310–312. On
Florianus, see Willems L., “Reinaerdiana VII. Het leven van Johannes Florianus, vertaler
van den Reinaert”, Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor
Taal- en Letterkunde (1922) 1211–1233; Arens J.C., “Apolloos aanspraack: Bredero benut van
Mander en Florianus”, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 77 (1959–1960)
299–301; idem, “De Princesse Liedekens. De Pellicanist ‘Ick hoop een beter’ bewerkt van
Ghistele en Florianus”, in ibid. 210–215; and Sluijter, “‘Metamorphoses’ in Prints” 310–312.
42 Ibid. 29, 36, 38–40.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 557

Lycaon was wont to lavish on his banquets and meals, he convened a

council of all the gods.43

At the council, Jupiter secures the gods’ assent by describing Lycaon’s mon-
strous deeds, not least the threat he poses to earth-bound deities – nymphs,
satyrs, dryads, and river gods: ‘But how were it possible for them to have any
measure of peace, given that this cruel Lycaon sought to ensnare and treacher-
ously to murder me (who rules heaven and all of you)’. Lycaon’s evil, he assev-
erates, knows no bounds:

You gods, be at rest, for I have punished him after his deserts, whose mis-
deed and chastisement I shall now recount.
The great infamy and wickedness of the world had often reached my
ears, and though I would have wished otherwise, yet was I compelled to
descend thither and search out the truth: Thus went I, a god in human
form, wandering through the world, the evil and unchecked wickedness
of which was so great and incalculable, that to describe it would take too
long. Already had I crossed fearful Mount Maenala, and the whole land
of Arcadia, when as night fell, weary and spent I reached the house of
this vicious tyrant. When the people heard that a God had arrived, they
began to worship me: mocking them, Lycaon said to himself: I myself
shall easily find out whether he be no immortal god, for when he has
fallen fast asleep […] by stealth I shall cut his throat. Nor did this evil
intention satisfy him. He had in his house a Molossian hostage sent there
[from Epirus], whose throat he cut and limbs, still half alive, he prepared
to serve me, some parts boiled, others roasted. When I saw these things,
I called down fire upon his whole house, burning everything within it.

43
I have consulted the reprint edition of 1637; see Ovid, Metamorphosis, dat is: de Herschep-
pinghe ofte Veranderinghe, beschreven van den wijt-beroemden ende gheleerden Poët Pub.
Ovidius Naso, ende door den hoogh-geleerden Ioh: Florianum in onse Nederduytche spraeck
over-geset. […] Seer dienstelijck en nut voor alle Edele Geesten ende Konstenaers: als Rhe-
torijckers, Schilders, Beeldt-snijders, Goudt-smeden, ende alle Lief-hebbers der Historijen,
trans. Johannes Florianus (Rotterdam, Pieter van Waesberghe: 1637) 12–13: ‘Ende, soo men
seyt, soo wert de aerde heel nat van het warm bloedt der Reusen: ende op dat het ghe-
slachte niet te niet en quame, soo verresender andere menschen uyt, die haer voorvaders
niet seer onghelijck en waren. Want sy fel, vreet, ende verachters der Goden waren, soo
datmen lichtelijck kennen mocht, uyt welcken sade datse ghesproten waren.
‘D’welcke Jupiter wederom aenmerckende, wert seer verstoort, ende verhaelde een
ander feyt dat noch onbekent was, te weten, de groote overvloedigheydt, costelijckheyt,
ende gulsigheyt, die Licaon in sijn bancketten ende maeltijden bedreef, waer op hy alle de
ander Goden in den breeden Raet dede vergaderen’.
558 Melion

Terrified, he began to take flight […] but in vain. For his speech changed
into a howl, his mouth into the muzzle of a raging wolf: and the murders
he formerly committed against men, he now plies against sheep, being
bloodthirsty still. […]
With Lycaon (said Jupiter) one family and house have been destroyed;
but having seen the whole of the world, I find that not this family alone
has deserved this punishment, for everywhere so much evil reigns that
you would have thought them sworn to iniquity. Thus, my final sentence,
my conclusion, is that such retribution is owed to all. This judgment some
approved [by acclamation], others consenting with a nod.44

So, the story of Lycaon, recalled by Jupiter to himself at the start of the subsec-
tion on the Council of Gods, then mentioned in passing as a brief exordium
to his speech, and finally recounted fully as forensic evidence justifying his

44
Ibid. 14–16: ‘Ghy Goden, weest hier in gherust, want ick heb hem na sijn verdiensten wel
ghecastijt, het welck nu ‘t misdaet is, ende de vrake wil ick u gaen vertellen.
‘De groote infamie ende boosheyt des wereldts was my dickwils ter ooren gecomen,
ende hoe wel dat ick ‘t wel anders hadde ghewenscht, nochtans moest ick neder-dalen,
ende de waerheydt van desen ondersoecken: dus ghinck ick Godt wesende, in mensche-
lijcke figure de wereldt doorwandelen. Wiens quaetheyt ende ongheregelde boosheydt
soo groot ende ontallijck was, dat het te lanck soude vallen te vertrecken. Alreede had ick
den grouwelijcken bergh Menalus over-reyst, ende alle ‘t lant van Arcadien: dus quam ick
by avont moede ende mat gheloopen ten huyse van desen vreeden tyran. Als nu ‘t volck
hoorde seggen, datter eenen Godt overcomen was, soo begonstmen my te aenbidden,
ende eere te bewijsen sulcken als de Goden toebehoort: d’welck Lycaon bespottende,
heeft in hem selven geseyt: Ick sal noch desen nacht proeven oft desen Godt onsterffelijck
is oft niet, ende dat sal ick lichtelijck weten, want als hy wel vast sal ligghen slapen, soo wil
ick hem […] al heymelijck de kele af steken. Noch en heeft hy met dit quaet opset niet te
vreden geweest. Hy hadde in sijn huys eenen gijseler die daer vanden Molossen te panden
gesonden was, desen ginck hy met eenen deghen de strote af steken, ende de leden die
noch half levende waren ginck hy my bereyden ende voor-dienen, de sommighe gesoden,
de sommighe gebraden. Als ick alle dese dinghen aensagh, soo liet ick ‘t vier comen op ‘t
geheel huys, ende verbrande al datter in was. Waer af dese verrader vervaert zijnde begost
te vlieden. […] maer ‘t was te vergeefs. Want sijn sprake was hem in een huylen veran-
dert, sijnen mont in eens verwoeden wolfs muyl: ende de moort die hy te voren onder de
menschen plach te hanteren, die bedrijft hy nu onder de schaepkens, ende is noch even
bloet-gierich.
‘Een huys (seyde Jupiter) ende een familie isser ghedestrueert gheweest met desen
Lycaon; maer als ick alle de werelt wel oversien, soo bevinde ick, dat niet alleenlijck een
familie dese correctie alleen verdient en heeft, want over al en regneerter niet dan boos-
heyt, ghy sout segghen datse allegader de quaetheydt ghesworen hadden. Dus is mijn
conclusie ende finale sententie, datse alle sulcke punitie sullen lijden als hun-lieden toe-
behoort. Dese sententie hebben de sommighe gheapprobeert, ende hem tot deser puni-
tien geinciteert, die sommighe oock met een toeknicken gheconsenteert’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 559

decision to slaughter the human race, proves to be the ekphrastic subject of

his judicial oration, as well as its motivating cause. The deluge that ensues as a
consequence of the council’s approbation is presented as an expression of the
divine will, supremely embodied by Jupiter. Fearing that a conflagration might
engulf Olympus, he chooses instead to drown the world, calling upon the South
Wind to spread its low-hanging thunderclouds and enlisting the assistance of
Iris, who draws up the fallen rain and replenishes the torrential downpours.
Neptune, too, renders aid: striking the earth with his trident, he unleashes lakes,
rivers, and seas, inducing them to overflow their banks and shores:

[…] not content with this heaven-sent rain, Jupiter called upon Neptune
his brother to assist him, who summoned every river and stream, say-
ing: go to it, you waters, without respite or delay fulfill that which I com-
mand, show your strength, run your course, overspread everything,
boring through dikes, breaking down dams, and unleashing your high
tide against all that hinders you.45

Florianus simplifies Ovid’s richly ornamented diction, omitting his many

descriptive periphrases: gone, for example, is the personified South-wind, rain-
water dripping from his hoary locks, his brow wreathed with dark clouds, his
‘awful face veiled in pitchy darkness’. Instead, Florianus concentrates, as did
Canterus in his highly condensed narrative summary of the Metamorphoses,
on rendering the catena of interlocking episodes constitutive of the poem’s
episodic yet unbroken fabric.
The same holds true for the story of Venus and Adonis in Book X: Orpheus,
singing arboreal songs, tells the tale of Myrrha who, banished from Thrace for
the crime of incest, begs the gods to be released from both life and death, lest
she offend either the living or the dead; her wish granted by some unknown
god, she is transformed into the myrrh tree, her bitter tears into its fragrant
sap, and in this form, from her swelling trunk she gives birth to her incestuous
son Adonis. Preternaturally handsome, he becomes the paramour of Venus,
after she herself falls prey to love, having chanced to be pricked by Cupid’s
arrow. Fearing for his well-being, she warns the young huntsman against stalk-
ing the fiercer beasts – lions, bears, and boars, armoured with sharp tusks and

45 Ibid. 17: ‘[…] met desen reghen des hemels en was Jupiter noch niet te vreden, hy nam
mede t’ sijnder hulpe Neptunum sijnen broeder, de welcke tot hem roepende alle vloeden
ende rivieren, heeft hunlieden gheseyt: wel aen ghy wateren, sonder langher dralen oft
vertreck, volbrenght ‘t gene dat ick u sal ghebieden, toont uwe crachten, loopt, verbreyt
u selven over al, deurboort ende breeckt dijcken, dammen, ende al dat u mocht beletten,
gheeft alle uwe vloeden den toom’.
560 Melion

powerful claws. Couching her admonition in the meta-form of a story within a

story, she tells the tale of ungrateful Hippomenes and his lover Atalanta, who
for their combined crimes of blasphemy and sexual indiscretion were changed
by the goddess Cybele into the ferocious lions that pull her chariot:

They who before had lain in soft beds were both compelled to sleep in the
wild where they did nothing more than prowl and roar with other lions:
and at last, they were yoked to the chariot of the goddess Cybele. Keep
clear of these and other grisly beasts of this kind, for from one man or two
they do not run; attend well, my dearest love, that you be not too brave,
lest by your courage you are deceived.46

At this point, Venus’s story elides into Orpheus’s song, which resumes by narrat-
ing the death of Adonis, though it might be more accurate to say that Orpheus,
ceasing to ventriloquize Venus, now speaks again in his own voice. Book X thus
closes as it began, with Orpheus’s elegiac portrayal of lost love:

After the boar had dislodged the spear point with its tusks, it raced after
Adonis, sinking them into his groin and flipping him dead onto the sand.
Venus was in her chariot, not far from there, and hearing him groan,
immediately turned back, and seeing what harm had befallen him, she
began to tear her clothes and wring her hands, clamorously lamenting:
‘Oh, fierce death, not all shall go as you wish, for he shall be preserved as a
token of grief. His blood will be transformed into a flower, and every year
his death will be remembered’.47

46 Ibid. 276–277: ‘Daer sy te voren in sachte bedden gheleghen hadden, moesten sy nu bey-
den inde wildernisse blijven slapen, daer sy anders niet en deden (in leeuwen verand-
ert zijnde) dan met d’ander leeuwen loopen ende briesschen: ende wierden alsoo ten
lesten oock inden waghen vander Godinne Cybele ghespannen. Dese ende dierghelijcke
grouwelijcke gedierten suldy altijt in’t jagen schouwen, want voor eenen man oft twee en
souden sy niet verre loopen, siet wel toe mijn alderliefste dat ghy u niet te stout en kent,
op dat u uwe stoutigheydt niet en bedriege’.
47 Ibid. 277–278: ‘Na dat het swijn met sijn tanden den swijnspriet uytghetrocken hadde, is’t
Adonim toeghevaren, ende grijpende hem by de eechenissen, heeft hem over doodt in’t
sant gheworpen. Venus die met haren waghen niet verre van daer en was, hoorde hem
suchten, ende is terstont weder derwaerts ghekeert, ende siende dat het soo deirlijck met
hem gestelt was, begost sy haer cleederen te scheuren, haer handen te vringhen, ende
groot misbaer te maecken roepende, ten sal ô gy felle doodt, al nae uwen wensche niet
gaen, want noch sal hy een teecken des droefheyts behouden. Alle jaren salmen noch
een ghedenckenisse sijnder doot hebben, ende sijn bloedt sal in een bloeme verandert
worden’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 561

The series’ Latin quatrains closely describe their respective prints, but they
also attempt to underscore each linking episode’s position within the Ovidian
catena, its close relation to the scene that follows. Goltzius, in devising the
series’ subjects, clearly collaborated with his humanist collaborator, and con-
versely, that learned person, in composing the Latin texts, based them on the
images Goltzius had devised.48 The Gigantomachy is a case in point [Fig. 13.7]:

Striving after heaven, Briareus stands to fight, and fearful Typhoeus,

And Rhoetus hurls huge mountain ashes at the stars,
Saturnius with his three-forked fire shatters their efforts,
And raging Pallas opposes them with the aegis-shield and armaments.49

Ovid mentions none of the Giants by name, and he ascribes the victory wholly
to Jupiter, who smashes Mounts Olympus, Pelion, and Ossa with his thun-
derbolts, piling them onto his foes. The quatrain has Pallas Minerva fighting
beside him, and gives hundred-armed Briareus pride of place amongst the
Titans, in response to Goltzius, who positioned a colossus front and center,
his arms conspicuously outstretched, and set Minerva, armed with shield and
spear, in the sky above, from where she assists Jove. Minerva stands for the
other gods, such as Apollo and Pluto, who fight on his side, and by naming her,
the Latin inscription prepares the way for the next episode – the Council of the
Olympian Gods – wherein Jupiter calls upon the support of his fellow deities.
Tellingly, in another allusion to the council scene, he is designated ‘Saturnius’,
the epithet Ovid uses to describe him on his high throne at the convocation of
major gods.
The quatrain on the Council of the Gods includes two proleptic allusions
[Fig. 13.8]: the first to the wicked deeds of Lycaon, as yet unknown to the gods,
but soon to be recounted; the second to the deluge, as yet unchosen by Jove as
his method of destroying humankind, but soon to be unleashed. Whereas the
next print, Jupiter Transforms Lycaon into a Wolf, illustrates the former, the two
after that, Neptune Calls Forth the Waters and The Destruction of the World by
Flood, illustrate the latter.

The parent of gods and men, having been mocked, execrates

The wicked deeds of Lycaon and summons the gods.

48 His collaborators may have been Franco Estius and G. Rijckius, on whom see note 39 supra.
49 ‘Stat Briareus caelum affectans, dirusque Typhoeus / Ingentesque ornos Rhaetus in astra
iacit. / Fregit conatus Saturnius igne trisulco, / Aegidaque opposuit Pallas et arma furens’.
See Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 238, cat. nr. 538.
562 Melion

The attendant godly throng assents to the destruction

By billowing flood of the whole human race.50

Seriatim, in Jupiter Transforms Lycaon into a Wolf, the reference to the wood-
lands and cavernous dens that the vulpine Lycaon will soon haunt (‘sylvas et
[…] spelaea ferarum’) adverts equally to the setting of the next print, Neptune
Calls Forth the Waters [Fig. 13.9].51 And again, this print’s quatrain perfectly
narrates the deluge depicted in the following print, Destruction of the World
[Figs. 13.10 & 13.11].

While the South Wind casts waters forth, Iris, daughter of Thaumas,
Scatters clouds heavy with rain.
And fierce Neptune commands all the spirits of the waters
To unleash their streams.52

The quatrain on Destruction of the World explicitly alludes to Deucalion and

Pyrrha Seeding the Earth with Stones [Figs. 13.11 & 13.12]:

Who does not know of Deucalion’s surging tides?

Men and flocks that catastrophe gave over to death.
The great indignation of offended Jove did convey
This destruction earthward, and for her man was Pyrrha alone left
behind.53

Meanwhile, in the quatrain on Deucalion and Pyrrha, the allusion to the hard-
ness and obduracy of the human race, inherited from its stony origins (‘e saxis
hominum gens reparata fuit […] durum nos genus unde sumus’), sets the scene

50 ‘Divum hominumque parens scelerata Lycaonis acta / Devovet irrisus, conciliumque

vocant. / Turba Deum praesto est subscribens perdat ut omne / Diluvio humanum fluc-
tivagante genus’. See Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 228, cat.
nr. 539.
51 ‘Igne Lycaonias devastat Juppiter aedes, / Ille fugit rapidum vertitur inque lupum. / Sylvas
et rabiosa petit spelaea ferarum, / Visque ferox animo, quae fuit ante, manet’. See
Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 228, cat. nr. 540.
52 ‘Undivomo collecta Noto Thaumantias Iris / Nubila per terras dissipat imbre
gravi. / Nuptunusque ferox cunctis indicit aquarum / Numinibus fontes eiaculare suos’.
See Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 229, cat. nr. 541.
53 ‘Deucalionaeae fluctus quis nesciat unde? / Morti homines pecudes illa ruina dedit. / Tanta
Jovis laesi tulit indignatio terris / Excidia, una suo Pyrrha relicata viro est’. See Leesberg
(comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 229, cat. nr. 542.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 563

for the curious allusion to the power of Apollo’s art in Apollo Slaying Python
[Fig. 13.12 & 13.13].54 The latter quatrain implicitly celebrates the mollifying
power of Apollonian art, claiming that it can overpower no less effectively than
the god’s arrows [Fig. 13.13]:

Cynthius laid low the immense Python with sure arrows,

Nor by his art did he merit lesser glory,
While he slayed the monster that infested land and sea
On account of Juno’s wrath against Latona [his] mother.55

The quatrain on Apollo Seizing Daphne augments the list of epithets by which
the god is characterized [Fig. 13.14]: whereas previously, in his role as preserver
of the world, he was called Cynthius, after his terrestrial place of birth, Mount
Cynthus of Delos, now he is known by the names Phoebe and Titan, which
identify him as the omnipotent god of light and the sun.56 However, in con-
junction with the clause, ‘He burned, ablaze with desire for Daphne daughter
of Peneus’ (‘Ardebat flagrans Titan Penëida Daphnen’), these epithets serve
instead to underscore how low he has fallen, having been made subject to love
by Cupid’s invincible arrows: rather than giving forth light, he is now inciner-
ated by love.57 These Latin ironies operate in tandem with the laudatory argu-
ment and tone of the previous quatrain.
The reference to Daphne’s eschewal of the marriage bed and craving for the
forest haunts of wild beasts (‘Illa thorum vitat devia lustra petens’), along with
the monniker ‘Penëida’ (‘of Peneus’), announces the subject of the next print,
The Rivers Come to Visit the Bereaved Peneus [Figs. 13.14 & 13.15]. The rocky clefts
through which the river gods’ streams rush and tumble, and the lush forests
wherein they shelter are the very image of the wild isolated places for which
Daphne desperately longs [Fig. 13.15]:

54 ‘Diluvio cessante, et subsidentibus undis, / E saxis hominum gens reparata fuit / Pyrrha
nurus post terga iacit, post terga maritos / Deucalion, durum nos genus unde sumus’. See
Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 229, cat. nr. 543.
55 ‘Immensum certis stravit Pythona sagittis / Nec meruit minimum Cynthius arte decus, /
Latonae matri monstrum Junonis ob iram / Et terra infestum dum necat atque mari’. See
Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 229, cat. nr. 544.
56 ‘Ardebat flagrans Titan Penëida Daphnen / Illa thorum vitat devia lustra petens. / Vitat,
et in laurum cita vertitur, at sua semper / Dilecta Phoebus tempora fronde tegit’. See
Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 229–230, cat. nr. 545.
57 The caption-writer, not Ovid, was responsible for the clever use of these epithets to char-
acterize Apollo, though they comport perfectly with the poem’s ironic tone.
564 Melion

Seated in his pleasant grotto, Penaeus, who flows from the Thessalian
Pindus,
Summons nymphs and great rivers.
You, swift Amphrysus, and you, Spercheos,
Swelling with rushing streams, and the ancient Apidanus.58

This catalogue of the rivers of Thessaly serves to introduce the quatrain on

Jupiter and Io, which begins by calling Io ‘Inachiden’, i.e., daughter of the Argive
river god Inachus (‘Juppiter Inachiden densa caligine stuprat’) [Fig. 13.16].59
Jupiter, who ‘concealed Io in the form of a heifer’ (‘Iö sub imagine vaccae occu-
luit’), is styled an author of ‘wanton deceits’ (‘furta petulca’), and these remarks
function as harbingers of the quatrain on Mercury and Argus, which imputes
great slyness and cunning to Jove’s foster-son who, to do his father’s bidding,
disguises himself as an Arcadian shepherd [Fig. 13.16 & 13.17]:

The Arcadian foster-son makes sport of the hundred-eyed watchman,

And craftily obeys the commands of [his] eternal father.
By the song’s false harmony, Argus is undone,
The alluring pipe/reed lulls the sleepless one to sleep.60

The phrase ‘fistula blanda’, in that ‘fistula’ designates both a pipe and a reed,
constitutes a witty allusion to Syrinx, the subject of the next print, Pan and
Syrinx [Fig. 13.18]. Attempting to seize the nymph Syrinx, Pan instead finds him-
self clutching riverine reeds; charmed by the sweet tones of air stirring in the
reeds, he transfers his affections to them, crafting the pan-pipes – the syrinx –
as an everlasting memorial to his lost love: ‘She was transformed into the reed
of the resonant shepherd’s-pipe, which Pan ever loves when it resounds with
sweet breath’.61

58 ‘Aemonio manans Pindo Penaeus amoena / Rupe sedens Nymphas fluminaque alta citat. /
Te velox Amphryse, et te Sperchye fluentis / Undantem rapidis, Apidanumque senem’. See
Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 230, cat. nr. 546.
59 ‘Juppiter Inachiden densa caligine stuprat, / Juno sui sensit furta petulca viri. / Quod deus
advertens, Iö sub imagine vaccae / Occuluit, quae post de bove facta dea est’. See Leesberg
(comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 230, cat. nr. 547.
60 ‘Centum oculis vigilem Tegees illusit alumnus, / Aeternique astu iussa parentis
obit. / Fallaci cantus modulamine deperit Argus, / Insomnem sopit fistula blanda virum’.
Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 230, cat. nr. 548.
61 ‘Pana fugit Syrinx ripam Ladonis ad udam, / Dumque fugit, numen fluminis orat opem /
Vertitur in calamum resonantis arundinis hunc Pan / Clangentem dulci flamine semper
amat’. See Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 230, cat. nr. 549.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 565

The term ‘blanda’ also resonates through the quatrain on Mercury Slays
Argus, where it refers to guileful Mercury, who induces sweet sleep in order
to murder the unsuspecting Argus [Fig. 13.19]. The Latin text drips with irony:

Companioned by sweet sleep, unexpected death snatches from life

The custodian of Inachus’s heifer-daughter.
This work, this most valiant deed belongs to the Cyllenian falchion;
You, son born of Maia, have the power to cozen Juno.62

The insistence on Mercury’s power of deception correlates to the half-ironical

celebration of his cunning artifice in the previous two prints and their associ-
ated quatrains [Figs. 13.17–13.19]. Finally, this quatrain’s surprising use of the
nomenclature ‘son born of Maia’ (‘Maia […] nate’) looks forward to the follow-
ing print, Clymene Avows to Phaëthon that the Sun Is his Father, whose quatrain
closes by conjuring Clymene’s solemn vow to Phaëthon that he is indeed the
sun’s son [Figs. 13.19 & 13.20]: ‘Pointing to the light of the radiant sun, she swore
on the Styx and the gods that it was his father’. So, too, the previous quatrain’s
implication that sweet sleep makes unforeseen death painless aligns with
this quatrain’s opening couplet; taunted by Epaphus, son of Io, who denies
that Phaëthon is the son of Helios, he rushes to Clymene to assuage his pain:
‘Phaëthon languishes from the bitter insults of Epaphus, and that he might
bear them, entreats Clymene for whatever aid she can [give]’ [Fig. 13.20].63
Goltzius, too, in his own way made every effort to unite this sequence of
prints. Let me begin with the Age of Iron and the Gigantomachy [Figs. 13.6 &
13.7]: the former centers on a colossal figure of Mars wielding an enormous
sword; close behind, a squire holds Mars’s spear and shield, and a woman car-
ries his bulging moneybag [Fig. 13.6]. Together they personify the two impulses
that rule the Iron Age – violence and avarice: ‘And now baneful iron had come,
and gold more baneful than iron; war came, which fights with both, and bran-
dished in its bloody hands the clashing arms’.64 At right, bound Piety sits beside

62 ‘Eripit e vivis blando sociata sopori / Custodem Inachiae mors inopina bovis. / Hoc opus,
hoc ingens decus est Cyllenidos Harpes, / Junonem Maia fallere nate potes’. See Leesberg
(comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 231, cat. nr. 550. ‘Cyllenian’ in this context
signifies ‘possessed by Mercury’.
63 ‘Opprobrys Epaphi Phaeton marcescit amaris / Quamque potest Clymenen ut ferat orat
opem. / Illa sui Solis radiantia lumina monstras, / Per Styga, perque deos deierat esse
patrem’. See Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius III 231, cat. nr. 551.
64 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Miller I 12–13: ‘Iamque nocens ferrum ferroque nocentius
aurum / prodierat, prodit bellum, quod pugnat utroque, / sanguineaque manu crepitantia
concutit arma’.
566 Melion

her attribute, an altar for burnt offerings, and three further personifications
are shown retreating from a battlefield – Fidelity cradling a trusty dog, Truth
holding the rod of justice, and veiled Modesty clutching a branch of hyssop (cf.
Psalm 51:7). Above them, Astraea, goddess of justice and innocence, turns her
back on the vicious world; flying heavenward, she displays a sword and scales.
All this illustrates Ovid’s remarks about the Fourth Age, into which the previ-
ous Ages of Gold, Silver, and Bronze devolved: ‘Straightway all evil burst forth
into this age of baser vein: modesty and truth and faith fled the earth, and in
their place came tricks and plots and snares, violence and cursed love of gain.
[…] Piety lay vanquished, and the maiden Astraea, last of the immortals, aban-
doned the blood-soaked earth’.65
Goltzius directly connects the Gigantomachy to the Age of Iron, showing
that the Giants’ presumption and contempt for the gods are a consequence
of this degenerate age, by positioning Briareus exactly where Mars had stood,
though turned 180 degrees into the image [Figs. 13.6 & 13.7]. The personifi-
cations of Fidelity, Truth, and Modesty, processing to the right, become the
three Giants at left, armed not with attributes but weapons – boulders and a
club carved from the trunk of a mountain ash – who assail Mount Olympus.
Similarly, the figure of Astraea turns into the battling gods Jupiter and Minera
at center, and Mercury at left, all of whom, though they rotate out of rather
than into the image, share her pose.66 These correspondences serve to reveal
that the attempt on Olympus is motivated by the same ‘blood-soaked’ vices
universally characteristic of the Age of Iron: ‘And, that high heaven might be
no safer than the earth, they say that the Giants essayed the very throne of
heaven, piling huge mountains, one on another, clear up to the stars’.67
Kindred features link the Gigantomachy and the Council of the Gods [Figs. 13.7
& 13.8]: most conspicuously, Jupiter, enthroned above his fellow gods, at left,
closely resembles Briareus in appearance: crowned, his coiled locks flutter-
ing, he addresses the assembly with one arm extended, holding a scepter-like
thunderbolt in the other arm. That his features ‘usurp’ those of Briareus wryly

65 Ibid. 10–12: ‘Protinus inrupit venae peioris in aevum / omne nefas: fugere pudor verumque
fidesque; / in quorum subiere locum fraudesque dolusque / insidiaeque et vis et amor
sceleratus habendi. […] Victa iacet pietas, et virgo caede madentis / ultima caelestum
terras Astraea reliquit’.
66 Mercury is shown not with the caduceus but with the simpler wand he uses to separate
the souls of the dead from their bodies. On this attribute, see Vergine de Tressan A. de la,
A History of the Heathen Mythology, or, the Fables of the Ancients, trans. H. North (London:
1806) 211.
67 Ibid. 12–13: ‘Neve foret terris securior arduus aether, / adfectasse ferunt regum caeleste
gigantas / altaque congesto struxisse ad sidera montis’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 567

indicates how ineffective the Giant’s efforts at usurpation have been. Goltzius
made Briareus king of the Giants, placing him in the most conspicuous spot,
to illustrate what Ovid says about the Giants’ chain of command; Jupiter is
speaking: ‘I was not more troubled than now for the sovereignty of the world
when each one of the serpent-footed giants was in act to lay his hundred hands
upon thee, captive sky’.68 By transferring the pose to Jupiter, Goltzius empha-
sized that he is in complete command. Seated furthest forward, another god,
again posed like Briareus, points in the direction of Neptune, who will play a
crucial role in the print to follow, Neptune Calls Forth the Waters [Fig. 13.8 &
13.10]. Whereas the gesture was previously marshaled to mobilize the Giant’s
forces, it now alludes to the godly authority of Neptune [Fig. 13.10]. Beside this
god sits Hercules, whose massive club transposes the Giants’ mountain ashes
from a weapon of assault to one mustered in defense of the gods. Mercury
and Apollo-Helios, who fought with Jupiter against the Giants – Mercury from
nearby, at left, Apollo-Helios from the far distance, at right – now flank him in
the Council of the Gods [Figs. 13.7 & 13.8].
Jupiter’s gesture of address signifies, amongst other things, that he is tell-
ing his fellow gods the story of Lycaon [Fig. 13.8]: ‘When now the clamour had
subsided, checked by his royal authority, Jove once more broke the silence
with these words: “He has indeed been punished; have no care for that. But
what he did and what his punishment I will relate”’.69 It comes as no surprise,
therefore, to find his pose repeated in Jupiter Transforms Lycaon into a Wolf
[Figs. 13.8 & 13.9]. The prior print’s rolling banks of cloud become the clouds of
smoke unfurling from Lycaon’s palace, but whereas Jove’s face was previously
lit by the presence of Apollo-Helios, it is now deeply shadowed to show that he
visited Lycaon ‘as a god disguised in human form’.70
Goltzius added the next scene, Neptune Calls Forth the Waters (unillustrated
by Salomon or Solis), because Ovid makes such a point of insisting that the
destruction of the world resulted from the combined efforts of Jupiter and
Neptune, who jointly unleashed the waters of the earth and the sky [Fig. 13.10].
In the background, airborne Iris hauls a bucket of water skyward, feeding the
sea’s moisture into the surrounding clouds: ‘Iris, the messenger of Juno, clad

68 Ibid. 14–15: ‘Non ego pro mundi regno magis anxius illa / tempestate fui, qua centum
quisque parabat / inicere anguipedum captivo bracchia caelo’.
69 Ibid. 16–17: ‘Substitit ut clamor pressus gravitate regentis, / Iuppiter hoc iterum sermone
silentia rupit: / “Ille quidem poenas (curam hanc dimittite?) solvit; / quod tamen admis-
sum, quae sit vindicta, docebo”’.
70 Ibid.: ‘et deus humana lustro sub imagine terras’.
568 Melion

in robes of many hues, draws up water and feeds it to the clouds’.71 Below her,
Neptune stands upon a rocky outcrop, having just dismounted from his chariot;
he has just struck an earthen dike with his trident, and water rushes in through
the cleft thus opened, inundating the earth: ‘Neptune himself smites the earth
with his trident. She trembles, and at the stroke flings open wide a way for the
waters. The rivers overleap all bounds and flood the open plains’.72 Obedient to
Neptune, four rivers spill floods of water from their tipped-over urns. Goltzius
had previewed the important part Neptune would play, by featuring him in
Council of the Gods, and he marries the present scene to its predecessor, Jupiter
Transforms Lycaon, by repeating its key elements [Figs. 13.8–13.10]: the seated
Jove provided the model for the river god seated at far left; the servant who
pours wine for Jupiter recalls the nymph at center, who turns her head left
while reaching to the right, in concert with the sea god beside her, whose
arm parallels hers; Neptune, were his arms shifted to the right, would be the
exact double of Lycaon. The nymph and sea god, rather like the wine-bearer,
are water-bearers, and Neptune and the river gods are, in their different ways,
no less ominous than the righteous Jupiter and blameful Lycaon, all of whom
wreak destruction.
The Destruction of the World by Flood, by reverting to the format of the
Gigantomachy, calls to mind that this event, too, was authored by Jove, and
also that the persons about to be annihilated were born of the blood of the
Giants when the earth gave it human form [Figs. 13.7 & 13.11]: ‘You might know
that they were the sons of blood’.73 The man in the foreground at center is
posed like Briareus, though he wraps his right arm around his wife, rather than
pointing imperiously, and with his left hand holds his infant son instead of a
scepter. The woman sheltering in the tent at left, and the man raising it to cover
her repeat the poses of the Giants at left, one of whom lifts a boulder while the
other swings a club. Many other figures correspond – the Giants on the plateau
at far right, for instance, and the refugees clustering on the highest hilltop at
center. Goltzius, precisely illustrating Ovid’s description of the flood, includes
such details as the boar and stag ‘alike swept away by the flood’, but his empha-
sis falls on revealing the dire effects of the twofold deluge, from air and earth,
whose origins Neptune Calls Forth the Waters had shown [Figs. 13.10 & 13.11].74

71 Ibid. 20–21: ‘Nuntia Iunonis varios induta colores / concipit Iris aquas alimentaque nubi-
bus adfert’.
72 Ibid. 22–23: ‘Ipse tridente suo terram percussit, at illa / Intremuit motuque vias patefecit
aquarum. / Exspatiata ruunt per apertos flumina campos’.
73 Ibid. 12–13: ‘[…] scires e sanguine natos’.
74 Ibid. 22–23: ‘[…] nec vires fulminis apro, / crura nec ablato prosunt velocia cervo’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 569

Figure 13.21 Virgil Solis, Deucalion and Pyrrha, 1563, from Johannes Posthius von
Gersmersheim, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt am Main,
Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus [Weigand Han] (haeredes):
1563) 11. Woodcut and letterpress, oblong octavo. Universiteitsbibliotheek
Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties

The next three plates are the ones that most closely follow Salomon and Solis:
Deucalion and Pyrrha Seeding the Earth with Stones, Apollo Slays Python, and
Apollo and Seizing Daphne as she Transforms into a Laurel [Figs. 13.12–13.14 &
13.21–13.24]. His version of Deucalion and Pyrrha clearly derives from his fore-
bear’s, though typically, he inserts various subsidiary scenes that establish the
narrative flow from out of which the foreground scene emerges [Figs. 13.12 &
13.21]: on the distant sea are the mermen and nereids who marveled at the
deluge, one of whom, Triton, sounded the conch that marked the flood’s end.
Deucalion and Pyrrha, their skiff perched on one of the two peaks of Mount
Parnassus, purify themselves by the ‘waters of Cephisus’s stream’, near the
shoreline [Fig. 13.12]. They then ‘ben[d] their steps to the goddess’s sacred
shrine’, halfway up Mount Parnassus, stooping as they go.75 Goltzius portrays
the couple exactly as Ovid describes them, their heads fully veiled, their robes

75 Ibid. 28–29: ‘[…] adeunt pariter Cephesidas undas / […] flectunt vestigia sanctae / ad
delubra deae’.
570 Melion

Figure 13.22 Virgil Solis, Apollo Triumphant over the Slain Python, 1563, from Johannes
Posthius von Gersmersheim, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt
am Main, Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus [Weigand
Han] (haeredes): 1563) 12. Woodcut and letterpress, oblong octavo.
Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties

ungirt, and he takes pains to show that the rocks they threw ‘softened to take
on form. Then, when they had grown in size and become milder in their nature,
a certain likeness to the human form, indeed, could be seen, still not very clear,
but such as statues just begun out of marble have, not sharply defined, and
very like roughly blocked-out images’.76 The male figure rising from the ledge
behind Deucalion, his right arm fully extended, recalls the crowned giant
Briareus in The Gigantomachy, but rather than gazing heavenward, he looks at
his progenitor, as if seeking guidance, and this change of attitude indicates that
this new breed is indeed chastened, different from the ‘sons of blood’ whom
Jupiter had resolved to destroy [Figs. 13.7 & 13.12]. In fact, he points back toward
the small figures of Deucalion and Pyrrha purifying themselves; he thus tacitly
acknowledges them as epitomes of piety. In the foreground, at Deucalion’s feet,

76 Ibid. 30–31: ‘[…] mollitaque ducere formam. / Mox ubi creverunt naturaque mitior illis /
contigit, ut quaedam, sic non manifesta videri / forma potest hominis, sed uti de marmore
coepta / non exacta satis rudibusque simillima signis’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 571

Figure 13.23 Virgil Solis, Apollo, Struck by Cupid’s Arrow, Pursues Daphne, 1563, from
Johannes Posthius von Gersmersheim, Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV
(Frankfurt am Main, Georgius Corvinus [Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus
[Weigand Han] (haeredes): 1563) 13. Woodcut and letterpress, oblong octavo.
Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Bijzondere Collecties

inchoate figures, half rock, half flesh, gradually mutate, on the way to becom-
ing recognizably human. Goltzius even shows the tree tops doubled over, their
‘leaves still hold[ing] the slime which the flood has left’.77
Goltzius combined Solis’s three scenes from the story of Apollo and
Daphne – Apollo Triumphant over the Slain Python, Apollo, Struck by Cupid’s
Arrow, Pursues Daphne, and Daphne, Struck by Cupid’s Arrow, Eschews Apollo
and Is Transformed into the Laurel [Figs. 13.22–13.24] – into two, Apollo Slaying
Python and Apollo Seizing Daphne as She Transforms into the Laurel [Figs. 13.13–
13.14]. Typically, he cleaves closer to Ovid’s hypotyposes, and embraces the
challenge of depicting them both more vividly and precisely. Whereas Solis dis-
played Python’s corpse as a mere trophy beside victorious Apollo, who exults
in his triumph, Goltzius endeavours to represent the fierce battle described
by Ovid [Figs. 13.13 & 13.22]: ‘This monster the god of the bow destroyed with
lethal arms never before used except against does and wild she-goats, crushing

77 Ibid. 26–27: ‘[…] limumque tenent in fronde relictum’.

572 Melion

Figure 13.24 Virgil Solis, Daphne, Struck by Cupid’s Arrow, Eschews Apollo and Is
Transformed into the Laurel, 1564, from Johannes Posthius von Gersmersheim,
Tetrasticha in Ovidii Metam. lib. XV (Frankfurt am Main, Georgius Corvinus
[Georg Rab] – Wigandus Gallus [Weigand Han] (haeredes): 1563) 14. Woodcut
and letterpress, oblong octavo. Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Bijzondere
Collecties

him with countless darts, well-nigh emptying his quiver, till the creature’s poi-
sonous blood flowed from the black wounds’.78 Python is poised against a high
mountain to indicate that the creature, as Ovid apostrophizes it, filled ‘so huge
a space of mountain-side’ [Fig. 13.13].79 The oak tree growing behind Apollo
refers to the oaken garland wherewith victories were formerly marked, ‘for as
yet the laurel-tree was not’.80
Goltzius merged Solis’s sequential scenes of Daphne’s flight and transforma-
tion into one composite image that reveals how close Apollo came to capturing
her [Figs. 13.14 & 13.23–13.24]. Her appearance derives from Ovid’s breathless

78 Ibid. 32–33: ‘Hunc deus arcitenens, numquam letalibus armis / ante nisi in dammis cap-
reisque fugacibus usus, / mille gravem telis exhausta paene pharetra / perdidit effuso per
vulnera nigra veneno’.
79 Ibid.: ‘[…] tantum spatii de monte tenebas’.
80 Ibid. 34–35: ‘Nondum laurus erat […]’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 573

description of the chase’s end: the winds have ‘bared her limbs, the oppos-
ing breezes set her garments a-flutter’; her feet, ‘but now so swift’, suddenly
grow fast, as if clinging to the ground with ‘sluggish roots’, her head converting
into a ‘tree’s top’ [Fig. 13.14].81 Ovid, writing in a comic mode, compares Apollo
to a hound snapping at the heels of a timorous hare: ‘Just as when a Gallic
hound has seen a hare in an open plain, and seeks his prey on flying feet, but
the hare safety; he, just about to fasten on her, now, even now thinks he has
her, and grazes her very heels with his outstretched muzzle; but she knows
not whether she be not already caught, and barely escapes from those sharp
fangs and leaves behind the jaws just closing on her’.82 Goltzius describes the
moment when Apollo, hanging ‘over [Daphne’s] fleeing shoulders’, touches the
‘branches as if human limbs’: he tries to wrap his arm around her back as her
upper body begins to turn into trunk and bark, and he thus feels both tree and
flesh, seizing his prey yet instantly losing her.83 Based on the Apollo Belvedere,
Goltzius’s absurd image of the god – out of kilter, with arms outstretched in
front, and legs outspread behind, an insipid expression on his face, his bow
unstrung – is a deformation of the aloof, triumphant, and much revered
ancient statue; his appearance, wildly divergent from that in Apollo Slaying
Python, functions as a pictorial counterpart to Ovid’s comic account of the god
undone by love [Figs. 13.13 & 13.14]. Indeed, it is the small, background figure
of Cupid, hovering in the sky above Apollo and Python, who seems to have
appropriated Apollo’s former pose; Goltzius thereby gives Cupid the upper
hand, conveying his power and invincibility. Further, the diminutive figure of
Apollo, at whom Cupid fires his arrow, is analogized to Daphne, whose atti-
tude he shares, with legs parted, torso turning, arm extended, and head looking
heavenward. The implication is that he is as much the prey of Amor as hitherto
Python was Apollo’s prey. By this clever device Goltzius adverts to the cause of
Apollo’s undoing – his confrontation with Cupid, immediately after the defeat
of Python: ‘Now the first love of Phoebus was Daphne, daughter of Peneus, the
river-god. It was no blind chance that gave this love, but the malicious wrath
of Cupid. […]. And to him Venus’ son replied: “Thy dart may pierce all things

81 Ibid. 38–41: ‘[…] nudabant corpora venti, / obviaque adversas vibrabant flamina vestes, /
[…] / pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret, / ora cacumen habet: remanet nitor
unus in illa’.
82 Ibid.: ‘Ut canis in vacuo leporem cum Gallicus arvo / vidit, et hic praedam pedibus petit,
ille salutem; / alter inhaesuro similis iam iamque tenere / sperat et extento stringit ves-
tigia rostro, / alter in ambiguo est, an sit conprensus, et ipsis / morsibus eripitur tangen-
tiaque ora relinquit’.
83 Ibid. 40–41: ‘[…] tergoque fugacis / inminet […] / complexusque suis ramos ut membra
lacertis’.
574 Melion

else, Apollo, but mine shall pierce thee; and by as much as all living things are
less than deity, by so much less is thy glory than mine”’.84 In an ironical, prolep-
tic gesture, Goltzius confers on Apollo the victor’s laurel wreath, thus alluding
to this story’s end, when Apollo declares: ‘My hair, my lyre, my quivers shall
always be entwined with thee O laurel’.85
As the rearward presence of Cupid and Apollo connects Apollo Seizing
Daphne to Apollo Slaying Python [Figs. 13.13 & 13.14], so the laurel crown, in that
it stands for the triumph of chaste Daphne, transformed by her father, the river
god Peneus, into the ever virginal laurel, henceforth sacred to Apollo, connects
Apollo Seizing Daphne to the following scene, The River Gods Pay Homage to the
Bereaved Peneus [Figs. 13.14 & 13.15]. Ovid emphasizes, by reference to Peneus’s
fellow river gods, who come either to ‘congratulate or console’ him, that he
was both sad, having lost his daughter, and exultant, having shielded her from
Apollo [Fig. 13.15].86 Apollo’s laurel crown is a sign of Peneus’s loss, but also of
his victory. Ovid distills this ambivalent outcome of the story of Apollo and
Daphne in the exquisite ekphrastic landscape he limns just after. The descrip-
tion of the rivers of Thessaly gathering at the foot of Mount Pindus, in the vale
of Tempe, around the cavernous ‘inmost haunt of the mighty stream’ Peneus,
in turn mediates between Apollo Seizing Daphne and Jupiter and Io, for as Ovid
asserts, one river alone failed to pay homage to Peneus, forsaking to join the
‘poplar-fringed Sperchios, restless Enipeus, hoary Apidanus, gentle Amphrysos
and Aeas, and later all the rivers which, by whatsoever way their current carries
them, lead down their waters, weary with wandering, into the sea’ [Figs. 13.14–
13.16].87 The absent river was Inachus who, ‘hidden away in his deepest cave’,
neglected to attend, overcome by the loss of his daughter Io.88 Goltzius signi-
fies Inachus’s absence by placing a water jar, sans river god, in the lower left
corner [Fig. 13.15].
‘Seated in a cave of overhanging rock’, at upper left, Peneus presides over
the other rivers, his waters flowing down through the ‘steep-wooded slopes’
of Tempe, their tree-tops heavy-laden with mist [Fig. 13.15].89 The river god
and water nymph in the center foreground, since their poses adumbrate those

84 Ibid. 34–35: ‘Primus amor Phoebi Daphne Peneia, quem non / fors ignara dedit, sed saeva
Cupidinis ira, / […] / filius huic Veneris “figat tuus omnia, Phoebe, / te meus arcus” ait;
“quantoque animalia cedunt / cuncta deo, tanto minor est tua gloria nostra”’.
85 Ibid. 40–41: ‘[…] semper habebunt, / te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure, pharetrae’.
86 Ibid. 42–43: ‘[flumina] nescia, gratentur consolenturne parentem’.
87 Ibid.: ‘[…] haec sunt penetralia magni / amnis […] / populifer Sperchios et inrequietus
Enipeus / Apidanosque senex lenisque Amphrysos et Aeas, / moxque amnes alii, qui, qua
tulit inpetus illos, / in mare deducunt fessas erroribus undas’.
88 Ibid. 42–43: ‘[…] imoque reconditus antro’.
89 Ibid.: ‘[…] praerupta quod undique claudit / silva […] / […] residens facto de cautibus
antro’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 575

of Jupiter and Io in the following print, though spatially reversed, provide a

transitional link between the two scenes. Indeed, one might argue that the
primary function of The River Gods Pay Homage to the Bereaved Peneus is to
ensure that the continuous chain of Ovidian ekphrases is illustrated without
interruption, in the manner enjoined by Canterus. The arrangement of river
gods and nymphs echoes the configuration of Neptune Calls Forth the Waters,
not only because both scenes feature water deities, but more importantly,
because Ovid confers on Peneus, in small, an authority like that exercised by
Neptune [Figs. 13.10 & 13.15]. Regarding Neptune, he writes: ‘So he commands,
and the rivers return, uncurb their fountains’ mouths, and in unbridled course
go racing to the sea’.90 About Peneus, he states: ‘Here is the home, the seat,
the inmost haunt of the mighty stream. Here […] he was giving laws to his
waters, and to his water-nymphs’.91 The most patently analogous figures are
the god and nymph at center and their twins sitting in the right foreground of
Neptune Calls Forth the Waters [Figs. 13.10 & 13.15]. To underscore the author-
ity of Peneus, Goltzius gave him the attitude of Jupiter in Council of the Gods
[Figs. 13.8 & 13.15]. Unillustrated by Solis, Goltzius’s interest in visualizing Ovid’s
riverine ekphrasis proclaims his commitment to illustrating the poet integrally.
As noted above, the urn noticeably bereft of a river god in The River Gods Pay
Homage alludes to Inachus, who alone failed to answer Peneus’s call [Fig. 13.15]:
‘Inachus only does not come; but, hidden away in his deepest cave, he augments
his waters with his tears, and in utmost wretchedness laments his daughter, Io,
as lost’.92 As this device looks forward to Jupiter and Io, so the poses of its chief
protagonists look backward to Apollo Seizing Daphne [Figs. 13.14–13.16]; the
seated, lunging Jupiter reverses the pouncing Apollo, and Io reverses Daphne
[Figs. 13.14 & 13.16]. Goltzius depicts the ‘thick dark cloud’ with which Jupiter
attempted to conceal his dalliance from Juno, which doubles as a reference
to the occluded sight of Io’s father who, ‘knows not whether she still lives or
is among the shades [Fig. 13.16]. But, since he cannot find her anywhere, he
thinks she must be nowhere, and his anxious soul forbodes things worse than
death’.93 But Io’s pose also previews that of Syrinx in Pan and Syrinx and, unex-
pectedly, that of Mercury in Mercury and Argus, with the exception of his arms

90 Ibid. 22–23: ‘Iusserat; hi redeunt ac fontibus ora relaxant / et defrenato volvuntur in

aequora cursu’.
91 Ibid. 42–43: ‘Haec domus, haec sedes, haec sunt penetralia magni / amnis […] / in his
[…] / undis iura dabat nymphisque colentibus undas’.
92 Ibid.: ‘Inachus unus abest imoque reconditus antro / fletibus auget aquas natamque
miserrimus Io / luget ut amissam’.
93 Ibid. 43–44: ‘[…] nescit, vitane fruatur / an sit apud manes; sed quam non invenit
usquam, / esse putat nusquam atque animo peiora veretur. / […] / cum deus inducta latas
caligine terras / occuluit […]’.
576 Melion

[Figs. 13.16–13.18]. The analogy between Io and Syrinx is obvious – both were
chased by an enamored god [Figs. 13.16 & 13.18]. The complementarity amongst
Mercury, Io, and Syrinx, surely has to do with cause and effect [Figs. 13.16,
13.17, & 13.18]: Mercury, his pasturing flock beside him, disguised himself as
an Arcadian shepherd because Io, having been disguised as a heifer, and held
captive on a ‘high mountaintop’, now needs to be rescued from Juno’s watch-
man, Argus [Fig. 13.17]. Disguise leads to disguise, in other words, as one pose
derives from the other.94 And Syrinx’s pose, a tempered version of Mercury’s
and Io’s, is as it is because her story originates from Mercury, who tells it to lull
Argus into oblivious sleep [Figs. 13.16, 13.17, & 13.18].95 By the same token, the
complementarity of poses speaks to the shared theme of entrapment, though
the precise roles of hunter and hunted are reversed: whereas Mercury strives
to entrap Argus, Io is entrapped by Jove, Syrinx nearly entrapped by Pan. There
is also the element of deception: Io and Syrinx are guileless, nearly defense-
less, while Mercury pretends to be an innocuous shepherd: ‘Only his wand he
keeps. With this, in the character of a shepherd, through the sequestered coun-
try paths he drives a flock of goats which he has rustled as he came along, and
plays upon his reed pipe as he goes. […] So Atlas’s grandson takes seat, and fills
the passing hours with talk of many things’.96
When, in Mercury Slays Argus, the god, now standing, inflects his pose,
so that he more closely resembles Mars in the Age of Iron or Briareus in the
Gigantomachy, he reveals his capacity for violence, as well as declares his
descent from the warlike Giants (by way of Atlas) [Figs. 13.6, 13.7, & 13.19]: ‘And
forthwith he smites with his hooked sword the nodding head just where it
joins the neck, and sends it bleeding down the rocks, defiling the rugged cliff
with blood’.97 Other witty analogies come into play in the Mercury and Argus
sequence: Pan’s pose is a version of Mercury’s as it appears in both Mercury
and Argus and Mercury Slays Argus [Figs. 13.17–13.19]. Pan grabs a bunch of
reeds, soon to become his pan-pipes, while Mercury holds a reed, playing it to

94 Ibid. 48–49: ‘Ipse procul montis sublime cacumen / occupat […]’.

95 Mercury’s pose can also be seen as a version of Jove’s, whose will he fulfills; moreover, his
desire to deceive and entrap Argus is the direct consequence of Jove’s desire to do the
same to Io.
96 Ibid. 48–51: ‘[…] tantummodo virga retenta est: / hac agit, ut pastor, per devia rura capel-
las / dum venit abductas, et structis cantat avenis. / […] / Sedit Atlantiades et euntem
multa loquendo / detinuit sermone diem iunctisque canendo’. Mercury’s splayed legs
recall the widely parted legs of Briareus, in what amounts to an allusion to his descent
from the Titan Atlas.
97 Ibid. 52–53: ‘Nec mora, falcato nutantem vulnerat ense, / qua collo est confine caput, sax-
oque cruentum / deicit et maculat praeruptam sanguine rupem’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 577

Figure 13.25 Hendrick Goltzius, The Daughters of Cecrops Uncover the Infant Erichthonius,
1590. Engraving, 177 × 255 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

intoxicate Argus [Figs. 13.17–13.18]. Pan desired to capture Syrinx, as Mercury to

subdue Io’s captor. And on it goes in a seemingly endless round of enlacements.
Goltzius occasionally built his analogies on elements of the landscape.
The figures of Clymene and Phaëthon in the final print of Book I are closer
to their counterparts in Book II than to any of the figures who precede them,
since this final tale inaugurates the series of tales to follow – the stories of
Phaëthon, Callisto, Corvus, Cornis, Cornix, Ocyroe, Battus, Aglauros, and
Europa [Figs. 13.20, 13.25, & 13.26].98 But the tree beneath which they sit resem-
bles the one under which Mercury murders Argus, presumably to indicate, in
typically ironical fashion, that though Clymene tells Phaëthon the truth, it will
prove to be his undoing [Figs. 13.19 & 13.20]: deceived by a false sense of his
native abilities, trusting too much in his solar descent, he will unwittingly seal
his fate. Indeed, Ovid implies that Clymene, moved more by the slight leveled

98 Cf., for example, the pose of Phaethon with that of Aglauros in The Daughters of Cecrops
Uncover the Infant Erichthonius, or the pose of Clymene with that of Herse in Mercury
Visits the Bedchamber of Herse, Having Turned Envious Aglauros into a Stone; in the latter
image, Mercury’s pose is like a standing version of Phaethon’s, and their facial features
make them look like fraternal twins. See Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick
Goltzius III 245, cat. nr. 563, and III 246–247, cat. nr. 570.
578 Melion

Figure 13.26 Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury Visits the Bedchamber of Herse, Having Turned
Envious Aglauros into a Stone, 1590. Engraving, 176 × 255 mm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam

by Io’s son Epaphus against her own son Phaëthon, may have been motivated
less by maternal love than wounded pride [Fig. 13.20].99 The tree that shel-
ters them and yet evokes the massive oak from Mercury Slays Argus implies
that Clymene, even if she means her son no harm, is causing Phaethon’s death:
“Phaëthon leaps up in joy at his mother’s words, already grasping the heavens
in imagination”.100
The prominent tree, its lobed leaves suggestive of an oak, aligns with the
protagonists it respectively shelters: the bulge near its base reverts to the curve
of Argus’s back and shoulders, its diagonal trunk to the angle of Mercury’s
right leg, torso, and raised right arm, its rightward branch to his left forearm,
its twisting bole to their serpentine bodies. The swelling and tapering hatches
that appear dynamically to mobilize the oak, and to articulate its bark and
foliage, ripple across the figures as well, animating them in the same fashion.

99 Tired of Phaëthon’s frequent boasts about his father, Epaphus had questioned whether
he was truly the son of Helios: ‘“You are a fool to believe all your mother tells you, and are
welled up with false notions about your father”’. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Miller,
I 54–55.
100 Ibid. 56–57: ‘Emicat extemplo laetus post talia matris / dicta suae Phaethon et concipit
aethera mente’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 579

The tree’s bulk, texture, and lighting, and Mercury and Argus’s, are correspond-
ingly described. Clymene’s body, inclined along a diagonal leading from her
right foot to her dropped left shoulder, aligns with the upper half of the tree,
her bent head and pointing right arm with the tree’s leftward branch. By the
same token, Phaëthon’s outstretched lower legs parallel the tree’s roots, and its
protuberant lower trunk matches the curve traced by his thighs, buttocks, and
lower back.
This conformation of tree to person, person to tree, was enshrined by Karel
van Mander in two chapters of his theoretical poem on art, Den grondt der
edel vry schilder-const (The Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting)
[Fig. 13.27]: chapter 4, “Van der Actitude, welstandt, ende weldoen eens Beeldts”
(On the Attitude, Well-Placed Stance, and Well-Placed Action of a Human
Figure), and chapter 8, “Van het Landtschap” (On Landscape).101 The Grondt
constitutes part 1 of Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Book on Picturing), a six-
part treatise on the visual arts, probably begun in the 1590s, around the time
Goltzius drew the Landscape with Venus and Adonis, and finally issued in 1604
by the Haarlem publisher Paschier van Wesbusch. Goltzius and Van Mander
were good friends, and scholars have long surmised that their views on art
were complementary if not identical. Van Mander, in the closing excursus to
his “Life of Hendrick Goltzius, Excellent Painter, Engraver, and Glass-engraver
of Mulbracht”, even calls himself a latter-day Plato to Goltzius’s Socrates: ‘For
Plato, when his time of death approached, thanked Genius, his birth-god, and
Good Fortune, for having granted him to be born a Man and a Greek, neither
a Barbarian nor an irrational Beast, and finally, for having let him live in the
time of Socrates. And so, too, do I rejoice to have known my boon companion
Goltzius, a fervent lover of art, and to have had friendly acquaintance with him
for more than twenty years’.102

101 On chapter 4 of Den Grondt, see Miedema H. (ed.), Karel van Mander, Den grondt der
edel vry schilder-const, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1973) II 447–459; on chapter 8, see ibid., 534–558;
and Bakker B., Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt (Burlington, VT: 2012)
175–199. On the mutual significance of Van Mander’s chapters on landscape and history as
imbricated categories of schilderconst, see Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon:
Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago – London: 1991) 1–12.
102 Van Mander, “T’leven van Henricus Goltzius, uytnemende Schilder, Plaet-snijder, en
Glaes-schrijver, van Mulbracht”, in Het Schilder-Boeck, waer in voor eerst de leerlustighe
Iueght den grondt der Edel Vry Schilderconst in verscheyden deelen wort voorghedraghen
(Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604), fols. 286v–287r: ‘Want also Plato, doe zijnen
sterf-tijt naeckte, danckte Genium zijnen gheboort-Godt, en t’gheluck, te zijn gheboren
Mensch, Grieck, en geen Barbar, noch onredelijcke Beest: eyndlijck, gheleeft te hebben
ten tijde van Socrates: Soo verblijd’ ick my oock, te hebben gehadt meer als twintigh Iaer
met mijnen vriendt, den heel Const-liefdigen Goltzio, vriendlijcken omgangh en kennis’.
580 Melion

Figure 13.27 Title-page of Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, waer in voor eerst de
leerlustighe Iueght den grondt der Edel Vry Schilderconst in verscheyden deelen
wort voorghedraghen (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604)
Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden. Bijzondere Collecties
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 581

3 Goltzius’s Art of Landscape and Karel van Mander’s Grondt

The Schilder-Boeck codifies critical categories applicable to the making and

viewing of Dutch and Flemish art: introduced in the Grondt, these criteria
are then variously applied in the tripartite series of artists’ lives that follow
(Books 2–4). The treatise concludes with two further parts: Wtlegginghe, en sin-
ghevende verclaringe op den Metamorphosis Publij Ovidij Nasonis (Explanation
and Meaningful Elucidation of the Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso)
and Van de Wtbeeldinghen der Figueren, en hoe de oude Heydenen hun Goden
hebben uytghebeeldt, en onderscheyden (Portraying Figurative Devices: How
the Ancients Portrayed and Differentiated their Gods). Chapter 4 of the Grondt
largely focuses on how to compose a serpentinate figure (known in Italian as
figura serpentinata): torsion is the identifying feature of this paradigmatic
pose, which is characterized by rotation; the body’s axis of orientation is heli-
cal rather than linear, and every limb balances around this notional helix,
turning and counter-turning in space. Moreover, the serpentinate figure is
a contrapposto, in the sense that it reconciles the antithesis of mobility and
immobility, converting these into the paradox of motion in rest, rest in motion,
as David Summers explained long ago in a series of groundbreaking articles: in
that the figure and its component parts turn, they epitomize graceful motion,
but in that the body’s parts are perfectly balanced, held in equilibrium, they
also epitomize graceful stasis.103 Goltzius appropriated the figura serpentinata
as the building block of his figural art, as witness the turning figure of Venus
in the Landscape with Venus and Adonis, or virtually every protagonist in the
Ovidian series we have just examined [Fig. 13.1]. But he also applied this para-
digm to his landscapes, in particular, to the trees that often tower within them.
Van Mander, as noted above, sanctions this usage in the Grondt, in the linked
chapters on attitude and on landscape.
Van Mander’s term for the kind of motion epitomized by the serpentinate
figure is wisselinghe (alternation): the body is mobilized ‘transversally or diago-
nally’ (‘kruisgewijs’); if the raised right arm projects forward, the lowered right

103 On the figura serpentinata, see Summers D., “Maniera and Movement: The Figura
Serpentinata”, Art Quarterly 35 (1972) 269–301; idem, “Contrapposto: Style and Meaning
in Renaissance Art”, The Art Bulletin 59 (1977) 336–361; idem, “The Archaeology of Fire:
Pyramidal Composition and the Figura Serpentinata”, Source: Notes in the History of
Art 36.3/4 (2017) 149–158; and Da Costa Kaufmann T., “The Eloquent Artist: Towards an
Understanding of the Stylistics of Painting at the Court of Rudolf II”, Leids Kunsthistorisch
Jaarboek 1 (1982) 119–148. On a more extreme form of the figura serpentinata, sculptural
rather than pictorial, and concerned more with force than grace, see Cole M., “The Figura
Sforzata: Modeling, Power, and the Mannerist Body”, Art History 24.4 (2001) 520–551.
582 Melion

leg will extend backward, while the left arm and leg answer conversely, the
former receding, the latter advancing – on the model of this pose as it appears
in the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Giambologna:

But put your mind to alternation (‘wisselinghe’),

Let the right arm come forward,
And the right leg sink backward,
The left leg project, and against it
The right arm recede, in a measured way,
At all times cross-wise; whether the Figures be sitting,
Or standing, they shall turn their face
Toward the arm that’s thrust to the fore.
Such an Attitude (‘Actitude’) Raphael of Urbino
Displayed together with Michelangelo.
[…]
And in Florence, that beautiful city,
This feature is especially observable
In the well sculpted works of [Giam]bologna.104

This kind of actitude, as Van Mander further elucidates, is more than a matter
of advancing and retreating in syncopation; it is also about turning the head
and the body in counter-rotation:

Following nature, one sees how in standing poses

The head is usually turned
To align with the foot, nor shall one see

104 Van Mander, Den grondt, in Schilder-Boeck, fol. 12v:

‘Maer dat wy een wisselinghe ghedincken,
Den rechten arem voor uyt comen laten,
En t’rechter been achter doen henen sincken,
T’slincke been voor uyt, daer teghen den slincken
Arem achter wech laten gaen by maten,
Altijt cruyswijs, t’zy of de Beelden saten,
Oft stonden, soo sal haer de troenge weynden
Naer den arem, die men voor uyt sal seynden.
‘Sulck’ Actitude hebben laten blijcken
Raphael d’Urbin, Machael Angel mede
[…]
En te Florencen in die schoone Stede
Is sulcken aerdt oock bysonder te mercken,
Aen Bolongen wel ghesculpeerde wercken’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 583

The body moving in conformation with

The turn of the head it carries:
But in disposition this shall be prized
Truly as befitting the rules of Attitude,
That the head be turned in another direction than the body.
Otherwise, slipshod clumsiness will perturb us;
Thus must one endeavour in every way,
To rotate the Fead as best befits,
For such a thing can quite mar or adorn
The look of a Figure, in a knowledgeable person’s eyes:
[…].105

What holds true for the well-disposed human figure proves equally to apply to
the well-executed oak tree:

Well-fashioned tree trunks must likewise be found [in your landscape],

Thick underneath, and thinning as they rise;
On occasion, distinguish amongst bare white birches,
Chestnuts, and lindens, and also twist
The wrinkled bark of the oak, and the green ivy;
And the straight trunks as well, good for spanning
Sails, into which the wind may blow,
Clothe them all in their green foliage.106

105 Ibid.: ‘Natuerlijck sietmen in staende postueren,

T’hooft ghemeynelijcken ghekeert te wesen
Soo den voet gherecht is, noch salmen spueren,
Dat t’Lijf hem altijt wil schicken en rueren
Nae t’weynden des hoofts, als steunsel van des en:
Maer dit wordt in de stellinghe ghepresen
Werckelijcker, nae Actitudens orden,
t’Hooft elders als t’Lichaem gheweynt te worden.
‘Oft tammighen onaerdt wil ons ontpaeyen,
Dus moetmen op veelderley wijse pooghen
Ter beste welstandicheyt t’Hooft te draeyen,
Want sulcx can gantsch bederven oft verfraeyen
Den aerdt eens Beeldts, in verstandighen ooghen:
[…]’.
106 Ibid., fol. 37v: ‘Aerdighe Boom-stammen moetmen oock vinden,
Die onder grof, en boven dun opsteylen,
Wit cale bercken, kasboomen, en Linden,
Somtijts onderscheyden, en oock bewinden
Berimpeld’ eycken schorff’, en groen beveylen,
584 Melion

The closing lines about straight trees good for masts describe them as
exceptions to the rule, thus revealing that Van Mander envisages the other spe-
cies of trees – birches, chestnuts, and lindens – twisting and turning like the
oaks. This is, of course, how Goltzius depicts the trees in Mercury Slays Argus,
Clymene Avows to Phaëthon, and Landscape with Venus and Adonis: arboreal
and human specimens are made complementarily to turn according to the
rule of art Van Mander fully formulates, perhaps with an eye to Goltzius, in the
Grondt [Figs. 13.1, 13.19, & 13.20].
Indeed, Landscape with Venus and Adonis follows Van Mander even more
closely in another respect: it incorporates the sort of storykens (little stories,
fables) that he counsels landscapists to disperse throughout their pictures
[Fig. 13.1]. Van Mander conceives of these embedded fables as attachments to
the landscape, more precisely, as corollary embellishments of its most prom-
inent trees: rather than playing out against a backdrop, they are selected to
complement the landscape, and are fully integrated into it:

‘twould be good, were you to know your little stories beforehand,

Scriptural or Poetic, as you wish,
Whereby to dispose your landscape better,
But above all forget not
To place small Figures beside great Trees.107

The inserted little fables put the finishing touch on the illusion that the land-
scape is a miniature world, a complete and self-contained if fictional place (‘u
cleyn Weerelt ghemaeckt’). The Landscape with Venus and Adonis, which not
only stations the lovers beneath paired trees but also utilizes them to allude to
the storykens from out of which story of Venus and Adonis emerged – namely,
the fable of Myrrha and the overarching fable of Orpheus and the arbores –
perfectly accords with, indeed exemplifies Van Mander’s prescriptive recom-
mendation [Fig. 13.1].
In the long excursus on landscape inserted midway through chapter 5 of the
Grondt, “Van der Ordinanty ende Inventy der Historien” (On the Composition

En oock de rechte stammen, nut om seylen

Aen te spannen, daer den windt in mach snuyven,
Dees al becleyden met hun groene luyven’.
107 Ibid.: ‘T’waer goet, waert ghy u storyken voorweter,
Schriftich, oft Poetich, naer u benoeghen,
Om u Landtschap daer naer te schicken beter,
Maer boven al en weest doch gheen vergheter,
Cleyn Beelden by groote Boomen te voeghen’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 585

and Invention of Histories), Van Mander explains at greater length how the
stroryken should be deployed. His term for these narrative interpolations into
landscape is byvoechsel (addendum, supplement):

Some seek, in curious ways,

By means of various skilful addenda (‘byvoechselen’),
To insert historical deeds,
In such a manner that their significance could hardly be guessed,
Even if one knew the story in advance;
Whereof I here impart an example,
As recounted by Jacopo, a Poet originating
From the city named after one of the Sirens [i.e., Naples].108

Van Mander is referring to Jacopo Sannazzaro’s Arcadia, more precisely, to the

prosa terza that immediately follows the Annotazioni all’ Egloga seconda.109
He now embarks on a long ekphrastic paraphrase of Sannazzaro’s originating
ekphrasis, which describes the landscape painting hung over the entrance to
the Temple of Pales. This is what the shepherds and shepherdesses of Arcadia
see, says Sannazzaro in launching his description, when they enter the temple
precinct to make their burnt offerings on the feast day of the goddess Pales. The
landscape, it turns out, is peppered with numerous mythological scenes, each
of which, more than being merely anchored to one of various landsmarks – a
notable tree, rock, or stream – appears to issue from it. These features establish
the respective vantage points from which the various mythological personages
are seen to gaze at something that catches their eye, in a meta-discursive allu-
sion from within the fictive picture to the shepherds’ viewership and, more
importantly, to the reader-viewer’s action of beholding the ekphrastic image
that Sannazzaro conjures up.

108 Ibid., fol. 19r:

‘Eenighe soecken, door soo vreemde paden,
Met verscheyden byvoechselen behende,
By te brenghen d’Historiale daden,
Datmen qualijck den sin soude gheraden,
Of men al schoon de gheschiedenis kende,
Waer van ick hier een exempel voorwende,
Welck verhaelt Jacobus, Poet verschenen
Wt der Stadt, ghenaemt nae een der Syrenen’.
109 See Sannazzaro J., Arcadia, ed. G. Corniani (Milan: 1806), 27–30. On Van Mander’s famil-
iarity with Sannazzaro, see Miedema H. (ed. – trans.), Karel van Mander, Den grondt der
edel vry schilder-const, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1973), 2:483–484.
586 Melion

Van Mander commences by evoking the pastoral character of the picture as

a whole: wild woodlands alternate with meadows and green fields populated
by flocks and sheepdogs, by shepherds and herdsmen, some vigilant, others
asleep, still others milking their cows (‘heuvels en bosschen, met boomen ver-
wildert […] in de groene beemden veel kudden verspreyt […] en de Herders’).
One shepherd plays a bagpipe, while his companions, singing along, attempt
to imitate its keening tone (‘eenigh op sackpijpen sachmen daer spelen, ander
schenen, wilden oock in hun singhen t’ghluydt nae bootsen’).110 One catches
sight of a chestnut tree and, half-hidden behind it, a group of nymphs making
sport of a goat so intent on gnawing at the wreath they dangle, that it forgets to
graze on the foliage within easy reach.111 And while they peer at the goat, they
themselves are oblivious to a company of satyrs spying on them from behind a
mastic tree, intent on pouncing:

What above all, in the eyes of many had

A particularly pleasing, graceful character,
Was the nude company of Nymphs,
Half hidden behind the trunk of a Chestnut tree.
[….]
In the meantime, four Satyrs together,
With horned heads and the legs of Goats,
Were come stealthily to peep around a Mastic tree,
And plot how to grab them from behind
By their shoulders; one could at once see
How the nymphs, catching wind of their arrival and cunning intention,
Made ready posthaste to flee into the wood,
Without fear of brambles or thorn bushes.112

110 Ibid., fol. 19r.

111 Ibid.
112 Ibid., fol. 19r–v: ‘Waer het ghene dat in d’ooghen van velen
Had eenen behaeghlijcken sonderlinghen
Welstandighen aerdt, boven ander dinghen,
Dat waren Nimphen, al naeckte compagnen,
Half bedeckt achter eenen struyck Castagnen.
[….]
‘Middeler tijdt daer vier Satiren t’samen,
Met hoornen op het hooft, en Geyten beenen
Door een Mastickboom struyck al soetgens quamen
Van achter reyckend’, op dat syse namen
By hen schouderen, daer sachmen met eenen,
Die alree hun comst en archlistich meenen
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 587

The nymphs take flight, some climbing a nearby maple, others swimming to
the opposite shore of the river that borders the greenwood, from where, drip-
ping and breathing hard, they look back and taunt their would-be captors.
This same river leads the eyes to the next storyken / byvoechsel, taken from
Book II of the Metamorphoses. The young Apollo sits by the river, guarding
the flocks of Admetus: his attention fixed on two bulls playfully locking horns,
he remains unaware of thieving Mercury who, camouflaged as a shepherd
clad in goat skin, furtively makes away with the god’s prize heifers (‘niet siend’
hoe Mercurius den subtijlen, […] hem zijn koeyen heeft ontstolen terwijlen’).
Within reach stands a large rock that alludes to the next inserted tale: the rock
was once the old shepherd Battus whom Mercury turned to stone when he
broke his promise to keep the god’s theft secret (‘in een steen verandert, op
sulcker ghijsen, als schijnende metten vingher te wijsen’).113
The one rock leads to another, adjacent to it and much larger, on which
Mercury, appearing a second time, still in disguise, sits and pipes to Argus,
endeavouring to lull him to sleep.114

Further below, beside a great boulder,

Sat Mercury, his cheeks distended,
Playing a Rustic Flute, his manner sly,
His eyes peering crosswise,
A white heifer standing beside him,
And filled full with cunning he seemed
To consider, how best he might
Deceive the many-eyed Argus.115

Hadden vernomen, snel nae t’bosch toe vluchten,

Sonder voor struycken oft bramen te duchten’.
113 The story of Apollo, Mercury, and Battus comes from Book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; see
Metamorphoses, ed. G.P. Goold – trans. F.J. Miller (Cambridge, MA – London: 1916; reprint
ed. 1984), 106–109.
114 The story of Mercury, Argus, and Io comes from Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; see ibid.,
42–49.
115 Van Mander, Den grondt, in Schilder-Boeck, fol. 19v:
‘Aen eenen grooten steen, noch meer beneden,
Sat Mercurius met wanghen verheven,
Spelend’ op een Ruyspijp, met loose zeden
En dweerse ooghen, aensiende ter steden
Een witte Veerse, die hem stont beneven,
En scheen dat hy gants met schalckheyt doordreven
Bedachte, hoe best soude wesen moghen
Den gheooghen Argus van hem bedroghen’.
588 Melion

The theme of sleep connects in turn to the next storyken, which plays out
on the other side of the rock, where Endymion lies sleeping beneath a massive
oak (‘aen d’ander sijde was in slaep ghelegheen, een herder […] onder eenen
seer hooghen eycken-boom’). Diana-Silene, goddess of the moon, stares down
at her lover, having secured for him the gift of eternal sleep (‘blijd’ ooghe de
mane aensiende desen’).116
One’s eye next travels from the oak to an elm, into whose bark the shep-
herd Paris, interrupted by the sudden advent of Venus, Minerva, and Juno, has
been carving the name of his first love, Enone; his cutting tool raised, his task
half complete, he abruptly stops.117 Van Mander informs us that the tortuous
sequence of byvoechselen has now reached its climax – what he calls the scopus
(goal, target) – the final storyken: this is the Judgment of Paris.118

[…] but having come under foot

Of the three Goddesses, and being quite unable
To finish, he left it as is,
In order to render judgment and thus forestall the quarrel
Amongst these three, over who was loveliest and worthy of the prize,
On which account, now apace, they stood naked before him.119

116 Van Mander probably knew the story of Diana / Selene and Endymion from Ovid’s
Amores 1:13, 43, though his most likely source was either Gyraldo Giglio Gregorio, De deis
gentium (Basel, Ioannis Oporinus:1555) 346; or Cartari Vincenzo, Le imagini dei dei de gli
antichi (Venice, Francesco Ziletti: 1580) 107.
117 Van Mander, Den grondt, fol. 20r: ‘[…] maer wesend’ overronnen
Van dry Goddinnen, en haddet niet connen
Gants eyndighen, maer alsoo laten blijven,
Om gheven oordeel tot belet van kijven,
Tusschen dees dry, wie schoonst den prijs waer weerdich,
En daerom al naeckt voor hem stonden veerdich’.
Van Mander would have known the story of Paris and Oenone from Ovid’s Heroïdes 5; see
Heroides and Amores, trans. G. Gowerman (London – New York: 1914) 56–69. He would
have known the story of the judgment of Paris from Homer’s Iliad 24:25–30 and Lucian’s
Dialogues of the Gods 20, but chiefly from Heroïdes 17; see Heroides and Amores 232–235.
118 Van Mander, Den grondt, in Schilder-Boeck, fol. 20r: ‘Dit is nu heet scopus der History, te
weten, t’vonnis van Paris’.
119 Ibid.: ‘[…] maer wesend’ overronnen
Van dry Goddinnen en haddet niet connen
Gants eyndighen, maer alsoo laten blijven,
Om gheven oordeel tot belet van kijven,
Tusschen dees dry, wie schoonst den prijs waer weerdich,
En daerom al naeckt voor hem stonden veerdich’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 589

Paris is about to be deceived by Venus, who will offer him Helen of Troy as
a bribe. But the picture’s true scopus, Van Mander informs us, is another kind
and degree of deception, one effected by the painter, who having brilliantly
portrayed the ineffable beauty of Minerva and Juno, now found a clever trick
for showing that Venus is the fairest of the fair. Painting Venus from the rear,
implying that were she to turn around, her perfection would contravene theirs,
he appears to depict the true lineaments of her face and body, even while
actually concealing them. The true subject, then, of Sannazzaro’s ekphrastic
picture, as utilized by Van Mander to represent, in an ekphrastic paraphrase,
the nature of the embellishing byvoechsel, is a pictorial device – a kind of
visual periphrasis in paint – that purports to make known what in fact is being
dissembled.

But what was very ingenious, pleasing, and apposite,

Worthy to be considered and seen,
Was the great attention with which
This judicious painter of fine sharp wit,
Had made Juno and Minerva to stand,
Each in her person exceptionally beautiful,
Each so utterly perfect that he himself could not
Have presumed to do better.
Now, since he did not know how to make Venus,
More beautiful than the other two, as is her wont,
He portrayed these two from the front,
But taking subtle advantage of the situation,
He, a wise artist (‘wijs Artiste’), painted Venus subtly, with her back turned,
By this trick of artifice (‘list’) licensing pleasure,
Giving one to think that were she to turn herself,
She would bring the others’ beauty to distraction.120

120 Ibid.: ‘Maer t’gheen t’overlegghen en te aensiene

Stondt, seer vernuftich, bevallijck, ydoone,
Was de groote aendacht, fraey van ingiene,
Van desen discreten Schilder, door wiene
Daer stonden ghemaeckt, uytnemende schoone
Iuno en Minerva elcke persoone,
Soo gants volcomen, als dat hy van beter
Te doen niet hadde moghten zijn vermeter.
‘Nu hy Venus dan schoonder, nae t’behooren,
Als d’ander twee te maken niet en wiste,
Heeft hy, daer dese twee stonden van vooren,
Venus gheschildert subtijl in’t orbooren,
590 Melion

Landscape opens onto an itinerary leading through woodlands, meadows,

and streams, around a man-sized stone and a boulder, and past a chestnut, a
mastic, a maple, an oak, and an elm, before finally reaching the scopus, which
is both in the picture and comments on it. Many discrete acts of viewing – the
nymphs watching the goat, the satyrs peering at the nymphs, the nymphs spot-
ting the satyrs and then, after their near escape, looking back to mock them,
Battus catching sight of Mercury, Mercury detecting Battus’s betrayal, Mercury
staring at Argus, the Moon gazing at Endymion, and Paris locking eyes on the
goddesses – are comprised by the analogous activity of ekphrastic beholding,
the shepherds of the temple painting, and the reader’s of Van Mander’s land-
scape epitome in the manner of Sannazzaro. The sequence of verdant places,
the byvoechsels they encapsulate, and the acts of viewing they record and
thematise, are links in a concatenated journey through an intricate pastoral
landscape, a multi-layered ekphrastic picture consisting of the pictorial type
being modeled by Van Mander and, nesting within it, the image described by
Sannazzaro. Within the concatenation of constituent places, the storykens also
enact a crucial thematic chain centering on deception: the nymphs deceive
the goat, the satyrs try and fail to deceive the nymphs, Mercury deceives Apollo,
Battus tries and fails to deceive Mercury who then deceives Battus, Mercury
deceives Argus, Paris deceives (in the sense of betraying) Enone, Venus deceives
Paris (with a bribe that proves the undoing not only of Paris but of his home-
land Troy), and finally, the skilful painter is seen to deceive the beholder,
prompting him to think he enjoys the privilege of seeing Venus resplendent in
all her beauty when in truth he sees nothing of the sort.121 More particularly,
every one of these stories has to do, in one form or another, with visual decep-
tion: for example, Mercury disguises himself to deceive both Battus and Argus;
Venus avails herself of Helen’s physical beauty to coopt Paris; and the painter
pretends to show what he is not actually showing. In point of fact, the power
of the visual arts licitly to deceive the eyes and mind is one of Van Mander’s
central topics, to which he frequently returns throughout the first four books
of the Schilder-Boeck: this is to say that the process of enchainment, spatial and
thematic, which his ekphrastic tour de force sets forth serves to license a visual
effect fundamental to his theory of art. The power of landscape to produce and
sustain the illusion that one has entered a self-contained and self-sufficient

Met den rugg’ om ghewent, als wijs Artiste,

Ontschuldighende t’behaghen met liste,
Ghevende t’bedencken, mocht sy haer keeren,
Sy soude des anders schoonheyt onteeren’.
121 The guileless Endymion serves as a kind of antithesis to the deceivers and deceived com-
prised by this chain of beguilements.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 591

universe – a cleyn Werelt – enfolds the corollary illusions evinced by his sto-
rykens / byvoechsels.
I have dwelt at such length on Van Mander’s account of the byvoechsel because
it can function as a telling analogue to Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and
Adonis [Fig. 13.1]. We might put this as follows: as Van Mander composed an
elaborate ekphrasis based on Sannazzaro’s, so Goltzius composed an impos-
ingly complex drawing based on the ekphrases in Ovid’s Book X. As Ovid’s
ekphrases constitute a catena (chain) of interwoven fables, so Goltzius’s draw-
ing uses landscape to enchain various storykens from Book X. Ovid amalgam-
ates these various stories by compiling them under the rubric of the trees
Orpheus enlivens, whose origin stories he sings: in this sense, Ovid unites
them in and through landscape, just as Goltzius does, on Ovid’s model. As
Ovid, viewed through this lens, demonstrates his command of landscape, so
too do Sannazzaro, Van Mander, and Goltzius. And finally, just as Ovid relies
on the landscape trope of the tree to splice disparate stories together, so
Sannazzaro entwines discrete tales by means of landscape motifs, Van Mander
under the theme of history in landscape, and Goltzius in an ambitious land-
scape drawing.122
It bears mentioning that the byvoechsels discussed by Van Mander, and the
allusions to linked fables encoded by Goltzius, change the identity of the land-
scape that comprises them. It would be more precise to claim, however, that they
confer multiple identities on one and the same landscape: for Sannazzaro and
Van Mander, the landscape starts out as Arcadia, where Pales’s votaries reside,
then by turns becomes Thessaly (Apollo and Mercury, Mercury and Battus),
the Peloponnese (Mercury and Argus), Aeolia (Endymion and Diana-Silene),
Mount Ida in Phrygia (Paris and Oenone, the Judgment of Paris). For Goltzius,
the landscape can be identified alternately as Thracian Mount Rhodope, but
also Mount Haemus, to the summits of which Orpheus went to sing of the
lost Eurydice; then again, it is the land of the Sabaeans, where Myrrha gave
birth to Adonis; and again, Laconia, where Apollo loved Hyacinthus; and of
course, it is also the place where Venus kept company with Adonis, unnamed
by Ovid, but similar to Arcadia in its ‘mountain ridges, forests, and thorny
cliff-sides’, and described by him as unlike the lands sacred to Venus, Cyprian
Amathus and Paphos, or Carian Cnidos. Whereas the linked places through
which Sannazzaro’s and Van Mander’s ekphrases take the reader are subsumed
by the unified landscape painting they ostensibly describe, the notional places

122 The only fables enmeshed by Sannazzaro and Van Mander that were not originally dis-
crete are those of Apollo and Mercury, and Mercury and Battus, which Ovid had already
conjoined in Book II of the Metamorphoses, as noted above.
592 Melion

Figure 13.28 Hendrick Goltzius, Landscape with Mercury in Flight, 1596. Pen and brown ink,
308 × 433 mm. Musée des Beaux-Arts et de Archéologie, Besançon

evoked by Goltzius’s byvoechsels, explicit (Venus and Adonis) and implicit

(Orpheus, Myrrha, Hyacinthus, et al.), are integrated seamlessly into the uni-
fied landscape whose copiously diverse terrains allow it to pass muster under
numerous toponyms. That all these Ovidian places derive from the ekphrases
sung by Orpheus converts Goltzius’s drawing into a kind of grand ekphrastic
repository consisting of multiple constituent, concatenated ekphrases.
A related landscape drawing by Goltzius in Besançon, Landscape with
Mercury in Flight of 1596, reveals how the byvoechsel can confer an ekphras-
tic identity on a captivating but otherwise anonymous panoramic prospect
[Fig. 13.28].123 The landscape’s ground plane gradually climbs, tilting up as it
approaches the mountain range in the distance. Much of the fore- and middle-
ground consists of a hilly lowland, punctuated with rocky outcrops and strewn
with boulders. Shrubs cluster beside them, and growing at left, a pair of trees,
their trunks intertwined, provides one of the few vertical elements. Close by,
part of a toppled column lies on the ground, and next to it stand the over-
grown ruins of what was once a vaulted building, features vaguely evocative of

123 On Goltzius’s Landscape with Mercury in Flight, see Reznicek, Zeichnungen von Hendrick
Goltzius I 424, cat. nr. 393.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 593

antiquity. A two-tiered waterfall flows obliquely across the right corner of the
picture, its waters accelerating around half-submerged rocks. The waterfall is
fed by a river curving past a distant town: it spreads out over both riverbanks
and several hilltops, two of which are connected by an arched bridge; a forti-
fied citadel towers over the adjacent structures rising from the surrounding
greenery. In the distance, at left and right, two other towns can be seen: one
nestles in the foothills of a mountain pass, the other below a rocky escarpment
topped by two summits. These mountains form part of a sierra that demar-
cates the horizon, its tallest peak, at center, cloud-capped. The landscape’s
only (mortal) inhabitant is the traveler seated by the pathway winding into
the image at right; presumably a trader on his way to the fortified town, he car-
ries a backpack and holds a staff, resting at the threshold of the image before
resuming his journey.
Flying swiftly through the cloudy sky, his caduceus raised, his cape billowing,
Mercury looks down on the landscape unspooling as he passes overhead.124
Whereas our low vantage point coincides with that of the traveler, Mercury’s
encompasses everything we see and more. With his raised right hand he points
heavenward, indicating that he has been sent from on high by Jove, to carry out
some mission, perhaps on his way to save Io from Argus, or headed for Sidon,
Europa’s homeland, to drive the king’s cattle to the sea-shore:

When Mercury had inflicted this punishment on the girl [Aglauros] for
her impious words and spirit, he left the land of Pallas behind him, and
flew to heaven on outflung pinions. Here his father calls him aside; and
not revealing his love affair as the real reason, he says: ‘My son, always
faithful to perform my bidding, delay not, but swiftly in accustomed flight
glide down to earth and seek out the land that looks up at your mother’s
star from the left. The natives call it the land of Sidon. There you are to
drive down to the sea-shore the herd of the king’s cattle which you will
see grazing at some distance on the mountain-side’.125

124 Goltzius included Mercury in Mid-Flight, Catching Sight of Herse amongst the twenty
scenes illustrating Book II; see Leesberg (comp.) – Leeflang (ed.), Hendrick Goltzius
III 246, cat. nr. 568.
125 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Miller I 118–119: ‘Has ubi verborum poenas mentisque profa­
nae / cepit Atlantiades, dictas a Pallade terras / linquit et ingreditur iactatis aethera
pennis. / Sevocat hunc genitor nec causam fassus amoris / “fide minister” ait “iussorum,
nate, meorum, / pelle moram solitoque celer delabere cursu, / quaeque tuam matrem tel-
lus a parte sinistra / suspicit (indigenae Sidonida nomine dicunt), / hanc pete, quodque
procul montano gramine pasci / armentum regale vides, ad litora verte!”’.
594 Melion

However, when seen in conjunction with Mercury, the citadel anchored to

a base of living bedrock and the four distant mountains, along with the river
running along the town’s outskirts, and, last but not least, the ancient ruins,
are evocative of a different, more famous place, described by Ovid in Book II
of the Metamorphoses. Immediately after his encounter with Battus, Mercury
takes flight and, looking earthward, descries and instantly falls in love with the
beautiful Herse, who is marching in the Panathenaia:

The god of the caduceus had taken himself hence on level wings and now
as he flew he was looking down upon the Munychian fields, the land that
Minerva loves, and the groves of the learned Lyceum. That day chanced
to be a festival of Pallas when young maidens bore to their goddess’ tem-
ple mystic gifts in flower-wreathed baskets on their head. The winged
god saw them as they were returning home and directed his way towards
them, not straight down but sweeping in such a curve as when the swift
kite has spied the fresh-slain sacrifice, afraid to come down while the
priests are crowded around the victim, and yet not venturing to go quite
away, he circles around in air and on flapping wings greedily hovers over
his hoped-for prey; so did the nimble Mercury fly round the Athenian
hill, sweeping in circles through the same spaces of air. […] so much was
Herse more lovely than all the maidens round her, the choice ornament
in the solemn procession of her comrades. The son of Jove was astounded
at her beauty, and hanging in mid-air he caught the flames of love. […]
Mercury now turns his course, leaves the air and flies to earth, nor seeks
to disguise himself.126

Seen in relation to this particular trajectory, the river would be the Ilisos which,
flowing from Mount Hymettus, skirts the city walls of Athens (though it might
also be the Cephissus or the Eridanus), and the four mountains would be

126 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Miller, I 110–111: ‘Hinc se sustulerat paribus caducifer alis, /
Munychiosque volans agros gratamque Minervae / despectabat humum cultique arbusta
Lycei. / Illa forte die castae de more puellae / vertice supposito festas in Palladis arces /
pura coronatis portabant sacra canistris. / Inde revertentes deus adspicit ales iterque /
non agit in rectum, sed in orbem curvat eundem: / ut volucris visis rapidissima miluus
extis, / dum timet et densi circumstant sacra ministri, / flectitur in gyrum nec longius
audet abire / spemque suam motis avidus circumvolat alis, / sic super Actaeas agilis
Cyllenius arces / inclinat cursus et easdem circinat auras. / Quanto splendidior quam
cetera sidera fulget / Lucifer, et quanto quam Lucifer aurea Phoebe, / tanto virginibus pra-
estantior omnibus Herse / ibat eratque decus pompae comitumque suarum. / Obstipuit
forma Iove natus et aethere pendens / non secus exarsit, […] / vertit iter caeloque petit
terrena relicto / nec se dissimulat’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 595

Hymettus, Pentelicus, Parnetha, and Poikilon Oros. The city’s inhabitants, too
distant to be seen by us, are to be understood as visible to sharp-eyed Mercury,
whose tilted pose intimates that he is turning or gyring in mid-flight. The
landscape becomes the setting of an implied storyken: its features take on an
identity contingent on the presence of Mercury, whose activity, conversely, can
be insinuated by reference to the landscape but not conclusively determined.
Once these identifications are proposed, the landscape takes on an ekphrastic
complexion: Mercury can be seen to fly round the Athenian hill, scanning the
Munychian fields and the groves of the Lyceum as he flits by; the drawing then
becomes a notional setting for other ekphrastic images, which may be visu-
alised by way of amplification – the beauty of Herse, for example: ‘As Lucifer
shines more brightly than all the other stars and as the golden moon outshines
Lucifer, so much was Herse more lovely than all the maidens round her’.127
The unambiguous presence of an identifiable fable bestows a more spe-
cific ekphrastic character on the Landscape with Venus and Adonis, but it, too,
attracts and compounds other ekphrastic readings, as layered by Ovid in mul-
tiple episodes from his Orphic Book X [Fig. 13.1]. I want to point out, in closing,
that the drawing perfectly matches the extended ekphrasis describing a para-
digmatic landscape, that Van Mander develops by amplification in chapter 8
of the Grondt. The descriptive showpiece takes up forty-one of the chapter’s
forty-seven stanzas (1–41), beginning with stanza 1. Van Mander exemplifies
the landscape that every schilder should aspire to draw or paint. The ekphrasis
takes the form of a journey into the countryside, starting at dawn, and lead-
ing from landscape feature to feature, and through every kind of terrain and
variation in weather, lowland marshes to snowy peaks, bright sunshine and
blue skies to hailstorms and tempests; these elements are threaded together
as if comprised by the same landscape – a landscape, moreover, described as
if it were an epitome of art, not merely a linked collection of sights seen in
nature, but a naturally various pictorial image. Goltzius complies so fully with
Van Mander’s example and precepts that the Landscape with Venus and Adonis
can be seen either as the drawn realization of such an ekphrastic exercise, or,
more likely, as an exemplum intentionally designed to inspire such an ekphras-
tic response.
I shall briefly paraphrase Van Mander, distilling his major points, before cir-
cling back to the drawing and demonstrating how it accords with his ekphrasis.
The trope of the painter’s journey through landscape exemplifies the notion
that the landschap, if it is properly composed, will mobilize the viewer’s eyes,

127 Ibid.: ‘quanto splendidior quam cetera sidera fulget / Lucifer, et quanto quam Lucifer
aurea Phoebe, / tanto virginibus praestantior omnibus Herse’.
596 Melion

sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, sending them down country paths, up

steep mountainsides, beside rivers flowing gently or rushing torrentially, pro-
pelling them deep into space, then steering them back into the foreground,
tracking alongside forms straight or curved, twisted or turning, serpentine or
helical. Stanza after stanza begins with the directives ‘Attend’, ‘Observe’, or ‘See’:

First of all, observe over there how the Bride of old Tithonus
Climbs up out of her saffron bed,
Announcing the advent of daylight’s torch,
[….]
See, the whole of the distant Landscape takes on
The form of the Air, seeming almost to flow into it;
Stationary mountains appear to be moving clouds;
On either side of the vanishing point, like floor tiles,
All that we see on the plain, ditches, furrows,
Narrow as they recede
[….]128

Various sights, natural and man-made, punctuate these optical vectors and
spatial corridors: cultivated fields and marshlands, copses and woodlands,
many species of plants, trees, and animals, buildings of all kind, from farm-
steads to citadels. Van Mander inserts numerous asides that remind the reader
that the landscape in the poem, as if in nature, is indistinguishable from the
one he is expected to picture:

Aye, see indeed how up above [nature] paints [the dawn],

With what greater beauty of varied colours,
Of so many mixtures: one might believe
That molten Gold thus glistens in the Furnace,
[….]’.

128 Van Mander, Grondt, in Schilder-Boeck, fols. 34v–35r:

‘Mercket alvooren, uyt haer bedde saffranich
Des ouden Titons Bruydt ginder opstijghen,
Die ons de dagh-fackels comst is vermanich,
[….]
‘Siet al t’verre Landtschap ghedaente voeren
Der Locht, en schier al in de Locht verflouwen,
Staende Berghen schijnen wolcken die roeren,
Weersijdich op’t steeck, als plaveyde vloeren,
In’t veldt, sloten, voren, wat wy aenschouwen,
Oock achterwaert al inloopen en nouwen,
[….]’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 597

See, on the other side, Morning has already covered over

The great vault of heaven with the fine azure of lake pigments
[….]

Above all, it shall behoove us, come what may, sharply to define
Our foreground, in order to make everything else recede,
And to place up front something large,
As did Bruegel, and others of great name
[….]

On rising, hilly, barren ground

Let no beautiful bluish greens be coaxed [into view],
As appear in low-lying Meadowed Dales,
Which Cynthian Apollo with his radiant arrows
Even under the signs of the Crab, Lion, and Maiden,
Can do little or nothing to fade,
[….]

Rushing streams with swelling curves

One shall give leave to wander through these marshlands,
And allow water ever to search for declivities,
And beside them build (in order boldly to display one’s Art)
Cities reaching for higher ground,
With Fortresses on Clifftops, fallen into ruin:
Now climbing a bit higher, let us attend
To ample fields subdivided into bounded zones.
[….]

Ploughed Farmlands, too, cut through with furrows,

Or sometimes fields, their harvests reaped,
Now Grasslands and Greenswards, just as they should be,
With canals, hedges, or twisting roads:
[….]

And now, to drive away sadness, have we come

To the shadowy realm of the Hamadryads,
That is, to the Trees [and woods] […].129

129 Ibid., fols. 34v–37r:

[Fol. 34v] ‘Ay siet doch eens, hoe schildert men daer boven,
Wat meerder schoonheyt, van verwen verscheyden,
598 Melion

Van Mander assures the reader that the variety of things and effects, natural
and pictorial, to be seen in such a landscape, its colours above all, will exercise
a therapeutic effect on the eyes, mind, and body, restoring tired spirits and
exhausted faculties (‘verscheydenheyt, soo van verw’ als wesen’):130

Youthful painters, having long sat hunched [over your work],

Tangled up in Art, constantly cramming,
Ever desirous of learning more, until half blind,
You’ve worn out your dulled senses,

En soo veel mengsels: ay machmen gheloven,

Dat ghesmolten Goudt soo blinckt in den Oven,
[…]
‘Siet ter ander sijd’ heeft alree de Morghen-
stondt overcleedt met schoon asuerich laken
[…]
[Fol. 35v] ‘Alvooren onsen voor-grondt sal betamen
Altijts hardt te zijn, om d’ander doen vlieden,
En oock voor aen yet groots te brenghen ramen,
Als Brueghel, en sulcke van grooter namen,
[….]
[Fol. 36r–v] ‘Van verhevender heuvel-gronden schralich
Laet u geen schoon blaeuverwich groen ontsmeecken,
Ghelijck als van neder Beem-gronden dalich,
Al waer Cynthius met zijn pijlen stralich
Jae selfs onder het Kreefts, Leeuws, oft Maeghts teecken,
Seer weynich oft gantsch niet en can verbleecken,
[….]
[Fol. 36v] ‘Vloedt-stroomen met hun uytloopende hoecken
Salmen in dees meersschen oock laten swerven,
Doende t’water altijt de leeghte soecken,
Daer beneven bouwend’ (om Const vercloecken)
De Steden, streckende naer hoogher erven,
Met Sloten op Clippen, quaet om bederven:
Nu wat hoogher climmende, laet ons wacker
In percken deelen den ghestreckten Acker.
[….]
‘Oock gheploegd’ Ackers, met vooren doorsleghen,
Oft somtijts velden met ghemaeyde vruchten,
Nu Beemden en Ackers zijnde te deghen,
[….]
[Fol. 37r] ‘Nu zijn wy ghecomen, om drucx verstroyen,
Tot t’schaduwich rijck der Hamadryaden,
Dats tot de Boomen […]’.
130 Ibid., fol. 36r. On Van Mander’s use of the term ‘verscheydenheyt’, with specific reference
to a painting by Hans Bol, see Miedema, Den grondt II 549.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 599

Stop for now, you’ve been pulling the plough long enough;
From labor allow yourselves duly to be unyoked,
For even strong men crave rest,
No bow may always be pulled taut.
[….]

And come, let’s open the gate early,

Together shorten the hours, lighten the spirits.
And go look at the beauty out there,
Where the wild beaked Music-makers pipe;
There shall we see many sights,
That serve us to confect Landscape
On linen canvas or hard oaken planks from the North;
Come, you shall (I trust) thank yourself for having journeyed.131

Van Mander treats nature as if it were a painted landscape in order to teach his
audience of aspiring painters and draughtsmen how to depict landscapes that
appear persuasively natural.
He describes multiple kinds and degrees of optical experience, from clear
to occluded, shifting from one vantage point to another, oscillating from view
to view, close or distant, advancing or receding, direct or circuitous (or even
tortuous), unhindered or impeded.

But in the joyful season of Spring,

It behooves us to attend to the noble

131 Ibid., fol. 34r–v: ‘Schilder-jeught, die langh hebt verhaemt gheseten,
Verwert in de Conste met stadigh blocken,
Dat ghy staersichtich schier stomp hebt versleten
U sinnen, leer-lustigh om meer te weten,
Houdt op, t’is voor ditmael ghenoech ghetrocken
Den ploegh, van den arbeydt wilt u ontjocken
In tijts, want rust hoeft oock den stercken Mannen,
Den bogh’ en mach altijt niet zijn ghespannen.
[….]
‘En comt, laet ons al vroech met t’Poort ontsluyten
T’samen wat tijdt corten, om s’gheests verlichten,
En gaen sien de schoonheyt, die daer is buyten,
Daer ghebeckte wilde Musijcker fluyten,
Daer sullen wy bespieden veel ghesichten,
Die ons al dienen om Landtschap te stichten
Op vlas-waedt, oft Noorweeghsch’ hard’ eycke plancken,
Comt, ghy sult (hop’ ick) de reys u bedancken’.
600 Melion

Adornments of jewel-like colors, and to be diligent

In producing that Emerald and Sapphire green
Pavement with its variegated squares,
And coiling their way amidst them, the twists and turns
Of murmuring, Crystal-clear streams,
Flowing between green, grassy banks.132

Van Mander’s aim is to show that natural and pictorial artifice are mutually
consequent, mutually recursive, and that exceptional varieties of form and
color are characteristic of both. This becomes especially evident in stanzas 33
and 34, where he first drives home the point that the painter must closely imi-
tate (‘bootst naer’) the sights and even sounds of high mountain reaches, and
then follows up by claiming that nature vividly imitates herself in this way, as
if she were a painter:

Yes, indeed, the fearful rocks that fill

The Swiss lands, and divide the French from the Italians,
The North Wind’s port of call, brimming with white lightning,
From here betimes rise peaks so high,
They resemble clouds, with Castles just below:
Here give Echo her due, and imitate as well, O, you Brushes,
The water’s rushing noise, as it comes tumbling down,
Raging between shattered stones.
See there the stones, like ferrous icicles,
Hanging from the waterfall’s rocks
Green with moss, and the drunken flood,
Entirely unloosed, rambles circuitously,
Until it reaches the bottommost point, where, all higgledy-piggledy,
It cuts sinuous waterways: now observe how the Resinous Pines,
Imitating the likeness of Serpents, grow here,
And how strangely they lie about, who could dream up such a thing?133

132 Ibid., fol. 36v: ‘Maer in des vroylicken Lenten saysoene,

Op d’edel ghesteentighe verwe ciersels
Behoeftmen te letten, en vlijt te doene,
Dat Esmaraldich oft Saphyrich groene
Plaveysel te maken met zijn schakiersels,
Oock midden daer door slingherende swiersels
Der morrende Beeckskens Cristalijn-glasich,
Vloeyende tusschen groene sponden grasich’.
133 Ibid.: Jae die grouwlijcke steenen, die der Switsen
Landt vervullen, en t’Fransch van t’Welsch afdeelen,
Welck Noordwindts doelen zijn, vol witte flitsen,
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 601

Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and Adonis contains the multiple trajecto-
ries traced by Van Mander, along with the many varieties of terrain and the
natural and pictorial effects he so arrestingly describes [Fig. 13.1]. Venus and
Adonis sit on a grassy hummock, half-concealed in a spinney, a triad of ser-
pentine trees towering over them; just behind, a tiered stream rushes over flat
stones, takes a sharp turn at left, and flows into a lake or sea bordered by high
escarpments, its shores dotted with buildings, most prominent amongst which
is a tower. The stream becomes choppy as it races round a small headland of
undulating ground, so that both earth and water appear to billow.

Rushing rivers, their bends curving outwards,

One shall allow to wind into these wetlands,
Always letting the water search for the lowest spot,
And beside there, build (making bold with Art)
Cities, which reach for higher ground,
With Castles on Clifftops, fallen into ruin.134

Hummock, spinney, stream, headland, and lake / sea are described by net-
works of hatched line that differentiate various forms and textures, and are
themselves differentiated in length and breadth, weight, density, and speed
of stroke, and transparency or opacity of ink. The rapids of the swiftly flowing
stream, to give one example, are rendered with evenly spaced straight lines,
applied with the full nib of the quill, each line narrowing to a point at upper
right where the quill’s tip has pivoted sideways; the hatches give an impression

Van deser somtijts staen eenighe spitsen,

Ghelijck op wolcken, en onder Casteelen:
Wort hier Echo, en bootst naer, o Pinceelen,
Oock t’waters ghedruysch, dat af comt ghebortelt,
Al rasende tusschen steenen ghemortelt.
‘Merckt hoe daer de steenen, als ysen keghels,
Aen de rootsen in dien waterval hanghen,
Al groene bemoscht, en los sonder reghels,
De vloedt als droncke, door dolende weghels,
Al hobbel tobbel doet soo cromme ganghen,
Alst beneden is: nu bootsende Slanghen,
Siet, hoe wassen hier dees Mastighe Boomen,
En hoe vreemt ligghen die, wie soudt ghedroomen’?
134 Ibid., fol. 36v: ‘Vloedt-stroomen met hun uytloopende hoecken
Salmen in dees meersschen oock laten swerven,
Doende t’water altijt de leeghte soecken,
Daer beneven bouwend’ (om Const vercloecken)
Se Steden, streckende naer hoogher erven,
Met Sloten op Clippen, quaet om bederven’.
602 Melion

of the water’s high speed and strength of flow. Because Goltzius eschews con-
tour lines, refusing to demarcate objects by outlining them, and instead relies
on internal hatches to articulate surface appearances, every feature of the
landscape reads as intercalary and mutually connected, if not conjoined. The
types of terrain he delineates and the optical effects he displays tally precisely
with the properties of landscape particularised by Van Mander:

Now must I mention something essential,

Which greatly intensifies the comeliness [of our landscapes],
This is that starting from the foreground
One should bind each thing fast to the next,
As Neptune, in his domains, does with the waves,
Which, observe, how they roll, one into the other,
And thus shall you let the ground undulate,
Rather than piling it heap upon heap.
If we weave together our [fore-, middle-, and back-] grounds,
Letting the one issue from the other,
In the manner that twisting serpents creep,
Then will our hopes for a good effect of distance be met.
[….]

Proceed as necessity dictates, but otherwise avoid

An oppressive state of affairs, and do not smother the place;
Rather, as befits the situation,
Cultivate your [fore-]ground, though not too copiously,
By growing a few fine plants.135

135 Ibid., fols. 35v–36r:

‘Nu moet ick nootlijck een dinghen vermonden,
T’welck crachtich onsen welstandt sal verstercken,
Dats datmen van vooren aen al de gronden
Vast sal maken aen malcander ghebonden,
Soo wy de baren in Neptuni percken
Al in malcander te wentelen mercken
Soo salmen al slanghende laten loopen
De gronden, en hoop achter hoop niet hopen.
‘Als wy onse gronden dus vast beknopen,
En soo van d’een in d’ander laten strijcken,
Ghelijck ofter swierende aders cropen,
Van goet verschieten werdt niet te mishopen,
[….]
‘Naer eysch salment doen, maer andersins swichten,
Swaermoedighen standt, en plaetse versmooren,
In stede van dien salmen, naer t’behooren,
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 603

The brown colour of the paper blends with that of the lines, ensuring that the
forms are ‘mutually bound’ (‘aen malcander ghebonden’); the base colour cre-
ates the effect of an ambient tone into which the distant forms merge, from out
of which the foreground forms emerge.
Beyond the hillock on which Venus and Adonis shelter, the ground begins
steeply to rise; swards give way to rocky formations that climb ever higher,
finally shooting skyward. Accordingly, the vertical hatches lengthen and mul-
tiply, while the horizontal cross-hatches become sparser, and as the cliffsides
recede, so the lines thin and pale. At the top of the dark mountainside vis-
ible behind the splintered tree that alludes to Myrrha, the distinction between
middle- and background is ambiguated, indeed elided, and as the cliff sides
recede in serried ranks toward the distant sky at left (or is it a further set of
distant escarpments that one sees?), they seem to dissolve into the ambient air.
Vaporous whiffs of smoke rise from one of the peaks, but by the same token, the
billowy clouds through which Venus rides take on the look and feel of sideways
boulders. The clifftops are reminiscent of Van Mander’s Alpine ‘summits like
unto clouds’ (‘eenighe spitsen, ghelijck op wolcken’), just as the rushing stream
recalls the Alpine torrents that having ‘tumbled down, rage between fractured
stones’ (‘dat af comt ghebortelt, al rasende tusschen steenen ghemortelt’).136
Heightening the effect of distance, Goltzius merely stipples in the trees and
foliage growing on the ledges and along the ridges:

The smallest Trees, one shall simply stipple,

But before rushing to the foreground trees,
Let us climb the steep cliffs,
Which the driving clouds dampen with their wet lips,
And whose topmost summits they wash.
In general, their colour is much like light ash,
And sometimes their bare horns stick up
From out of dense pine woods.137

Doch niet t’overvloedich, zijn gronden passen,

Met eenighe schoon cruyden te bewassen’.
136 Ibid., fol. 37r.
137 Ibid.: ‘De minste Boomkens salmen maer bestippen,
Doch eer wy tot de voor-boomen ons rasschen,
Laet ons wat beclimmen de steyle klippen,
Welcke de drijf-wolcken met vochte lippen
Bespaersen, en d’opperste cruynen wasschen,
In’t ghemeen hun verw’ is ghenoech licht’ asschen,
Somtijts hun cale hoornen steken boven
Wt midden een dicht denne-woudt verschoven’.
604 Melion

He also used stippling to insert few additional figures whose diminutive size
establishes the huge scale of the surrounding landscape: perched on one of
two gibber stones beside the stream in the right middle distance, a tiny hunter
stands, spear in hand, and surveys the scenery. At the top of the fifth-tallest
peak, directly below the highest spire, two minuscule figures can be descried,
again taking in the view; beneath them, two others, barely discernible, cross a
precarious bridge, and another pair observes the stream’s choppy waters from
their vantage point within a circular crevice of the rocky promontory in the left
middle distance. These figures fulfill the function of duplicating, from within
the picture, the spectator’s action of viewing the landscape, inviting him / her
to look at its every part – from above (the pair atop the pinnacle), from below
(the pair standing by the stream), and from the Orisont (the figure on the gib-
ber), Van Mander’s term for ‘level’, i.e., the axis parallel to the plane of the hori-
zon, from which the viewer looks directly at the vanishing point. Were a line to
be drawn across the sheet, at the level of this figure’s eyes, it would locate the
position of our own eyes relative to the horizon line. Everything above this line
is seen from below; everything below it is seen from above: which is to say that
this figure cleverly marks the plane of our vantage point, from where we orient
ourselves with respect to the spatial coordinates of Goltzius’s landscape. Van
Mander insists on the importance of setting this plane of orientation:

Pay attention to recession and diminution,

I speak of what one sees after the life;
Even if the matter at hand isn’t masonry, for [the depiction of] which
Strict Rules are required, yet must you know
How rightly to set on the Horizon (‘Orisont’) your eyes’ vantage point and
the vanishing point,
That is, on the high-water line:
Everything below, one sees from above,
And conversely, what is shifted, one sees from below.138

Goltzius calls attention to the foreground trees, giving them added promi-
nence in three ways: he models their cylindrical trunks more regularly than
any other element in the drawing, mainly relying on concentric hatches, each

138 Ibid., fol. 35r: ‘Op vercorten en verminderen letten,

Ghelijck men in’t leven siet, ick bespreke,
Al ist geen metselrie, die nauwe Wetten
Behoeft, soo moet ghy doch weten te setten
Op den Orisont recht u oogh’ oft streke,
Al watter onder is sietmen dan boven,
En t’ander sietmen van onder verschoven’.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 605

laid down in a swelling and tapering arc, that suggests the tree’s dual patterns
of growth. The longer hatches running along the sheet’s vertical axis represent
how the specimen grows upward, whereas the curved horizontal hatches rep-
resent how it turns as it grows. The leaves, on the other hand, rendered with
loops and dashes in shades of ink varying from dark to light brown, thin where
the light shines brightly, thick where the shadows obscure the foliage, are ori-
entated in every conceivable direction, following no clear trajectory. They, too,
give an impression of having been applied swiftly, with a quick flick of the nib,
and this suggests the rapid growth of verdant foliage in late spring or high sum-
mer. Van Mander’s term for the kind handelinghe (handling, manner of line)
Goltzius displays here, in the arboreal foliage especially, is al geest (spirited, of
the spirit): the pen strokes, incised at seeming speed, as if improvised, appear
loose yet controlled, urgent and various:

[…] which [i.e., the trees] grace and adorn

The whole of one’s work, if they be well done,
But if [poorly done,] disgrace it, and thus is it expedient
To acquire an artful, fine manner,
A good stroke, for the leaves,
For know this, that therein lies the force [of your landscape].
But were you to test every manner,
After the life, or after [another master’s] pleasant handling,
Constantly practising on prepared paper,
Fashioning leaves with swirls of ink wash,
Hoping in time to reach a good outcome:
Yet is this not a teachable art, comparable to [drawing] the muscular body:
For leaves, hair, the sky, and drapery,
That is all spirit, and the spirit teaches how to fashion them.139

139 Ibid.: ‘[…] die al t’werck vermoyen,

Als sy wel ghedaen zijn, jae gantsch vervroyen,
Oft anders ontcieren, dus waer te raden,
Een aerdigh’ en fraeye manier van bladen,
Op eenen goeden slach, hem aen te wennen,
Want hier in leyt de cracht, dit moetmen kennen.
‘Al soudemen soecken op veel manieren,
Nae t’leven, oft handelingh aenghename
Ghestadelijck op grondighe papieren,
Met sap al wasschende bladers te swieren,
Hopend’ ofmer al metter tijdt toe quame:
Doch, ten schijnt niet alst bemuysde lichame
Leersaem Const: want bladen, hayr, locht, en laken,
Dat is al gheest, en den gheest leert het maken’.
606 Melion

By contrast, Venus and Adonis and Venus in her chariot are portrayed with
delicate lines in semi-transparent ink: they are less conspicuous than the trees,
stream, or cliffs, and this registers their status as byvoechsels – supplementary
adornments to the landscape, that affect it, as discussed above, in the man-
ner of attributes. The third way in which the foreground trees agree with Van
Mander’s discourse on landscape is through the many references to natural
artifice they incorporate: everywhere on their surfaces, anthropomorphic pro-
tuberances and cavities coalesce into grotesque, mask-like faces, broadly remi-
niscent of a satyr’s lineaments. One of these faces, mentioned at the start of
this chapter, opens its mouth or, better, muzzle in a silent scream that evokes
the painful birth of Adonis, born from the heartwood of the transformed
Myrrha. Elsewhere as well – and not just here but also on the cliffsides – mute
faces peer out, their eyes, nostrils, mouths distributed pell-mell, as nature ran-
domly disposes.
Although leaves and weather must be rendered uyt den geest, other aspects
of landscape can be learned from close observation of masters such as Bruegel
and Titian, as Van Mander points out.140 He cites Bruegel twice: first, for the
placement of his boldly delineated tree trunks, which accentuate the fore-
ground space, causing everything beyond it emphatically to recede; second,
for his articulation of Alpine vistas that hoist the eyes vertiginously skyward,
then plunge them deep into low-lying valleys, before thrusting them into the
far distance by way of sinuous streams that flow rushingly.

140Van Mander enjoins his readership – schilder-jeught (aspiring, youthful picturers) – to

work after good masters, whose works will teach them how to draw with charcoal, chalk,
and pen and ink; see Den Grondt, in Schilder-Boeck, fol. 9r:
‘Daerom een goet Meester waer goet ghevonden,
Voor eerst, om goede manier aen te wennen,
En om te leeren seker vaste gronden
Int stellen, handelen, omtrecken, ronden,
Dagh, en schaduws plaetsen wel leeren kennen,
Eerst met Colen dan met Crijen oft Pennen,
Aerdich trecken op den dagh, datment nouwkens
Sien mach, en daer schaduw valt harde douwkens’.
[Therefore, it would go well to find a good Master,
Above all, to accustom yourself to a good manner,
And to learn how to position, manipulate, silhouette, model,
And how to know well where to place highlights and shadows,
First with charcoal, then with chalk and quills,
Drawing daylight with such art as to make [the hatches] barely
Visible, and there where the shadows fall, to impress [the hatches] forcefully.]
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 607

Above all, it shall suit us

Always to fortify our foreground, so that the rest [of the picture] speeds
away,
And also firmly to plant there something large,
Like Bruegel and others of great name,
To whom one offers the palm for Landscape:
For in the works of these worthy men
Powerful tree trunks loom in the foreground;
Let us burn with zeal to imitate such as these.141
[…]
Beside these I should wish proudly celebrate
The fine colouring and artful disposition
Of ingenious Bruegel’s works and prints,
In which, as in the rocky-horned Alps,
He teaches us to make, without great vexation,
Deep distant views into dizzying valleys,
Steep cliffs, cloud-kissing Pines,
Far distances, and rushing streams.142

Equally worthy of praise, though simpler in their optical effect and range, are
the landscapes of Titian, Tintoretto, and Girolamo Muziano of Brescia, with
their single view into a distance that unfolds gradually, by way of various ter-
rains dotted with urban settlements:

141 Ibid., fol. 35v: ‘Alvooren onsen voor-grondt sal betamen

Altijts hardt te zijn, om d’ander doen vlieden,
En oock voor aen yet groots te brenghen ramen,
Als Brueghel, en sulcke van grooter namen,
Die men van Landtschap den pallem mach bieden:
Want in’t werck van dese weerdighe Lieden
Zijn veel voor aen gheweldighe boom-stammen,
Laet ons om sulcx nae te volghen oock vlammen’.
142 Ibid., fol. 36r: ‘Neffens dese mocht ick noch rommen trootsich
Op de welverwigh’ en constighe stellingh
Der stucken, en printen van Brueghel bootsich,
Daer hy, als in de hoornigh’ Alpes rootsich,
Ons leert te maken, sonder groote quellingh,
Het diep afsien in een swijmende dellingh,
Steyle clippen, wolck-cussende Pijnboomen,
Verre verschietens, en ruysschende stroomen’.
608 Melion

The Italians paint Landscapes

Seldomly but artfully, almost without peer,
And usually let one see
But one view into the distance, and very solidly construct
The Grounds and Cities, yea whatsoever they lay out:
Beside Tintoretto, the specially great
Titian, whose woodcuts are here our lessons,
And in addition, the things here to be seen by that Painter of Brescia.143

Goltzius’s foreground, anchored by the boldly drawn trees and stump, with
their eye-catching forms, by turns twisted, criss-crossing, or jagged, and their
sinuous hatches, beyond which steep foothills and plateaus, files of cliffs, and,
nestling between them, a shoreside town rapidly recede, brilliantly emulates
both qualities of Bruegel’s landscape art singled out by Van Mander for praise
[Figs. 13.1 & 13.29]. And the stream widening into a river gradually flowing into
a bay-like lake and harbour town gestures toward the landscape type favoured
by the Italians, its lineaments compacted into interlocking planes that recede
along a single trajectory [Figs. 13.30 & 13.31]. Indeed, as Emil Reznicek observed
half a century ago, the gnarled foreground trees partially shorn of bark, swol-
len with exposed heartwood, were a device that Goltzius partly borrowed from
Titian, just as the sinuous trees and verdant treetops (though not the individ-
ual leaves) were adapted from Cornelis Cort’s landscapes engraved after Titian

143 Ibid.: ‘D’Italisch’ om te schilderen Landouwen

Weynich, maer constich, schier sonder ghenooten
Wesend’, en laten meestmaels maer aenschouwen
Een verschietend’ insien, en seer vast bouwen
Gronden en Steden, jae wat sy ontblooten,
Boven Tinturet, den bysonder grooten
Titiaen, wiens hout-print hier zy ons lesse,
Oock wat wy sien van dien Schilder van Bresse’.
Van Mander, in his biography of Muziano, in “Van verscheyden Italiaensche Schilders, die
in mijnen tijdt te Room waren, tusschen Ao. 1573 en 1577”, lavishes praise on his superb
trees depicted in a pleasing manner, with inventively designed trunks and roots, and
finely rendered leaves, modeled for the most part after chestnuts; see Het leven der mod-
erne, oft dees-tijtsche doorluchtighe Italiaensche Schilders, Book III of Het Schilder-Boeck,
fol. 192v. Van Mander also mentions that Goltzius met Muziano in Rome, where he
drew his portrait. Muziano also showed Goltzius numerous landscapes he had drawn,
some after the life, others invented, hoping to persuade him to produce engravings after
them. On Van Mander’s references to Tintoretto, Titian, and Muziano, see Miedema,
Den grondt II 550–552.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 609

Figure 13.29 Johannes and / or Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the
Elder, Alpine Landscape with a River Valley Cut through by a Stream,
1553–1558. Engraving and etching, 324 × 428 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Figure 13.30 Anonymous after Titian, Landscape with Nobleman and Groom by a
River, ca. 1525. Woodcut, 335 × 450 mm
British Museum, London
610 Melion

Figure 13.31 Giovanni Britto after Titian, Landscape with Milkmaid, Goatherd, and an Eagle,
ca. 1530–1550. Woodcut, 374 × 526 mm
British Museum, London

and Muziano [Figs. 13.32, 13.33, & 13.34].144 It is not only in what he shows,
but also in his manner of imitating the art of landscape, that Goltzius appears
to embrace the criteria Van Mander would soon encapsulate in his ekphrastic
encomium of the ideal landscape.

144 Reznicek, Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius 432–433. See, for example, the trees grow-
ing from a rocky outcrop in Cornelis Cort’s St. Jerome Reading in the Wilderness (1565)
after Titian, or the stand of trees in the foreground of Cort’s Landscape with St. John the
Baptist (ca. 1573), Landscape with the Vision of St. Eustachius (1573), and Landscape with St.
Onuphrius (1574), all after Girolamo Muziano, in Sellink M. (comp.) – Leeflang H. (ed.),
New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Cornelis
Cort, 3 vols. (Rotterdam – Amsterdam: 2000), respectively II 162, cat. nr. 120, II 170, cat. nr.
123, II 129, cat. nr. 107, and II 210, cat. nr. 134 [Figs. 13.32, 13.33, & 13.34]. Also see the range of
cliffs skirting a deep valley cut through by a winding stream, in Johannes and / or Lucas van
Doetecum’s Alpine Landscape with a Valley Cut through by a Stream (ca. 1553–1558) after
Pieter Bruegel [Fig. 13.29], in Riggs T., Hieronymus Cock: Printmaker and Publisher at the
Sign of the Four Winds (New York: 1977) 318, cat. nr. 28.4; Nalis H. (comp.) – Luijten G. (ed.),
New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: The Van
Doetecum Family, 4 vols. (Rotterdam – Amsterdam: 1998), I 13–14, cat. nr. 13; Orenstein N.
(comp.) – Sellink M. (ed.), New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and
Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Rotterdam – Amsterdam: 2006) 120, cat.
nr. 52; and Grieken J. van et al. (ed.), Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print, exh.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 611

Figure 13.32 Cornelis Cort after Titian, St. Jerome Reading in the Wilderness, 1565. Engraving,
312 × 280 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

This drawing was one of several in which Goltzius strove to demonstrate his
abilities as a landscapist in the 1590s, not long before Van Mander embarked

cat., Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels; Museum M, Leuven; Institut néerlandais, Paris
(Brussels: 2013) 380, 384, cat. nr. 1075. And finally, see the river flowing past a hillside
town in an anonymous woodcut after Titian, Landscape with Nobleman and Groom by a
River [Fig. 13.30], or the pastureland receding toward a hilltop fortress in Giovanni Britto’s
Landscape with Milkmaid, Goatherd, and an Eagle (ca. 1530–1550) after Titian [Fig. 13.31],
in Rosand D. – Muraro M., Titian and the Venetian Woodcut: A Loan Exhibition, exh. cat.,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute
of Arts (Washington, D.C.: 1976), cat. nr. 21.; and Fage G. (ed.), Le siècle de Titien: l’âge d’or
de la peinture à Venise, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris (Paris: 1993), cat. nr. 210.
612 Melion

Figure 13.33 Cornelis Cort after Girolamo Muziano, St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness,
ca. 1573. Engraving, 537 × 381 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 613

Figure 13.34 Cornelis Cort after Girolamo Muziano, Landscape with the Vision of
St. Eustachius, 1573. Engraving, 520 × 390 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
614 Melion

on the task of codifying the criteria for landtschap. Like Van Mander, who was
a member of De witte Angieren (The White Carnations), the Flemish rederijk-
erskamer (chamber of rhetoric) in Haarlem, Goltzius was affiliated with one of
the city’s chambers, De Pellicanisten (The Pelicanists), for which he designed
a blazon featuring the group’s motto ‘Trou moet blycken’ (Fidelity must show
itself).145 It is within this rhetorical context, and perhaps for specific Angieren
or Pellicanisten, that he designed landscapes that were susceptible to the kind
of richly detailed ekphrastic reading put on show by Matthijs de Castelein
in his primer on poetics, De const van rhetoriken, and by Van Mander in his
theoretical poem on art, Den grondt. Another such landscape, the Mountain
Landscape with Travelers of 1594, differs from the Landscape with Venus and
Adonis, in that it lacks a literary byvoechsel, but contains a conspicuous scopus
[Figs. 13.1 & 13.35].146 The scopus, as discussed above, is the endpoint and goal
of an optical itinerary, which also sets, in the sense of distils, the theme of the
picture: in Sannazzaro’s ekphrasis and Van Mander’s paraphrase of it, this was
the Judgment of Paris – an epitome of visual deception.
In Landscape with Venus and Adonis, the byvoechsel / storyken barely qual-
ifies as the scopus, and it would be truer to say that the drawing altogether
lacks one [Fig. 13.1]: although the dalliance of Venus and Adonis may embody a
kind of invitation to the viewer to dally with / in the landscape, allowing one’s
eyes delightedly and recursively to wander through it, the tree that alludes to
Myrrha is far more conspicuous, and perhaps suggests that the picture’s true

145 On De witte Angieren, see Koppenol J. (ed.), Jan van Hout. Verzen voor de Leidse Loterij en
de rederijkerswedstrijd van 1596, Jan van Hout-cahiers 3 (Soest: 1994); and Dixhoorn A. van,
Repertorium van rederijkerskamers in de Noordelijke Nederlanden 1400–1650, in Digitale
bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren (2005), available at www.dbnl.org/tekst/dix-
hoo2repe01_01/. On the Pellicanisten, see Kalff G., Trou moet blijcken. Tooneelstukken der
zestiende eeuw, voor het eerst naar de handschriften uitgegeven (Groningen: 1889) 3–25,
57–80; Laan N. van der, Uit her archief der Pellicanisten. Vier zestiende-eeuwse esbate-
menten (Leiden: 1938); and Hüsken W.N.M. – Ramakers B.A.M. – Schaars F.A.M., Trou moet
blijcken. Bronnenuitgave van de boeken der Haarlemse rederijkerskamer ‘de Pellicanisten’, 8
vols. (Assen: 1992–1998).
146 On Goltzius’s Landscape with Travelers, see Reznicek, Zeichnungen von Hendrick
Goltzius I 426, cat. nr. 396; and Bleyerveld Y., “Hendrick Goltzius, Mountain Landscape”,
in Bleyerveld – Veldman I.M., The Netherlandish Drawings of the 16th Century in Teylers
Museum (Leiden: 2016) 153–159. Bleyerveld points out that this is the first Netherlandish
landscape drawing without a ‘religious, mythological, or symbolic’ subject. She also
connects it to other ‘imaginary landscapes’ drawn by Goltzius in the 1590s, includ-
ing Landscape with the Temptation of Christ in Orléans (Reznicek no. 399), Panoramic
Mountain Landscape in Dresden (Reznicek no. 395), Mountainous Coastal Landscape
in the Morgan Library (Reznicek no. 408), Landscape with Mercury in Besançon, and
Landscape with Venus and Adonis.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 615

subject is the loss of love and the human failings from which such loss springs.
By contrast, the Landscape with Travelers has a scopus, but no identifiable
byvoechsel / storyken: the place toward which the eye is drawn is the arched
opening between two natural bastions in the cliff wall separating the picture’s
foreground and background [Fig. 13.35]. The winding road that starts from
somewhere below the threshold of the image is populated by various figures,
most of them merchant-traders making their way toward the archway: two sets
of paired figures have clambered up from the valley floor, one of them pointing
up to the left, the other to the right, signaling where we should look. Closer to
us, a trader laden with a large backpack climbs with the help of two walking
sticks; two bends of the road beyond him, a muleteer, his pack animal loaded
with goods, turns a corner, closing in on the aperture; stooping as they walk,
two further figures, one with another large backpack, have almost reached
the archway. The hind perched on the rock beside the man with the walking
sticks signifies the wildness of the locale. The tonal hatching of the tunnel is
complex: the five tiers of rock wall visible through the opening are delineated
consecutively in as many strokes and tones, shifting gradually from dark to
light, from dense cross hatching to widely spaced hatches. Numerous axes, ver-
tical, horizontal, and diagonal, radiate outward from the opening, and most of
the landscape’s constituent elements – ridged ledges, furrowed escarpments,
serried peaks, mountain passes (one near, one far), and the plateau at right
with its lakeside lumber mill and the distant valley at left with its towns and
woodlands – are situated on these axial rays, both in the plane of the image
and in space. In addition, the cavernous thruway also functions as the Orisont,
and for this and all the other reasons just enumerated, it inexorably pulls the
eye in, anchoring it, in the manner of a narrative scopus situated at the end of
a staged catena of corollary places, though without the story.
The sights Goltzius gives us to see are exactly the ones Van Mander thought
noteworthy: Alpine summits blending into mists and clouds, so that mobile air
seems to petrify, and living rock to swirl (‘en schier al in de Locht verflouwen,
staende berghen schijnen wolcken die roeren’147), dizzying views into moun-
tainside dales and up vertical cliffsides dotted with pines, abruptly switching
with distant vistas (‘het diep afsien in een swijmende delingh, steyle clippen,
wolck-cussende Pijnboomen, verre verschietens’148), the mirroring surface of
the lake at right (‘t’spieghelijck water niet te laten missen’149), turbulent, windy
weather, especially noticeable along the lightly sketched sheer cliff face at

147 Van Mander, Den grondt, in Schilder-Boeck, fol. 34v.

148 Ibid., fol. 36r.
149 Ibid., fol. 35r.
616 Melion

Figure 13.35 Hendrick Goltzius, Mountain Landscape with Travelers, 1594. Pen and brown
ink, 440 × 356 mm
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

left, where billowing mists resemble waves of molten rock or a teeming water-
fall (‘doch t’hardtwindich weder hier uytghesondert, als beroert zijn Zee, en
Beken fonteynich’150) [Fig. 13.35]. Goltzius’s handelinghe likewise corresponds
to what Van Mander envisaged: the contrastive foreground, rendered more

150 Ibid.
OVIDIAN POETICS IN GOLTZIUS ’ S LANDSCAPE WITH VENUS AND ADONIS 617

darkly and boldly than the lighter, swiftly sketched background that appears
swiftly to recede (‘alvooren onsen voor-grondt sal betamen, altijts hardt te
zijn, om d’ander doen vlieden’151), the distant trees stippled evocatively (‘de
minste Boomkens salmen maer bestippen’152), the sheer variety of things, ren-
dered in multiple shades of brown ink that elicit the full spectrum of nature’s
colours (‘veel verscheydenheyt, soo van verw’ als wesen, sullen wy naervol-
ghen, wijs en bevroedich’153), and the limited palette, reminiscent of Apelles’s,
which yet seems unlimited in the effects of light, colour, and texture it educes
(‘nu maeckt my t’bedencken somtijts verwondert, hoe soo gheblixemt heb-
ben en ghedondert, Appellis verwen, wesende soo weynich’154). In sum, this
‘pure’ landscape, adorned with no byvoechsel or storyken, yet brilliantly con-
structed around a scopus, calls for – one might almost say ‘predicts’ – a richly
circumstantial and highly coloured ekphrastic response, on the order of Van
Mander’s tour de force on landscape. So, too, as my essay has tried to argue,
does Goltzius’s Landscape with Venus and Adonis, though in a full-throated
Ovidian key [Fig. 13.1].

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 Chapter 14

Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Silver of 1629:

Visual and Literary Associations

Amy Golahny

Rembrandt’s 1629 Judas Returning the Silver signifies the young artist’s ambi-
tion to portray action and emotion, and to stage complex scenes combining
architecture, figures, textiles, and still life in a unified space with chiaroscuro
and perspective. [Fig. 14.1] In this regard, the panel demonstrates Rembrandt’s
mastery of invention and the craft of painting. As a history piece, the Judas is
an advertisement for future work, much as Rembrandt’s first commissioned
portrait Nicolas Ruts of two years later shows off his skill in portraiture (New
York, The Frick Collection). The genesis of the composition involves drawings
and alterations during its making; these have been well analyzed. Technical
examination indicates that Rembrandt had conceived of the kneeling figure
of Judas at the outset and did not change it, but moved the empty money
bag from in front to behind him in the shadow; he adjusted the figures of the
priests and elders and altered the entire left side in the course of painting.1
Three recent studies offer rhetorical background to Rembrandt’s work, with
particular relevance to the Judas. Rudolf Preimesberger has discussed the
painting in light of Tragedy and rhetorical gestures, using John Bulwer’s hand
language for the high priest’s gesture of Negabit and the gesture of Repelling
for the younger priest with white turban.2 Thijs Weststeijn demonstrated how
Affectus provides a theoretical framework for many of Rembrandt’s works, and
specifically this painting.3 Eric Jan Sluijter proposed that Rembrandt’s ‘from

1 Bruyn J. – Wetering E. van der, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, six vols. (The Hague: 1982–
2014) vol. 1, 191, Cat. A 15; Rumberg P. with Bevers H., Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece, exh. cat.,
The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY: 2016).
2 Preimesberger R., “‘Inventio’ in Rembrandts Fruhwerk: ‘Die Erweckung des Lazarus’ in Los
Angeles und ‘Die Reue des Judas’ in englischem Privatbesitz”, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen,
Neue Folge 51 (2009) 97–112.
3 Weststeijn T., “Rembrandt and Rhetoric. The Concepts of affectus, enargeia and ornatus
in Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Judgement of His Master”, in Doel M. van den – Eck N. van –
Korevaar G. – Tummers A. – Weststeijn T. (eds.) The Learned Eye. Regarding Art, Theory, and
the Artist’s Reputation (Amsterdam: 2005) 111–130.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 623

Figure 14.1 Rembrandt, Judas Returning the 30 Pieces of Silver (1629), Oil/oak, 79 × 102.3 cm
© Private Collection

life’ ideology guided his choice of figural type, posture and emotive intensity.4
The Judas indicates the direction of Rembrandt’s large-format paintings
through the early 1640s in its combination of passion and immediacy of action.
The introductory essay to this collection poses the question: “Are such
images evocative of text-based processes of image-making, in the way that
verbal ekphrases perforce evoke visual ones?” Rembrandt’s Judas certainly
evoked Constantijn Huygens’s forceful description that proceeds directly
from the image. The painting generated visual derivations by Amsterdam
artists, including some pupils. Literary associations may have contributed to
Rembrandt’s invention, and we may speculate on the painting’s interest to
poets in Rembrandt’s circle.
Rembrandt’s choice to portray the remorseful Judas is generally explained
by his interest in unusual scenes, and in this case, one that fostered represen-
tation of an extreme passion. In his diary, written around 1630 but unpub-
lished until the late 19th century, Huygens wrote at length about the distraught

4 Sluijter E.J., Rembrandt’s Rivals. History Painting in Amsterdam 1630–1650 (Amsterdam –

Philadelphia, PA: 2015) 41.
624 Golahny

Judas, giving it more attention than any other art work. He concluded that it
was a marvel worthy of comparison with great art of all time, especially Italy
and antiquity:

Rembrandt, by contrast [to Jan Lievens], devotes all his loving concentra-
tion to a small painting, achieving on that modest scale a result which
one would seek in vain in the largest pieces of others. I cite as an example
his painting of the repentant Judas returning to the high priest the silver
coins which were the price for our innocent Lord. Compare this with all
Italy, indeed, with all the wondrous beauties that have survived from the
most ancient of days. The gesture of that one despairing Judas (not to
mention all the other impressive figures in the painting), that one mad-
dened Judas, screaming, begging for forgiveness, but devoid of hope, all
traces of hope erased from his face; his gaze wild, his hair torn out by
the roots, his garments rent, his arms contorted, his hands clenched until
they bleed; a blind impulse has brought him to his knees, his whole body
writhing in pitiful hideousness. All this I compare with all the beauty that
has been produced throughout the ages.5

Huygens would have seen the Judas in Rembrandt’s studio in Leiden, but wrote
the passage not while looking at it, but back at home in his study. Recalling
details as torn clothing, hands clenched and scalp bleeding, Huygens also gave
Judas a wild gaze, but in fact, his eyes are closed. Judas’s mouth is slightly open
to show teeth, but it is difficult to be certain that he screams or moans. In these
details, Huygens gives the figure qualities that enhance his agony, but may be
misremembered.
Huygens’s admiration of the panel led him to recommend Rembrandt
to Frederik Hendrik. By 1632 there were six paintings by Rembrandt or Jan
Lievens in the collection of the Stadholder.6 Rembrandt would soon paint
for him the Passion series, eventually comprising seven paintings. Huygens’s
extraordinary description of the Judas is a measure of the artist’s early success.
The biblical text concerning Judas and the silver is spare, although the epi-
sode is essential to the crucifixion of Christ and its consequential redemption
and salvation. Judas’s betrayal by taking money from the priests is in three gos-
pels (Matthew 26:14–16; Mark 14:10; Luke 22:3–6) and alluded to in the fourth

5 Quoted from Rumberg, Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece, 1 (and elsewhere).

6 Drossaers S.W.A. – Hofstede de Groot C. – Jonge C.H. de, “Inventaris van de meubelen
van het Stadhouderlijk kwartier met het Speelhuis en van het Huis in het Noordeinde te
‘s-Gravenhage”, Oud Holland 47 (1930) 193–236, 241–276.
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 625

(John 6:71, 12:4). Only Matthew 27:3–5 (KJB) includes Judas giving back the sil-
ver to the priests and hanging himself:

Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was
condemned,
repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief
priests and elders,
Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they
said, What is that to us? see thou to that.
And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and
went and hanged himself.

With the money returned, the priests bought a potter’s field to bury the poor.
As a gospel text, the episode would have been enacted in passion plays and
referred to in other literary and verbal ways, so that the character of Judas was
present in the popular imagination. Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver have cred-
ibly proposed that Rembrandt may have been familiar with Hugo Grotius’s play
of 1608, republished in 1627, Tragoedia Christus Patiens. Grotius amplified the
gospel account of the passion; the third act includes two soliloquys of Judas to
Caiaphas, in which he curses the high priest and anticipates punishment.7 As
a Latin publication, Rembrandt may have known it through an intermediary,
such as Huygens if he were acquainted with him when planning the paint-
ing, or a Leiden contact, possibly through Latin school or university. Whether
Rembrandt relied upon the play to give a voice to Judas is unclear; within rhe-
torical convention and Rembrandt’s approach to painting, the depiction of
intense emotion and engagement is more, rather than less, typical of his work.
George Sandys’s English translation, first published 1640, captures Judas’s
anguish as he addresses Caiaphas twice in the third act. The second, longer
soliloquy is here excerpted:

Is this the doctrine of your piety

To approve the Crime, yet hate the Hire? O fly,
Fly, wretch, unto the Altar, and pollute
The Temple with thy Sins accursed fruite.
Nor will I for my selfe with hopelesse praier
Solicit Heaven; lost in my owne despaire;
But Gods sterne Justice urge, that we, who were

7 Perlove S. – Silver L., Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age
(University Park, PA: 2009) 234.
626 Golahny

Joyn’d in the guilt, may equall vengeance beare.

Nor shall I in my punishment proove slow:
Behold, your Leader will before you go;
‘Tis fit you follow; to those silent Deepes,
Those horrid Shades, where Sorrow never sleepes.
… Let melting Stars their sulphrous surfet shed,
And all the Heavenly Fires fall on my Head.
And thou, O injur’d Earth, thy jawes extend,
That I may to th’infernall Shades descend:
… Is my punishment decree’d
In Hell already? …
Master, I fly to anticipate the event
Of my foule crime with equall punishment.8

Judas’s recitation reveals self-awareness, guilt and despair that greatly enhance
the text of Matthew 27, and finds a parallel in Rembrandt’s painting. Rembrandt
extended the terse exchange between Judas and the priests and represented
the event as unfolding in time, like a theatrical performance. Rembrandt’s
Judas has entered the sacred space, thrown the coins to the floor, knelt with
hands clasped and lamented; he calls attention to himself by crying out. The
figures near to Judas react with emphatic physical gestures, while others are
just becoming aware of his actions. As Huygens expressed the performative
quality of Judas, he presumably recognised the gestures of the high priest and
younger priest as denial and rejection (Negabit and Repellit), which were codi-
fied by Bulwer but in use long before.

1 The Visual Tradition in Print

Rembrandt’s Judas has been generally considered without precedent in

the visual tradition of the Renaissance and Baroque. As the authors of the
Rembrandt Research Project stated, “The theme, which was illustrated repeat-
edly afterwards in imitation of Rembrandt, was up to 1629 an uncommon one …
and first illustrated … around 1600.”9 They and others have noticed the pose
with clasped hands of Judas as similar to Saint Peter in the series of eight prints
of penitents designed by Abraham Bloemaert and engraved by Willem Isaacsz

8 Sandys George, Christ’s Passion. A tragedy, 2nd edition (London, T. Basset: 1687) 28–30.
9 Bruyn, Corpus, vol. 1, 191, with mention but not illustration of one Luther Bible of around 1600
with Christoph Murer’s woodcuts.
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 627

van Swanenburg (1580–1612) with verses by Petrus Scriverius. [Fig. 14.2]10

The penitent Peter may also have contributed to Rembrandt’s anguished
Tobit in his 1626 painting Tobit and Anna (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), and
to Lievens’s drawing Christ in Gethsemane of about 1626–1628 (Dresden,
Kupferstichkabinett). Although Van Swanenburg died young, he would have
been well known in Leiden; he engraved designs by Rubens, and his older
brother Jacob was Rembrandt’s first teacher. The print of Judas in this series
shows him arranging the rope around his neck and with disheveled hair, and
in the background, hanging from a tree. [Fig. 14.3] In Scriverius’s verse, Judas
admits his guilt, wishes to repent and understands his punishment:

Long ago I defamed God and received money. May I repent, alas! Truly,
I am besieged by feelings of repentance. I testified against the Lord and
unknowingly lost myself. Alas! What am I to do? My neck must bend
before the guilt. He said it, and with a crude knot strangled his neck. And
Judas hung his disgraceful burden upon a tree.11

The Latin lines give a voice to Judas, amplifying the gospel and offering a brief
parallel passage to that of Grotius. Whether or not Rembrandt was familiar
with this text, he would have found the engraved series sympathetic in its por-
trayal of fraught emotion. Other such depictions may also have been familiar
to him, including Dürer’s enigmatic etching of five figures, The Desperate Man,
with the foreground figure kneeling and pulling at his hair in agony. [Fig. 14.4]
By posing Judas as kneeling, as in the Dürer, rather than seated, Rembrandt
considered how the whole body could be involved in the act of despair. In
this way he considered how the seated penitential postures of Saint Peter and
Judas in the Bloemaert and Van Swanenburg series could be made more ago-
nised. These prints provide visual analogies for Rembrandt’s distraught Judas.
Nonetheless, Rembrandt’s Judas has generally been considered in an icono-
graphic vacuum. Representations of Judas receiving the silver belong to cycles
of the Passion of Christ from late antiquity, although the episode is not consis-
tently included.12 In 2006, Christian Tümpel proposed a singular precedent of

10 Bruyn, Corpus, vol. 1, 191; Schwartz G., Rembrandt, his life, his paintings (New York, NY:
1985) 45.
11 Roethlisberger M.G., “Abraham Bloemaert’s Series of Penitents”, Print Quarterly 9, 1 (1992)
36–45.
12 Passion cycles with Judas receiving the silver include the large altarpiece of the north
Netherlandish Master of Viborg, ca. 1515, Osnabruck, Mariakerk; see the Iconclass files
of the RKD, under 73D26. Italian precedents include Giotto, Arena Chapel fresco cycle
(Padua, Arena Chapel, 1305) and Duccio, Maestà polyptych (Siena, Museo del Opera
Metropolitana del Duomo, 1308–1311).
628 Golahny

Figure 14.2 Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg (engraver) after Abraham Bloemaert,
Penitent Saint Peter (1609–1611). Engraving, 26.8 × 17.1 cm. Amsterdam,
Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-P-1904-60)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 629

Figure 14.3 Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg (engraver) after Abraham Bloemaert, Judas
Iscariot (1611), Engraving, 26.8 × 17.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv.
no. RP-P-OB-103.684)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
630 Golahny

Figure 14.4 Albrecht Dürer, The Despairing Man (ca. 1515). Etching, 18.6 × 13.5 cm.
Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-P-OB-1233)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 631

Figure 14.5 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Christ Mocked and Judas Returning the
Silver”, in [Hiël], Figures de toutes les plus remarquables histoires et aultres
événements du Vieil et Nouveau Testament ; Avec une brieve exposition
allégorique, ou spirituelle de chascune d’icelles histoires, très utile à toutes
sortes de gents (Amsterdam, Michel Colijn: 1613), plate 8. Etching, plate
10.4 × 22.7 cm. First published Leiden, Frans van Raphelingen: ca. 1592.
Amsterdam University Library Onderzoekzaal Bijzondere Collecties
(Shelfmark OTM: O 62-2061)
Photo: Author

Judas returning the silver in an etching by Pieter van der Borcht that belonged
to an illustrated series, Bibelsche Figuren. [Fig. 14.5]13 Van der Borcht’s print
offered the essential narrative elements, with Judas stepping in front of the
priests as he tosses the coins to the floor and the priests reacting in agitated
consternation; the subsequent actions of Judas walking toward a tree and
hanging from it are shown in the background left.
The context of Van der Borcht’s print is worthy of consideration. Judas
Returning the Silver is on the same plate as Christ Mocked; the page is captioned

13 Tümpel C., “Behoudend en grensverleggend: Rembrandt in iconografisch perspectief”,

Rembrandt Zoektocht van een genie, exh. cat., Museum het Rembrandthuis (Amsterdam:
2006) 125–151, esp. 142.
632 Golahny

Matthaeus Cap 26, 27 in a series of eighty-eight oblong etchings first published

about 1592 by Frans van Raphelingen in Leiden with text by Hendrik Jansen van
Barrefelt (Hiël).14 The series was produced under the direction of Christophe
Plantin, who lived in Leiden 1583–1585, and had the series printed there by Van
Raphelingen, his son in law, because his association with Barrefelt invited cen-
sure were he to have these published in Antwerp. Barrefelt wished to reconcile
opposing factions of Protestants and Catholics, and belonged to the Family of
Love. The prints were adaptable to a variety of confessions. The plates were
republished in Amsterdam 1613 with a French translation of Barrefelt’s text,
and continued to be reissued in various editions until 1717. Given the first
Leiden publication and the second Amsterdam printing, the imagery belongs
to the print culture in which Rembrandt lived.
The text beneath the paired images of Christ Mocked and Judas Returning
the Silver comments on the divinity of Christ and the failings of humankind.
It resonates with the juxtaposition of the physically tortured Christ and the
emotionally tormented Judas. The viewer is invited to consider the betrayer
who regrets his deed together with Christ mocked and tortured; the two events
take place close in time at nearby locations, with the mocking of Christ later in
the chapter (Matthew 27: 29–31).
Rembrandt’s centralised staging and vigorously gesturing Caiaphas in the
Judas suggest that he was familiar with Van der Borcht’s print. To strengthen
Rembrandt’s familiarity with Van der Borcht’s Judas Returning the Silver, Tümpel
further mentioned its similarities in setting and figures with Rembrandt’s etch-
ing The Twelve-year old Jesus in the Temple of 1630. Van der Borcht’s print surely
could have been a suggestive theme and visual prompt for Rembrandt, who
created an image of remorse and its physical manifestation, with Judas near
the center and several priests in dismay and censure.
Another folio series that Plantin had printed in Leiden, probably a bit earlier,
by Van Raphelingen was also etched by Van der Borcht, and featured expansive
landscapes. Like Bibelsche Figuren, it also was republished in Amsterdam 1613
and reprinted until 1717.15 One print of a rarely illustrated subject may have

14 The circumstances, editions, and variants of the prints have been discussed by
Hamilton A., “From Familism to Pietism. The fortunes of Pieter van der Borcht’s Biblical
illustrations and Hiël’s commentaries from 1584 to 1717”, Quærendo 11, 4 (1981) 271–301, and
Visser P., “Jan Philipsz Schabaelje and Pieter van der Borcht’s Etchings in the First and the
Final State. A contribution to the reconstruction of the printing history of H.J. Barrefelt’s
‘Imagines et Figurae Bibliorum’”, Quærendo 17, 1 (1988) 35–76. See further Coelen Peter van
der, Patriarchs, Prophets & Angels. The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmaking from
Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt, exh. cat., Museum Het Rembrandthuis (Amsterdam:
1996) 153.
15 Van der Coelen, Patriarchs, Angels & Prophets, 158. See further Clifton J. – Melion W.,
Scripture for the Eyes, exh. cat., Museum of Biblical Art (New York, NY: 2009), 57–62.
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 633

Figure 14.6 Jan Lievens, Jacob Anointing the Stone (1625–1626). Etching, 20 × 16 cm.
Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-P-OB-4227)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

been a suggestive prompt for Lievens.16 His etching Jacob Anointing the Stone of
ca. 1625–1626 has been identified as Jacob pouring oil on the stone after using it
as a pillow and dreaming of angels on a ladder, following his flight from Esau’s
wrath and going to his uncle Laban’s estate. [Fig. 14.6] This episode is found in

16 Sellius, Bernard, Emblemata Sacra … (Amsterdam: Colijn, 1613).

634 Golahny

Figure 14.7 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Landscape with Jacob Anointing the Stone
and God Naming him Israel”, in Bernardus Sellius, Emblemata Sacra […]
(Amsterdam, Michel Colijn: 1613), plate 46. Etching, 18.7 × 24.1 cm. First
published Leiden, Frans van Raphelingen: 1592. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
(inv. no. Bl-1919-77-47)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Genesis 28. There Jacob prospers with his family. But there is a later episode
in which Jacob anoints a stone. In Genesis 35, God commands Jacob to return
to the place called Bethel where he had earlier slept and dreamed, to build
and anoint an altar. This second consecration is rarely, if ever, illustrated. Van
der Borcht illustrated both consecrations; the first includes Jacob dreaming
and the ladder, and the second, anointing the stone and conversing with God.
[Fig. 14.7] In the etching to Genesis 35, Jacob pours oil on a rectangular stone
at center, and at the left God appears to him in human form and announces
that his name is now Israel. The small figure of Jacob reaches awkwardly to
tilt the large jug of oil over the top of the tall stone. This second anointing of
Genesis 35 is Lievens’s subject, as the dreamt ladder is absent; Jacob’s looking
heavenward would indicate he is listening to God’s pronouncement. Jacob’s
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 635

facial features and heavy robes indicate a more mature man, rather than his
younger self. Lievens considered how Jacob’s action could appear natural, and
he portrayed Jacob kneeling comfortably and pouring a small flask of oil with
ease over the top of the stone. Jacob’s upward gaze acknowledges divine guid-
ance, obedience and protection, as a conflation of the two actions in Van der
Borcht’s etching. Iconographical precedent in rare subjects alone does not
indicate a connection, but we may suppose that in the cases of Rembrandt’s
Judas and Lievens’s Jacob, the young artists looked at Van der Borcht’s two
extensive series.
Van der Borcht’s two series, the oblong and the landscape, belong to the
extensive tradition of illustrated biblical manuscripts and prints, to which
Rembrandt, Lievens and their audiences were attentive. For Rembrandt, the
oblong series with many images in continuous narration may have provided
a precedent for the Hundred Guilder Print: Christ Preaching, ca. 1648, which
combines healing, arguing, blessing, and preaching in one frame.17
A number of representations of Judas receiving or returning the silver occur
in sixteenth century print series and devotional books. A few examples may
be mentioned here to indicate the currency of the subject. Urs Graf included
Judas Receiving the Silver among the twenty-six woodcuts in his illustrations
to a 1506 Latin Passion.18 Augustin Hirschvogel’s etchings Judas Receiving the
Silver and Judas Returning the Silver accompany verses by Peter Perenyi, pub-
lished in 1548.19 This small devotional book is structured by typology, so Judas
is paired with Absalom, as both perish in trees, a pendant already established
with the Biblia Pauperum. Previous to his two etched series published in Leiden
by Van Raphelingen, Pieter van der Borcht made woodcuts for Frans Vervoort’s
devotional book that was published in Antwerp in 1574 and later; these include
Judas Receiving the Silver and Judas Returning the Silver. [Figs. 14.8, 14.9]20 As
a small volume of devotional text and woodcuts, this inexpensive handbook
would have had wide circulation. Rembrandt’s Judas thus belongs to the broad
range of printed passion illustrations.
Judas also represented Despair in opposition to Hope within the depictions
of the Virtues. One example is Giorgio Vasari’s panel of Hope with the anchor
and Judas who is tied to a tree and about to hang; this has been connected to

17 I examine this print in a forthcoming monograph, Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print:

His Master Etching (London, Lund Humphries: 2021).
18 Urs Graf, Passionis Christi vnvm ex quattuor Euangelistis textum (Strassburg, J. Knobloch:
1506).
19 Perenyi P., Vorredt vnd eingang der Concordantzen alt vnd news Testaments … (Vienna,
Aegidius Adler: 1548).
20 Vervoort F., T’Gulde Gebedeboeck (Antwerp, Jan van Ghelen: 1574) and later editions.
636 Golahny

Figure 14.8 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Judas taking the Silver”, in Frans
Vervoort, t’ghulden ghebedeboecxken (Antwerp, Jan van Ghelen:
1574), unnumbered pages. Woodcut, 10 × 6.5 cm. London, The
British Library (Shelfmark 3455.ccc.51)
Image © The British Library
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 637

Figure 14.9 Pieter van der Borcht (engraver), “Judas returning the Silver”, in
Frans Vervoort, t’ghulden ghebedeboecxken (Antwerp, Jan van
Ghelen: 1574), unnumbered pages. Woodcut, 10 × 6.5 cm. London,
The British Library (Shelfmark 3455.ccc.51)
Image © The British Library
638 Golahny

Figure 14.10 Hans Collaert (engraver) after Crispijn van den Broecke (attributed), Hope and
Judas (1576). Engraving, 18.8 × 25.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv.
no. RP-P-2003-36)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

the ceiling decoration of a room in the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli in Venice, which

featured allegories of Virtues with a human opposite.21 The palazzo was newly
purchased by Giovanni Corner, and renovated by Michele Sanmichele in 1542;
Vasari, in Venice at the time, most likely devised the program in collaboration
with the patron and architect. Another example is the 1576 series of Virtues
engraved by Hans Collaert after Crispijn van den Broeck, which pairs optimis-
tic Hope with despairing Judas. [Fig. 14.10] Such personifications develop from
the medieval Virtues and Vices, and the pairing of Hope paired with Judas was
established by the fifteenth century.22 The pairing persisted, and appeared in
the 1758 edition of Cesare Ripa.23 These representations of Judas would remind
the viewer of his doomed role as the betrayer of Christ.

21 Schulz J., Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA – Los Angeles, CA:
1968) 120.
22 Caporossi L. – Cavigli R., “Vasari at Venice: The ‘Suicide of Judas’ at Arezzo, another
addendum to the Corner ceiling”, Burlington Magazine 158 (2016) 10–12.
23 Maser E.A. (ed.), Cesare Ripa Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery. The 1758–60 Hertel
Edition of Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’ with 200 Engraved Illustrations (New York, NY: 1971) no. 59:
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 639

As is now well established, Rembrandt painted subjects independently that

had been previously treated in print series, including Samson Threatening His
Father in Law (1635, Berlin, Staatliche Museen Gemäldegalerie) and Samson’s
Wedding (1638, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister). These subjects have
their authority in Scripture, and however uncommon in painting, they appear
in prints.24 For Pieter Lastman, print series provided visual precedent and
prompts for his paintings of Tobit Catching the Fish, Sara Awaiting Tobit,
Sacrifice of Manoah, Judah and Tamar and David Giving the Letter to Uriah. In
Lastman’s studio, Rembrandt and Lievens would have seized on this approach
of isolating an unusual episode from a print series.
Depictions of Judas giving back the silver were more common than has
been asserted in the Rembrandt literature. However, comparison of earlier
and later representations of this subject emphasises Rembrandt’s uniqueness
for rendering Judas’s intense remorse. Even allowing for the currency of the
Van Swanenburg penitents after Bloemaert, none of the depictions of Judas
and penitents shows a man kneeling in such agony. Rembrandt would rep-
resent a number of figures in meditation, prayer, and penitence, focusing on
inner conflict; these include his painting Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction
of Jerusalem of 1630 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), and later etchings David in
Prayer of 1652 and Agony in the Garden of ca. 1655. But he would not represent
a figure so physically manifesting emotional torment as Judas.

2 The Afterlife of Rembrandt’s Judas in Art

Acknowledging the potential popularity of his own invention, Rembrandt pre-

sumably allowed Jan van Vliet to make a print of the main figure of Judas as a
half-length tronie, without identifying it as the repentant apostle.25 The paint-
ing of Judas apparently was available in Rembrandt’s studio for some time, or
its location was accessible, as two copies by different painters closely follow

Despair is personified by a woman thrusting a dagger into her chest, and illustrated by
Judas hanging from a tree.
24 Examples of Samson illustrations include engraved series by Cornelis Massijs (1549) and
Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck (ca. 1560).
25 Van Vliet’s 1634 etching has been titled “Man Grieving,” and shows the figure clasping
his hands, eyes closed, and mouth open, as in grief, pain or even intense prayer. It was
adapted for a print of the two philosophers, Heraclitus and Democritus; Bruyn, Corpus,
vol. 1, 194. One indication that Van Vliet’s etching was popularly received is a drawn copy
by the young Mozes TerBorch (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).
640 Golahny

Figure 14.11 Bernard Picart (engraver) after Samuel van Hoogstraten (attributed), Judas
Receiving the Silver (1734). Etching, 1734, 14.5 × 21.7 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet
(inv. no. RP-P-OB-51.811)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

the original.26 A number of variations were made by pupils, presumably in the

studio or soon after leaving it.27 In the workshop, other moments in the nar-
rative were considered for many years. That is the case in the studio drawing
Judas Receiving the Thirty Pieces of Silver, and here shown in the 1734 etching
by Bernard Picart for clarity. [Fig. 14.11]28 Judas holds the bag of silver, as the
chief priest seems to pinch a coin in his fingers. Apparently drawn by a pupil
as a studio assignment, it reflects Rembrandt’s etchings of the late 1640s and

26 One copy is in Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, and another is in Prague,

Narodni Galerie. Collins Baker C.H., “Rembrandt’s Thirty Pieces of Silver”, The Burlington
Magazine 75 (1939):178–181 notes additional versions.
27 See RKD files and Iconclass under 73D341. Pupils’ derivations of Rembrandt’s Judas include
Jacob de Wet’s painting (1642, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst) and Constantijn
de Renesse’s drawing (ca. 1650–1655, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen).
28 The Picart etching appears to be after the Chatsworth drawing in Benesch O., The Drawings
of Rembrandt (2nd edition, enlarged and edited by Eva Benesch), 6 vols, (London – New
York, NY: 1973), vol. 6, no. 1378, fig. 1691. Jaffé M., The Chatsworth Collection of Northern
European Drawings (Venice – Turin – London: 2002) no. 1459, attributed this sheet to
Samuel van Hoogstraten. A copy of the drawing is in the National Museum, Stockholm;
Magnusson B., Dutch Drawings in Swedish Public Collections (Stockholm: 2018) no. 344.
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 641

1650s in the repoussoir platform at the foreground, narrow planar space, and
conversing men.
Rembrandt’s Judas also inspired paintings by artists not associated with
his studio.29 Salomon Koninck (1609–1656) studied Rembrandt’s early history
paintings carefully, and often made recognizable derivations of them. A pupil
of François Venant and others, Koninck was familiar with the artists of the
Breestraat neighborhood. He referred to Rembrandt’s panel in his own Judas
Returning the Silver of ca. 1640, but simplified the spatial and figural arrange-
ment; his painting is illustrated here in the mezzotint by Robert Dunkarton,
who reproduced it in 1791 as by Rembrandt. [Fig. 14.12]30 Dunkarton made
Caiaphas younger, but altered few other details from the painting. Koninck set
the scene in a hall, with Caiaphas upon a central dais and the priests clus-
tered at the right; they regard Judas with curiosity. At the left, the scribe peers
over his brightly lit table at Judas. Caiaphas looks with disapproval, and his
outstretched hand may indicate the gesture of Anger as illustrated in Bulwer
(Irascor). The kneeling Judas pleads solemnly, his mouth closed, fingers inter-
laced, eyes gazing down, money bag at his waist, and hair neatly in place.
Koninck tempered the vehemence of Rembrandt’s invention.
Taken together, these varied visual responses to the Rembrandt’s Judas
commence soon after the painting was completed, and continue through
the century. Within the workshop the painting must have been suggestive
for instruction, as a subject assigned for variation. Outside the studio, the
theme held interest as a topic for depiction, possibly with Rembrandt’s prec-
edent in mind. The Judas had an enduring presence in the art culture of the
Dutch republic.

29 For example, Adriaen van der Venne’s brunaille Judas Returning the Silver is apparently
a pendant to his Adoration of the Magi of 1644 (both Stockholm, National Museum); Van
de Venne repeated the Judas in a panel dated 1653 (Amsterdam/Geneva, Salomon Lilien
2004). Leonart Bramer sketched the remorseful Judas in front of Caiaphas and another
priest (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). Godfried Schalken (1643–1706) is associated with
Rembrandt at second hand through his teachers, Samuel van Hoogstraten and Gerard
Dou; his painting Judas Receiving the Silver (ca. 1665, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado)
indicates a persistent interest in the theme of Judas.
30 See Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, 204, fig. 111–105 for Koninck’s canvas, oil on canvas, 77
× 92 cm., art market Sotheby’s, London, 1978. Sluijter points out Cornelis de Bie’s evi-
dent reliability in his life of Koninck, which includes a Judas by Koninck in the collection
inventory of Jan Petersz Bruyningh, 1647. The Amsterdam inventory of Abraham Jacobsz
Greven, 1660, mentions a Judas by Koninck, which might be the same painting; Montias
database of 16th and 17th century inventories of Dutch art collections from the Stadsarchief,
Frick Art Reference Library, record 884.0013.
642 Golahny

Figure 14.12 Robert Dunkarton (engraver) after Salomon Koninck, Judas Returning the
Silver (1791). Mezzotint, 46.8 × 59 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv.
no. RP-P-1918-2094)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

3 Literary Resonance in Rembrandt’s Circle

In contrast to the many images that reflect the theme or composition of

Rembrandt’s panel, the literary response in devotional poetry is scant, which
is understandable given its purpose to guide, comfort and inspire the pious.
Huygens, whose private response to Rembrandt’s Judas was so strong around
1630, later wrote nine sonnets on the passion, published in 1646 as Heilighe
Daghen. The reformed quality of his series of meditations is well known, and
has recently been summarised by Simon McNamara, who analysed Huygens’s
approach through the writings of Bishop Joseph Hall. The meditative technique
was intended to involve self-analysis beginning with repentance, to make wor-
ship personally meaningful, and offer a pathway to bridge the gap between
man and god.31 Thus Huygens omitted the figure of Judas, who condemned

31 McNamara S., Rembrandt’s Passion Series (Newcastle Upon Tyne: 2015), 103.
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 643

himself to death and offered no hope, no redemption and no positive union

with god.
Jeremias de Decker (1609–1666) had a sustained friendship with Rembrandt
from around 1650, evident from several poems in the 1660 anthology Hollantsche
Parnas.32 It included his own poem on Rembrandt’s Risen Christ Appearing
to the Magdalene of 1651 (Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum). De
Decker claims that he watched the artist paint it; in lines 11–12, he wrote ‘Uw’
meesterlijcke streken,/ Vriend Rembrandt, heb ick eerst sien gaen langs dit pan-
eel’ (‘Friend Rembrandt, I first saw your masterly strokes [as they were] applied
to this panel’). Details of the painting appear in his phrases.33 These include
Christ saying ‘do not tremble’ to Mary, who ‘wavers between joy and grief, fear
and hope’; and the shadowy towering rock of the cave. Titled ‘Geschildert door
den uytneemenden Mr. Rembrant van Rijn, voor H.F. WATERLOOS’, the poem
honored Hendrick Frederick Waterloos, and thus commemorates friendship
among the artist, the poet, and the dedicatee.34
The same 1660 anthology includes Waterloos’s poem on a Rembrandt por-
trait of De Decker, another indication of the friendship among the three. Such
a painting could not be the well known head of the poet which carries a date
of 1666 (St. Petersburg, Hermitage). Although the date has also been read as
1656, the portrait is unlikely to have been painted at that earlier time.35 In its
impasto paint application with brush and knife, it is similar to Rembrandt’s later
portraits.36 The relationship between De Decker, Waterloos and Rembrandt
involves several points of personal contact and conjecture. De Decker cer-
tainly visited the artist’s studio repeatedly and viewed paintings there. At the
least, Waterloos was familiar with the portrait of De Decker and one or more
additional works. Waterloos inscribed four stanzas below one impression of
the Hundred Guilder Print: Christ Preaching (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de

32 On Hollantsche Parnas (Amsterdam: J. Lescaille, 1660), see Schwartz, Rembrandt, 330 for a
discussion of the authors involved and their relationships to Rembrandt.
33 Bruyn, Corpus, vol. 5, 18. See further Klessmann R., “Rembrandt’s ‘Noli me tangere’: mit
den Augen eines Dichters gesehen,” Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte 27 (1988):
89–100, where the relationship between the painting and the poem is made explicit.
34 Strauss W.L. – Meulen M. van de. The Rembrandt Documents (New York, NY: Abaris, 1979),
473, 1660/25.
35 For the dating of Rembrandt’s portrait of De Decker (St. Petersburg, The Hermitage), see
Van de Wetering in Bruyn, Corpus, vol. 5, 18.
36 During the later 1650s, Rembrandt painted few formal portraits. For examples, Arnold
Tholinx of 1656 (Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André) and Man with Arms Akimbo of 1658
(Kingston, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Bader Collection) are both primarily rendered
with brushwork. The Staalmeesters of 1662 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) and De Decker’s
portrait have pigment more thickly applied.
644 Golahny

France). The print may have been completed by 1648, and it is most probable
that Waterloos wrote these verses soon afterward to be inscribed on an etched
copy, intended to be inserted in large bibles, as Gary Schwartz proposed.37 Two
Rembrandt prints were copied for this purpose around 1650, with quatrains in
the same format.38 As the Hundred Guilder Print became known by its reputed
price soon after it appeared, it was among the costliest prints on the market.
Waterloos did not apparently have the means to purchase expensive art, and
the print may have been a gift by the artist to write the poem for a copy to be
issued by a publisher.
Rembrandt’s portrait of De Decker that received Waterloos’s attention by
1660 is presumed lost.39 However, a small oval portrait showing a younger De
Decker may reflect it. Arnoud van Halen (1672–1732) made a reduced copy
of an original Rembrandt, now lost. [Fig. 14.13] This small oval belongs to the
series of over 300 oval portraits of Dutch authors on tin or copper; these were
kept in a wooden chest with drawers especially made for them. The series was
called Panpoëticon Batavûm, and related to the book of the same title, a his-
tory of Dutch poetry, that was begun by Lambert Bidloo and completed by Van
Halen, published in 1720.40 The oval portraits were engraved for this publica-
tion. The mezzotint of De Decker carries the inscription ‘Rembrant pinxt’ and
is very close to the small oval oil on copper, with slight differences in the tilt of
the head and the lighting. [Fig. 14.14] Jan van Petersom’s poem on a Rembrandt
portrait of De Decker, published in De Decker’s collected poetry of 1667, Lof
der Geldsucht, could refer to either the original source for Van Halen’s oval or
the 1666 portrait.41 At the minimum, De Decker watched Rembrandt paint
the Risen Christ appearing to the Magdalene and two portraits of himself, one
before 1660 and another in 1666. Waterloos would have written about the ear-
lier portrait, and Van Petersom could have written about either.
Yet De Decker must have spoken to the artist about various topics. In his
poem Danck-Bewys And den uitnemended en wijt-beroemden Rembrandt van
Rijn, published in 1667 in the second volume of his collected poetry Lof der

37 Schwartz G., Schwartzlist 375, published electronically September 19, 2019. http://www.
garyschwartzarthistorian.nl/375-another-third-poem-on-rembrandt-jews/ (accessed:
03.03.2021).
38 These are Christ before Pilate and Christ Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple, both
of 1635.
39 Strauss, Rembrandt Documents, 470, 1660/27.
40 Bidloo, Lambert – Van Halen, Arnoud, Panpoëticon Batavûm (Amsterdam, Andries van
Damme: 1720); Deinsen L. van, The Panpoëticon Batavûm: The Portrait of the Author as a
Celebrity, Rijksmuseum Studies in History vol. 1 (Amsterdam: 2016).
41 Strauss, Rembrandt Documents, 571, 1667/9.
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 645

Figure 14.13 Arnoud van Halen after Rembrandt, Jeremias de Decker (ca. 1720). Oil on
copper, 11 × 8.5 cm. oval. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (inv. SK-A-1504)
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Geldsucht, De Decker declared that Rembrandt’s fame was international,

and had reached Rome where the artist could be compared to Raphael and
Michelangelo.42 De Decker would have known of the three paintings com-
prising the Antonio Ruffo commission for Messina (1653–1663). He would

42 Strauss, Rembrandt Documents, 573, 1667/11.

646 Golahny

Figure 14.14 Arnoud van Halen, Jeremias de Decker (ca. 1720). Mezzotint, 16.5 × 14 cm.
Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. RP-P-1906-3334).
Image © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

also have known of the planned altarpieces for the church in Carmignano,
Genoa, to be commissioned by Francesco Maria Sauli, whose negotiations
through his agent were underway by June 1666, well before De Decker’s death
in November 1666. Such patronage was evidence of Rembrandt’s reputation in
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 647

southern Italy, and, as it demanded both persistence and expense, would have
impressed Rembrandt’s friend.
De Decker’s Goede Vrijdag ofte Het Lijden onses Heeren Jesu Christi consists
of nine poems on the Passion that vary in length, but are 1088 lines in all. It
was first published in 1651, the same year De Decker watched Rembrandt paint
the Risen Christ appearing to the Magdalene. At the time, he must have been
considering his meditations on the passion, and possibly discussed the project
with the artist. Jan Konst analyzed the poem as a demonstration of rhetoric
in the service of devotional poetry meant to affect the reader profoundly; he
pointed out how its language vividly evokes piety and imagery in the mind of
the reader.43 As W. Buitendijk has noted, the characteristics of the Crucifixion
as a cosmic phenomenon are shared concerns in De Decker’s Goede Vrydag
and Rembrandt’s grand etching of two years later, The Three Crosses.44 Both
bring the darkening sky to the whole hemisphere and contain additional ele-
ments for dramatic effect. De Decker gave remarkably intense attention to
Judas in Goede Vrydag, although any connection to Rembrandt’s Judas of 1629
is thematic, rather than specific.
De Decker’s interest in Judas is indicated by four brief references in the
contexts of the Last Supper (line 53), the Agony in the Garden (line 103), the
Condemnation (line 373) and Crucifixion (line 544). The fifth reference to
Judas takes up the third poem, Christ Captured, Betrayed; it is a lengthy speech
to Judas (lines 129–204). This third poem contrasts the evil of greed with
the holiness of Christ. The poet addresses Judas, blinded by greed, in satan’s
power, and with bloodied hands; he has delivered Christ to death, and deserves
death himself. The deceitful and greedy nature of Judas is a counterpart to De
Decker’s lighthearted satire on greed, Lof der Geldsucht, published in 1667. The
poet’s characterisation of an unremorseful Judas contrasts with Rembrandt’s
Judas, but his intensity of language has a kinship with the painting’s rendition
of Judas as a fraught character.
De Decker’s meditations on the passion surely could proceed from Scripture
alone, but his presence in Rembrandt’s studio close to the time he was writing
Goede Vrijdag makes the possibility that the two discussed the character of
Judas a tempting suggestion. As the theme was still current in the studio, it is
likely that a copy or other version of the 1629 painting remained in the work-
shop as an example for pupils.

43 Konst J., “De retorica van het ‘movere’ in Jeremias de Deckers Goede Vrydag ofte het Lijden
onses Heeren Jesu Christi”, De nieuwe taalgids 83 (1990) 298–312.
44 Decker, Jeremias de, Goede Vrydag ofte Het Lijden Onses Heeren Jesu Christi, ed. with intro-
duction W.J.C. Buitendijk (Culemborg: 1978), 45.
648 Golahny

In its own genesis, Rembrandt’s Judas relates to Grotius’s drama and the print
tradition. The many variations by Amsterdam artists around mid-century indi-
cate it was well known long after its invention. The painting inspired Huygens
to write his powerful ekphrasis, and it may have encouraged discussion with
De Decker, whose Goede Vrydag resonates with the image.

Select Bibliography

Bruyn J. – Wetering E. van de, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, 6 vols. (The Hague:
1982–2014).
Coelen P. van der, Patriarchs, Prophets & Angels. The Old Testament in Netherlandish
Printmaking from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt, exh. cat., Museum Het Rem-
brandthuis (Amsterdam: 1996).
Decker J. de, Good Friday, trans. H. TenHarmsel (Jordan Station, Ontario: 1984).
Deinsen L. van, The Panpoëticon Batavûm: The Portrait of the Author as a Celebrity,
Rijksmuseum Studies in History vol. 1 (Amsterdam: 2016).
Golahny A., Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print: His Master Etching, Lund Humphries
(London: 2021).
Hamilton A., “From Familism to Pietism. The fortunes of Pieter van der Borcht’s
Biblical illustrations and Hiël’s commentaries from 1584 to 1717”, Quærendo 11, 4
(1981) 271–301.
Klessmann R., “Rembrandts ‘Noli Me Tangere’ – Mit den Augen eines Dichters gesehen”,
Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte 27 (1988) 89–100.
McNamara S., Rembrandt’s Passion Series (Newcastle upon Tyne: 2015).
Maser E.A., (ed.), Cesare Ripa Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery. The 1758–60 Hertel
Edition of Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’ with 200 Engraved Illustrations (New York, NY: 1971).
Perlove S. – Silver L., Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age
(University Park, PA: 2009).
Roethlisberger M.G., “Abraham Bloemaert’s Series of Penitents”, Print Quarterly 9, 1
(1992) 36–45.
Rumberg P. with Bevers H., Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece, exh. cat., The Morgan
Library & Museum (New York, NY: 2016).
Sandys, George, Christ’s Passion. A Tragedy (London, T. Basset: 1687) 2nd edition.
Schulz J., Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA – Los Angeles, CA:
1968).
Schwartz G., Rembrandt, his life, his paintings (New York, NY: 1985).
Schwartz G., Schwartzlist 375, published electronically September 19, 2019. http://
www.garyschwartzarthistorian.nl/375-another-third-poem-on-rembrandt-jews/
(accessed: 03.03.2021).
REMBRANDT ’ S JUDAS RETURNING THE SILVER OF 1629 649

Sluijter E.J., Rembrandt’s Rivals. History Painting in Amsterdam 1630–1650 (Amsterdam –

Philadelphia, PA: 2015).
Strauss W.L. – Meulen M. van de. The Rembrandt Documents (New York, NY: Abaris,
1979).
Visser P., “Jan Philipsz Schabaelje and Pieter van der Borcht’s Etchings in the First
and the Final State. A contribution to the reconstruction of the printing history of
H.J. Barrefelt’s Imagines et Figurae Bibliorum”, Quærendo 17, 1 (1988) 35–76.
 Chapter 15

‘By This Blood Most Chaste […]’ (Livy, The History

of Rome, Book 1.59): Passion and Politics in
Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1666
Shelley Perlove

Rembrandt’s two interpretations of the Roman legend of Lucretia’s suicide,

the 1664 version in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. [Fig. 15.1.], and
especially the 1666 painting in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts [Fig. 15.2],
demonstrate his use of classical texts to explore the passions, one of the hall-
marks of his late style.1 The painting of 1661 is an epitome of ekphrastic image-
making, particularly as defined by the volume’s editors, Arthur J. DiFuria and
Walter S. Melion.2 Visual ekphrasis, they argue, may enhance the textual, his-
torical record of an event, personalizing its affective impact, while also con-
verting it more fully into an epideictic instrument. Such ideas are developed
in this essay which closely studies the artist’s ekphrastic interpretations of the
suicide of Lucretia in relation to classical and contemporary texts; ancient and
contemporary art theory; his personal, traumatic memories of death; and his
reactions to deeply troubling events of the 1660s, which threatened to under-
mine the values of political liberty as espoused by the Dutch Republic. This
study of Rembrandt’s paintings of Lucretia in comparison with other inter-
pretations of the theme foregrounds what is distinctive about Rembrandt’s
interpolations within the visual tradition. Rendered in heavily-textured paint
and placed close to the viewer, the modest figure of Lucretia is displayed in her
dying moments; an event made poignant by her facial expression, pose, and
attire. This plaintive image of the Roman matron elicits an intense emotional

1 Rembrandt created an earlier, now-lost painting of Lucretia documented in the inventory of

Abraham Wijs and Sara de Porter in 1658. See Schwartz G., Rembrandt. His Life, His Paintings
(London: 1985) 330. Ernst van de Wettering questions the attribution of Rembrandt’s Lucretia
of 1664, and states that the inferior painting of the hands may have been done by a pupil,
but nonetheless acknowledges this work’s close relationship to the later version of 1666 and
suggests the two may have been pendants. See Wettering E. van de, A Corpus of Rembrandt
Paintings (Dordrecht: 2014) 681–682.
2 I wish to thank Walter Melion for his insightful comments and invaluable suggestions. On
definitions of eckphrasis for the visual arts see the excellent introductory essays in this vol-
ume by Arthur J. DiFuria and Walter S. Melion.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 651

Figure 15.1 Rembrandt, Lucretia, 1664, oil on canvas, 120 × 101 cm., Washington, D.C.,
National Gallery of Art. Andrew W. Mellon Collection

response from the viewer, who becomes a direct witness to her tragic demise.
This study reveals Rembrandt’s attentive staging of the ancient accounts of
Livy and Ovid, as well as the influence of such contemporary Dutch authors as
Jan Vos, Jacobus Revius, and Joost van den Vondel, whose poetry situated the
Lucretia narrative within the context of the Dutch Revolt beginning in 1568.
The essay reveals how Rembrandt focused upon specific details of the story to
foreground the concepts of pathos (the power of a work to stir the emotions by
652 Perlove

Figure 15.2 Rembrandt, Lucretia, 1666, oil on canvas, 110.2 × 92.3 cm, Minneapolis,
Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The William Hood Dunwoody Fund

depicting the passions) and ethos (the moral force conveyed through portray-
ing the passions).3 A discussion of ancient and contemporary art theory on the
affects or the passions offers background to this interpretation.

3 Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Book 1.3 and Book 2: 1) discusses three modes of persuasion: ethos, pathos,
and logos. Logos relates to the weight of the arguments or the character of the speaker or pro-
tagonist. See Fortenbaugh W.W., “Aristotle’s Rhetoric on Emotions,” Archiv für Geschichte der
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 653

The Dutch humanist Gerardus Vossius, author of a treatise on painting,

De Graphice, sive arte pingendi of 1650, used the term pathopoios to describe
the ideal artist as a maker or creator of the emotions.4 Vossius, however, was
not the only critic to champion such ideas, since Karel van Mander, Samuel
van Hoogstraten, and Franciscus Junius the Younger assigned high praise to
any painter who observed nature and engaged his active imagination in com-
municating the passions of the soul or mind.5 Van Mander claimed that the
affects were the ‘kern en ziel van de kunst’ (kernel and soul of art);6 Samuel
van Hoogstraten calls them the ‘alleredelste deel der kunst’ (the most noble
form of art),7 and Franciscus Junius equates successful communication of the
emotions with the best imitation of ancient art.8 These concepts deriving from
the rhetorical theories of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others, circulated freely
during Rembrandt’s lifetime, in the Leiden Latin school where he was edu-
cated, and were most likely discussed among his collectors, and in the artist’s
studio, where Van Hoogstraten studied. Classical principles of rhetoric were
known to Rembrandt, although I do not mean to imply that such intellectual
discussions were part of a formal curricular ‘academy’ within his studio. Rather
these classical ideas were pervasive within the artist’s cultural milieu in Leiden
and Amsterdam.
While the ideal artist was praised for his power to portray the emotions,
Rembrandt was especially lauded for this talent, even at the early age of
23. When Constantijn Huygens, secretary and diplomat to the Stadtholder
Frederik Hendrik, visited the young artists Rembrandt and Jan Lievens in

Philosophie 52 (1970) 40–70; Freese J.H., Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric (London -Cambridge,
Mass.: 1926); and Leighton S. “Aristotle and the Emotions.” Phronesis 27 (2009) 144–174.
4 See Ellenius A., De arte pingendi: Latin art literature in seventeenth-century Sweden and its
international background, trans. R. Cox – N. Tomlinson – J. Tomlinson (Uppsala: 1960) 56–59;
and also Weststeijn T, “Between Mind and Body: Painting the Inner Movements according
to Samuel van Hoogstraten and Franciscus Junius”, in Dickey S. – Roodenburg H. (eds.), The
Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern Netherlands, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60
(2010) 272–279; 283, note 77.
5 Stated in Westeijn, “Between Mind and Body” 264.
6 Mander Karel van, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, in Het schilder-boeck (Haarlem,
Pachier van Wesbusch: 1604) 6.55.
7 Hoogstraten Samuel van, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst anders de Zichtbaere
Werelt (Rotterdam, François van Hoogstraeten: 1678) 109. On Hoogstraten and art theory see
Westeijn T., The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of
Painting in the Dutch Golden Age, trans. B. Jackson – L. Richards (Amsterdam: 2008). On Van
Mander’s and Van Hoogstraten’s impact upon Rembrandt, see Wetering E. van de, Rembrandt.
The Painter Thinking (Amsterdam: 2016) 61–221.
8 Junius Franciscus, De schilder-konst der oude begrepen in drie boecken (Middelburg, Zacharia
Roman: 1641) 221.
654 Perlove

Figure 15.3 Rembrandt, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1629, oil on panel,
79 × 102.3 cm., Mulgrave Castle

Leiden around 1629, he praised Rembrandt’s ‘affectuum vivacitas’ (liveliness of

affect) and noted with satisfaction that the young artist searches within him-
self to convey what he wishes to express.9 Most particularly, the stadtholder’s
secretary famously described in highly dramatic rhetoric Rembrandt’s Judas in
the painting of 1629, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver [Fig. 15.3]:

The painting of the repentant Judas returning to the high priest the
pieces of silver, the price of our innocent Lord, illustrates the point I wish
to make concerning all his works. It can withstand comparison with
anything ever made in Italy, or for that matter with everything beauti-
ful and admirable that has been preserved since the earliest antiquity.
That single gesture of the desperate Judas – that single gesture, I say, of

9 Walter S. Melion informs me that the word affect that translates as affection, was often associ-
ated with passion. Roodenburg H. “Beweeglijkheid Embodied: On the Corporal and Sensory
Dimensions of a Famous Emotion Term,” in Dickey S. – Roodenburg H. (eds.), Nederlands
Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60 (2010) 309; and Chapman H.P. Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits. A Study
in Seventeenth-Century Identity (Princeton: 1990) 17.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 655

Figure 15.4
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait Wide-Eyed and Open-Mouthed,
1630, etching, 5.1 × 4.6 cm., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

a raging, whining Judas groveling for mercy he no longer hopes for or

dares to show the smallest sign of expecting, his frightful visage, hair torn
out of his head, his rent garment, his arms twisted, the hands clenched
bloodlessly tight, fallen to his knees in a heedless outburst – that body,
wholly contorted in pathetic despair, I place against all the tasteful art of
all time past […].10

Rembrandt moved beyond the portrayal of the extreme passions of his Judas
figure to explore more subtle human emotion by studying his own facial
expressions in the mirror. His tiny etched self-portraits of around 1630 express
such sentiments or emotional states as distress, surprise, and laughter; their
naturalism rooted in empirical observations seems to inflect the advice of the
art theorist Karel van Mander, who considers the expression of the affects to
be the very ‘soul of art’ [Figs. 15.4–15.5].11 Van Mander in Den grondt der edel
vry schilder-const of 1604 states that ‘the eyes are the seat of the emotions […]
mirrors of the soul, messengers of the heart’; the forehead and brows ‘reveal
the thoughts,’ and in them ‘one can read the human mind’; and ‘the brow’s
wrinkles and furrows […] show that in us is concealed a sorrowful spirit, anx-
ious and full of cares […]’.12 While Van Mander points out specific physiog-
nomic features that convey the workings of the mind and heart, he valued the
observation of nature above all else.13 As demonstrated here, the latter concept
is crucial to Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1666.

10 Quoted from the translation in Schwartz, Rembrandt. His Life, His Paintings 74. For a full
discussion of the theological aspects of the painting see Perlove S. – Silver L., Rembrandt’s
Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park, PA: 2009) 234–236.
11 Mander K. van, Den Grondt der edel vry Schilder-const, I, ed. H. Miedema,. (Utrecht:
1973) 174.
12 Quoted and translated from van Mander in Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits 17.
13 On Van Mander and the role of empirical observation, see ibid. 17–18.
656 Perlove

Figure 15.5
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Laughing, 1630, etching,
5.2 × 4.5 cm., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Rembrandt later invoked Huygen’s early praise of his work in a letter excusing
his lateness in delivering paintings to the stadtholder:

Because of the great zeal and devotion which I exercised in executing

well the two pictures which His Highness commissioned me to make –
the one being where Christ’s dead body is being laid in the tomb and the
other where Christ arises from the dead to the great consternation of the
guards – these same two pictures have now been finished through studi-
ous application, so that I am now also disposed to deliver the same and so
to afford pleasure to His Highness, for in these two pictures the greatest
and most natural emotion has been expressed, which is also the main
reason why they have taken so long to execute.14

Rembrandt wrote that he strove to achieve the ‘greatest and most natural emo-
tion’ (‘die meeste ende die naetuereelste beweechgelickheyt’) in these works
and employed the Dutch word beweechgelickheyt, whose meaning has been
much debated in Rembrandt literature, but which has been generally defined
as the emotion or moving quality or liveliness of a work of art. The word
embodies the classical ideal of conveying the inner workings of the mind or
soul through movement. Within these debates Herman Roodenburg states that
the term connotes the ‘liveliness of the motions’ portrayed within the picture,
as well as their capacity to move the viewer.15 Amy Golahny offers a broad defi-
nition that encompasses ‘both the physical body and the mind, as they work

14 Translation from Schwartz 112.

15 This scholar offers a fascinating discussion of the theoretical basis of kinesthetic empa-
thy. See Roodenburg, “Beweeglijkheid embodied” 306–318.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 657

together for expressive effect’.16 While Rembrandt used the words “the greatest
and most natural emotion” in the letter of 12 January 1639 to make excuses for
his lateness, the works delivered bear witness to the artist’s self-proclaimed
goals. The lugubrious setting of Rembrandt’s Entombment of Christ, for one,
is populated by mourners, whose natural movements of posture, gesture, and
facial expression convey a variety of emotional reactions to the dead Christ,
revealed in the bright glow of the lamps [Fig. 15.6].
While certain works by Rembrandt have been consistently cited as prime
examples of his mastery of the passions, such as the violent and gruesome
painting of The Blinding of Samson of 1636 [Fig. 15.7], his Lucretia paintings
appear to focus on the quieter, more complex, and internalized workings of
the emotions.17 Notably, Rembrandt’s images of Lucretia in Washington and
Minneapolis elicit reactions of pity and distress in the beholder [Figs. 15.1–15.2].
The legendary story of Lucretia told in Livy and Ovid takes place in the
early sixth century BCE, when Rome was governed by the tyrant Tarquinius
Superbus.18 Encamped with the Roman army under the Tarquins, Lucretia’s
husband Collatinus boasts of his wife’s virtue to his fellow soldiers, who col-
lectively decide to visit their wives unannounced to see who is the most chaste.
While the other spouses are attending parties, the virtuous Lucretia has stayed
in her chamber, accompanied by her hand maidens. Among the soldiers
accompanying Collatinus is Tarquinius Sextus, the King’s son, who admires
Lucretia’s virtue, but overcome by lust, vows to stain her chastity. He returns
alone to her house under false pretenses and during the night succeeds in vio-
lating her, having threatened to murder both Lucretia and her male servant,
and place their bodies in her bed, as false evidence of adultery. To avoid public
disgrace, the Roman matron submits to his dark desires.
Overcome with shame, Lucretia sends for her husband, father, and friends,
and tells them what happened. She implores them to avenge her dishonor.
Collatinus and her father forgive her, but rather than becoming an example to
unchaste wives, she commits suicide in their presence. Enraged by her death,
Collatinus’s friend Lucius Junius Brutus pulls the bloody knife from her body
and swears by her ‘chaste blood’ to avenge her death. He displays her dead

16 See Golahny A., “Pieter Lastman: Moments of Recognition,” in Dickey S. – Roodenburg H.

(eds.), Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60 (2010) 198.
17 For an excellent discussion of works by Rembrandt and the passions, but not covering
the artist’s paintings of Lucretia see Westeijn, “Between Mind and Body” 263–283; and
Sluijter E.J., “Rembrandt’s Portrayal of the Passions and Vondel’s ‘staetveranderinge,’” in
Dickey S. – Roodenburg H. (eds.), Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60 (2010) 284–305.
18 Livy, History of Rome, trans. B.O. Foster (Cambridge: 1919) I. 57–59; and Ovid, “February:
The Rigifugium”, in Fasti 2, trans. J.G. Frazer (Cambridge – London, 1931) 24 (II: 685–813).
658 Perlove

Figure 15.6 Rembrandt, Entombment of Christ, 1639, oil on canvas, 92.5 × 68.9 cm., Munich,
Alte Pinakothek
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 659

Figure 15.7 Rembrandt, Blinding of Samson, 1636, oil on canvas, 236 × 302 cm., Frankfurt,
Städel Museum

body to the populace and rallies them to overthrow the Tarquins and establish
the Roman Republic, free from tyrannical rule.
The Minneapolis painting focuses upon a climactic moment rarely por-
trayed for this subject [Fig. 15.2]. Lucretia has already stabbed herself with
the knife and is about to collapse from her wound. Her brocade robe is pulled
open, with the sleeves rolled down, exposing the blood-soaked chemise that
extends down to her genitals, the site of her sexual violation. A gold chain
signifying her noble rank cascades across her chest, drawing attention to the
bleeding wound just beneath her heart, near the center of the composition.
The dripping blood elicits shock and empathy from the beholder, who mirrors
her agony. There is urgency in this moment, since she is dying from her mortal
wound. Positioned close to the picture plane, barely erect, the Roman matron
tilts her head to her left, drawing attention to her hand tightly grasping the
cord of the bed curtain – her last source of support before falling into death.
Her mournful expression, her tear-moistened eyes, convey sadness and coura-
geous resolve, as well as tragic resignation to her chosen fate. The prominence
of the bleeding wound reminds the viewer that the flow of her ‘chaste blood’
660 Perlove

will rally the Romans against the Tarquinian tyrants. In short, Lucretia’s tragic
plight is brought emotionally close to the beholder.
Van Hoogstraten used the term hartstocht, meaning passion, to refer to
works of art whose emotional impact is extremely powerful, as if viscerally
affecting the heart. Well known to such contemporary Dutch art critics as
Junius, Vossius, and Van Hoogstraten, the ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca
describes the revulsion or paralysis one feels at the sight of blood or wounds in
his letter to Lucilius:

4. For there are certain emotions, my dear Lucilius, which no courage can
avoid; nature reminds courage how perishable a thing it is. And so he
will contract his brow when the prospect is forbidding, will shudder at
sudden apparitions, and will become dizzy when he stands at the edge
of a high precipice and looks down. This is not fear; it is a natural feeling
which reason cannot rout. 5. That is why certain brave men, most willing
to shed their own blood, cannot bear to see the blood of others. Some
persons collapse and faint at the sight of a freshly inflicted wound; oth-
ers are affected similarly on handling or viewing an old wound which is
festering. And others meet the sword-stroke more readily than they see
it dealt.19

These heightened reactions to wounds and blood are typical of the writings
of Seneca and his followers; the blood in Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1666 affects
the beholder in a similar manner.20 Rembrandt’s earlier painting of Lucretia of
1664 is different from the artist’s later version, since it focuses upon a more tra-
ditional visual moment in the narrative – just before she stabs herself, with no
blood visible in the painting [Fig. 15.1]. Lucretia hesitates in the midst of action.
She plaintively gazes at the dagger and vigorously raises her left hand, as if
to ward off interference from her relatives. Her dress is unfastened and mod-
estly displays the filmy blouse that will soon be soaked in blood. Her gestures
are feminine, dancelike and graceful, as opposed to the tense grasping of the
knife and cord in the Minneapolis picture [Fig. 15.2]. The temporal differences
between Rembrandt’s two versions of Lucretia – one before and the other after
the stabbing – lend credence to the theory that they are pendants.21

19 Seneca, Ad Lucilum, Epistulae Morales, 1, trans. R.M. Gummere, (London – New York: 1917)
Letter 57.4–5.
20 The severe gravity of Seneca’s writing is associated with a rhetorical style known as atti-
cism see Fumaroli M., l’âge de eloquence: rhetorique et “res literaire” de la Renaissance au
seiul de l’époque classique (Geneva: 1980) vii, 54, 133.
21 See Wettering, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings 681–682.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 661

Visual interpretations of Lucretia’s suicide by other artists foreground the

unique qualities of Rembrandt’s interpolations. The posture of the artist’s ear-
lier Lucretia is based upon a 1534 engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, executed
after a design of Raphael [Fig. 15.8]. Raimondi’s Lucretia is boldly flamboyant;
she fully extends her left arm towards the right in a gesture recalling that of
Laocoön in the famous statue in Rome, while the left arm of Rembrandt’s fig-
ure is foreshortened and appears to touch the surface plane of the painting,
bringing the figure closer to the viewer [Fig. 15.1].22 The open-handed gesture of
Rembrandt’s Lucretia reaches out plaintively to the beholder, as she withdraws
into her own tragic reverie. Raimondi’s Lucretia is attired in classical dress with
one breast exposed much like a statue of a Greek Amazon. The figure may have
been based on a classical sculpture fragment found in Rome around 1500 that
was thought to portray Lucretia’s suicide.23 Raimondi’s Lucretia was based
upon Raphael’s drawing after that sculpture.24 In the engraving she turns her
body, as she performs a vigorous dance of death within a Renaissance loggia,
with a view of a landscape. This interpretation of the suicide of Lucretia is very
different from others and notably ignores the traditional bedchamber setting
for this subject as described in classical texts.25
Albrecht Dürer’s full-length figure of the Roman matron of 1518 is quite dif-
ferent from Raimondi’s in its bold nudity, statuesque contrapposto stance,
and intimate bedroom setting [Fig. 15.9].26 Without hesitation, Lucretia
plunges the sword into her flesh, producing a nearly bloodless wound. The pro-
nounced self-possession of this heroic figure, however, is compromised by the
folds of fabric binding her to the marital bed, the site of the rape. The setting
within the marital bedchamber anticipates Rembrandt’s interpolation of 1666
[Fig. 15.2]. Dürer’s Lucretia, however, is intent upon vengeance, as Norman
Bryson justly suggests.27
The impassioned facial expression and position of the head of Dürer’s figure
are reminiscent of Lucas van Leyden’s 1515 engraving of Lucretia [Fig. 15.10]. Van
Leyden’s nude figure has powerful, muscular legs, and her movement towards

22 On the outstretched gesture see Emison P.A., “The Singularity of Raphael’s Lucretia”, Art
History 14. 3 (1991) 381–382.
23 On Raimondi’s Lucretia see Hults L.C., “Dürer’s Lucretia: Speaking the Silence of Women”,
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16.2 (1991) 211–213; and Sheard W., Antiquity in the
Renaissance, exh. cat., Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton: 1978) cat. 102.
24 See Stock J., “A Drawing by Raphael of ‘Lucretia’”, Burlington Magazine 126 (1984) 223–224.
25 See Emison, “The Singularity of Raphael’s Lucretia” 379.
26 On the Dürer painting, see Hults, “Dürer’s Lucretia” 205–237.
27 See Bryson N, “Two Narratives of Rape in the Visual Arts: Lucretia and the Sabine Women,”
in Tomaselli S. – Porter R. (eds.), Rape (Oxford: 1986) 164–165.
662 Perlove

Figure 15.8 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, The Suicide of Lucretia, 1509–1514,
engraving, 21.2 × 13 cm., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 663

Figure 15.9
Albrecht Dürer, The
Suicide of Lucretia,
1518, oil on panel,
168 × 75 cm., Munich,
Alte Pinakothek
664 Perlove

Figure 15.10 Lucas van Leyden, Lucretia, c. 1515, engraving, 11.7 × 7.9 cm., New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, the Elisha
Whittelsey Fund, 2018
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 665

the beholder is menacingly aggressive, as she falls forward upon a large sword.
Her lightning-bolt hair and furious stare adduce her inner emotional turmoil.
None of the versions by Raimondi, Dürer, and Van Leyden conveys the gen-
tle, plaintive sorrow of either of Rembrandt’s Lucretias [Fig. 15.1–15.2]. As in
the later interpretation, the sixteenth-century painting by Joos van Cleve dis-
plays the figure of Lucretia close to the foreground plane, making her plight
more accessible to the beholder [Fig. 15.11]. This lovely, courtly figure is emo-
tionally distraught, as she pierces her body with the blade, causing a single
drop of blood to flow neatly from the wound. The ornamental beauty of her
shot-colored sleeves and the overt eroticism of her bared breasts, emphasized
by the thread pulled across them, distract the viewer from her tragic self-
immolation.28 The diaphanous ribbons floating above her head offer rhythmic
accompaniment to her lyrical sadness, but this decorative detail imparts an
abstract beauty to the work that contrasts with Rembrandt’s naturalism.
One of numerous, popular versions by Cranach the Elder that Rembrandt
might have seen in Amsterdam, the German artist’s The Suicide of Lucretia
(1529) [Fig. 15.12] situates the chaste, Roman matron inside her home; resigned
to her fate; she pitifully gazes into the eyes of the beholder. She has just thrust
the sword into her body, creating a bloodless wound. The open window offers a
dramatic landscape view of a site reminiscent of Saxony, with its high, sharply
angled rocky promontories topped by castles, and a river meandering below
through the valley. Cranach was court painter to the Electors of Saxony from
1504 until his death in 1553, and this figure of Lucretia may inflect an ideal
of wifely chastity particular to German, courtly society, although the identity
of the patron is unknown. The figure of Lucretia also displays the material
wealth of her high, social stature, with her heavy, gold necklaces, and fash-
ionable attire of linen and velvet with extravagant puffy sleeves. Rembrandt’s
Lucretias, though dressed in brocade, are modestly attired by comparison.
Moreover, Cranach’s Lucretia is erotically portrayed with bared breasts, as in
numerous other sixteenth-century representations of this classical heroine.
An engraving of the Death of Lucretis, executed by Aegidius Sadeler after
Hans von Aachen, also features a bare-breasted Lucretia thrusting a dagger
into her chest, just beneath her full breasts [Fig. 15.13]. This highly eroticized
figure seems to conflict with traditions praising Lucretia’s chastity. Notably, the

28 Lucretia’s eroticism in sixteenth-century Northern art is discussed in Schuler C.M.,

“Virtuous Model/Voluptuous Martyr. The Suicide of Lucretia in Northern Renaissance Art
and Its Relationship to Late Medieval Devotional Imagery”, in Carroll J.L. – Stewart A.G.
(eds.), Saints, Sinners, and Sisters. Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe (Burlington, VT: 2003) 7–25.
666 Perlove

Figure 15.11 Joos van Cleve, The Death of Lucretia, 1520/ 1525, 76 × 54 cm., Vienna,
Kunsthistorische Museum
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 667

Figure 15.12 Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Suicide of Lucretia, 1529, oil on panel,
74.9 × 54 cm., Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Sarah Campbell Blaffer
Foundation
668 Perlove

Figure 15.13
Aegidius Sadeler, after Hans
von Aachen, Death of Lucretia,
1580–1629, engraving, 19.5 × 14.2 cm.,
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

inscription at the bottom of the image even questions her innocence: ‘Stulta
quid in corpus stringus Lucretia telum; non scelus eluitur, quod cumulas
scelere’ (Foolish Lucretia, why do you thrust the dagger into your body? One
crime on which you heap further crimes is not thereby effaced).29 Such ambi-
guity regarding Lucretia’s sexual purity derives from St. Augustine’s discussion
of the Roman matron in De civitate Dei (City of God), which was well known
in the early modern period.30 The main issue Augustine tackled was whether
Lucretia was an adulteress, a chaste wife, or a murderer of herself which was
a violation of the Christian interdiction on suicide. If she was raped and took
pleasure in the act, then she was an adulteress, he reasoned, and guilty of sin
and deserving of death. On the other hand, if her soul remained pure, and
she partook of no sexual enjoyment, then the rape in no way compromised
her chastity; but if that were so, Augustine wonders, why did she commit
the mortal sin of suicide? He posited, however, that Lucretia took her life to

29 Inscription quoted in Veldman I.M., “Lessons for Ladies: A Selection of Sixteenth and
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prints”, Simiolus 16.2/3 (1986) 124.
30 Augustine, City of God, I. trans. M. Dobs (Edinburgh: 1871) 28–30. Also see Veldman,
“Lessons for Ladies” 124–125; and Emison, “The Singularity of Raphael’s Lucretia” 376.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 669

Figure 15.14
Crispin de Passe the Elder, Lucretia,
from a series of Nine Female
Worthies, 1601, engraving with
etching, 26.5 × 19 cm., London,
British Museum. The Trustees of the
British Museum

avoid the shame of being found in bed with her slave, as a response to Sextus
Tarquinius’s threat:

But this case of Lucretia is in such a dilemma, that if you extenuate the
homicide, you confirm the adultery: if you acquit her of adultery, you
make the charge of homicide heavier; and there is no way out of the
dilemma. When one asks if she was adulterous, why praise her? If chaste,
why slay her[self]?31

Augustine’s conundrum explains the meaning of the inscription on Sadeler’s

engraving referring to further crimes not ‘thereby effaced’.32 Yet Lucretia read-
ily served in other contexts as an exemplar of a chaste wife, as in Cranach’s
painting just discussed. Even though Lucretia also appears as a voluptuous,
half-nude woman in a print by Crispin de Passe the Elder, from a series of Nine
Female Worthies (1601–1602), the inscription below the image celebrates her as
a model of matrimony, who confirms ‘the marriage laws for all time’, since she
refused to serve as an excuse for other women to commit adultery [Fig. 15.14]’:

31 Augustine, City of God 30.

32 Veldman, “Lessons for Ladies” 124.
670 Perlove

‘Vim diram queror illatam Lucretia divis: exemplum sumat per me sibi adultera
nullum./ Coniugij firmo statuit deus ordine legem […]’. (I, Lucretia, complain
to the gods of the infamous deed inflicted upon me: let no adulteress cite my
example / God has laid down the marriage laws for all time […].33) In the left
background, through a window, her death becomes a public event staged by
Brutus: enraged Romans gather about her supine, semi-exposed corpse, cov-
ered with blood. Her death rallies the passions of the people to rebel against
the Tarquinian ruler, as told in both Livy and Ovid.34
Rembrandt’s interpolation is unique within the visual tradition in its avoid-
ance of any trace of eroticism [Fig. 15.2].35 Lucretia’s body is present to the
beholder not as a reminder of the sensual desirability that led to her ruin, but
solely as the site of the brutal attack. Rembrandt’s Lucretia demonstrates a rare
combination of pathos and ethos, revealing both her pitiful, emotional state
and exemplary character. The artist drew upon details of textual sources to
enhance the emotional and ethical import of this work. Livy’s account stresses
her loss of honour, but also her redemption through suicide which ensured
that her rape would not encourage other women to commit adultery. The fol-
lowing describes her dramatic confrontation with her husband, father, and
friends, who arrive at her bidding after the rape:

They found Lucretia sitting in her room prostrate with grief. As they
entered, she burst into tears, and to her husband’s inquiry whether all
was well, replied, ‘No! what can be well with a woman when her honour
is lost? The marks of a stranger, Collatinus, are in your bed. But it is only
the body that has been violated the soul is pure; death shall bear witness
to that. But pledge me your solemn word that the adulterer shall not go
unpunished. It is Sextus Tarquinius, who, coming as an enemy instead
of a guest forced from me last night by brutal violence a pleasure fatal
to me, and, if you are men, fatal to him’. They all successively pledged
their word, and tried to console the distracted woman, by turning the
guilt from the victim of the outrage to the perpetrator, and urging that it
is the mind that sins not the body, and where there has been no consent
there is no guilt. ‘It is for you’, she said, ‘to see that he gets his deserts:

33 Ibid. 122.
34 Livy, History of Rome 59; and Ovid, Fasti 2, 813.
35 Linda Hults notes the absence of eroticism in Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1666. See Hults,
Dürer’s Lucretia 234. Stephanie Dickey notes the eroticism of 16th century images of
Lucretia and Rembrandt’s departure from this visual tradition. See Dickey S., “Damsels in
Distress: Gender and Emotion in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish art”, in Dickey S. –
Roodenburg H. (eds.), Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60 (2010) 66–68.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 671

although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty;
no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example’.
She had a knife concealed in her dress which she plunged into her heart
and fell dying on the floor. Her father and husband raised the death–cry.36

The foregoing passages focus upon her tears and the violation of her marriage
bed by her rapist. These narrative elements are evoked in Rembrandt’s 1666
painting [Fig. 15.2]. The rims of Lucretia’s eyes are red from crying, and the
bedding in the left background adduces the marriage chamber. Livy sets up a
contrast between the violation of her body and the inviolate innocence of her
heart. Rembrandt’s painting connotes her disgraced body by her robe opened
down to her pudendum, and her lips raw with dried blood from her attacker’s
rough kisses; but her noble dignity is asserted by her gold chain, elegant bro-
cade robe, and innocent facial expression. As Lucretia states in Livy, her death
bears testimony to her guiltless heart.37
Whereas most discussions of Rembrandt’s Lucretia have focused upon
Livy, Ovid’s Fasti 2 is extremely significant for the artist’s interpretation, since
it is most detailed and imparts a strong emotional dimension to the legend.
Ovid relates how Sextus, the royal son of King Tarquinius, at the first sight of
Lucretia, ‘caught furious fire, and raged about, captured by blind love […].
He plotted force and deceit to an innocent bed’. The latter phrase exonerates
Lucretia from sin, but she is nonetheless full of shame when her relatives arrive
at her bidding:

She was long silent, and for shame hid her face in her robe: her tears
flowed like a running stream. On this side and on that her father and her
spouse did soothe her grief and pray her to tell, and in blind fear they
wept and quaked. Thrice she essayed to speak, and thrice gave o’er, and
when the fourth time she summoned up courage, she did not for that
lift up her eyes. ‘Must I owe this too to Tarquin? Must I utter’, quoth she,
‘must I utter, woe’s me, with my own lips my own disgrace’? […] Her hus-
band and her sire pardoned the deed enforced. She said, ‘The pardon that
you give, I do refuse myself’. Without delay, she stabbed her breast with
the steel she had hidden and weltering in her blood fell at her father’s
feet. Even then in dying she took care to sink down decently: that was her
thought even as she fell. Lo, heedless of appearances, the husband and
father fling themselves on her body, moaning their common loss. Brutus

36 Livy, History of Rome 58.

37 Ibid. 58.
672 Perlove

Figure 15.15 Paulus Moreelse, Death of Lucretia, 1612, chiaroscuro woodcut, 25.7 × 32.9 cm.,
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Gift of Jean Paul Slusser

came, and then at last belied his name; for from the half-dead body he
snatched the weapon stuck in it, and holding the knife, that dripped
with noble blood, he fearless spake these words of menace: ‘By this brave
blood and chaste, and by the ghost, who shall be god to me, I swear to be
avenged on Tarquin and on his banished brood’.38

Ovid’s description of her morose, yet dignified collapse explains the proba-
ble function of the cord Lucretia tightly grasps in Rembrandt’s interpolation.
The ancient writer relates that ‘even then in dying she took care to sink down
decently’. Rembrandt’s Lucretia firmly holds the rope of the bed curtain to
steady herself, as she is just about to collapse. She does not fall indecorously
as in Paulus Moreelse’s woodcut of 1612, The Death of Lucretia, where she tum-
bles off a chair in the presence of her father [Fig. 15.15]. In Tobias Stimmer’s
woodcut of 1574, Lucretia sits on the lower edge of the bed with a knife in her
chest, dripping with blood; she is in the presence of male witnesses, and in the

38 Ovid, Fasti 2, Book 2, 813.

PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 673

Figure 15.16 Tobias Stimmer, The Death of Lucretia, 1574, woodcut, 10.6 × 12.7 cm.,
reproduced from Golahny A., Rembrandt’s Reading: The Artist’s Bookshelf of
Ancient Poetry and History (Amsterdam: 2003) 153, Fig. 40

background is a small scene of her rape [Fig. 15.16].39 Early modern authors
and artists often focused upon Lucretia’s attack by Sextus in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The Venetian poet G.F. Loredano in 1644 wrote a trea-
tise on the passions figured by various historical figures and he notably enti-
tled his chapter on the Roman heroine, ‘Lucrèce forcée’.40 Rembrandt avoided
the scene of her rape, but imparted dignity to the matron and focused upon
her ultimate moment of agency, even in the depths of her utter shame and
despair, just before she fell to the ground. The artist did not show her lying
prone on the ground, but rather in the climactic moment when she inspired
her relatives with her words to avenge her death and rebel against the tyranni-
cal Tarquinians.

39 For discussion and a reproduction see Golahny A. Rembrandt’s Reading: The Artist’s
Bookshelf of Ancient Poetry and History (Amsterdam: 2003) 153.
40 See Loredano G.F., trans. F. de Grenaille, Les caprices héroïques (Paris: Antoine Robinot,
1644) 134–159. Also Fumaroli, l’âge de eloquence 363, which briefly discusses Loredano, but
erroneously indicates his first initials as G.B. rather than G.F.
674 Perlove

Rembrandt did not depict the witnesses in her room, although the cord
which she grasps makes it clear that she is just about to fall out of the paint-
ing, into the actual space before her, occupied by her relatives, friends, and the
beholder. The painting is sparse, concise, and sketchy, with a thick application
of paint in relief, as was typical for the artist’s late style of the 50s and 60s.41
Rembrandt often paired down the number of characters in his late works; such
reduced figure compositions, termed Herauslösung by Christian Tümpel, gave
special emphasis to the principal character or characters, as meditations, just
as in Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1666.42 The dark background creates an intimacy
between viewer and Roman matron. Such details as the brocaded robe, the
white ruff about her wrist, and the gold chain are rendered in thick brush-
strokes that enhance Lucretia’s physical presence, but also enable the viewer
to engage with the artist as creator.
Other Ovidian details such as Lucretia’s blood are inflected in Rembrandt’s
interpretation. Her filmy chemise is soaked in the blood flowing from her self-
inflicted wound. This lurid detail is consistent with Ovid’s reference to her ‘wel-
tering’ in her own blood, which he describes as ‘noble’, ‘brave’, and ‘chaste’ (just
like Lucretia herself). It is no wonder then that Lucretia’s bloody, red wound
is a major element of colour in Rembrandt’s otherwise subdued palette. Ovid
narrates that after Lucretia collapsed and died, Brutus pulled out the knife and
said, ‘By this blood brave and chaste I swear to be avenged on Tarquin’. The
people bore her to burial, ‘that matron of manly courage’. Tears and indigna-
tion followed in her train. The ‘gaping wound was exposed for all to see […].
With a cry Brutus rehearsed the king’s foul deeds and Tarquin and his brood
were banished’. Her ‘gaping wound’ thus became the rallying cry that inspired
the people to overthrow the Tarquinians and establish the Roman republic,
free from tyrannical monarchy.
Some contemporary texts also emphasize the shedding of Lucretia’s blood.
One is a seventeenth- century epigram attributed to Ovid: ‘When Lucretia
pierced her chaste breast with the sword, and the stream of blood was pouring
forth, she said, “Let this be my witness that I was not pleasant with the tyrant,
my blood before men, my soul before the gods”’. The blood mentioned in this
text testifies to her sexual purity and courage. The Dutch poet, Jan Vos, wrote:

41 On Rembrandt’s sketchy, heavily-textured late style of painting see De Wettering,

Rembrandt: The Painter Thinking 267–280. For a discussion of Rembrandt’s late style, see
Tümpel C., Rembrandt. Images and Metaphors (London: 2006) 244–249.
42 On Herauslösung see Tümpel C., “Rembrandt’s Old Testament Etchings”, in Patriarch,
Angels, and Prophets, ed. Peter van der Coelen, exh. cat. Museum het Rembrandthuis
(Amsterdam: 1996) 31–36, with additional references.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 675

‘In the red ink [of Lucretia’s blood] she writes a definition of freedom’.43 These
words underscore the significance of her blood and celebrate her suicide as
an act of free will leading to Roman liberation. The political meaning of her
sacrifice cannot be overlooked.
Her suicide was a sacrifice made meaningful by ‘that matron of manly cour-
age’, as Ovid called her. Rembrandt visually intones these words by neglecting
to paint her with breasts. The artist, like Ovid, seems to imply that her mascu-
line virtues enabled Lucretia to face her dreadful situation with courage, bring
down the Tarquins, and establish the Roman Republic.44
Lucretia’s legend was the subject of contemporary Dutch poetry, especially
during the war with the Spanish Crown from 1620–1648. The poet Jacobus
Revius adopted the figure of Lucretia as a model of unquestionable purity
and courage. Revius’s poem Lucretia of 1630 closely follows Livy and speaks
of her treacherous violation by the haughty Sextus Tarquinius, who punished
her body, but could not win over her chaste heart. Her suicide bore witness to
her innocence. Given the date of the Revius text, Lucretia here may embody
the Dutch people threatened by Spain, a foreign monarchical power like the
Tarquins.45
Vondel’s Op den Burgher-krijgh der Rommeren (On the Civil War of the
Romans) of 1620 is blatantly political in its reference to ancient Roman his-
tory and the Roman legend of Lucretia. This work is based on the text of
M. Annaeus Lucanus that describes the civil war between Julius Caesar and
Pompey the Great, but it clearly evokes the conflicts of the Dutch Revolt, and
begins with a reference to Brutus’s uprising as a key precedent:

Wat voordert Brutus deughd dat zy den Dwingelanden/ Wt haren zetel

ruckt, en breecht de troonen af,/ En sticht een vryen Staet, nae datse nu
den staf/ Tarquin gheweldigh heeft ontwronghen t’zijnder schanden:/ Als

43 Quoted in Schwartz, Rembrandt, his Life, his Art 330.

44 For an anti-Hapsburg political interpretation of the Lucretia narrative in Jörg Breu the
Elder’s Death of Lucretia, 1527, see Cuneo P.F., “Jörg Breu the Elder’s Death of Lucretia.
History, Sexuality, and the State”, in Carroll J.L. – Stewart A.G. (eds.), Saints, Sinners, and
Sisters. Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT:
2003) 26–43.
45 See Revius Jacobus, Over-Ysselsche Sangen en Dicten, II, Smit W.A.P. (ed.) (Amsterdam:
1930). The full text of the poem reads: ‘Lucretia verradelijck geschonden/
Van uwen soon hovaerdige Tarquijn/ Aen haren Heer heeft haestelijck gesonden/
Van haere siel hem clagende t’gepijn/ Ah! seyde sy, het ongeregelt swijn/
Vant lichaem heeft vercregen sijn begeren/ Maer t’cuys gemoet en cost hy niet verheren,/
Getuyg’ de doot die ick van stonden aen/ Om yder een mijn onschult te verkleren,/
Straffende t’lijf, gesint ben aen te gaen’.
676 Perlove

t’Romulynsche volck zijn eyghen inghewanden/ Gaet rijten met het Stael
dat eertijts wonden gaf/ d’Uytheemschen vyand, en gaet dragen na het
graf/ d’Erlangden vrydom met vermenghde en bloed’ghe handen? / De
staet-sucht eens soldaets was veler Helden dood […].46

(What benefits Brutus’s virtue that it pulls the tyrants from their seats
and breaks up their thrones and founds a free State after he violently
seized the staff of office from Tarquin for his disgrace. As the descendants
of Romulus went and cut their own guts with the steel that erstwhile
wounded the foreign enemy and sent them to the grave with bloodied
hands for the sake of freedom? The desire for a republic of a single soldier
[meaning Brutus] was the death of many heroes […]).47

But more recent political debates centered upon the restitution of the Orangist
stadtholdership, which had ceased to be an office in 1650, but was liable to
be reinstated under Prince Willem III of Orange, especially after the restora-
tion in England of the Stuart King Charles II in 1660.48 The Orangist monar-
chists supported an agenda of peace with England and fiercely opposed the
liberal, republican policies of the Holland Regents movement known as ‘True
Freedom’, that advocated freedom of religious conscience and the supremacy
of Holland over other provinces.49 Pro-Orangists, on the other hand, adhered
to older traditions based on the strong rule of the Prince of Orange, who would
preside over church, state, and military matters. This issue, strenuously argued
by both sides, was the most important political debate of the century.50 The
pro-Orangist Leuwe van Aitzema doubted in 1661 that the United Provinces
would ever be able to achieve ‘True Freedom’, since he believed Holland had
no historical experience with republicanism.51 Pieter de la Court in Interest

46 For the full Dutch poem with notes see Vondel J. van den, De Werken van Vondel, II, ed.
J.F.M Sterck (Amsterdam: 1929) 396.
47 My translation, for which I consulted notes by Sterck in ibid. 396, is a prose version of the
part of the poem relating to Brutus’s uprising in the Lucretia legend.
48 On the stadtholderless period, see Rowan H.H., The Princes of Orange: The Stadholders in
the Dutch Republic (Cambridge: 1988) 80–110.
49 On ‘True Freedom’, see Deursen A. van, “The Dutch Republic, 1588–1780”, in Blom J.C.H. –
Lamberts E. (eds.), History of the Low Countries, trans. J.C. Kennedy (New York – Oxford:
2006) 181–193.
50 For an excellent discussion of this debate and the role of the passions, see Weststeijn A.,
Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan and
Pieter de la Court (Leiden – Boston: 2012).
51 Israel J., The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: 1995) 795. Also
see Plaat G. van der, “Lieuwe van Aitzema’s kijk op het stadhouderschap in de Republiek
(1652–1669) en de crisis van 1650”, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 677

van Hollandt of 1662 argued that republics were superior to monarchies, since
kings and their courtiers kept the whole world in constant wars for their own
benefit. De la Court argued that monarchs put their own interests before that
of the Dutch citizenry.52 Most repugnant of all to the anti-Orangists was the
hereditary dynasty of the House of Orange. The story of Lucretia who suffers
the violent actions of a king’s evil son and heir to the throne would have reso-
nated with Rembrandt’s compatriots in the 1660s, who were faced with the
threat of the institution of a Dutch monarchy in opposition to ‘True Freedom’.
S.A.C. Dudok van Heel has demonstrated Rembrandt’s many ties to the more
liberal wing of the Calvinist church, the Remonstrants; the artist was most
likely sympathetic to the Republicans of ‘True Freedom’ who predominated in
Amsterdam politics and espoused freedom of religion.53 Among Rembrandt’s
liberal compatriots in Amsterdam of the 1650s and 1660s were: Floris Soop,
Jan Six, Willem Schrijver, Petrus Scriverius, Cornelis and Andries de Graeff, Jan
Vos, Joan Huydecoper, Jacob Jacobsz. Hinlopen, among others.54 One might
reasonably assume, therefore, that the unknown patron for Rembrandt’s paint-
ings of Lucretia came from the anti-Orangist camp in Amsterdam.
Yet, how did Rembrandt relate in an emotional, and even a personal way,
to Lucretia’s death? Ancient and contemporary theorists called for the close
engagement of the artist in the event portrayed. The poet Horace famously
advised actors in tragedies:

When they [the performers] want their moaning to touch the listener’s
heart.
It’s not enough for poems to have beauty: they must have
Charm, leading their hearer’s heart wherever they wish.
As the human face smiles at a smile, so it echoes
Those who weep: if you want to move me to tears
You must first grieve yourself: […].55

der Nederlanden 103 (1988) 341–372; and Aitzema L. van, Historie of verhael van saken van
state en oorlogh in, ende ontrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden 6 (The Hague: 1667–1671).
52 Court P. de la, Het Interest van Holland, ofte gronden van Hollands welvaren,
(Amsterdam, Joan Cyprianus vander Gracht, 1662) 71–75, at https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/
cour001inte01_01/cour001inte01_01_0029.php. Also see Israel, Dutch Republic 759–760.
53 See Dudok van Heel S.A.C., De jonge Rembrandt onder Tijdgenoten: Godsdienst en Schil-
derkunst in Leiden en Amsterdam (Nijmegen: 2006) 177–198. On the Remonstrants and
Remonstrant patrons of Rembrandt, see Perlove – Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith 23–41.
54 On Rembrandt’s supporters in the 1650s and 1660s, see Schwartz, Rembrandt, his Life, his
Paintings 267–271, 279–282.
55 Horace, Ars Poetica or: Epistle to the Pisos, trans. A.S. Kline at http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/
Latin/HoraceArsPoetica.htm.
678 Perlove

Van Mander urged painters to represent emotions based on real-life, empiri-

cal observation’.56 It behooves us, therefore, to explore the theme of death and
dying within Rembrandt’s life experience.
The artist first took up the subject of a dying figure in his etching of 1639,
The Death of the Virgin, where Mary, on the very brink of death, with her arms
dangling over the side of the bed, is surrounded by grieving figures [Fig. 15.17].
The naturalism of the exhausted, bedridden figure of the Virgin may derive
from Rembrandt’s experiences of observing his wife Saskia lying in bed, espe-
cially after the loss of three of their children in infancy in 1635, 1638, and 1640.
The Sheet of Studies with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed, etc., an etching of 1641/ 1642,
shows the sad figure of the artist’s wife from above, on the lower right of the
sheet, lying on a pillow, with her arms crossed before her [Fig. 15.18]. Surely the
most traumatic event of his early years was Saskia’s death in 1642 at the age of
only 29. In 1662, only two years before painting the earlier Lucretia, Rembrandt
was forced to sell Saskia’s grave in the Ouderkerk because of financial prob-
lems. Her reburial would have triggered painful memories of her premature
death. One year after the exhumation, his beloved mistress Hendrickje Stoffels
died of the plague. Death, then, must have been front and centre in his mind
when he painted Lucretia in her final moments.
In sum, the deeply emotional tenor of Rembrandt’s interpretation was
rooted in his careful, sensitive reading of classical and contemporary texts, his
dire concerns about maintaining political freedom in the United Provinces,
and his memories of the traumatic deaths of Saskia and Hendrickje. As Van
Hoogstraten explained, the passions of an artist originate within the most sen-
sitive register of the human soul.57
Rembrandt’s extraordinary ability to capture and elicit the affects lies at the
very core of his ekphrastic image-making in his painting of Lucretia of 1666.
Clearly the artist construed ekphrasis as indissolubly linked to the comple-
mentary rhetorical figures of pathopoeia and ethopoeia. The highly emotional
dimension of the painting, its pathopoeia, is achieved through such details as
her woeful facial expression, disheveled appearance, the thick application of
paint, and her placement close to the viewer in the foreground; all of which
allude to the violence of her rape, while chiefly focusing upon the tragic dig-
nity of her imminent demise. These elements inflecting her intense suffering
are integrally linked with ethopoeia – the ideas of ethical and moral force

56 Chapman H.P., “Reclaiming the inner Rembrandt; Passion and the Early Self-Portraits”, in
Dickey S. – Roodenburg H. (eds.), Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60 (2010) 249–250.
57 Westeijn, “The Visible World” 206.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 679

Figure 15.17 Rembrandt, Death of the Virgin, 1639, etching and drypoint, 41 × 315 cm.,
London, British Museum. The Trustees of the British Museum
680 Perlove

Figure 15.18 Rembrandt, Sheet of Studies with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed, etc., 1641/ 1642,
etching, 13.6 × 15.2 cm., London, British Museum, The Trustees of the
British Museum

that impart character and honour to the Roman matron. In her collapse into
death, Lucretia emerges as a political heroine whose corpse rallies the popu-
lace under the banner of republicanism in the face of tyranny. Significantly,
Rembrandt’s reading of Livy, Ovid, and contemporary critics and poets did not
prevent him from exceeding the spectrum of the rhetoricized passions. The
artist’s Lucretia displays complex, paradoxical mixtures of manly courage and
feminine weakness; she is intrepid and resourceful in this moment of agency,
just as she falls in weakness and exhaustion into death. Rembrandt expands
the scope of the experience he shows, as well as its attendant emotions, and,
most important, invites the beholder to participate in these emotions, which is
one of the things ekphrasis does. But the image of Lucretia he proffers is richer
and more specific than any of the textual images, though complementary to
them. And that’s the point, of course, of his cultivation of an ekphrastic mode.
PASSION AND POLITICS IN REMBRANDT ’ S LUCRETIA OF 1666 681

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 Chapter 16

Finding, Stealing, Translating: The Subject(s)

of Tintoretto’s Brera Scuola Grande di
San Marco Istoria
Letha C. Ch’ien

Early modern texts1 often intimate completeness when describing artwork.

Even brief accounts of narrative action, or even a title, imply that important
aspects of the artwork have not been omitted, but words cannot describe all
visual complexity though textual sources might feign totality. Tintoretto’s
Miracles of St. Mark [Fig. 16.1] now housed at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan
has been variously determined to be a finding, stealing, translating, exorcism,
or revivification. Textual reception of the Brera painting demonstrates the fail-
ure of words to account for the full complexity of an image that operates within
a visual tradition I call ‘polytopos.’2 The polytopic mode frequently employed
in Venetian art combines places and times into a simultaneous presentation of
moments that could not coexist. Repeated ekphrastic efforts to normalize the
Brera painting by assigning it a clear narrative subject fail because they cannot
settle the painting into a fixed singularity. The variety of subjects attributed
to the Brera canvas indicates Tintoretto’s painting failed to conform to a more
general sixteenth-century understanding of painting or at least the under-
standing expressed in textual form.3 Albertian istoria privileged the active

1 Thanks to my colleague Brantley Bryant for his generous comments and to Elizabeth Honig
whose clarity brings order to my inchoateness.
2 For a greater discussion of polytopos see: Letha Ch’ien “Polytopos: Multi-ethnic Practice
in Venetian Imagery” in Cultures and Practices of Coexistence in the Multi-ethnic Cities of
the Mediterranean World, 13th–18th Centuries Volume I. ed. Marco Folin and A. Musarra.
(Routledge), Forthcoming 2019. 2014. I have adopted the title “Miracles of St. Mark” for its
elasticity, a quality of the Brera painting itself. In this way, I follow Roland Krischel who titled
the painting “St. Mark Working Many Miracles” and Marcia Hall with whom I entirely agree
with “Miracles of Saint Mark.” Roland Krischel, Jacopo Tintoretto, 1519–1594 (Köln: Könemann,
2000). Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco,
Caravaggio (Yale University Press, 2011).
3 Studies including Alexander Nagel and Christopher S Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New
York; Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books; Distributed by MIT Press, 2010). have shown us that
sixteenth century viewers were well versed in ways of looking that went beyond Albertian
single moment in time and space istoria.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

686 Ch’ien

Figure 16.1 Tintoretto, “Stealing of the Body,” (1552–1556). Oil on canvas. 397 × 315 cm.
Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia
Image © Alamy

narrative moment, a unified instant of the time space continuum, and modes
of art writing that developed over the following century responded to that
model. With the Brera painting, though, visual and verbal responses diverge;
we witness one of the last iterations of polytopic imagery in Venice and the
failure or unwillingness of textual sources to accommodate the existence of
such imagery.
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 687

Figure 16.2 Tintoretto, “Rescue of a Saracen at Sea” (1552–1556). Oil on canvas. 396 × 334
cm. Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia
Image © Alamy

In 1566 Venetian-born Jacopo Tintoretto delivered three paintings commis-

sioned by Tommaso Rangone to the Scuola Grande di San Marco, Venice’s
most important confraternity and the one dedicated to the city’s patron, St.
Mark. Of the three, the Brera Miracles of St. Mark has generated the most icon-
ographic confusion in the written record. Rescue of a Saracen at Sea [Fig. 16.2]
has enjoyed stable iconographic identification as has the Stealing of the Body
[Fig. 16.3], though the Stealing, which depicts the first century rescue of St.
Mark’s corpse, is occasionally mistaken for the ninth-century translation of his
688 Ch’ien

Figure 16.3 Tintoretto, “Miracles of St. Mark” (1552–1556). Oil on canvas. 396 × 400 cm.
Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera
Image © Pinacoteca di Brera

relics to Venice. The focus of this essay, Miracles of St. Mark, has evaded secure
attribution of a subject through the modern era. The painting and its reception
illustrate the divergent agendas of visual and textual art response in the latter
half of the sixteenth century in Venice. I establish that the Miracles of St. Mark,
far from being an outlier in the confraternity’s painting cycle, corresponds to
Venetian pictorial practice, polytopos, a visual mode beyond the expectations
of early modern written modes.
I begin with my own ekphrasis in order to guide the reader through the com-
plex painting. The Miracles of St. Mark places Venice’s patron saint in steep
perspective within a dark cavernous hall covered by a barrel vault crossed by
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 689

transverse arches. In the foreground St. Mark stands to the left wearing familiar
blue and red imitatio Christi robes. His right hand clasps the gospel book that
identifies him as an evangelist while his left stretches into the dark depth of
the corridor. Head raised, eyes lifted, St. Mark appears to be performing an
action, though what that action might be remains unclear for within the space
many figures seem engaged in discrete actions of their own. The viewer’s atten-
tion fragments among multiple figural groups from the foreground right trio
to the apparently blind man at midground to the lightly sketched background
figures at the floor tomb.
From the foreground to the end of the hallway, figures tilt, point, reach, and
bend. In the foreground a pale supine body at St. Mark’s feet lies on an orien-
tal carpet. Behind his head, a kneeling blind man clutching a pilgrim’s staff
points at his eyes. In shimmering golden robes Tommaso Rangone, patron of
the three 1560s paintings, sinks to his knees. He gestures both towards St. Mark
and the three conjoined figures in the right foreground. In tumbling twisting
movement, these three hurl themselves in a centrifugal whirl. A woman stum-
bles backwards, grasped around the legs by a man on his knees, while he in
turn is pulled back into the painting by a third figure. Around them wisps of
vapor or smoke, byproducts of exorcism, curve upwards, dissipating into the
vast expanse of the barrel vault. A couple of putti heads traced in white lead
float in the ceiling heights.
Beyond the foreground the multipronged drama continues. Immediately
behind the exorcism trio positioned at the picture plane, a turbaned man tugs
the arm of a nude body being lowered from one of a series of rectangular wall
tombs, extending down the aisle by two men who have climbed ladders to
explore its contents. Three tombs farther along, lightly painted figures explore
yet another tomb. A man alights on his toes lifting a candle to aide their search.
At the far end of the loggia, two men pry open the stone slab while a second
pair peers inside the floor tomb emitting a brilliant light. Orthogonal light lines
extend from within the tomb out into the dark aisle.
Beyond St. Mark’s confident gesture at the picture plane, commotion reigns.
Because the figures do not unite in one activity, the painting offers more than
one possible subject, a varied presentation contrary to the Albertian istoria
that assumed a unitary moment in perspectival space. One point perspective
offers the illusion of a moment in time, a point on a fixed plane. Tintoretto’s
painting combines multiple actions and scenes within the hallway, putting
into one painting numerous miraculous moments.
Tintoretto’s Brera painting received divergent subject identifications during
from the sixteenth century, indicating the subject matter was never entirely
690 Ch’ien

clear and fixed even to contemporary viewers. No episode has been found
among the written hagiographies of St. Mark that can provide a definite sub-
ject for the Miracles of St. Mark, nor has any artwork of similar subject has not
been found in other Marcian cycles at the Basilica San Marco or elsewhere.
Given Tintoretto’s uneven critical reception throughout his career and the
painting’s unusually undirected composition, it would be tempting to declare
the painting merely an unsuccessful istoria.4 I would argue, though, this is not
the case. The number of subjects attached to the painting – finding, stealing,
translating, and more – indicate that we have been asking the wrong question
of this painting. The Brera canvas does not want to be any particular story at
all. Instead it provides a space that can accommodate many stories of St. Mark
without settling on one. It connects to Venetian confraternity viewers through
their spatial experience. In its polytopic multiplicity and specific Venetian
architectural connection, the Miracles of St. Mark follows Venetian precedent.
The painting is not anomalous.
One does not expect to find a difficult painting commissioned by the Scuola
Grande di San Marco. As Venice’s most important confraternity dedicated to
the city’s patron saint, the Scuola Grande di San Marco was an important pro-
ducer and guardian of Marcian imagery. To produce this cycle the confrater-
nity members hired prestigious artists including Giovanni Mansueti, Gentile
and Giovanni Bellini, Palma il Vecchio, Bordone, and Jacopo Tintoretto, who
was individually responsible for the majority of the sala capitolare istorie.5
Paintings in the cycle consistently work to establish the importance of St.
Mark, his miraculous efficacy, and most importantly, St. Mark’s connection to
Venice. It is unlikely a conservative and prestigious confraternity would tol-
erate an unclear subject, yet written records refer to the Brera painting by a
surprising number of subjects without considering visual possibilities more
complex than a single moment in a linear narrative.
Unlike other confraternity commissions issued by corporate consensus,
the three paintings Tintoretto made from 1562 to 1566 were commissioned by

4 Twenty years prior, Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave (1548) failed at the Scuola Grande di
San Marco with its singular narrative story and lack of Venetian references. Confraternity
members initially rejected the painting despite its deficiencies before eventually accepting
its return, presumably for budgetary reasons. The prestezza unfinished effect Pietro Aretino
criticized did not preclude its use in later paintings Tintoretto made for the scuola. Letha
Ch’ien. “Making Miracles at the Scuola Grande di San Marco from Bellini to Tintoretto.” PhD
diss., UC Berkeley, 2014.
5 This notably does not include Titian, who while famous and prestigious, did not make great
career efforts to serve Venice the State.
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 691

one individual on behalf of the confraternity. Tommaso Rangone, physician

and self-styled man about town funded the sala capitolare decoration project
that had stalled due to the confraternity’s unstable finances. In exchange he
received unprecedented pictorial prominence in all three paintings: Rescue of
a Saracen at Sea, Stealing of the Body, and Miracles of St. Mark.6 The confrater-
nity notary record of June 21, 1562 documents the expense, carefully assigning
payment responsibility to Rangone, ‘il mag.co thomaso Ravenna D. il guardian
grande che li far datto liberate deputer far dipingere atute sue spexe li tre quadri
con i miracoli del nostro sanctiss.mo protetor messer San Marco,’ ‘to paint at
entirely his expense three paintings with the miracles of our most holy protec-
tor, mister saint Mark.’7
Apart from the general miracles of exorcism, healing, and revivification
occurring in the Brera painting that do not refer to any specific episode of
Marcian hagiography, the most frequently proposed subjects are the first-
century finding of the body, the ninth-century translation of St. Mark’s rel-
ics from Alexandria to Venice, and the eleventh-century inventio in which St.
Mark’s body miraculously appears in the Basilica San Marco after it was lost,
episodes fundamental to civic mythology in Venice, the city that had adopted
St. Mark as its patron saint following the translatio. St. Mark, apostle and
evangelist, had travelled the Mediterranean on his Christian mission before
his eventual martyrdom in Alexandria, Egypt during the first century. His
body required rescue from a small group of Christians who had safeguarded

6 Tommaso Rangone was a physician and philologist who expended considerable efforts
towards his integration into Venetian society after his arrival in 1539. He sought a number
of positions on various boards, procuratorships. By 1562 his name M Tomaso del Ravenna
can be found listed on the banca at the Scuola Grande di San Marco. ASV. Scuola Grande di
San Marco. Reg. 22 inside cover marginalia. Tintoretto’s father in law Marco Episcopi joined
the board in the 1560s and helped direct the commission to Tintoretto. ASV. SGSM. Reg 2, 52,
18 March 1564.
7 ‘[Rangone requested] dato libertà de poder far dipingier a tutte sue spese li tre quadri con
I miracoli del nostro Santissimo protetor mess. S. Marco … – Dichiarando però che tutte quello
che spenderà iesso Mag.co messer Tomaxo ravena … in far far ditta pitura et opera in la sala …
sua mag.tia ne fa uno prexente alla scuola.. Proposta accolta con 144 voti favorevoli contro soli
6.’ ‘Rangone requested the liberty to paint at entirely his expense three paintings with the
miracles of our most holy protector mister San Marco … declaring however that they will be
paid for by the same Magnificent mister Tomasso of Ravenna … to make, to make [SIC] the
said painting and works in the room [sala capitolare] … his magnificence is present at the
confraternity. Proposal passes with 144 favorable votes against only six.’ ASV.Scuola Grande di
San Marco. Reg. 22 fol. 4r–4v. Cited in Pietro Paoletti, La Scuola grande di San Marco: lavoro
premiato dal R. Istituto veneto di scienze lettere, ed arti col premio Vanna Arrigoni degli Oddi
(Venezia: Comune di Venezia, 1929), 173–174.
692 Ch’ien

it until two Venetians arrived eight centuries later in 827 CE to transport St.
Mark’s holy relics to Venice where the Basilica San Marco was built to house
the evangelist’s body. The translatio, the translation of St. Mark’s body from
one location to another, confirmed Venice’s predestined possession of their
patron saint, at least according to the Venetian view. The inventio emphasized
the saint’s reiterated intention to stay in Venice. During the rebuilding of the
Basilica San Marco, the body of St. Mark was hidden to prevent theft by the
Alexandrian Christians whose revenge Venetians feared. During the lengthy
construction process the body’s location was forgotten. After Doge Vitale Falier
joined the bishop and people of Venice in three days of fasting and prayer, a
stone fell from a column revealing the body of St. Mark inside. Various authors
have seen each one of these stories in the Brera painting, which invites each
of these attributions concurrently allowing an open ambiguity to exist in the
visual realm. Textual accounts disdain the polyvalence of the Brera painting in
favor of more deterministic accounts.

1 Written Accounts

Though ekphrasis seeks to replicate an internal non-sequential visual experi-

ence in words, as noted by the editors of this volume written accounts can
reduce the visual and its non-sequential experience to what can be described
in words. While I doubt erasure of complexity was ever a goal, there is a per-
vasive strain of simplification throughout written accounts of the Brera paint-
ing. Notably Florentines Raffaello Borghini and Giorgio Vasari took pains to
suggest that the Miracles of St. Mark depicted a straightforward subject, as
Albertian istoria would expect. The Venetian accounts by Marco Boschini and
Carlo Ridolfi permit more than one action to occur within the unified pictorial
space, a closer ekphrastic response to the painting’s visual conditions though
they still identify a ‘main’ subject. A worthwhile painting had a discernible sub-
ject; the authors’ words conformed to that valuation.
Tuscan Giorgio Vasari saw only an exorcism in the busy Brera paint-
ing. Describing the sala capitolare, he listed four ‘storie grandi.’ St. Mark first
‘libera un suo divoto,’ ‘liberates one of his followers’ in the Miracle of the Slave
[Fig. 16.4], before ‘libera un altro suo divoto,’ ‘liberating another one of his fol-
lowers’ from ‘una tempesta di mare,’ a sea storm in Rescue of a Saracen at Sea.
Vasari fails to realize the nude body transported in the Stealing of the Body is
St. Mark’s own, instead identifying it as yet another ‘un altro divoto.’ The fourth,
the painting that most concerns us receives a brief, but vivid description.
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 693

Figure 16.4 Tintoretto, “Miracle of the Slave” (1548). Oil on canvas. 416 × 544 cm. Venice,
Gallerie dell’Accademia
Image © Alamy

Nella quarta, dove uno spiritato si scongiura, ha finto in prospettiva una

gran loggia et in fine di quella un fuoco che la illumina con molti rinverberi;8

In the fourth, where one evil spirit is exorcised, he [Tintoretto] feigned in

perspective a great loggia and at the end of it a fire that illuminates it [the
loggia] with many reflections.

Vasari identifies one action, but focuses mainly on the perspectival setting. He
ignores three dead bodies: one on the carpet, another lowered from the wall
tombs, and the final corpse implied inside the floor tomb. Unlike his descrip-
tion of the other three sala capitolare paintings in which he clearly attributes
miracles to the actions of St. Mark, Vasari does not ascribe the Brera’s exorcism

8 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piu eccelenti pittori, scultori, e architettori … di nuovo dal medesimo
riviste et ampliate, con I ritratti loro et con l’aggiunta delle vite de’vivi e de’morti dall’anno insino
al 1567. Florence: I Giunti, 1568.
694 Ch’ien

to St. Mark, perhaps an indication of the painting’s own ambiguity. St. Mark
gestures forcefully, but the effect of his gesture cannot be definitively deter-
mined. Into ambiguity, multiplicity, and complexity, Vasari wrote simplicity.9
Sixteen years after the second edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, Raffaello
Borghini’s Il Riposo addressed notable artwork and judgment criteria, but
when discussing the confraternity’s artwork, Borghini approached the paint-
ings in the form of a catalog listing the miracles together.

Nella Scuola di san Marco quttro quadri de’ miracoli di detto Santo, dove si
veggono diverse belle attitudini, risuscitar morti, liberare spiritati, fuggire i
mori, venir pioggia dal Cielo, e spegnere il fuoco in cui dovea esser abbru-
ciato un martire, e spaventosi effetti d’una fortuna di mare.10

In the Confraternity of St. Mark [there are] four paintings of miracles of

said Saint in which different beautiful attitudes can be found, the dead
resuscitated, [people] liberated from spirits, moors fleeing, rain comes
from Heaven, and extinguishes the fire in which the martyr was supposed
to be cremated, and the fearsome effects of the fate of the sea.

Borghini discusses the room as a whole, including within his inventory the
Miracle of the Slave Tintoretto produced in 1548, but neglected to describe the
narrative the painting depicts. Instead Borghini focuses on the events depicted
in the three paintings Tintoretto made for the 1560s Rangone commission, list-
ing six active events: revivification, exorcism, fleeing of Moors, rainfall, extin-
guishment of fire, and a battering by the sea. ‘Fearsome effects of the fate of the
sea’ refers to Rescue of a Saracen at Sea, ‘rain from Heaven’ and ‘extinguishes
fire’ to Stealing of the Body which, like the Stealing, features a miraculous
orange storm dampening the pagan’s funeral pyre for St. Mark. The passive
event, the body of St. Mark carried to safety Vasari does not mention though it
is the purpose of the other actions. The Brera painting receives a description
of two actions, resuscitation of the dead and exorcism, generic saintly actions,
but the actions of the Stealing clearly formed important elements of the nar-
rative episode in which St. Mark’s body is absconded to safety. Borghini’s brief
tidy list of actions implies each painting has a straightforward subject that is

9 For more on Vasari’s focus in ekphrases on narrative as “the constant end of art,” see
Svetlana Alpers, “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (1960):190–215.
10 Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo in cui cella pittura e della scultura si Savella, de’ piu illustri pit-
tori, e scultori, e delle piu famose opere loro si fa mentione; e le cose principali appartenenti
à dette arti s’integnano (Fiorenza: Giorgio Marescotti, 1584), 27.
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 695

immediately discernible. He does not refer to a possibility of multiple subjects

or complex spatial references.
Vasari and Borghini strove to find a single subject for each painting. Venetian
texts were more accommodating of multiplicity, perhaps because of their
author’s familiarity with a visual tradition that had frequently combined narra-
tives in pictures with unified space.11 In the seventeenth-century Boschini and
Ridolfi both combine a major narrative episode from St. Mark’s hagiography
with a more unspecified saintly miracle.
Positioning the Miracles of St. Mark as both a resurrection of the dead and
inventio, Marco Boschini’s La carta nel navegar pitoresco (1660) discusses the
Brera painting alongside the Scuola Grande di San Marco istorie in the form
of a long art travelogue poem. Boschini recognizes the floor opening at the
end of the corridor as a grave, a source of light, and where St Mark’s body was
placed and also nods to revivification of the dead, ‘Quelo xè morto, e si sè più
che vivo;/ Perche d’eterna vita el xè per viver,’ ‘he that is dead is now he who can
live because of eternal life.’12
The two episodes, the one specific to St. Mark and the other a habit of saints,
are described together in a section noted as the ‘Invenciou del corpo de S. Marco.’

Che bela porspetiva maestola!

O cimiterio ben aventurà;
Dove, che un sì gran Santo drento stà!
Per molti capi ation miracolosa!

What beautiful majestic perspective!

O what an adventure in the tomb
Where, he who is a great Saint was inside!
So many miraculous events and actions!13

11 Gentile Bellini, who also worked at the Scuola Grande di San Marco, produced the
Procession in Piazza San Marco for the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in
which a confraternity procession in front of the Basilica San Marco also contains the
small figure of Jacopo de’ Brescia kneeling to the confraternity’s relic of the True Cross, an
act that will lead to the miraculous healing of his son at home.
12 Dove a lusor de lume se procura
De trovar quela degna sepoltura,
Che’l corpo de San Marco ghe fù messo
Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco dialogo (Venezia: Per li Baba, 1690), 247.
13 Ibid.
696 Ch’ien

Boschini too praises Tintoretto’s perspective, but focuses on the ‘molti capi
ation miracolosa,’ which seems to refer to the non-specific miracles habitually
ascribed to saints. The inventio occurs simultaneously with miraculous res-
urrection of the dead; multiple events transpire within its unified beautiful
perspective. Nothing in Boschini’s text indicates a viewer would experience
cognitive dissonance.
Tintoretto’s first biographer, Carlo Ridolfi, writing in 1642, shared Boschini’s
premise that a painting could simultaneously depict more than one narrative
action, but differs from Boschini in the identification of those actions. Where
Boschini saw the eleventh-century inventio and revivification of the dead in
the Brera Miracles of St. Mark, Ridolfi perceived the ninth-century translatio
and exorcism.

Nel primo si vede il modo tenuto nel levare il corpo di S. Marco in Alessandria,
che ottenero Buono da Malamocco e Rustico da Torcello, Mercatanti
Venetiani, da Sacerdoti Greci, e vi appaiono in lungo porticale molti sepolcri
appesi à muri, tirati in bella prospettiva, da’ quali si cavano molti corpi, e nel
pavimento è quello di San Marco, in tale positura accommodato, che segue
l’occhio dovunque si gira. Finsevi di più ingegnosamente un’indemoniato ivi
condotto, come suole avvenire nella motioni de’corpi Santi, in cui si veggono
le agitationi, che fà il Demonio ne’ corpi humani.14

In the first one sees how the body of St. Mark is lifted in Alexandria,
that Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, Venetian merchants,
obtained it from the Greek priests, and you see in a long colonnade, there
are many tombs attached to the walls – in beautiful perspective – from
which many bodies are taken. On the floor is that body of St. Mark in such
a position that the eye [of the viewer] follows it everywhere it turns. Even
more ingeniously, [Tintoretto] places a possessed man there and how it
moves in the motion of holy saints. One can see the agitations that the
Devil makes in human bodies.

Ridolfi connects the ninth-century translatio to non-specific non-episodic

exorcism. In admitting the presence of at least two actions in a single unified
space, Ridolfi acknowledges the existence of images that offer the viewer mul-
tiple narrative subjects as Venetian paintings sometimes did. Like Boschini,

14 Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell’arte: overo le vite de gl’illustri pittori veneti, e dello stato,
1648, 22.
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 697

Ridolfi gives no hint that a multiple narrative painting should trouble the
viewer or pose any difficulty.
One of the most persistent single subject identifications for the Brera paint-
ing is either a Discovery or Finding of the Body of St. Mark. However, which
instance of discovery the painting is said to depict vacillates between recovery
of Mark’s body in Alexandria and the inventio in Venice. The foreshortened
body on carpet complicates matters. Ridolfi was not the only viewer to have
identified the body on the carpet as St. Mark. The misconception persists prob-
ably because it would conveniently establish a reasonably secure subject.15
Many accounts including the Inquisitori inventory records erroneously iden-
tify the body as St. Mark’s corpse lying at the saint’s own feet.

Nela Scola di S. Marco

Trè quadri di Giac.o Tintoretto, che sono nella stanza grande del secondo
Piano
Il pino’ rapp’uta [primo rappresenta] quando fù levato il Corpo di S. Marco
che stà sopra un Tapeto16

15 In 1929 Pietro Paoletti identified the Brera canvas as a ‘Finding of the Body,’ ‘La scoperta
del corpo di S. Marco in Alexandria’ Paoletti, La Scuola grande di San Marco, 179. Rosalba
Tardito identifies the Brera painting as ‘Il ritrovamento del corpo di San Marco,’ a ‘find-
ing of the body’ in G.R. Arosio, Pisano, Nicola, and Rosalba Tardito, “Il Ritrovamento
Del Corpo Di San Marco: Il Restauro,” in Il Ritrovamento Del Corpo Di San Marco Del
Tintoretto:Vicende e Restauri (Firenze: Cantini Editore, 1990).
‘In the complementary Finding of the Body of St. Mark we witness the retrieval of the
body from the Alexandrian catacombs some 800 years later by a group of Venetian mer-
chants. Their search is halted by the miraculous intervention of the saint himself at the
left.’ Tom Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (Reaktion Books, 1999), 242. Marcia
Hall writing in 2011 identified the Brera painting as depicting the ninth-century transla-
tio but also recognized ‘three unrelated miracles … – resurrection, healing a blind man,
and an exorcism – are bound together in a coherent composition by the perspective.’
Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco,
Caravaggio (Yale University Press, 2011), 184.
16 ASV.Inquisitori 47. De Quadri più degni, che esistono nelle Chiese, Scole, ed altri
Luoghi Pubblici della Città e dell’Isole cironvicine consegnati ad assispettivi superiori di essi
luoghi in ord.e al Decretto dell’Eccelso Consiglio di X: 20 April 1773
In Venezia

Disposte per ordine di Sestiere

Nela Scola di S. Marco

Trè quadri di Giac.o Tintoretto, che sono nella stanza grande del secondo Piano
698 Ch’ien

In the Scuola of San Marco

Three paintings by Giacomo Tintoretto that are in the large room on the
second floor. The first represents the finding of the Body of St. Mark
that was on top of a Carpet

However, a quick iconographic perusal of Marcian imagery tells us the body

lying on the carpet cannot be St. Mark. Even in strong foreshortening, the
figure is clearly clean-shaven, unbearded. Both in images inside and outside
the Scuola Grande di San Marco St. Mark wears a brown beard throughout
Venetian imagery in sixteenth-century paintings such as Titian’s St. Mark
Enthroned (1510–11) and in the medieval mosaics at the Basilica San Marco.
The desire to fix the Brera painting to a single subject persists even now.
The Pinacoteca di Brera’s website currently titles its painting Discovery of the
Body of Saint Mark and presents it to the public as a straightforward narra-
tive painting.17 The museum’s language of the momentary, ‘This painting
shows the moment when …’ demonstrates the effort to accommodate single
moment istoria expectation. However, as the museum’s identification of the
body lying on the carpet as St. Mark’s holy body cannot be supported by the
visual evidence. The museum acknowledges other moments of the painting
only as additions ‘to the miraculous tone of the episode.’ The website refers to
the painting as ‘theatrical,’ as if a play were being performed. A performance
with so many different episodes, however, is more like a three ring circus than
a coherent linear narrative play.

Il pino’ rapp’uta [primo rappresenta] quando fù levato il Corpo di S. Marco che stà sopra u
n Tapeto

Il secondo ha il S. che libera un Saracino in una tempesta di Mare

Il terzo contiene il Miracolo del S. Med.mo che libera un servo fatto Martirezrare dal suo
Padrone
Il Quadro coll’appariccione dell’Evangelista, e nobilsimi ritratti, opera di Domenico Tintoretto
figliuolo di Giacomo

Dalle parti dell’Altare alcuni comparti con la traslacione del corpo del Santo pitture
dell’istesso Domenico
17 ‘This painting shows the moment when, as the Venetians are busy removing corpses
from tombs in their search for Saint Mark’s body, the saint appears to them and impe-
riously commands them to stop because his body has already been removed from the
tomb at the end of the room and is lying at their feet.’ “Discovery of the Body of Saint
Mark.” Pinacotecabrera.org https://pinacotecabrera.org/en/collezione-online/opere/the
-finding-of-the-body-of-saint-mark/ (accessed Nov. 18, 2018).
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 699

There are other reasons to avoid pinning a single narrative episode from
St. Mark’s hagiography onto the Brera canvas. Because each episode proposed –
finding, stealing, translating – has a canvas in the Scuola Grande di San Marco
cycle, the Brera painting cannot be any of the above episodes. The initial sei-
zure of the body by the Alexandrian Christians is the subject of Tintoretto’s
Stealing of the Body delivered alongside the Brera canvas. Domenico Tintoretto,
son of Jacopo, later provided a painting of the translatio, the movement of St.
Mark’s body from Egypt to Venice.18 It is highly unlikely that any episode from
a saint’s hagiography would have been duplicated in a single painting cycle.
The same implausibility of duplication negates assigning inventio to the Brera
painting for the miraculous reappearance of St. Mark’s body inside a column
at the Basilica San Marco was later painted by Domenico Tintoretto for the
Scuola Grande di San Marco.19
We should take note of the divergent approaches by Venetian and Central
Italian writers. The Florentine efforts to limit the Miracles of St. Mark to a single
narrative evidence a desire that paintings should follow the constraints of lin-
ear time and space whereas the Venetian ekphrasis permits multiplicity, but
writers on both sides specifically mention Tintoretto’s use of pictorial space.
Vasari, Boschini, and Ridolfi specifically mention the perspective Tintoretto
employed in the Miracles of St. Mark and two of them describe its extraordi-
nary depth ending in golden orthogonals emanating from the floor tomb as
‘bella.’20 Drawing attention to the technical achievement echoes Albertian
values and highlights the unified pictorial space perspective creates. Italian
one point perspective puts everything within its bounds into a single moment
in the time space continuum. But Venetian confraternity narrative painting
had rarely concerned itself with the restrictions of the time-space continuum.
The unifying power of spatial illusion connects actions that would otherwise
not relate to one another. In the perspectival embrace viewers join in scenes
already gathered into a whole and become part of an imagined togetherness
through the spatial recession feigned on a flat canvas.

18 Domenico Tintoretto, Translatio, oil on canvas, Ospedale Civile, Venice.

19 Domenico Tintoretto, Inventio [Apparition of the Relics], oil on canvas, Ospedale Civile,
Venice.
20 Borghini does not mention perspective, but does discuss disegno. ‘[Tintoretto] Costui
essendo molto inchinato da natura al disegno,’ Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo in cui della pit-
tura, e della scultura si savella, de’ piu illustri Pittori, e Scultori, e delle piu famose opere loro
si fa mentione; e le cose principali appartenenti à dette arti s’integnano. (Florence: Giorgio
Marescotti, 1584), 551.
700 Ch’ien

Venetian narrative painting, as I have mentioned above, habitually referred

to more than one place and one time simultaneously through use of the poly-
topic mode. This practice enabled images to refer to Venice and frequently spe-
cific locations within the city that viewers could identify from their personal
pathways through the city. In Carpaccio’s Sant’Orsola cycle, the princess saint’s
legend plays out amidst canals and the multi-colored stonewalls particular
to Venice. Crowds attired in contemporary Venetian garb populate historical
myth. Tintoretto’s paintings diverged from the Bellini and Carpaccio genera-
tion of minute figures and intensely detailed description in favor of larger
figures and clearly miraculous istoria action, but nevertheless maintained the
Venetian practice of referring to the urban terrain.
The Stealing of the Body delivered alongside the Miracles of St. Mark per-
haps most clearly demonstrates how contemporary Venetian terrain could
become a part of St. Mark’s historical legend. Relating the rescue of St. Mark’s
body from the pagan funeral pyre by a small group of Christians and a camel
underneath a miraculously stormy orange sky interrupted by jagged white lead
brushstrokes of lightning and rain, the Stealing of the Body places the episode
that took place in Alexandria in a piazza closed by an ecclesiastical structure
and bracketed by a classical arched loggia. A group of three men carrying the
body of St. Mark progress down the length of a piazza flanked by a two-story
loggia resembling the procuratorie offices that can be found on the Piazza San
Marco. As they move towards the picture plane, they leave behind the pagan
funeral pyre in front of an ecclesiastical structure.
Architectural similarity to the Piazza San Marco aides the transfer of an
Alexandrian story to a Venetian setting visually guarantees the future destiny
of St. Mark’s final resting place in Venice. The pavement matches the square
delineations of the Piazza San Marco as pictured in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 1500
meticulous woodcut view of the city. The loggia follows Jacopo Sansovino’s
mid-century renovation plans for the Piazza San Marco.21 Finally, the struc-
ture at the end of the piazza behind St. Mark’s funeral pyre has been connected
to the church of San Geminiano, which stood opposite the Basilica San Marco
before the Napoleonic conquest.22 To turn the first journey of St. Mark’s body
from the pagan funeral pyre into the translatio journey of St. Mark’s body
to the Basilica San Marco, Tintoretto directed the movement along the steep

21 Tintoretto’s two story procuratorie buildings in the Stealing comply with Sansovino’s orig-
inal plan that was adjusted after his death by Scamozzi. Fenlon, The Piazza San Marco,
66. Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 15.
22 Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, 85–88.
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 701

perspectival push towards the picture plane, its position opposite San
Geminiano at the far end of the piazza turns into the Basilica San Marco. In
one swift pictorial move, the painting assures Venice’s future possession of
the saint just beyond the picture plane. Facing San Geminiano implies that
beyond the picture plane stands the Basilica San Marco, future resting place
of St. Mark’s relics.
Despite its rather non-Alexandrian looking setting and Deposition-style
figural group, the story communicated its subject clearly to Venetians who
knew the history of their relics, though the painting was often mistaken for
the subsequent translatio, the movement of St. Mark’s relics from Alexandria
to Venice. Vasari, apparently unfamiliar with Marcian legend, stuck to descrip-
tion: ‘In the third is a storm of rain, with the dead body of another of S. Mark’s
votaries, and his soul ascending into Heaven; and there, also, is a composition
of passing good figures.’23
Tintoretto’s favorable biographer, Ridolfi misinterpreted the painting as the
translatio when he assumes the men carrying the body of the saint are the mer-
chants moving towards their boat. Nevertheless, he describes a storm of ‘mys-
terious air’ and ‘ruinous rain’ the Alexandrians, ‘blurry’ from the ‘fragrance;’
traditionally associated with a saint’s incorruptible body:

Nel secondo è portato il corpo del Santo da Mercatanti detti alle nave; e di
lontano scorgesi l’aria tenebrosa, con fulmini cadenti misti con rovinosa
pioggia e lo spirito di San Marco, che preso forma di nube le precorre il
camino; da che spaventati gli Alessandrini, mossi dalla fragranza sparsa
per impedirlo, si fuggono ne’ porticali vicini …24

In the second, the body of the saint is carried by merchants to the boat
(nave); and not far you catch sight of the mysterious air, with mixed fall-
ing lightning strikes, with a ruinous rain and the spirit of Saint Mark, who
absorbed in the form of clouds moves like a chimney; from the alarm the

23 Vasari was unable to identify the body as that of St. Mark. ‘In the third is a storm of rain,
with the dead body of another of S. Mark’s votaries, and his soul ascending into Heaven;
and there, also, is a composition of passing good figures.’ Vasari, Lives of the Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects, 513.
24 ‘In the second, the body of the saint is carried by merchants to the boat (nave); and not far
you catch sight of the mysterious air, with mixed falling lightning strikes, with a ruinous
rain and the spirit of Saint Mark, who absorbed in the form of clouds moves like a chim-
ney; from the alarm the Alexandrians, blurry from the diffuse fragrance hindering them,
they flee to the nearby portico….’ Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, ovvero le vite degli illustri
pittori veneti e dello stato, 23.
702 Ch’ien

Alexandrians, blurry from the diffuse fragrance hindering them, they flee
to the nearby portico….

Even though Ridolfi would like to give Tintoretto artistic credit, he finds no way
to reconcile the multiplicity of subject with the constraints of ekphrasis within
the art critic’s text. The written response’s vacillation between the first-century
Stealing of the Body and the ninth-century translatio speaks to Tintoretto’s suc-
cessful iconographic slippage, a frequent practice of his.25
In asking the viewer to see more than one story at a time and connecting
the painting’s space to the viewer’s the Miracles of St. Mark operates similarly
to the Stealing of the Body. The Stealing of the Body seals the image of Piazza
San Marco onto the first-century Alexandrian story. The painting threatens the
heavy body of St. Mark will fall imminently out of the painting into the Scuola
Grande di San Marco’s sala capitolare. The Miracles of St. Mark employs the
same steeply raked perspective to add dramatic tension.26 The Brera painting
implies motion from the depth of the loggia where the floor tomb opens to the
foreground where St. Mark’s hand gestures and once again Tintoretto has given
the viewer a figure threatening to fall outside the painting into the confrater-
nity’s chapter general room.
Like the Piazza San Marco in the Stealing of the Body, the Sala capitolare
becomes part of St. Mark’s legend in the Miracles of St. Mark. The Scuola
Grande di San Marco’s sala capitolare sat above the ground floor looking out
onto the Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo with windows on two sides of the long
room. Tintoretto’s istorie filled the walls torno a torno, side by side around the
room. Opposite windows that faced onto the campo outside a small raised
platform presents an altar area for masses performed in the confraternity’s
sala capitolare. Two parapets supporting columns mark the platform area as
separate from the rest of the chapter room. They frame an altar on the dais
spanning the width of the room covered by a barrel vault with stone trans-
verse arches. The shape of this vault in the sacred area of the confraternity’s
meeting room where the membership at large gathered for masses repeats in
Tintoretto’s Brera Miracles of St. Mark. Covering the rest of the sala capitolare

25 Frederick Ilchman collects examples of Tintoretto’s tweaking of ‘traditional iconography’

including the San Rocco Baptism of Christ and Last Supper, attempts to force the viewer
to attend to the painting. In a stable painting tradition such as Venice’s, ‘viewing habits
may become complacent,’ and thus Tintoretto ‘ceaselessly attempted to find new ways to
tell the stories more effectively.’ Frederick Ilchman, “Tintoretto as a Painter of Religious
Narrative,” in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir, 2008.
26 See Hall on theatricality in Chapter 7: Jacopo Tintoretto: Sacred Narrative and Theater.
Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 173–198.
FINDING, STEALING, TRANSLATING: TINTORETTO ’ S BRERA ISTORIA 703

beyond the altar area is a typical ornate gilded flat ceiling featuring carvings of
St. Mark.
St. Mark’s hagiography spills into the confraternity’s meetinghouse. His
miraculous afterlife takes place in a continuity of spaces melding holy his-
tory with present tense Venetian life. In Tintoretto’s paintings, the stories of St.
Mark end at the Scuola Grande di San Marco, an institution that understood
itself as a near-equivalent to the Basilica San Marco where the state housed its
patron saint and conducted its most important ritual. Far more than a single
story, the painting absorbs multiple miraculous actions in a space that is at
once both elsewhere and Venice.
While ekphrasis frequently struggled to accommodate polytopos, simul-
taneous multiplicity in paintings, some texts do imply equivalence between
the two buildings dedicated to St. Mark. The primary Venetian source on St.
Mark’s life, the Vita di San Marco (1610) written by Giovanni Stringa takes as its
mission reiteration of the Venetian position that St. Mark is a Venetian saint
whose ardent desire is to have his relics remain in Venice, city of his especial
protection.27 After each description of a hagiographic episode, Stringa notes
where the reader can go to see representations of that event in Venice. For
Stringa, the Scuola Grande di San Marco’s pictorial program carries the same
institutional heft as that of the Basilica San Marco. Stringa’s Vita di San Marco
reads halfway between a standard hagiography and a laudatory guidebook to
Venice featuring art works instead of relics as pilgrimage destinations. By cre-
ating an equivalence between the Basilica San Marco, an institutional govern-
mental site in possession of the saint’s body, and the Scuola Grande di San
Marco, a non-governmental lay confraternity in possession of a painting cycle,
Stringa articulates the reality of the painted image. In art, St. Mark can appear
in Venice and in the confraternity’s sala capitolare, itself mirrored ghostly in
the stone barrel vault of the Miracles of St. Mark.
Stringa discusses art, but does not engage in ekphrasis. His Vita di San Marco
sidesteps description in favor of hagiography. The ekphrasis and art theory of
the sixteenth century faltered in its reception of complicated artworks that
employed a visual mode combining times and places instead of the singular
moment of Albertian istoria. The rotating list of subjects attached to the paint-
ing testifies to the painting’s availability to multiple subjects rather than an
iconographic failure. In the pretense of a single subject, written accounts in

27 Giovanni Stringa, Vita Di S. Marco Evangelista Protettore … Della … Repubblica Di

Venetia … Con Una Breve Descrittione Della Chiesa [Di S. Marco] … In Venetia, per Francesco
Rampazetto (Venezia, 1610). Biblioteca Marciana.
704 Ch’ien

the sixteenth century diverge from a familiar visual mode of multiplicity that
harkened backwards to nonlinear understandings of time and place.

Selective Bibliography

Alpers Svetlana. “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives.” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, no. 3–4 (1960): 190–215.
Borghini Raffaello. Il Riposo in cui della pittura e della scultura si savella, de’ piu illus-
tri pittori, e scultori, e delle piu famose opere loro si fa mentione; e le cose principali
appartenenti à dette arti s’integnano. Fiorenza: Giorgio Marescotti, 1584.
Boschini Marco. La carta del navegar pitoresco dialogo. Venezia: Per li Baba, 1690.
Boschini Marco. Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana; seconda impressione con nove
aggiunte. Compendiosa informazione di Marco Boschini, non solo delle pitture pub-
liche di VENEZIA: ma dell’Isole ancora circonvincine. Venezia: Francesco Nicolini,
1674.
Ch’ien Letha. “Making Miracles at the Scuola Grande di San Marco from Bellini to
Tintoretto.” PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 2014.
Hall Marcia B. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco,
Caravaggio. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Ilchman Frederick. “Tintoretto as a Painter of Religious Narrative.” In Tintoretto, edited
by Miguel Falomir, 2008.
Krischel Roland. Jacopo Tintoretto, 1519–1594 (Köln: Könemann, 2000).
Lepschy Anna Laura. Tintoretto Observed: A Documentary Survey of Critical Reactions
from the 16th to the 20th Century. Ravenna: Longo, 1983.
Marinelli Sergio. “La costruzione dello spazio nelle opere di Jacopo Tintoretto.” Atti del
Convegno internazionale di studi tenutosi al Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte
di Milano, dall’11 al 15 ottobre del 1977/a cura di Marisa Dalai Emiliani., 1980, 319–30.
Paoletti Pietro, La Scuola grande di San Marco: lavoro premiato dal R. Istituto veneto
di scienze lettere, ed arti col premio Vanna Arrigoni degli Oddi (Venezia: Comune di
Venezia, 1929), 173–174.
Ridolfi Carlo. Le Maraviglie dell’arte: overo le vite de gl’illustri pittori veneti, e dello stato,
1648.
Stringa Giovanni. Vita Di S. Marco Evangelista Protettore … Della … Repubblica Di
Venetia … Con Una Breve Descrittione Della Chiesa [Di S. Marco] … In Venetia, per
Francesco Rampazetto (Venezia, 1610).
Vasari Giorgio. Le vite de’ piu eccelenti pittori, scultori, e architettori … di nuovo dal
medesimo riviste et ampliate, con I ritratti loro et con l’aggiunta delle vite de’vivi e
de’morti dall’anno insino al 1567. Florence: I Giunti, 1568.
 part 5
Nature, Art, Ekphrasis

∵
 Chapter 17

Reveries of the Source

Christopher P. Heuer

Albrecht Dürer’s Deluge haunts as a work out of time [Fig. 17.1].1 The sheet’s
washy coloration bespeaks, on the one hand, mid-twentieth-century abstract
painting. Its written confessional on blank rag2 paper – wherein Dürer
describes a nightmare and his bodily reaction to it – seems an inchoate docu-
ment of interiority, long before Freud or Proust. The astonishing watercolor,
a reverse mushroom cloud,3 pairs a catastrophic vision with an expository
text. It describes a nocturnal vision the artist experienced between June 7–8,
1525. In it, an inundated space of hillocks specked with trees and houses is
pummeled by a colossal column of water. Below, nine ink lines and a sig-
nature detail the flood’s speed and scale relative to the trembling artist at
home: ‘I painted the above as I had seen it’. Dürer inscribes. Heinrich Wölfflin,
entranced by the world-ending grimness of the paper in 1905, deemed it
simply ‘ein Stück Apokalypse’.4
The sheet has long dazzled as an art-historical ‘source’.5 It promises direct
access to Dürer’s thinking, an autograph caption, a primal message from the
hand of a maker. It stabilizes, signs, and even temporalizes – dates – the artistic
message it transmits to history.6 And to do so it mobilizes, as Caroline Fowler
eloquently points out, the paper medium’s burgeoning affinity with the aes-
thetic of the archive, to a then-developing rhetoric of bureaucratic legitimacy.7

1 Winkler F., Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, 4 vols. (Berlin: 1936–39), no. 944; Strauss W., The
Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, 6 vols. (New York: 1974), no. 1525/4; Poeschke J., “Dürers
‘Traumgesicht’”, in Hiestand R. (ed.), Traum und Träumen: Inhalt/Darstellung/Funktionen
(Dusseldorf: 1994) 187–206; Böhne H., “Albrecht Dürers Traumgesicht”, in: Härle G. (ed.):
Grenzüberschreitungen. Friedenspädagogik, Geschlechter-Diskurs, Literatur-Sprache-Didaktik.
Festschrift für Wolfgang Popp (Essen: 1995) 17–35.
2 Schütz K. (ed.), Albrecht Dürer im Kunsthistorischen Museum (Vienna: 1994) 99.
3 Smith J.C., “Dürer’s Losses and the Dilemmas of Being”, in Tatlock L. (ed.), Enduring Loss in
Early Modern Germany (Leiden: 2010) 80.
4 Wölfflin H., Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers (Munich: 1905) 15.
5 Fehl P., “Dürer’s Literal Presence in his Pictures”, in Winner M. (ed.), Der Künstler über sich in
seinem Werk (Weinheim: 1992) 191–244.
6 Wood C.S., “Source and Trace”, Res 63/64 (2013) 5–19.
7 Fowler C.O., The Art of Paper (New Haven: 2019) 4–7.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

708 Heuer

Figure 17.1 Albrecht Dürer, Deluge, 1525. Wash, pigment, and ink on paper
Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum
Reveries of the Source 709

Yet as early as the nineteenth century, when art history was sorting out the
very grounds by which its discipline could moor cultural performances to con-
text (and when the Dream sheet was rediscovered8) the idea of Durer’s writings
as ‘sources’ were vexed. Alois Riegl’s curious teacher Mortiz Thausing, direc-
tor of the Albertina, all but conceded that the study of Dürer’s words left ‘the
philologist, the layperson, and the Geschichtsforscher’ perennially unsatisfied.9
Editing a volume of art historical Quellenschriften published in 1872, Thausing
admitted frustration that undiluted ‘facts’ about Dürer, sought in his manu-
scripts and books, would always elude.
But dreams – and indeed, the reporting of dreams – were understood very
differently in Dürer’s decades than in ours.10 In the sixteenth century, rather
than taken as products of the self, visions were understood as material mes-
sages from above, from without.11 They were connections to the divine – and
the diabolical. There is no shortage of work on this truism in an early modern
context; that psychoanalysis (and Dürer’s art history) shared a cradle in late
nineteenth century Vienna sustains interest in, if not the artist’s subconscious,
his art’s probing of internality.12 It is now a commonplace that Dürer’s has long
been a prominent – perhaps, the prominent – voice in the story of Northern
Renaissance art’s selfhood and its explication. But, as Koerner brilliantly
exposed so many years ago, this selfhood is conflicted, productively so. Dürer’s
writings offer a unique Quelle in relation to form, self-mediated through print’s
replicative technology. But is selfhood simply a repository of control? Thausing
saw Dürer’s 1525 description of his nightmare as an aberration, a fleeting
departure from an otherwise-placid self.13 What follows here, however, will
look away from older concerns with past mastery, with subjectivity, to query
the sheet’s own understanding of the ‘source’ itself as a catastrophe.

…
8 Schütz K., Kunsthistorischen Museum 99–101.
9 Thausing M., Dürers Briefe, Tagebücher und Reime, Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte
und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 3 (Vienna: 1872) VIII.
10 On this, see most recently: Klemm T. Bildpsyschologie: Wahrnehmung und Korper in
Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin: 2013) 209–246.
11 Recent overviews of the vast literature: Schmidt P. – Weber G. (eds.), Traum und Res Publica:
Traumkulturen und Deutungen sozialer Wirklichkeit im Europa von Renaissance und Barok
(Berlin: 2008); Buck S. (ed.), Michelangelo’s Dream (London: 2010); Kaizer J., “Leonardo’s
Prophecy: Towards a Visual Culture of Dreaming in the Renaissance”, in Borgo F. (ed.),
Leonardo e gli altri (Venice: 2019) 241–261.
12 See, for example, the essays by Bal and Holly in Bubenik A. (ed.), The Persistence of
Melancholia in Arts and Culture (New York: 2019).
13 Thausing M., Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst (Leipzig: 1876) II, 473.
710 Heuer

Figure 17.2 Mortiz von Thausing, Albrecht Dürers Briefe (1872), title page
Reveries of the Source 711

Figure 17.3 Augustin Anton Pfaundler, Traumgesicht, (after Dürer), 1811

Bamberg: Staatsbibliothek

The original Dürer watercolor occupies the upper section of a 43.7 × 30.1
cm sheet of watermarked paper. It is pasted down to folio F of the so-called
‘Kunstbuch’, an anonymous grouping of drawings and prints bound in leather
around 1560, possibly assembled by Dürer’s pupil Hans Döring. The album’s
first mention is in 1596, from an inventory of the collection of Ferdinand II in
Tyrol; it moved from Ambras to the imperial collection in Vienna in the 1820s.
The upper part of the sheet – the watercolor and inscription – was loosely
copied in 1821 [Fig. 17.3] by the Tirolean painter Augustin Pfaundler, who actu-
ally may have owned the volume at one time, ‘I tried to render the color of the
712 Heuer

original’ wrote Pfaundler to a friend the same year.14 The text is meticulously
transcribed but shrunk, spaced and broken differently. The large blankness
below Dürer’s original now gone.
The original Vienna assemblage where the Deluge resides houses thirteen
other drawings, and several dozen engravings and etchings. In the majority of
these Dürer poses watercolor as tint, with ink lines carefully marking contour,
delimiting color fields sharply from one another. In some designs traces of a
straight-edge is present. The later works are trimmed, but, curiously, not the
Deluge. Adjacent pages – a chandelier design dated to 1513, for example15 –
deploy watercolor and pen. But the Deluge is, fittingly enough for a preternatu-
ral vision dealing with water, fully aqueous.16 Such a wash method does not
delimit inside from outside, or even figure from ground. When first catalogued
by a disegno-minded French connoisseur in 1822, the drawing was dismissed as
‘a poor performance, lacking precision’.17
As much as the sheet seems a closed announcement, the open space beneath
the design suggests an unfinished state, almost a missive awaiting reply (The
fold right below the design cannot be dated to Dürer’s moment, but the artist,
as Thausing first pointed out, was an avid letter-writer.) The text reads like this:

In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after

Whitsuntide, I saw this vision [gesicht] in my sleep, and saw how many
great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles
away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing
that it drowned the entire countryside. I was so greatly shocked at this
that I awoke before the cloudburst. And the ensuing downpour was huge.
Some of the waters fell some distance away and some close by. And they
came from such a height that they seemed to fall at an equally slow pace.
But the very first water that hit the ground so suddenly had fallen at such
velocity, and was accompanied by wind and roaring so frightening, that
when I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long

14 Anton August von Pfaundler (1757–1822) studied geometry and perspective in Innsbruck,
and several pastels by his hand survive. See Süd-Deutsche Miscellen für Leben, Literatur
und Kunst 61 (31. Juli 1811) 247; Lemmen J. von, Tirolisches Künstler-Lexikon (Innsbruck:
1830) 177–179. On cognate copies from the Vienna book, many now lost, see Winkler F.,
“Dürerstudien III”, Jahrbuch Der Preuszischen Kunstsammlungen 53 (1932) 68–89, esp.
76–77.
15 Winkler, Die Zeichnungen, no. 709.
16 Parshall P., “Albrecht Dürer’s Gedenckbuch and the Rain of Crosses”, Word and Image 22.3
(2006) 206.
17 Ephrussi C., Albrecht Dürer et ses dessins (Paris: 1882) 345.
Reveries of the Source 713

time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it.
May the Lord turn all things to the best.18

The artist offers quantification of space in relative terms: ‘about four miles away
from me’, ‘distant and close by’. Dürer reveals that he does not draw the dream
vision immediately after experiencing it; he paints it only when he rises for
the day. He stores up the vision, keeps it within, ever the entrepreneur. This is
an enfolding of word and image, or more specifically, script and image; Dürer,
by this time an elderly man, knew well how the authority of the signed docu-
ment in manuscript signaled a different kind of presence than the trademark
in print, and conditioned a different relation to bodies and property. Such a
nexus of paper and violence was not new. After winning a court case against
piraters in Venice, in 1511, Dürer had threatened forgers of his works in a quiet
colophon, that used a similarly lack, downward-thrusting design [Fig. 17.4] to
promise bodily harm to his plagiarists.19
In the summer of 1525 Dürer was 54 years old, living in Nuremberg, at his
large house on the Zisselgasse. He was listed in registers as one of the city’s
hundred richest citizens.20 Reconfigurations of ‘place’ were very much on his
mind: he had just been commissioned to decorate the Nuremberg town hall,
and had made a trip to the Netherlands between 1520–1521 (the paper of the
Vienna sheet seems to be on reams acquired there).21 While in Zeeland Dürer
actually witnessed an actual flood near Arnemuiden: ‘We went by a sunken
place’, he recorded in his diary, ‘where we saw the tops of the roofs standing
up above the water’,22 It is a cognate curiosity about, and distance on, aberrant

18 Winkler, Die Zeichnungen, no. 944: ‘Im 1525 Jor nach dem pfinxstag zwischen dem
Mitwoch und pfintzdag in der nacht im schlaff hab ich dis gesicht gesehen wy fill großer
wassern vom himmell fillen Und das erst traff das erthrich ungefehr 4 meill fan mir mit
einer solchen grausamkeitt mit einem ubergroßem raüschn und zersprützn und ertrenck-
ett das gantz lant In solchem erschrack ich so gar schwerlich das ich doran erwachett e
dan dy andern wasser filn Und dy wasser dy do filn dy warn fast gros und der fill ettliche
weit etliche neher und sy kamen so hoch herab das sy im gedancken gleich langsam filn.
aber do das erst wasser das das ertrich traff schir herbey kam do fill es mit einer solchen
geschwindigkeit wynt und braüsen das und ich also erschrack do ich erwacht das mir all
mein leichnam zittrete und lang nit recht zu mir selbs kam Aber do ich am morgen auff
stund molet ich hy oben wy ichs gesehen het.Got wende alle ding zum besten’.
19 Pon L., “Prints and Privileges: Regulating the Image in 16th-Century Italy”, Harvard
University Art Museums Bulletin 6.2 (1998) 40–60.
20 Mende M., Albrecht Dürer. Ein Künstler in seiner Stadt (Nüremberg: 2000) 17.
21 Winkler, Die Zeichnungen IV, 104.
22 Rupprich H., Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass (Berlin: 1956–1969) I, 163.
714 Heuer

Figure 17.4 Albrecht Dürer, colophon from The Large Passion, 1511
Chicago: Art Institute
Reveries of the Source 715

events and things that conventionally explains the Vienna Deluge.23 Yet in
the sheet coherence is scrambled; the seeming mismatch between the washy
ambiguity of the upper register’s space, and the relative precision of Dürer’s
written estimation of the flood waters is vexing. The image, as one writer puts
it, ‘discourages iconography’.24
Perhaps, it is unsurprising that Erwin Panofsky dispensed with the piece in
the opening pages of in his unmatched 1943 Dürer monograph (first delivered
as lectures in Evanston in 1938.) The ‘American’ Panofsky resorted to a neat
dialectic between imagined and true to explain the Vienna sheet, again within
the artist’s own subjectivity:

Perhaps there is no more characteristic manifestation of Dürer’s mental-

ity than a watercolor drawing in which he tried to record a nightmarish
dream […]. Even in the grip of a nightmare Dürer could not help observ-
ing the exact number of miles which seemed to separate him from the
imaginary event, and to draw logical conclusions from the apparent
speed of the falling waters to the distance from whence they came.25

Panofsky seized upon Dürer’s detailing of measure to peg the artist as a kind
of pre-scientist conquering the fearsome imaginary. At the time of the lec-
tures, Panofsky himself was an exile from a Europe plunging towards its own
catastrophe; he redeemed Dürer’s nightmare as a cool reckoning of distance.
For Panofsky, Dürer cleanly split the realms of vision and quantity in his self-
referential description which, like his prints, would always remain somewhat
indeterminate with regard to recipient: ‘[…] Dürer’s imagination seethed with
the phantasmagorias of the apocalypse’, Panofsky wrote, ‘[but] he strove to
rival the Italians in female nudes as gracefully sensuous and well-proportioned
as he could possibly make them […]’.26 But what made the Vienna sheet most
troubling for Panofsky was its coupling of quantitative measurement with ale-
atory design. The watercolor’s value as a source – its explanation not just of the
vision, but of Dürer’s painting of the vision – actually frustrated attempts to
perspectivalize, to sharpen, a realm that its image literally left tenebrous. Dürer

23 Gandlemann C., “The Artist as ‘Traumarbeiter’: On Sketches of Dreams by Marcel Proust”,

Yale French Studies 82 (1994) 118–134, esp. 118–121.
24 With J., ‘Le réve du Dürer’ in Symboles de la Renaissance (Paris: 1976) 106.
25 Panofsky E., The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: 1943) 12–13; on the circum-
stances of the lectures’ preparation and the book’s wartime appearance, see xxvii–xliv of
the introduction to the 2005 reprint of the same.
26 Panofsky, Dürer 12.
716 Heuer

forges a union of contraries across the interval of sleep.27 But for Panofsky’s
Dürer, ‘logical conclusions’, straining, had to get the last word.

…
Dürer’s dream was influenced by a highly mediatized prediction of a worldly
deluge. This was to occur in February of 1524. It was based on a planetary con-
junction of stars in Pisces first described in an almanac by Johannes Stoffler
and Jacob Pflaum of 1499.28 The prediction was republished exuberantly.29 In
the wake of Luther in 1517, an astrologer named Luca Gaurico weaponized the
Pisces conjunction to side with the pope. Famous debates, largely in printed
pamphlets, began about whether these stars signaled a pro- or anti-church sign
from God. These politicized, with Luther in mind, the longstanding interest
in strange happenings as public visual phenomena. Linked astrological books
featured covers which, like Dürer, described water hurtling down hillsides or
erupting straight from clouds.30 In Wenzel Faber’s earlier Practica (Leipzig,
ca. 1491/92), Saturn literally vomits onto the earth, and on the cover of one

27 I borrow this phrase from Lee W-Y., “Dream Visions of Transcendence in Chinese
Literature and Painting”, Asian Art 3.4 (1990) 58.
28 Warburg A., “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten” (1920), in
Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schritten. Studienausgabe I.2:487–558. The essay began life as
lectures in Hamburg during the final years of the First World War. On the significance of
‘paper’ sources in both realms of crisis, see Newman J.O., “Luther’s Birthday: Aby Warburg,
Albrecht Dürer, and Early Modern Media in the Age of War”, Daphnis:. Zeitschrift für
Mittlere Deutsche Literatur 37 (2009) 79–110.
29 Almanach Nova (Ulm, J. Reger: 1499). On the larger publication history around the
1524 flood, see Talkenberger H., Sintflut: Prophétie und Zeitgeschehen in Texten und
Holzschnitten astrologischer Flugschriften 1488–1528 (Tiibingen: 1999), and the various
essays in Zambelli P. (ed.), Astrologi hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s
Time (Berlin: 1986), esp. Steinmetz M., “Johann Virdung von Haßfurt, sein Leben und
seine astrologischen Flugschriften”, 194–214. On the possibility of the 1524 prediction as a
quiet vector for trans-Mediterranean contact, see Pankenier D.W., “The Planetary Portent
of 1524 in China and Europe”, Journal of World History 20.3 (2009) 339–375.
30 Green J., Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change (Ann Arbor: 2012) 150:
Such predictions didn’t so much sow discord as respond to extant circumstances about
non-flood matters: ‘panic […] led to predictions’. See Schenk G., “Disastro, Catastrophe,
and Divine Judgment: Words, Concepts and Images for ‘Natural’ Threats to Social Order
in the Middle Ages and Renaissance”. in Spinks J. – Zika C. (eds.), Disaster, Death and the
Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700 (London: 2016) 45–67. More broadly,
the seventeenth century would mark a turning point in the interpretation of catastrophes
as natural phenomena rather than prophecies; see Koppenleitner V., Katastrophenbilder:
Das Vesuvasbruch 1631 in den Bildkünsten der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: 2018).
Reveries of the Source 717

of Heidelberg astrologer Johann Virdung’s many pamphlets, the sky opens,

drowning citizens of a town [Fig. 17.5].31 Such luridly-titled publications, on
the one hand, offered readers a bewildering miasma of competing viewpoints,
and, at the same time, associated the idea of forthcoming catastrophes with
pictorial acts.32 The press, in this context, did not just popularize, but also
became a surrogate, in material form, for the flood of natural doom which did
not, in February 1524, actually occur. The crisis was, as always, monetized by
the media. By 1500 there were more than 30 editions of Virdung’s pamphlet in
print.33
For there was a larger question about the flood prediction, about the role
played by visions in a confessionally-fractured Christian Europe: were weather
and strange earthly happenings readable as, well, sources?34 Could ekphras-
tic descriptions of seen things breed news? The idea of floods as justice was
older than Genesis: the Noah myth was based upon Babylonian legends of
Gilfgamesh. But in Reformation Europe the flood, its images of overflow and
disaster from above signaled excess and imbalance.35 Dürer likely would have
known of these discussions: his friend Willibald Pirckheimer had his horo-
scope cast in 1514 to try and see more about the future.36 Saturn was associated
with ooze and rot, and within the artist’s writing terms of overflow were com-
mon. The weeping of sores was pictorially related to floods and sin; Dürer had
illuminated a poem about syphilis by the Dutch physician and astrologer Dirck
Ulsenius in 1486 [Fig. 17.6]. Here, the artist set an unnamed sufferer within a
damp landscape beneath a zodiac. Fifty Latin lines surround him, narrating
the astrological origins of the malady, and how its cure had appeared to the
doctor two years prior, in a dream.37
That bodies – human or skyward – should ‘open’ metaphorically was very
much a concern in Dürer’s moment. It was self-described Protestants who
proved most vocal about the debate of what an impending flood might mean,

31 Virdung Hans., Practica deutsch Meister Hansen Virdung von Haßfurt, vff das Erschröcklich
Jare M.ccccc. vn[d] xxiiij. (Speyer, Nolt: 1523).
32 Trempler J., “Catastrophes and their Images: Event and Pictorial Act”, Res 63/64 (2013)
201–204; Crouzet D., “Millennial Eschatologies in Italy, Germany, and France: 1500–1533”,
Journal for Millennial Studies 1.2 (1999), pp. 1–8.
33 Kremer R.L., “Incunable Almanacs and Practica as Practical Knowledge Produced in
Trading Zones”, in Valleriani M. (ed.), The Structures of Practical Knowledge (Cham: 2017)
333–369.
34 Talkenberger, Sintflut 56–110; Barnes R., Astrology and Reformation (Oxford: 2015) 84–89.
35 Ludolphy I., “Luther und die Astrologie”, in: Astrologi hallicinati 101–107.
36 Pirckheimer W., Briefwechsel, ed. E. Reicke (Munich: 1940–1956) II, 362–373.
37 Massing J.M., “Dürer’s Dreams”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986)
241.
718 Heuer

Figure 17.5 Hans Virdung, Practica deutsch Meister Hansen Virdung von Haßfurt (Speyer,
1523), title page
Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek
 Reveries of the Source 719

Figure 17.6 Albrecht Dürer, The Syphilitic, in Theodoricus Ulsenius, Vaticinium in epidemicam scabiem
(1496)
Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek
720 Heuer

a hermeneutics of disaster reading. Implicit in these controversies was also a

debate between natural philosophy and what me might call Augustinian think-
ing, the question of interpretation; Protestants argued that the upcoming flood
could be read. Printed pamphlets accelerated the debates about the scale and
its contiguity with other kinds of natural disasters.38 The Marburg physician
Alexander Seitz, in his little Warning Concerning the Deluge, for example, pre-
dicted European-wide flooding and the immanent appearance of signs in the
heavens, all foretold by dreams.39 These politicized the longstanding interest
in strange happenings, chronicled in texts like Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus
Temporum (1474).
Luther and his followers put great stock in prophetic dreams. But the prob-
lem for reformers with portents was that their reading (as such) could look a
lot like astrology. Among Lutherans, positions were variable: aberrant natural
phenomena like monstrous births or comets could be interpreted in various
ways, or, alternatively, they were not to be interpreted at all.40 Luther frequently
turned predictions to his side: ‘fearful people are closer to their salvation than
those thoughtless, obstinate ones who neither fear nor take comfort in that day
[of the Lord]’.41 This was a move away from the idea that planets were respon-
sible for impending catastrophe; rather, catastrophe mattered most for what
its (threat) could do to turn people to a proper path.

…
Astrology, however, only goes so far to account for the Vienna Dürer’s explo-
sive structure. The watercolor, of course, is among the first artworks in his-
tory to image a self-experienced dream. Previous artists had described other’s
dreams: Jacob’s dream, the dream of Innocent III, the Dream of Scipio. But
Dürer locates the vision in his shaking, watery self, even as he reports on
the inundation of ‘the whole land’. This is not, of course, without precedent:
Leonardo took dream-based prophecy for granted. Dreams formed a category
of visual experience adjacent to, but different from, worldly observation.42 Via

38 Talkenberger, Sintflut 56–110.

39 Ein schoner tractat / darjnnen begriffen ist Die art vnnd vr- / sach des Traümes (Landshut:
Weissenburger: 1515). Also see Gantet C., Der Traum in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ansätze zu
einer kulturellen Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin: 2010) 103ff.
40 Methuen C., “Kepler’s Tübingen: Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics” (Ph.D. disserta-
tion, University of Edinburgh: 1995) 103–122.
41 Cited in Barnes, Astrology 120.
42 Kaizer, “Prophecy” 249–250.
Reveries of the Source 721

Pirckheimer Dürer may have come into contact with some ancient writings
on dreams, ideas that were actually changing in the sixteenth century. Crucial
was the rediscovery of Artimedorus’s Oneirokritikon (On the Interpretation of
Dreams) written in the second century AD. it was first printed (in Greek) by
Aldus in Venice in 1518, an edition which Pirckheimer likely owned.43 (Walter
Ryff’s German translation would not appear until 1540.) For Artemidorus, pro-
phetic dreams came from gods: ‘[…] they do not spring from the inner depths
of the individual’.44 Along with fascinating sections about visions of talking
animals, swimming, and war, the original Greek text had a section about earth-
quakes, clouds, winds, and floods. ‘Great tempestuous raynes are troubles, hurt
and dangers’.45 These were always bad portents, claimed Artimedorus.
Artemidorus’s book, as Foucault pointed out, is a ‘treatise about how to
interpret’.46 Dreams were a means by which the gods made contact with
humans. Dreams, that is, were a vehicle for communication, and always a
strangulated one. Numerous editions of the late medieval Somniale Danielis,
a kind of dream manual dedicated to, but not authored by, the Old Testament
prophet of its title, offered not just vernacular descriptions of dreams on
everything from hailstorms to fingernails to snakes, but also readings of those
dreams. Dürer, who had access to Pirckheimer’s library and purchased Greek
books for him in Venice, could have been familiar with both.
For Dürer talked about – and pictured – dream-states often, increasingly
presenting sleep as an environment of disquiet [Fig. 17.7]. In his manuscripts
he deploys variants on the term ‘trawm werg’. These have been translated as
various forms of ‘fantasy’ in the sense of grotesqueries, related to antique terms
like fantasia or invenzione, which have to do with creation via the mingling of

43 Artemidōrou Oneirokritikōn biblia pente. Peri enypniōn Synesiou hōs legousin] Artemidori
De somniorum interpretatione libri quinq[ue]. De insomniis, quod Synesii cuiusdam
nomine circu[m]fertur (Venice, Aldi et Andreae Soceri: 1518) (in Greek, even if title is in
Latin). Also see Pilz K., “W. Pirckheimers Kunstsammlung und Bibliothek”, in Glock B. –
Meidinger-Geise I. (eds.), Willibald Pirkheimer 1470/1970, Dokumente, Studien, Perspektiven
(Nuremberg: 1970) 93–110. In 1504 Pirckeimer claimed to own a copy of every book yet
printed in Greek.
44 Price S.R.F., “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artimedorus”, Past and Present 113
(1986) 17.
45 As in The iudgement, or exposition of dreames, written by Artimodorus, an auntientand
famous author, first in Greeke, then translated into Latin, after into French, and now into
English (London, Braddock: 1606) 64.
46 Foucault M., The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley (New York:
1986) 6. Italics in the original.
722 Heuer

Figure 17.7 Albrecht Dürer, The Despairing Ones, 1515, etching

Kiel: Kunsthalle
Reveries of the Source 723

parts.47 However, when the humanist Joachim Camerarius translated Dürer in

1534, he loosened the connection between Traumwerken and grotesques in the
ludic sense. In Camerarius’ Dürer, dream-works could be monsters, threats.48
Dürer frequently pairs thoughts on the cogitive capacities of dreams with wor-
ries about bad and good ‘comparison’ of unlike things:

Even in dissimilar things there is a great harmonious capability […].

I often see great and good things while asleep [im schlaff] which do not
occur to me when awake. However when I wake up the memory of them
is lost.49

Leonardo had sighed a similar lament: waking opened a break, a loss of com-
munication with the non-human rather than its return.50 In an essay of 1962,
Gaston Bachelard wrote about the constellation of water, dreams, and nar-
cissism, in effect embracing the idea of water as a recurring ‘mirror’ on the
self-as-source:

‘Images’ whose basis or matter is water do not have the same durabil-
ity and solidity as those yielded by earth, by crystals, metals, and pre-
cious stones. […] the material imagination of water is always in danger
[…] water symbolizes by means of the will to appear of the dreamer who
contemplates it.51

For Bachelard, literary images are different than visual images in that they are
‘energized’, they prompt ‘a gymnastics of the nervous system’. And in this con-
trast between reverie and a dream, a reverie is closer to a hallucination. As
Bachelard puts it: ‘In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To
be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being
relived all the more strongly because it is being written down’.

47 Ashcroft J., Dürer: A Documentary Biography (New Haven: 2017) 529 n. 9.

48 Massing, “Dreams” 240.
49 Rupprich, Nachlass II, 121: ‘Dÿ fergleichung eins gegen dem anderen dasz is schon […]’
and then, Rupprich, Nachlass II, 115: ‘Ach wÿ oft sichjch grosse kunst und gut ding jm
schloff, des gleichen mir wachent nit viir kumt. Aber sojch erwach, so verlewrt mirs dy
gedechtnus’.
50 Marinoni A (ed.), Il Codice Atlantico di Leonardo da Vinci nella Biblioteca Ambrosiana di
Milano, 12 vols., (Florence: 1975–1980), vol. v, fol. 393r. Also see Kaizer, “Prophecy” 242–248.
51 Bachelard G., Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. E. Farrell
(Dallas: 1994) 20.
724 Heuer

And Dürer, who wrote so much down, constantly returned to the language
of inspiration – of knowledge good or bad – as a pouring out from above, using
a watery vocabulary.52 In 1512, Dürer opined that the ‘well-practiced artist […]
pours out a sufficiency [er geust gnugsam herauß] from what he has garnered
over time’.53 And later, Dürer mused about how ‘a good painter is inwardly
teeming with figures, and were it possible that he might live forever, he would
always, from out of these inner ideas of which Plato writes, have new things
to pour forth in his works [albeg etwas news durch dy wreck aws zw gissen]’.54
This is indeed mimesis writ large: Dürer is invoking the Timaeus (we know that
Pirckheimer’s library contained a 1484 edition of Cicero’s Latin translation55).
It is hardly surprising, then, that in this language of dream-based gush, Dürer
goes on to speak of ‘verglichliche ding’ and ‘abgeschiedene ding’ – the compa-
rable and the separable thing in art. Since Plato’s mimesis presumes a space,
an interval, a κοσμος νοητος – between ‘inner ideas’ or sphere of ideas – and
their execution. And here Dürer, like Plato, is talking about beauty. Throughout
his works he described the beautiful as subsisting in Vergleichung – compari-
son, of unlike things. For Plato’s Renaissance interpreters like Marsilio Ficino,
comparison and harmony were vital categories for understanding all forms
which are themselves vested in measure.56 Panofsky once touted Ficino, in this
respect, as an early perspectivalist.57
But Dürer, whatever his vernacularized understanding of Plato might have
been, swerved somewhat. Comparison wrought difficulty. Vital for Plato was
the famed space between number and tone, and between form and matter, the
space between things that are compared.58 Plato’s ultimate interval is the
χώρα, the highly contested term, again, from the Timaeus – (48e4). Chora can
be translatable as the site (or non-site) where forms come to be between the
sensible and the intelligible. Plato explained chora, as Dürer would explain the
realm of creativity, using the language of dreams:

Chora […] is eternal and indestructible; [it] provides a position for every-
thing that comes to be […] and is so hard to believe in, we look at it as

52 The seminal source on this phenomenon remains Koerner J.L., “Albrecht Dürer:
A Sixteenth-Century Influenza”, in Bartrum G. (ed.), Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy
(London: 2002) 18–38.
53 Rupprich, Nachlass III, 296.
54 Rupprich, Nachlass II, 113.
55 Doorly P., “Dürer’s Melancolia I: Plato’s Abandoned Search for the Beautiful”, Art Bulletin
86.2 (2004) 255–276, esp. 257.
56 Wagner-Egelhaaf M., Die Melancholie der Literatur: Diskursgeschichte und Textfiguration
(Berlin: 2016) 42–61.
57 Panofsky E., Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, ed. D. Wuttke (Wiesbaden: 2001–2014) III, 459.
58 Brisson L., Le Même et l’autre dans la structure ontologique du Timée de Platon (Paris: 1974).
Reveries of the Source 725

in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity

be somewhere, in some place and occupying some space, and that that
which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn’t
exist at all.59

Chora, like a dream, is not simply ‘space’ understood as extension, but some-
thing prior to it; it ‘stands outside of Western ontology’.60 In fact in Greek,
chora originally designated territory beyond city walls. It usually meant a tract
of land between other entities – a piece of property, a landscape.61 Derrida
remained most associated with the notion for years (and he uses the word
espacement in his late texts, marking the preference for the interstitial as spa-
tial rather than temporal in terms of differénce). ‘Under the name of chôra’,
Derrida writes, ‘an irreducible spacing’ is opened up within Platonism: a ‘place
which would belong to neither the sensible nor intelligible, to neither becom-
ing, nor non-being nor being’.62
This, at its barest, is the interval between work and thought wherein
ekphrasis – an intense description of a visual phenomenon – pivots. Dürer’s
own ambit was awash in ekphrastic experimentation: Pirkheimer’s letters to
the artist are filled with literary accounts in the mode.63 Dürer, it seems, dou-
bles down on the idea of ekphrasis as both description and comparison in the
Deluge sheet; he offers a textual account of an image nearby, but insists (within
watercolor’s design) upon a sort of differénce between that narrative and his
art. Dürer aggressively returned to this language of creation, of personal
sourcing – of knowledge of the good or the bad – not just as an unyielding
flood, but as the often potentially dangerous site wherein that flood collides
with other Dingen. Ekphrasis collapses when its object is unsteady. Textual

59 Timaeus §52.
60 Mikuriya J.T., A History of Light (London: 2016) 44.
61 Sayre K., “The Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle”, in Reydams-Schils G.
(ed.), Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon (Notre Dame: 2003) 60–79; Vidler A., “Chora”, in
Cassin B. – Apter E. et al. (eds.) Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon
(Princeton: 2014) 131–135. ‘Interval’, meanwhile, is a word describing in-between states in
time, but, at least in English, the word’s etymology is vested in space; the Middle English
‘interval’ comes from Old French entrevalle, based on Latin intervallum ‘space between
ramparts, interval’, from inter- ‘between’ + vallum ‘rampart’. See OED ‘interval, n’.
62 Derrida J., “Comment ne pas parler”, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: 1987) 567, here
as “How to avoid speaking”, in Budick S. – Iser W. (eds.), Languages of the unsayable: the
play of negativity in literature and literary theory (New York: 1989) 4. On this, see Burchill L.,
“In-Between Spacing and the Chôra in Derrida”, in Oosterling H. – Plonowska E. (eds),
Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts. Politics (Lexington: 2011) 39–50.
63 Gast U., Willibald Pirckheimer in Neunhof (Ghent: 2018) 106–117.
726 Heuer

exposition of an image always carried with it a hint of violence itself, the vio-
lence of any interpretation.
Dürer had made his career in a Europe adjusting to new modes of economic
production. Particularly in the North Europe traversed by his prints, capital was
changing the idea of what ‘raw material’ was. Thus Dürer, ever the salesman,
does not just describe a flood in his elderly vision – he implies that descrip-
tion itself (like water) is something he can liquefy and transmit. And this is
precisely what Bachelard forgets in his reverence for hydrous consciousness:
in Dürer’s milieu, the ‘lack of solidity’ of value, truth, time, and the self under
capital is anything but liberatory.64
Within Dürer’s sheet, the seeming mismatch between the washy ambiguity
of the upper register’s space, and the relative precision of Dürer’s written esti-
mation of the flood waters imparts to the sheet its modern, dialectical charge
between, as it were, data and poetics. While watercolor had been used as a tint
for line drawings for centuries, its use in the ‘pure’ form was relatively new in
the early sixteenth century. Watercolor is a peculiar medium, both dry and wet.
In it, water functions as a carrier, a depositor of pigment attached to gum (Dürer
tended to use acacia gum, literally a product of trees).65 Once time has passed,
once the paper is dry, that carrier disappears. It is not, in fact, unlike the effects
of actual water on landscapes – like canyons, like cliffs: carved and imprinted
by ancient moistures which have long since moved away. Watercolor, unlike
other kinds of painted medium, depends upon transparency for effect; light
passes though the aqueous pigment and reflects off the paper – the whites
exist not just as ‘ground’, but as figure, as it were. This is paralleled in the motile
tension within the sheet between what is staying ‘up’ and what will fall down,
what will remain and what will disappear [Fig. 17.8]. Dürer had pioneered the
medium in his youth for images of watery landscape, made on the move to and
from Venice, which, again, rarely deployed underdrawing.66 Dürer combined
different layers in such paintings (the “wet-on-wet technique”), boldly altering
specific features before other of his marks had dried. Many such landscapes, as
Beate Böckem has argued, depict not so much sites as border regions, regional
transit-zones between Italy and Germany.67 They often comingle – as does the
Deluge sheet – multiple glimpses of interstitial weather, light, and damp.

64 I remain grateful to Amy Knight Powell for this reminder.

65 Leber H., “Die Drahtziehmühle: Bilderfindung und Aquarelltechnik bei Albrecht Dürer”,
in Träger J. (ed.), Kunst in Hauptwerken: von der Akropolis zu Goya (Regensberg 1988)
179–197.
66 Koschatzky W., Albrecht Dürer: Die Landshafts-Aquarelle (Vienna: 1971), no. 11.
67 Böckem B., “Der frühe Dürer und Italien: Italienerfahrung und Mobilitätsprozesse um
1500”, in Hess D. – Eser T. (eds.), Der frühe Dürer (Nuremberg: 2012) 52–64.
Reveries of the Source 727

Figure 17.8 Albrecht Dürer, Pond in the Woods, ca. 1497. Watercolor
London: British Museum

And this is not unimportant. The Vienna Deluge, too, is doubly liminal, and
not just in staging a vision zwischen day and night. In the inscription Dürer’s
words are notational: hectic, rushed, almost mimicking, in their assemblage,
the strange distance/space miasmas of the dream. They narrate an interval
of delay – the times between dreaming and waking, the unbalanced state
between rising and painting. The text offers commentary upon, and compari-
son with the watercolor above. Brown houses fade in and out of the line of
the horizon, overlap, collide, dissolve. The recession, if it can be called that, is
inconsistent, undulating, miasmic – it is, of course, the space of a dream. And
it confuses our idea of landscape as something exterior; its environment is a
reversal of the expected states of mental imagery ‘inside’ and natural imagery
‘out’. The landscape, unpeopled, is now internal. As such, this foments a differ-
ent mode of verity: Friederich Winkler, the master compiler of Dürer’s draw-
ings, invoked the vocabulary of Schelling, Nietzsche, and Freud, when he wrote
on the Deluge in 1938 (the same year as Panofsky), speaking of its ‘uncanny
truthfulness’ [unheimlichen Wahrhaftigkeit.]68

68 Winkler, Die Zeichnungen 104. On the watercolor as a symptom of illness, see

Federschmidt F., “Albrecht Dürers Krankheit und Leiden im Lichte der heutigen
Wissenschaft”, Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift 69 (1922) 1124.
728 Heuer

…
In the summer of 1525, Dürer was seeing a turgid treatise on perspective through
the press, it was a book which dealt with – among other subjects – twisted col-
umns and falling shapes [Fig. 17.9]. We know that the Unterweysssung had still
not appeared by autumn of that year; the astrologer Johann Schöner wrote
to Pirckheimer in late November 1525 to ask about the book’s publication,
and then again in January 1526.69 But Dürer was also continuing work on a
separate tract, the Four Books on Human Proportion, a treatise for which he
began making notes in Nuremberg as early as 1512.70 The latter appeared in
Nuremberg on 31 October 1528, several months after Dürer’s death, published
by his widow Agnes.
The proportion book deals with the quantification of bodies at rest and bod-
ies in motion. Towards the latter Dürer isolates his ‘words of difference’, six
verbs about bending illustrated by pairs of abstract strokes: ‘Bent at an angle,
Curved, Turned, Twined, Stretched, Shortened and Shifted [Fig. 17.10]’. These
are utterly unprecedented in the history of art. In one respect, the lines are
bravado fusers of Dürer’s pen stroke and the woodcut line, graphic remember-
ings of the author’s actual hand movement over the page, and over tiny dura-
tions in the past.71 [Fig. 17.10] But they are also strange emancipators of that
line, coagulating it as matter, and freeing it from normal referential duty. Dürer,
here at the outset of his tract’s section on immaterial movement, seems to be
rethinking the line’s informational role, suggesting that there may be more to
it than diagrammatic transparency.72 The lines – in a manner utterly differ-
ent than watercolor – are, again, not demarcating an inside from an outside.
Rather, Dürer is introducing the ineffable conditions of change from one linear
state to another – a to b – omitting the poles of those states. The disembodied
words inform, but are not limited by the application to particular material.73
Any tangible realization, in both cases, is posterior to the isolated statements.

69 Ashcroft, Biography 790.

70 Dürer Albrecht, Hierinn sind begriffen vier Bucher von menschlicher Proportion durch
Albrechten Dürer von Nurerberg […] (Nuremberg, Hieronymus Andreae: 1528). The most
attendant guide to the proportion book as both treatise and object is in Hinz B. (ed.),
Albrecht Dürer: Vier Bücher von menschlischer Proportion (Berlin: 2012).
71 Witte G., „Die Phänomenonalität der Linie – graphisch und graphemisch“, in Busch W. et
al. (eds.) Randgänge der Zeichnung (Munich: 2007) 29–54.
72 Cf. Krauss R., Line as Language: Six Artists Draw (Princeton: 1974) 31–32.
73 Dürer here parallels Richard Serra’s Verb List of 1967–19688, a handwritten set of infinitives
and phrases about interaction with material and the abstraction of language (‘to roll, to
crease, to fold, to bend, to chip, to tear’.). See Serra R., Writings, Interviews (Chicago: 1994)
3–4. Also see Lawrence Weiner’s 1970 Traces, a litany of fifty past participles, printed one
Reveries of the Source 729

Figure 17.9 Albrecht Dürer, Unterweyssung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1525), fol. H3r
730 Heuer

Figure 17.10 Albrecht Dürer, Vier Bücher der menschlicher Proportion (Nuremberg, 1528),
fols. V1v–V2r

Driven by woodcuts, the proportion treatise detailed spatial schema of men,

women, and children’s body types, in 26 different sets of examples. Spaces
between noses, toes, lips, and kneecaps were tracked down to the millimeter
in parts Dürer called Tielen. Across pages, these splayed out into a dizzying,
near-impenetrable morass of examples, each constructed around a single axis.
Dürer tabulated the relations of each set of body types in long columns, and
offered, page after page, a tattoo-like inscribing of numerals on doll-like nudes,
one after the other [Fig. 17.11]. Torsos were turned, arms grafted onto trunks,
heads encaged in grids of proportion, faces turned up, eyes cast down, necks
craned, backs skewed.
Numbers speckle the figures but line, line as trace and connector, as ink mark
and abstract sign, animates Dürer’s diagrams. This is as different as can be from
the Vienna sheet. Dürer speaks of different species of line: ‘d’gestreken linien’
and ‘Unrisslinenen’ and others, which permit ‘alterations’ between figures.74

to a page and bound, in Weiner L., Traces (Turin: 1970); and Kotz L., „Language between
Performance and Photography“, October 111 (2005) 3–21.
74 Dürer, Menschliche Proportion, fols. W2v–W3r.
Reveries of the Source 731

Figure 17.11 Albrecht Dürer, Vier Bücher der menschlicher Proportion (Nuremberg, 1528),
fol. B4r
732 Heuer

The blank printed space is used as a component of design; Dürer offers a way
to use ratios to permit scaling, a way to ‘shrink or broaden figures’.75 These all
derive, he writes, from the smallest mark an artist can make – a point, the clos-
est art can get to a sort of invisibility.76 And it is points connected by lines that
describe both geometric solids and human bodies in the tract. Dürer was inter-
ested in how multitudinous states inhere in, and can be wrung from, unitary
forms of matter. He thus offers a source book but, notoriously, a guarded one:
‘I do not put these things down for you to follow exactly’,77 he warns. This is of
a piece with Dürer’s completely contemporaneous thinking on distance and
measure so obsessively noted in the Vienna sheet.
For the question underlying (say) this proportion book and the Traumwerck
was the question of, quite literally, interiority, of a glimpse inside the human
body as a metaphor for subjective experience. Dürer was troubled by such
recounting of that experience. The image of the ‘inner man’ is something actu-
ally rife within Lutheran theology, something Luther places in dialectic with
the ‘outer man’. And Death (Tod) is the most interior of all things, the can-
celer of flood. Luther referred to this, in a sermon preached at Wittenberg in
April 1522, with words of shocking bluntness:

The summons of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another.
Everyone must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone. We can
shout into each other’s ears, but everyone must himself be prepared for
the time of death: I will not be with you then, nor you with me.78

Death, like dreams, is an interior conceit, something that, Lutheran or no, the
aging Dürer would have had on his mind in 1525. And water, indeed, plays no
small part in the artist’s melancholic recurrences: the side panel of an altar-
piece executed for a Cologne merchant around 1503–1504 reveals a Job (also
covered in sores) doused by his wife with fluid from a bucket [Fig. 17.12].
Traditionally dung, this matter is rendered by Dürer as dirty water, a rhyme
with the lake and the snowy mountains behind. The scene becomes one of

75 Dürer, Menschliches Proportion, fol. Q6v.

76 Which he connects to the point of an optical cone. See British Museum MS, vol IV, 132a,
and also Giessen J., Dürers Proportionslehre im Rahmen der allegemeinen Proportionsent-
wicklung (Bonn: 1930) 53–63.
77 Dürer, Vnderweysung der messing, fol G4r.
78 Luther, Wittenberger Predigten 1 (Wittenberg, 9 March 1522), in Martin Luthers Werke
(Weimar: 1883–1929) WA 10/3, 1,7–2.2: D: ‘Wir seindt allsampt zu dem tod gefodert und
wirt keyner für den andern sterben, Sonder ein yglicher in eygner person für sich mit dem
todt kempffen. In die oren künden wir woll schreyen, Aber ein yeglicher muß für sich
selber geschickt sein in der zeyt des todts: ich würd denn nit bey dir sein noch du bey mir’.
Reveries of the Source 733

Figure 17.12 Albrecht Dürer, Job and His Wife on the Dunghill, c. 1504. Oil on
panel
Frankfurt/Main: Städel
734 Heuer

damp humiliation, with transformed natural material raining from above.79

Here summoned is the unsettling vision Dürer experienced around the same
time and described in wash and brush (now Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett). This
time a rain of crosses:

The greatest marvel I have seen in all my days happened in the year 1503,
when crosses fell on many people, more often on children than others.
Among these I saw one in the form I have made here, and it fell on the
linen shirt of Eyrer’s maid, who sat at the house in back of Pirckheimer’s.
And she wept aloud, fearing that it meant [ forcht] she must die.80

As with the flood, suffering is at the center of the vision, and a watery, ghost-
like design is deliberate. Dürer does not just render the curious vision, but
chronicles its first, terrified interpretation by Eyrer’s maid. As with the Deluge,
we are presented with a drawn document (one too, influenced by contempo-
rary accounts of miraculous skyborne deposits, many hailing from local presses
[Fig. 17.13]).81 But as there we are left uncertain – deliberately so – for whom,
exactly, such ekphrasis – the raining down of words on an image – is meant.82
It has been claimed that Dürer’s art was motivated by an economics of loss
and gain.83 Seen now, much of the artist’s precocity lies indeed in his quarry-
ing of nature as a Dürerian ‘brand’ along with a professionalization of craft –
all of this, arguably, a reconfiguring of what is meant by a natural ‘source’ for
art-making. Warburg – modernity’s clichéd, but greatest, art historian of crisis,
knew differently and wrote that Dürer was ‘at home in the world of prophetic
freaks’.84 Lecturing in 1902, Warburg insisted that Dürer retained a ‘scientific

79 But see Kaufmann H., “Albrecht Dürers Dreikonigs-Altar”, Wallraf-Richart Jahrbuch

10 (1938) 166–178; and Merback M., Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s
Melancolia I. (New York: 2017) 213–224. Merback reads water poured onto Job as consola-
tory. Late medieval medical treatises often prescribed drenching in water as a cure for
melancholy.
80 Rupprich, Nachlass I, 36: ‘Daz grost wunderwerck, daz jch all mein dag gesehcn hab, ist
geschehen jm 1503 jar, als awff villewt krewcz gefallen sind, sunderlich mer awIT dy kind
den ander lewt. Vnder den allen hab jch eins gesehen jn der gestalt, wÿ’ ichs hernoeh
gemaeht hab, vnd es was gefallen awffs Eyrers magt, der jns Pirkamers hynderhaws sasz,
jns hemt jnn leinnen duch. Vnd sy klacktc; wan sy forcht, sy miist do rum sterben’.
81 On Kreuzwunder and their publication, more generally, see Weber B., Wunderzeichen und
Winkeldrucker (Zurich, 1972).
82 Parshall, “Gedenckbook” 210, who observes how wash is applied unevenly on the Berin
page, thus rendering Dürer’s process ‘an actual re-enactment’ of the crosses raining
over time.
83 Smith, “Dürer’s Losses” 71–101.
84 Warburg A, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Image”, in Britt D. (ed.), The Renewal
of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: 1999) 637.
Reveries of the Source 735

Figure 17.13 Jörg Glockendon, Die newen wunderbarlichen zeichen […] (Nuremberg, 1501)
Heidelberg: Universitatsbibliothek
736 Heuer

interest’ in nature – nature freed of superstition: Dürer, along with Luther,

was for Warburg an example of ‘pagan cosmological fatalism’ cast off.85 For
Warburg, this was an issue of survival; the ‘Denkraum der Besonnenheit’ (space
of rationality) needed to be ‘inserted’ between historian and fact. Perhaps it is
no surprise that both Warburg and Panofsky continued the Romantic habit
of defining the Renaissance itself against a metaphor of sleep, an ‘awakening’
from a dark age.86
But if for Panofsky the fifteenth century marked a sudden turn, for Warburg
renaissances were of course multiple, restless, impure consciousnesses of an
incubatory past. Apocalyptic floods, as always, were harbingers of modern cat-
aclysms. (Panel B of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas linked a 1523 deluge Practica
to wartime zeppelins.)87 Warburg’s whole project, even beyond his library, was
vested in the amassment and interrogation of sources. He was never very inter-
ested in art per se.88 But what he institutionalized, furtively, within the history
of art – that of Dürer and otherwise – was the value of the indirect take on the
Quelle itself. Like Thausing (who, too, suffered devastating mental illness late
in life), Warburg framed sources as mercurial phenomena with unpredictable
lives.89 Thausing came to see this as a disciplinary nightmare. But for Warburg,
such a condition offered hope.
Dürer’s deluged landscape, seen in this light, might read as a message against
continued, bewildering claims of direct access to an artwork and the fantasy
of ‘objective’ claims about source materials.90 Quelle itself is a sixteenth-
century word with an appropriately wet etymology of springs, outflow, and
swelling.91 For while the sheet is a personal vision interpreted by the visionary

85 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique” 645.

86 Didi-Huberman G., L’Image survivante: histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby
Warburg (Paris: 2000) 55.
87 Warburg A., “Luftschiff und Tauchboot in der mittelalterlichen Vorstellungswelt”, Illus­
trierte Rundschau 52 (1913), translated by D. Britt as “Airship and Submarine in the Medi-
eval Imagination”, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History
of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles: 1999) 333–342.
88 Nor, for that matter, was Panofsky. See Wood, “Source” 19.
89 On Thausing’s life, see Rosenauer A., “Moriz Thausing und die Wiener Schule der
Kunstgeschichte”, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 36 (1983) 135 ff; Aurenhammer H.H.,
“150 Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Wien (1852–2002) Eine wissenschaftliche
Chronik”, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Vergleichende Kunstforschung in Wien 54.2/3
(2002) 1–15; Rampley M., The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of
Scholarship, 1847–1918 (University Park, PA: 2013) 31–35.
90 Ferrier L.S., “The Rembrandt Research Project: Issues and Controversies Raised by a
Canonical Oeuvre”, in Brzyski A. (ed.), Partisan Canons (Durham: 2007) 225–244.
91 Rathmann T. – Wegmann N., “Ad Fontes-Bona Fides”, in Wegmann (ed.) ‘Quelle’: Zwischen
Ursprung und Konstrukt (Berlin: 2004) 27. On the watery nuances of ‘source’ as a metaphor
in history, see Blumenberg H., Quellen (Marbach: 2011) 7.
Reveries of the Source 737

himself – an eyewitness report – the positivist’s dream – what it reports is pre-

cisely the deferral of art’s source, to somewhere else, somewhere ‘from above’.
Ekphrasis assumes no authority. The only access to the artistic self, Dürer
insists, is through a literal layer of discourse; his scripted description is the
first, his blank page almost implying an expectation that others will continue,
wave upon wave, copy upon copy. Within the realm of the hallucinatory in the
flood sheet, Dürer struggles to measure vis-à-vis his own body (the descend-
ing water in the Deluge curls almost like hair.92) It is as if some sleepy gauging
will ward off what was, for him (and, maybe, Panofsky), a prophecy about the
end of the world. Here, the evaporative processes inherent in the watercolor
medium – and not just the blank paper itself – index the geological mechanics
of washing-away. They also signal the dirty mess of overflow and debris that
any flood brings about. And they point to the difficulty of clean access to the
self-as-source, signaled by the dream: by the time Dürer has awoken, the emul-
sive environment of sleep has vanished; what remains are the colored, fleeting
grains of unconscious envisioning, dispersed and seen from afar.

…
Thausing himself died in water. In 1884 he committed suicide, drowning, in
the Elbe.93 Before his death he wrote the first real monograph on Dürer, and
mused about the strangeness of sources for his burgeoning field:

The unique character of the history of art, and the unique difficulties of
its practice, are undoubtedly due to the completely different character
of the sources which supply its conclusions. On the one hand, these are
written sources, such as inscriptions, documents, letters or publications.
[…] On the other hand there are also those sources, the monuments,
sculpture, and art works which simultaneously comprise the central sub-
ject of our research […]. Just as the documents speak to us in words, so
do these monuments speak to us through their forms – and learning to
understand this language is the task of the history of art.94

92 Leymarie J., L’Aquarelle (Geneva: 1984) 11.

93 Thausing had spent years in a mental hospital before. See Feitz P., “Thausing, Moriz”,
Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier
Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart: 1999) 155, 410–411.
94 Thausing M., “Die Stellung der Kunstgeschichte als Wissenschaft”, in Thausing M., Wiener
Kunstbriefe (Leipzig: 1884) 8–9; my translation slightly modifies that in Johns K., Journal
of Art Historiography 1 (2009) 8.
738 Heuer

Ekphrasis, that is, serves the history of art unevenly. As early as his 1914
dissertation on Dürer, Panofsky was tacitly heeding such a call.95 But he was
trying to get away from the overdetermined formalism he had been trained
in; so doing, he adopted an approach which assumed, not unproblematically,
a synonymy of art and information. Image confidently translated into data.
This movement is iconography, an abrogation of visuality’s uncertainty, whose
critiques are themselves now legion. It famously upheld a complete faith in
historical scholarship (and source material) about the past which might save
a fractured present. At the time of the Dürer monograph Panofsky’s iconogra-
phy was in its developmental phase. It was hopeful. It already revealed none
of the pessimism about the writing of history that contemporary writers on
culture like Adorno (who once narrated a world-ending dream of his own)96
held towards empiricism itself.97
But iconography, which is never sad, always works better as art than as art
history.98 For Panofsky, too, was an avid dreamer. As one student recalled:

Panofsky heard words and entire sentences in his dreams and he had
what he called visions – verbal continuations of his dreams in a half-
waking state. Once he dreamt of an ugly old lady and woke up with the
untranslatable phrase, ‘Zum Schauen bestellt’. […] In another dream he
saw a hermit outside his cave; […] out of the mouth of the cave came a
scroll inscribed with the words, ‘Long distance for you, Sir’.99

Verbal-visual continuations of dreams in a half-waking state: even when

asleep the art historian insisted upon language taming vision – an untrans-
latable phrase, an inscribed scroll, a deferent semiotics. For Panofsky writing
about art – if not art itself, as for Dürer – trafficked in the idea of a consolatory
interstice in the face of what was, in a parallel world of the late 1930s, catas-
trophe. But for Dürer art, like dreaming, was never about escape but about
grappling with inescapable flows of the present. The 1525 Deluge sheet might

95 Panofsky E. Die theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht Dürers (Dürers Aesthetick) (Berlin: 1914);
and Panofsky E., “Dürers Stellung zur Antike”, Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921/22) 43ff.
The subsequent English translation of the latter, which is different from the original, sup-
presses Panofsky’s academic fealty to Thausing.
96 Adorno T.W., Traumprotokoll, ed. C. Gödde – H. Lonitz (Frankfurt: 2012) 79–80.
97 Wood C.S., The History of Art History (Princeton: 2019) 271–272.
98 Which Robert Morris recognized as early as 1964, in his famous 21.4 performance. See
Frank R., “When Form Starts Talking: On Lecture Performances”, Afterall 33 (2013) 4–15.
99 Heckscher W.S., “Erwin Panofsky: A Curriculum Vitae”, Record of the Art Museum,
Princeton University 28.1 (1969) 8.
Reveries of the Source 739

offer a canny self-reflective essay on what, exactly, for an aging, wealthy artist
near death, a ‘source’ for art had become. The source is difficulty, the source is
work. The empty paper in the Deluge signals interval, expectation; it exchanges
the print medium’s hard, instantaneous fixity of event for a written surge of
time.100 In this it presciently predicts – and then dissolves – any smug feeling
of future epistemological privilege that we can ‘know’ Dürer through his own
writings about his art. Sources left unrefracted, Dürer proffers, are but evanes-
cent dreams.

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1500”, in Hess D. – Eser T. (eds.), Der frühe Dürer (Nuremberg: 2012) 52–64.
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sich in seinem Werk (Weinheim: 1992) 191–244.
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100 Visman C., Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. G. Winthrop-Young (Stanford: 2008) 81.
For more on Dürer’s relation to time and paper, including content which expands some of
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740 Heuer

Merback M., Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melancolia I. (New York:
2017).
Panofsky E., Die theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht Dürers (Berlin: 1914).
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Parshall P., “Albrecht Dürer’s Gedenckbuch and the Rain of Crosses”, Word and Image
22, 3 (2006) 202–210.
Pilz K., “W. Pirckheimers Kunstsammlung und Bibliothek”, in Glock B. – Meidinger-
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(Nuremberg: 1970) 93–110.
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 Chapter 18

Ekphrasis and the Romance of Botany in the Age of

Pietro Andrea Mattioli

April Oettinger

A pressed leaf, interleaved among the pages of a 1585 edition of Pietro Andrea
Mattioli’s (1501–1577) celebrated Commentary on Dioscurides, commemorates
a botanical expedition from a time long past.1 [Fig. 18.1] The unknown col-
lector placed the specimen for posterity alongside a corresponding passage
that explicates the appearance and the medicinal uses of the Stellaria, a plant
whose form is described in a detailed woodcut on the facing page, among the
600 illustrations of flora, fauna, and minerals for which Mattioli’s Commentary,
one of the most ambitious undertakings in the early modern history of botany,
is famous.2 Some readers might have found the heading, Stellaria, mislead-
ing, for in Mattioli’s time, the plant was known by various names. As Mattioli
himself noted in the commentary, Stellaria was sometimes called Alchemilla
vulgaris, an herb that grows in the cooler climes of Greenland and Europe,
and which took the name, Alchemilla, from its associations with Alchemy.3 The
lobed form of the foliage, with its zig-zagged edges, prompted other descriptive
names for this plant, from the vernacular Piede di leone (lion’s paw), a name
that likened the specimen to a furry pawprint, to the Latin Stellaria, plausibly
inspired by the star-shaped habit of the leaves.

1 Mattioli Pietro Andrea, De I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Sanese, Nelli Sei Libri.
(Venezia: Felice Valgrisio, 1585) 1236–1237. [BMV D075 D027] All quotations from Mattioli’s
commentary on Dioscorides come from the 1585 Italian edition house in the Marciana; all
translations are my own.
2 The editio princeps, Mattioli’s Italian translation of Dioscurides’ Commentarii, first appeared
in 1544; the first lavishly illustrated edition of the Comentarii, printed in Latin, appeared in
1554. Mattioli’s book and the number of its illustrations expanded with each emendment.
See John Bidwell, Mattioli’s Herbal: A Short Account of Its Illustrations, With a Print from an
Original Woodblock. (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 2003). For Mattioli’s life and work,
see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009) 72,
308–312. On Mattioli and his circle (Ulisse Adrovandi, Francesco Calzolari, Luca Ghini, and
others), see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in
Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
3 Dizionario delle Scienze Naturali. (Florence: V. Batelli, 1849) 20: 502, s.v. “Alchemilla vulgaris”.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

742 Oettinger

Figure 18.1 “Stellaria”, in Pietro Andrea Mattioli, De I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Mattioli,
Sanese, Nelli Sei Libri. (Venezia, Felice Valgrisio: 1585): 1236–1237. Dried plant
inserted into Mattioli’s Discorsi. ca. 5 × 5 cm. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale
Marciana (inv. no. D075 D027)
Image © Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 743

These variations on the plant’s nomenclature were not lost on at least one
reader of the Marciana copy, who assiduously underlined each of the different
names for Stellaria in the text. Although we can only speculate on the identity
of the individual or individuals who left evidence of their reading of Mattioli
by marking excerpts and collecting this and other semplici (‘simples’) in this
particular copy, we do know that the 1585 Marciana Mattioli at some point
passed through the hands of Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750), the Venetian man of
letters and librettist who donated this and a great many books to the Library.4
It is tempting to imagine that Zeno inherited the book from his father, a phy-
sician who would have appreciated the salubrious benefits of the Stellaria, a
medicinal herb widely held to staunch bleeding, relieve menstrual pain, and
calm an upset stomach.
Venturing into the countryside to collect plants and preserving them
between the leaves of a book, in an herbarium, or through descriptions in word
and image, as in Mattioli’s Dioscurides, belonged to the ‘science of simples’, a
practice that informed the first natural history museums and natural science
itself, institutions that relied on a network of naturalists and their readers:
a ‘Botanical Republic’, as Paula Findlen put it in her seminal writings on the
topic.5 Mattioli and his peers shared a deep commitment to the close observa-
tion of nature’s changing habits, as when Mattioli emphasized (and effectively
advertised) in the preface of his Commentary the ‘very accurate diligence’ with
which he documented plants that he saw ‘with his own eyes’.6
Yet botanical knowledge relied as much on keen observation as memory.
Practically speaking, Mattioli’s Commentary was not a portable pocket guide
that lent itself to extensive treks in the field. A substantial tome produced

4 A bookplate on the inside cover reading, “Ex libris Apostoli Zeni” indicates that the book
passed through Zeno’s library. On the provenance of this famous library, which was ulti-
mately housed in the Marciana after the suppression of Venetian ecclesiastical institu-
tions in the age of Napoleon, see Orsola Braides and Elisabetta Sciarra, “The Archivio dei
Possessori of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. A Provenance Database”, in Digital Libraries
and Multimedia Archives. 12th Italian Research Conference, ed. Maristella Agosti et al. (Cham,
Switzerland: Springer Publishing, 2016): 3–15; see especially p. 13 n. 33.
5 Paula Findlen, “The Formation of a Scientific Community: Natural History in 16th-Century
Italy”, in Natural Particulars. Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. Anthony
Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999) 369–400.
6 Mattioli, 1. ‘Essortiamoci adunque insieme con tutti quelli, che questi nostri scritti leg-
geranno, che non consideriate quanto noi siamo eloquenti nel dire, ma la diligenza e
l’isperienza messe nelle cose. Imperoche molte cose habbiamo con l’occhio diligentissimam-
ente conosciute’. (Let us therefore come together with all who read this volume not to trouble
ourselves as much with the fine points of eloquent speech, but with the diligence and experi-
ence of observation. For we have come to know many things through the most diligent eye).
744 Oettinger

in folio format, 16th-century editions of Mattioli could weigh as much as 12

pounds, a scale and heft less than ideal for navigating the steep and often pre-
carious hills of the Veronese countryside and beyond.7 [Fig. 18.2] Nor did
the book slim down with Mattioli’s frequent emendations to various editions.
Indeed, the ever-expanding heft of Mattioli’s Commentary may well account
for specimens (such as the Stellaria), along with manuscript notes, that were
sometimes tipped into various copies well after the botanical adventurer had
returned home.8 Although the precise manner in which the early modern
botanical enthusiast (or enthusiasts) who consulted and interacted with the
Marciana’s 1585 copy of Mattioli is difficult to say, it bears pointing out that,
between the moment when the Stellaria leaf was plucked and placed in the
book; indeed, between the time of Mattioli’s emmendations to his commen-
tary and the production of the illustrations, there lies a gap: a space ripe for
description and storytelling.
As much as Mattioli and his contemporaries ardently professed their
commitment to the careful observation of plant life, their oblique vision of
Nature, a green world animated with stories and sensuality, has not been
fully considered. The following addresses early modern botany as an exten-
sion of landscape and, specifically, the ways in which florid descriptions of
Nature and memories of epic adventures in the field shaped the writings of
16th-century naturalists.9 An expanding scholarship has elucidated construc-
tions of Nature in 16th-century Italian painting and poetry, in particular, the
cultural dimensions of Arcady, garden architecture, and the emergence of
landscape in theories of painting.10 But it still remains to explore the debt of

7 I am grateful to Earle Havens for kindly agreeing to weigh a 1563 copy of Mattioli’s
Dioscurides housed in the Evergreen Library of The Johns Hopkins University. The text
block alone weighs in at 10 pounds, while the boards weigh approximately 2 pounds.
8 For early modern editions of Mattioli’s Commentary on Dioscurides, see http://chifar
.unipv.it/museo/Console/mattioli05/MttBbl.htm (accessed: 1.12.2018).
9 For the origins and use of the word, ‘landscape’, see Gianfranco Folena, “Storia e
Semantica di Paesaggio,” Il Linguaggio del Caos. Studi sul Plurilinguismo Rinascimentale
(Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991) 275–278. For a discussion of paesaggio in Italian litera-
ture, see A. Miorelli, Paese, villaggio, pagus, paes-aggio: uno scacco alla riflessione conc-
ettuale, «Dialogica», 9 (1999) 62–69. For a seminal study on the cultural dimensions of
landscape, see Dennis Cosgrove et al., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the
Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Ed. Stephen Daniels and
Dennis Cosgrove (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a recent bibliogra-
phy and a study of the cultural dimensions of greenery, see Green Worlds in Renaissance
Italy. Art and the Verdant Earth. Eds. Karen Hope Goodchild, April Oettinger, Leopoldine
Hoogendorp Prosperetti (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019).
10 Since the publication of Richard Turner’s The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1974), an expanding scholarship has elucidated
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 745

Figure 18.2 Pietro Andrea Mattioli, New Kreüterbuch : mit den allerschönsten und
artlichsten Figuren aller Gewechss, dergleichen vormals in keiner Sprach nie an
Tag kommen. Prague, Durch Georgen Melantrich von Auentin, auff sein vnd
Vincenti Valgriss Buchdruckers zu Venedig uncosten, 1563. Leather bound
text block
Image © George Peabody Library, The Johns Hopkins University
746 Oettinger

16th-century botanical discourse to the poetic, aesthetic, and magical thinking

that lay behind the science of simples, and the animating power of ekphrasis
that informed the language of botany and art.
A poem that Mattioli published in 1539, five years prior to the 1544 editio
princeps of his widely celebrated Commentary, is a case-in-point. In Il Magno
Palazzo del Cardinale di Trento, Mattioli cast himself as a dreaming botanist
who embarks on a journey that leads him through the verdant countryside of
Trent and at last to the grounds of the magnificent palace of Cardinal Bernardo
Clesio (1484–1539), which he describes in florid ekphrasis. Giancarlo Fiorenza’s
seminal article on the Magno Palazzo, the first to treat Mattioli’s poem in rela-
tion to 16th-century theories of painting, focused on Mattioli’s virtuosic vision
of the painted interior of the palace.11 Mattioli’s account of Dosso and Battista
Dossi’s frescos in the dining room, which picture Aesop’s fables in fictive
lunettes flanked by ruined statues – the ‘bel imperfetto’, as the poet described
them – lie at the heart of Fiorenza’s essay, which explored Mattioli’s concept of
‘incomplete’ antique ruins in connection with the imaginative faculties of the
beholder. Yet, it still remains to address the first 608 lines of Mattioli’s Magno
Palazzo, a dream sequence that opens the poem with an extended ekphrasis
of the countryside of Trent, the relationship of Mattioli’s botanical vision with
Dosso’s illusionism, and more generally, what Mattioli’s romance of Nature
suggests about the role of landscape ekphrasis in the production of early mod-
ern botanical knowledge.
Mattioli composed his courtly panegyric in 1536 to honor Bernardo Clesio
(1484–1539), Prince Bishop and later, the Cardinal of Trent, whom Mattioli
served as court physician. The Magno Palazzo appeared in print on the year of
the Cardinal’s death in 1539.12 To publish his poem, Mattioli chose Francesco

the aesthetics, iconography, and the emergence of the Pastoral in Venetian art and lit-
erature. See David Rosand, Robert Cafritz, and Lawrence Gowing, Places of Delight: The
Pastoral Landscape (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), Barbara Lynn
Davis, Landscapes of the Imagination in Renaissance Venice, Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton
University, 1998), Di là dal Fiume e tra gli Alberi: Il Paesaggio del Rinascimento a Venezia, ed.
C. Brouard & L. de Fuccia (Ravenna: Giorgio Pozzi Editore, 2012), and most recently, Jodi
Cranston, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2019).
11 Giancarlo Fiorenza, “Fables, Ruins, and the ‘bell’Imperfetto’ in the Art of Dosso Dossi”,
Modern Language Notes 119.1 (2004) 271–298.
12 In the tradition of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti and Paolo Cortesi, Mattioli’s poem
celebrated the Cardinal’s princely magnificence through his palace. See Rupert Shepherd,
“Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, Ercole I d’Este and the Decoration of the Italian
Renaissance Court”, Renaissance Studies 9.1 (1995) 18–57; Kathleen Weil-Garris and John F.
D’Amico, The Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace: A Chapter from Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu
(Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1980).
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 747

Marcolini da Forlì, whose Venetian press was widely known for printing the
works of Petrarch, Pietro Bembo, Anton Francesco Doni, and Pietro Aretino.13
Consisting of 445 stanzas (for a total of 3,560 verses) written in ottava rima, a
form associated with the epic poetry of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Mattioli’s
encomium celebrated the magnificence of the Cardinal through verse that
detailed the design and décor of Clesio’s 16th-century addition to the exist-
ing 13th-century Palazzo del Buonconsiglio and the expansive countryside that
surrounded the palace.14
Beyond painting the Cardinal’s palace in words, the poem also lures the
reader (alongside Mattioli) into a dream journey that frames the principal
subject, the Magno Palazzo, with verdant landscapes, pleasure gardens, and
a touch of romance. The poem begins when Mattioli, identifying himself as
a ‘pilgrim’ (pellegrino), departs from his home and ventures into the ‘cloud-
covered mountains’ (ombrosi monti). Led at first by his fantasia, the protago-
nist traverses the countryside until he reaches a walled city. As Mattioli lingers
there, a graceful lady, veiled and sumptuously dressed, appears to him: she is
a vision descended from Heaven.15 The lady addresses him warmly, promising
to help him attain his concetto (Che con dolce fatica io ti prometto/ Al fin conse-
guirai il tuo concetto).16 She then reveals that she is Iatria, the embodiment of
the Art of Healing. Like Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura, Iatria is Mattioli’s

13 To publish his more famous Commentary, Mattioli would choose Vicenzio Valgrisi.
See I Discorsi di P.A. Mattioli, Illuminated by Gherardo Cibo. Excellence in Art and Science
in the 16th Century (Arezzo: Aboca, 2015). 3 Vols. On Valgrisi’s publishing business and
his relationships with writers and artists, see Ilarea Andreoli, Ex Officina Erasmiana.
Vincenzio Valgrisi é L’Illustrazione del Libro tra Venezia e Lione alla Metà del Cinquecento
(Ph.D. Thesis; Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, and Université Lumière, Lyon, 2006). For
Marcolini, see Amadeo Quondam, “Nel Giardino dei Marcolini: Un Editore Veneziano tra
Aretino e Doni”, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 157 (1980) 75–116.
14 There is no modern critical edition of Mattioli’s Magno Palazzo, and since 1539 there have
been two 19th-century reprints (1858, 1889) and a 1984 facsimile with an introduction.
For the 1984 facsimile edition, see Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Il Magno Palazzo del Cardinale
di Trento, Intr. Aldo Bertoluzza (Trento: Manfrini, 1983). 2 vols. For an online version of
the poem with line numbers, see https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Il_Magno_Palazzo_del_
Cardinale_di_Trento (accessed: 15.7.2017). Enrico Castelnuovo’s edition of the Magno
Palazzo offers a general introduction and a reprinting of the text. See Enrico Castelnuovo,
Il Castello del Buonconsiglio (Trento: Temi, 1995–1996). 2 vols.
15 Mattioli, Magno Palazzo, ll. 215–216. [Hereafter ‘MP’]. All translations are my own. ‘The
lady, who was veiled and adorned in rich gowns, appeared to have descended from
Heaven’. (Di ricche veste ornata, sotto un velo,/ Ch’in terra mi parea scesa dal Cielo.)
16 MP, ll. 255–256.
748 Oettinger

guide, his muse, and the personification of his keenest desire: to understand
the world of plants.17
Together, the dreaming botanist and his guide proceed further into the
visionary landscape and, descending into a valley with a ‘hidden river’ ( fiume
nascosto), they arrive at the walls of Iatria’s palace, a place of ‘marvel’ that
leaves Mattioli ‘speechless’ (per le mirabil cose fa stupire). The seat of ‘all art
and ingenuity’ (ogn’arte et ingenio), the palace of Healing consists of a walled
pleasure garden (vago giardino) planted with green olive trees.18 Once inside
the garden, the protagonist beholds a mysterious temple that emits smoke, and
cannot resist the temptation to venture inside for a closer look.19 In the first
room, Mattioli encounters a library that houses an ‘infinite’ (infinite) array of
books in Latin, Arabic, and Greek: ‘all of knowledge’ (ogni scienza).20 The adja-
cent room is ‘adorned’ (ornato) with musical instruments – a lute and a lyre –
aural medicine for a clear and serene mind.21 After exploring the library and
the room of musical instruments, Mattioli’s divine guide leads him to a room
of ‘furnaces’ fornelli – for making medicinal concoctions.22 Having taken in
the marvels of Iatria’s garden and the treasures inside the ancient temple, the
protagonist and his guide retreat to the dining room, and, having satiated his
appetite, the dreaming Mattioli falls into a second, deeper slumber.
When he wakes the next morning, Mattioli cannot resist one more visit to the
library, where he takes pleasure in communing with the ‘ancient Philosophers’
(antichi Philosophi) who ‘gathered there in a venerable chorus’ (raccolti in un
venerendo coro).23 Now, having satiated his intellect, he is met once again by
the joyful Iatria (a constant, convivial presence at his side), and she leads him
into the countryside to witness a hunt. But the hunt is rather short lived, for
within three lines of verse, the hunters take off in pursuit of a deer, leaving the
protagonist, much to his delight, in a verdant field abounding with herbs. For the
next twenty-five stanzas, Mattioli turns his attention to the semplici that adorn
the lush landscape that lies before him. In the first ten stanzas of his ekphrasis,
Mattioli describes a catalogue of herbs, characterizing them not only by their
use, but also ascribing personalities to them and enumerating their virtues in a
manner that closely resembles Sannazaro’s famous Vergilian catalogue of trees

17 MP, l. 310.
18 MP, ll. 315, 335–337.
19 MP, l. 345.
20 MP, l. 348.
21 MP, l. 360.
22 For an excellent overview on the art of preparing herbal tinctures, see Anna Messinis,
Storia del Profumo a Venezia (Venezia: Lineadacqua, 2017).
23 MP, l. 416.
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 749

in the opening verses of the Arcadia.24 Like Sannazaro, he enumerates the

virtues of the herbs, ascribing to each of them an epithet: he beholds the ‘mar-
velous’ (mirabil) Gentiana, the ‘celebrated’ (celebrata) Narcissus and Verbena
(useful for reducing fevers), the ‘human-born’ Mandrake, and the ‘virtuous’
(virtuosa) Tormentilla, among others. Mattioli’s exuberant descriptions effec-
tively transform each of the plants into the botanical embodiment of human
virtues. The dreaming botanist’s leafy companions function as dramatic pro-
tagonists in the florid landscape ekphrasis that follows.
Wandering ‘step by step’ (passo a passo) from plant to plant, Mattioli and his
guide make their way to the top of a mountain:

Dall’herbe trasportati a passo a passo/

In su la cima del bel monte andamo,/
Dove un cristallin fonte esce d’un sasso./
Che d’un gran faggio adombra un verde ramo./
Di quindi tutto’l pian scorgevo al basso./
Mentre ch’all’ombra ci riposavamo,/
E disegnalo allhor col mio pennello,/
Per un paese ameno, e molto bello.//25

The botanist and his guide come to a ‘crystal fountain’ (cristallin fonte), a
common-place for poetic inspiration.26 And it is here, under the shade of the
‘spreading branches of a Beech tree’ (un gran faggio adombra), that the protag-
onist turns his attention from individual plants to the expansive view before
him. Gazing across the alpine vista, Mattioli takes out his ‘brush’ (pennello) and
paints a vision of the ‘pleasant, very beautiful view of the countryside’ (paese
ameno e molto bello) in words.
Mattioli’s verse evokes a green world that delights eye and ear. The paese,
‘adorned’ (orna), ‘refreshed’, (rinfresca), and ‘bathed’ (bagna) by a ‘clear stream’

24 MP, ll. 441–504. On the personality of trees, see John Henkel, Poems on Trees.
Ph.D. Dissertation. (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC-CH, 2009).
25 MP, ll. 497–504. (‘We went step by step from one plant to the next/until we reached the
summit of the beautiful mountain,/ Where a crystal fountain issued from a rock./As
we rested in the shade of the spreading verdant branches of a beech,/ With my brush
I painted the pleasant, beautiful countryside.’)
26 For a classic study of inspirational fountains, see Otto Kurz, “Huius Nympha Loci. A
Pseudo-Classical Inscription and a Drawing by Dürer”, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 16: 3–4 (1953) 171–177. For more recent bibliography on water, desire,
and inspiration, see April Oettinger, “Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo
Lotto’s Venus and Cupid”, in Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European
Art, 1300–1600, ed. Alison Poe and Marice Rose (Leiden: Brill, 2015) 230–263.
750 Oettinger

(chiaro fiume) that murmurs as it descends on its course down the mountainous
terrain, is ‘ringed’ (cinte) by pleasant mountains, a ‘fortress created by Nature
herself’ ( formati per fortezza da Natura).27 Some mountains are topped by
snow throughout the year, so that they appear to be ‘artfully glazed with the
clearest crystal’ (congelato di ghiaccio con grande arte).28 In and among the
mountains are clear lakes ‘teeming with noble, pleasant, and wandering fish’
(pieni con nobil Pesche, amoeni, e vaghi). Having taken in the icy mountaintops
and alpine lakes that frame his visionary landscape, Mattioli turns to the vari-
ety of animals that inhabit the environs, from wolves, bears, mountain goats,
and deer to an ornithological catalogue – cranes peacocks, herons, ducks, and
grouse – of avian life. There is such an abundance of birds that one can watch
them fly over by the hour.29 The landscape ekphrasis continues with a descrip-
tion of the noble villas and castles scattered throughout the distant valley
below, edifices that ‘adorn Nature with their magnificent pomp’ (Che con lor
pompe molto adornan quella).30 Suddenly, the shrill sound of a hunting horn
interrupts Mattioli’s verdant vision:

Ecco ch’un de compagni suona’l corno,/

Dando segnal ch’al pian debbiam tornare,/
Perche se n’era quasi andato’l giorno/
Nel nostro dolce, e grato favellare:/
Però lasciando’l fonte, a passo a passo,/
Dal monte in breve giu calammo al basso.//31

Leaving the crystal fountain, Mattioli descends the hillside, ‘step by step’, a
passo a passo.
The same phrase that marked the beginning of Mattioli’s landscape ekph-
rasis, a passo a passo, at once concludes and brackets his dream of Nature.
At that very moment, Mattioli encounters a dead bear, a sobering spectacle
at odds with the ‘scattered flowers’, the vaghi fiori, that colour the gentle

27 MP, ll. 505–592.

28 MP, ll. 547–548.
29 Some readers might have associated Mattioli’s variety of birds with poetic metaphors
related to bird catching, as, for example, in Mattioli’s letter to Vettori from December 10th,
1513. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli and his friends: Their Personal Correspondence
(Northern Illinois UP, 1996) 262–65.
30 MP, l. 573.
31 MP, 587–592. ‘Behold, one of their hunting companions sounded his horn, giving the sig-
nal that they must return to the plain below because the day was nearing its end. And so
was our sweet vision. Thus leaving the fountain, step by step, we soon descended from the
steep mountain climes to the plain below’.
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 751

slopes above. The end of the hunt and the setting sun mark the conclusion of
Mattioli’s landscape ekphrasis. The hero and Iatria, make their way down the
mountain at dusk, leaving behind what Mattioli calls an ‘incomplete work’, an
opera imperfetta: ‘Ma perche il Sol nell’occaso mirava,/Fu forza di lasciar l’opra
imperfetta […]’.32

1 Ruins and the Bel Imperfetto

Having sketched the landscape surrounding the palace in word and image, the
dreaming protagonist enters the Magno Palazzo of Cardinal Clesio and explores
the sumptuous furnishings and frescos that adorn each room. Mattioli returns
to the concept of the imperfetto when he reaches the dining room, the Stua
della Famea. The poet begins with an account of the Cardinal’s coat of arms
on the ceiling, an impresa adorned with bound golden rods, arms, red lions,
and eagles: an opra perfetta – in other words, a work of art ‘thoroughly’ (per)
‘complete’ (perfectus) – in every aspect.33 Then, in a playful linguistic twist,
the poet turns from the ‘thoroughly complete’ ‘splendor’ (splendore) of the
Cardinal’s coat of arms on the ceiling to an ‘imperfect thing’, a cosa imperfetta:
the ‘illusionistic antique statuary with crumbled or missing limbs’ painted on
the walls (Statue antiche in pittura son finte,/ C’han molte membra via troncate,
e tolte).34 Mattioli continues, explaining that the ‘wise painter’ (saggio pit-
tore) wished to imitate antique ruins as he found them, leaving them ‘beauti-
fully incomplete’ (bel imperfetto).35
As Giancarlo Fiorenza has pointed out, the ‘imperfect’ statues not only
appealed to the wide-spread proclivity for antiquity and antiquarian frag-
ments in the age of Cardinal Cles, but also to sophisticated beholders who
would have appreciated the intellectual dimensions of antique ruins, meta-
phors for ‘the dichotomy of unity versus fracture in humanist, artistic, and
Christian discourses’.36 [Fig. 18.3] Mattioli said as much when he pointed out
that the pleasure of beholding the crumbled statuary was lost on ‘some idiotic

32 MP, 601–602. ‘As we beheld the sight of the setting sun, we realized that we had to leave
the imperfect work behind’.
33 MP, l. 2079.
34 MP, ll. 2104, 2099.
35 MP, ll. 2112–2116, ‘Quivi ‘l saggio pittor quel ch’ha trovato/ D’antichi essempi ha voluto
mostrare,/ E ’l bel lavoro imperfetto ha lasciato,/ Perche l’antico ha voluto imitare […]’.
(The wise painter wanted to show examples of the ancients, which he left incomplete
because he wanted to imitate antiquity).
36 Fiorenza, “Fables”, 286.
752 Oettinger

Figure 18.3 Dosso and Battista Dossi (1531). Stua della Famea. Fragmented Statues and
Aesop’s Fables (ca. 1618–1621). Fresco, Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio

people’ [who] ‘want these statues expunged, because in their opinion the
eye takes no delight in gazing at an imperfect thing’.37 Understood as incom-
plete fragments, Dosso’s fictive statuary functioned to ‘cultivate the sense of
discovery and dialogue’ between the frescos and the sophisticated beholder,
and in turn, for the readers of the Magno Palazzo, between Mattioli and his
audience.38 The crumbled statuary effectively framed the imaginative process
of beholding Dosso’s frescos, for the intellectual play of ‘reconstructing’ the fic-
tive fragments resonated with the imaginative act of reading the moral lessons
(di moralitá l’intento pieno) of Aesop.39

1.1 Semplici, Fragments, and the Romantic Imagination

What, then, of Mattioli’s description of Nature as an opera imperfetta? Just
as the imperfect ruins frame the imaginative interplay between the beholder

37 MP, ll. 2103–2104. ‘Perch’al suo dire all’occhio non diletta/ Il rimirar una cosa imperfetta’
(Because why wouldn’t the eye delight in looking again and again at an imperfect thing).
38 Fiorenza, “Fables”, 295.
39 MP, l. 2124.
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 753

and the favole of Aesop, so the green world both conditions and embellishes
the experience of the Magno Palazzo. Mattioli’s lyrical word painting of
Nature grafts the ekphrasis of Philostratus and the pastoralisms of Vergil and
Sannazaro onto the narrative framework of medieval dream poetry – most
famously the Roman de la Rose. In a poem that recalls the tradition of the
Roman de la Rose, Mattioli cast himself as dreamer who embarks with his
guide and muse, Iatria, on a quest through a storied landscape, the principal
setting and the inspiration of his vision.40 Thus, in the opening sequence of
Mattioli’s poem, the dreaming botanist goes in pursuit of his Rose, so to speak,
the embodiment of that which he most desires: botanical knowledge.
We can appreciate Mattioli’s comparison of imperfect Nature with ruined
statuary through a Renaissance romance published some 40 years earlier than
the Magno Palazzo, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).41 A masterpiece of
art, literature, and early modern printing first published at the Venetian press
of Aldus Manutius, Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream tells of Poliphilo, a
15th-century intellectual who longs to revive antiquity. The hero embarks on a
solitary pilgrimage (peregrinando solitario) into an imagined world of the clas-
sical past embodied by his beloved Polia, his muse and his guide. Poliphilo’s
dream journey leads him through a series of multi-valent green worlds, from
verdant meadows and bubbling brooks to sublime forests and artificial gardens
of glass, where he encounters an encyclopedic array of crumbled monuments,
buildings, and statuary, described through florid prose and numerous wood-
cut illustrations.42 In the company of his beloved Polia, the personification of
antiquity, artifice, and Poliphilo’s most ardent desire, Poliphilo breathes life
into the crumbled fragments through florid ekphrasis, animating the shards
of the past into sensuous visions whose completion relies not only upon the

40 On the elements of literary romance and dream poetry, see A.C. Spearing, Medieval
dream poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). For the topos of Nature and
the Vita Solitaria, see Ursula Hoff, “Meditation in Solitude”, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld institutes 1 (1937–38) 292–294. Hoff pointed out that, although the vita solitaria
derived from a classical ideal, the medieval notion of the vita solitaria placed hermits and
other lone dreamers within a primitive wilderness.
41 For recent editions and commentaries, see Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili, Tr. Joscelyn Godwin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), F. Colonna, Hypne-
rotomachia Poliphili, Tr. Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele docet (Milano: Adelphi, 1998).
All citations from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili refer to the 1499 Aldine edition, and will
appear as ‘HP’.
42 On the 172 woodcut illustrations, see Helena Szépe, “Desire in the printed dream of
Poliphilo”, Art History 19 (1996) 370–392.
754 Oettinger

exchange of word and image, but fundamentally, the engagement of the reader,
who vicariously assumes the poetic role of Poliphilo.43
Leafy specimens and classical fragments bear a reciprocal relationship
throughout Poliphilo’s dream, a point that the opening passage makes clear.
In the beginning of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the hero, lamenting the
loss of Polia, falls into a fitful sleep, wakes in a terrifying dark forest, crosses a
stream, and finds himself under the pleasant shade of an oak, where he falls
into a deeper sleep. Upon his second awakening, the hero finds himself in a
field strewn with the scattered remains of the classical past – or so the illus-
tration tells us. [Fig. 18.4] In the woodcut, Poliphilo stands in an open field,
surrounded by a column capital, a section of entablature, a column base, a
breastplate, and a lone lizard: his only companion. The text tells a different, but
closely related story. In his account, Poliphilo makes no mention of antique
fragments, but instead enumerates the array of flora (multiplice herbe verdis-
sime) that populate the field, a ‘happy countryside […] copiously adorned
(adornata) with greenery’.44 Poliphilo’s verdant catalogue, which includes wild
shrubs, flowering plants, and other useful simples, or ‘specimens’ (semplici),
plays on the apian metaphors of Seneca and Petrarch, for whom diverse flow-
ers are the ingredients for concocting infinite varieties of honey.45
The reader, alongside Poliphilo, plays a generative role. Like a gardener,
the audience of Poliphilo’s Dream cultivates the antiquarian fragments, seats
of memory which unfold in the mind’s eye. Or, as the dedicatory text of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili put it, ‘by a certain pleasantness (amoenitate), as if
a garden of flowers of every kind had been opened, these difficult things are
declared and presented by sweet speech and they, subjected to the eyes by
illustrations and imaginative images (imaginibus), are laid open and related.’46

43 April Oettinger “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Art and Play in a Renaissance Romance”,
Journal of Word and Image, 27.1 (2011) 15–30; Rosemary Trippe, “The Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili: image, text, and vernacular poetics”, Renaissance quarterly 55.4 (2002) 1222–1258.
44 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a7r. ‘Tutta questa laeta regione de viridura copiosamente
adornata se offeriva’.
45 Ibid.
46 Leonardus Crassus to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice,
1499) ‘Illud accredit, quod si quae res natura sua difficiles essent, amoenitate quadam,
tamquam reserato omnis generis florum viridario, oration suavi declarantur et profer-
untur figurisque et imaginibus oculis subiectae patent et referuntur’. Leonardus Crassus
Veronensis Guido illustrissimo duci Urbini S.P.D., Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice:
Aldus Manutius, 1499) n.p. The dedication effectively advertised Poliphilo’s dream to an
audience who identified with the sophisticated persona of the Duke, whose court of
Urbino was the setting for Castiglione’s famous Il Cortegiano (1528).
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 755

Figure 18.4 Anon., “Poliphilo in a Field of Ruins”, in Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili[…] (Venice, Aldus Manutius: 1499).Woodcut, 9 × 7 cm. Baltimore,
George Peabody Library (inv. no. Incun. 1499 C699)
Image © George Peabody Library, The Johns Hopkins University

For Poliphilo, semplici are akin to ruins, living fragments brought to life through
the imaginative interplay of word and image.
The multi-valent green worlds of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili also func-
tion as parerga, or frames, which embellish Poliphilo’s antiquarian visions
with expression and inspire awe. Take, for instance, Poliphilo’s encounter with
a monumental portal. [Fig. 18.5] As he looks extremely intently (intensissi-
mamente remirava) at the arch, Poliphilo lavishes praise on the ‘exceedingly
beautiful, well crafted, perfectly composed, artificially depicted, and elegantly
expressed narratives (historie).’47 Moving in closer, the protagonist is amazed
to discover ‘carefully sought after ornaments’ (exquisiti parergi) that adorn the
sculpture: ‘streams, lakes, mountains, hills, forests, and animals’. His mouth
agape (gli labra aperti) and his spirit entranced (l’animo rapto), Poliphilo
examines the way in which certain atmospheric effects animate the image: the

47 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, d4v.

756 Oettinger

Figure 18.5 Anon., “Monumental Portal”, in Francesco Colonna,

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: ubi humana omnia non nisi somnium
esse docet, atque obiter plurima scitu sane quam digna com-
memorate. (Venice, Aldus Manutius: 1499). Woodcut, 15 × 9 cm.
Baltimore, George Peabody Library (inv. no. Incun. 1499 C699)
Image © George Peabody Library, The Johns Hopkins
University
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 757

colour modulations in the distance (il coloramento cum la distantia), the chang-
ing light (il lume opposito), and the harmonious reflections across the surface
(gli concinni reflexi nelle plicature dille vestimente) are so faithful to Nature (non
cum poca aemulatione dilla solerte natura) that he is amazed (mirabondo), and
astonished (absorto) to behold it.48 This early – if not the first – reference to
landscape parerga in the history of art draws inspiration from the writings of
Pliny and Vitruvius, for whom ornament stood to amplify the rhetorical impact
of the principal subject.49 In the context of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, it
is the landscape imagery, the parergi, that enlivens the principal subject, the
monumental portal, with colour, changing light, harmonious reflections: daz-
zling effects that fill the astonished protagonist with a sense of awe and wonder.
Let us return to Mattioli’s vision of Nature in the Magno Palazzo. Like the
scattered fragments that populate Poliphilo’s dream, Mattioli’s semplici are at
once the inspiration and the personification of his vision, the lush and salubri-
ous image of Nature personified by Iatria. As in the Dream of Poliphilo, imperfect
semplici and crumbling statues not only inspire vision, but they also embellish
the principal subject. Thus, Dosso’s fictive antique fragments condition the
imaginative act of beholding the favole of Aesop, just as Mattioli’s impression-
istic green world both frames and animates the Cardinal’s Palace, a living and
lasting testament to the deceased Cardinal’s magnificence. Mattioli’s poem
can also be understood as an encomium to Nature in the form of a dream; a
lasting testament to the poetic virtuosics of Mattioli himself. Indeed, Mattioli’s
landscape ekphrasis both echoes and rivals Paolo Giovio’s more famous com-
ment on Dosso Dossi in a letter of 1527, which praised the painter’s demonstra-
tion of ‘cultivated skill’ through judiciously selected parerga: ‘charming little

48 Ibid., ‘Cum gli exquisiti parergi. Aque, fonti, monti, colli, boscheti, animali. Dipravato il
coloramento cum la distantia, et cum il lume opposito, et cum gli concinni reflexi nelle
plicature dille vestimente et nelle altre operature, non cum poca aemulatione dilla solerte
natura. Intanto mirabondo et absorto che in me quasi non era praesente’.
49 For discussions of parerga in classical art, see Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 10 vols. Tr.
H. Rackham. (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1968): IX.XXXV.xxxvi, 101–102; Vitruvius,
de Architectura, IX.8.5; X.7.4–5. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Vitr.%20
10.7&lang=original [Consulted March 1, 2020]. Cesare Cesariano wrote of two modes of
painting: megalografia (‘solemn works’) and parerga (‘landscapes and pastoral scenes’)
in his commentary Vitruvius. See Vitruvius, De Architetura Libri Deci Traducti de Latino in
Vulgare. Tr. C. Cesariano (Como, 1521), cxvii. On the role of landscape parerga in theories
of painting, see Karen Hope Goodchild, “‘A Hand More Practiced and Sure’: The History
of Landscape Painting in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” Artibus et Historiae, XXXII.64
(2011): 25–40. For a broader discussion of the concept of parerga in Renaissance thought
and the arts, see David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 455; Clare Lepraik Guest, The Understanding of
Ornament in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2016) 21–66.
758 Oettinger

diversions of painting’ [such as] ‘lavish and lively style jagged cliffs, woods full
of life, the shady banks of flowing rivers, the blossoming produce of the coun-
tryside and the hard but happy toil of farmers. Moreover, far distant views of
lands and seas, fleets, trapping, hunting and all that type of thing pleasing to
the indulgent eye […]’.50 A visionary space that lay outside of the principal sub-
ject of the poem (the Cardinal’s palace), the landscape that Mattioli painted in
words effectively demonstrated the poetic abilities of Mattioli the poet.
The spirit of Mattioli’s botanical romance resonates in the exquisite albums
of Gherardo Cibo (1512–1600), where semplici rendered from life (‘dal vivo’, as
Cibo put it) hover above birds-eye view landscapes.51 MS Add. 22332 and 22333,
now housed at the British Library, contain (respectively) 168 and 54 botani-
cal illustrations inspired by the woodcuts that adorned the Commentary of
Mattioli, whose admiration for the ‘molto Magnifico’ Cibo is evidenced in an
autograph letter mounted in one of the albums.52 As in the Magno Palazzo,
vividly rendered specimens unfold in an Arcadian vision set in the country-
side below: a storied landscape that echoes Mattioli’s oblique vision of the
green world. [Fig. 18.6] In the 168 illustrations of MS Add. 22332, each speci-
men floats above a sweeping panorama, a convention that repeats a compo-
sitional formula typically found in Northern European devotional landscapes
such as Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut, The Virgin Crowned by Two Angels Above a
Landscape (1515). [Fig. 18.7] In Cibo’s illustration, Asplenium hemonites (com-
monly known as spleenwort) looms in a heavenly realm, much like Dürer’s
Virgin and Angels, transforming the semplice into a sacred epiphany, a micro-
cosm of wondrous Nature.
In the vignette that unfolds below the floating Asplenium hemonites, a
ruined building reminiscent of the remains of the Basilica of Maxentius and
Constantine is nestled in a tufted green field that lies before a dramatic moun-
tainous vista in the distance. Small figures inspect the cavernous vaulting of
the ruined edifice, while two travelers, one on horseback and the other on foot,
pass by the building. It is a vision akin to ‘wandering through a most delightful
Flemish painting’ (un vaghissimo quadro di Fiandra dipinte), as Mattioli’s close

50 E.H. Gombrich discussed Paolo Giovio’s comments on Dosso in ‘Renaissance Artistic

Theory and the Development of Landscape Painting’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 41 (1953)
335–360, esp. 335.
51 Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Gherardo Cibo: Visions of Landscape and the Botanical Sciences
in a Sixteenth-Century Artist’, The Journal of Garden History. 9.4(1989): 199–216, Gherardo
Cibo: Dilettante di Botanica e Pittore di “Paesi”. Arte, Scienza e Illustrazione Botanica nel
XVI Secolo, ed. by Giorgio Mangani and Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi (Ancona, Italy: Il lavoro
editoriale, 2013). Findlen (1996) 167–170.
52 Ibid., 201.
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 759

Figure 18.6 Gherardo Cibo, Asplenium hemonites with Ruins in a Landscape (ca.
1564–1584). Extracts from an edition of Dioscorid es’ “De re medica”,
fol. 51. Watercolour and gouache, 315 × 210 mm. London, British Library
(inv. no. BL MS Add. 22333)
Image © British Library, London
760 Oettinger

Figure 18.7 Albrecht Dürer, The Virgin Crowned By Two Angels Above a Landscape (ca.
1515). Woodcut, 10.1 × 55.2 cm. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (inv.
no. 1943.3.3679)
Image © National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
EKPHRASIS AND THE ROMANCE OF BOTANY IN THE AGE OF MATTIOLI 761

associate, Francesco Calzolari, described the environs of his beloved Monte

Baldo in an extended landscape ekphrasis that lies at the center of another
botanical rhapsody penned within two decades of the Magno Palazzo, the 1566
Viaggio di Montebaldo.53 For Cibo, a botanical enthusiast who shared the imag-
inative proclivities of Mattioli and Poliphilo, ruins, like semplici, inspired lively
visions. And, like the ruins of the classical past, Nature’s fleeting phenom-
ena allude to the passage of time and the mystery of human origins. Indeed,
Cibo ruminated on the cosmopoetic dimensions of semplici elsewhere in his
albums, as in a Petrarchan nature poem composed at the end of the first album
and, in the second, a series of five dramatic landscapes frame – and thereby
embellish – sketches of St. Augustine.54
Let us conclude with the leaf in the Marciana Mattioli. [Fig. 18.1] Through
the eyes of Mattioli and his contemporaries, the Stellaria was not an inert spec-
imen of Nature – natura morta – but a relic alive with stories and sensuality.55
These tangible fragments of divine Nature, mementos of adventures in the
field, invite descriptions whose animating powers conjure vision. Mattioli’s
Magno Palazzo not only typifies the poetic dimensions of 16th-century natu-
ral science, but also the blurred boundaries – and shared language – of early
modern botany and landscape. As such, the magical thinking that lay behind
Mattioli’s botanical Bible – a collection of simples animated through the
power of words – belongs to the Book of Nature, the storied Word of God. Like
Dosso’s crumbling sculptures, the fleeting semplici that populate Mattioli’s
green worlds are tinged by the poignancy of loss – Iatria’s farewell at the end of
the dream – but revived through the pleasure of recollection, the invigorating
word of the beholder.

53 Francesco Calzolari, Il Viaggio di Monte Baldo. Con la Testimonianza sul Museo Calzolari
di Ulisse Aldrovandi. Ed. Giuseppe Sandrini (Verona: Alba Pratalia, 2007) 6. Calzolari was
a Veronese spice merchant best known for assembling a natural history museum. On
Calzolari, see Conor Fahey, Printing a Book at Verona in 1622 (Lunenberg: The Stinehour
Press, 1993), and for the Latin version of the Viaggio di Montebaldo in the context of moun-
tain poetry, see William Barton, Mountain Aesthetics in Early Modern Latin Literature
(London: Routledge, 2016).
54 See Cibo, Add. MS 22333, 57r. 58r., 59r. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.
aspx?ref=add_ms_22333 (accessed: April 1, 2020), Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Goddess
Natura” and “The Book of Nature,” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 106–127; 319–326.
55 On relics, materiality, and memory, see Ittai Weintryb, “Living Matter: Materiality, Maker,
and Ornament in the Middle Ages”, Gesta 52,2 (2013): 113–132.
762 Oettinger

Selective Bibliography

Andreoli Ilarea, Ex Officina Erasmiana. Vincenzio Valgrisi é L’Illustrazione del Libro

tra Venezia e Lione alla Metà del Cinquecento (Ph.D. Thesis; Università Ca’ Foscari,
Venice, and Université Lumière, Lyon: 2006).
Barton William, Mountain Aesthetics in Early Modern Latin Literature (London:
Routledge, 2016).
Brouard C. – de Fuccia L., Di là dal Fiume e tra gli Alberi: Il Paesaggio del Rinascimento a
Venezia, ed. C. Brouard & L. de Fuccia (Ravenna: Giorgio Pozzi Editore, 2012).
Calzolari Francesco, Il Viaggio di Monte Baldo. Con la Testimonianza sul Museo Calzolari
di Ulisse Aldrovandi. Ed. Giuseppe Sandrini (Verona: Alba Pratalia, 2007).
Castelnuovo Enrico, Il Castello del Buonconsiglio (Trento: Temi, 1995–1996) 2 vols.
Colonna Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Trans. Joscelyn Godwin (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1999).
Colonna Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Trans. Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele
(Milano: Adelphi, 1998).
Cosgrove D. – Daniels S. et al., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic
Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
Cranston Jodi, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice (University Park, PA: Penn State UP,
2019).
Curtius E.R., “The Goddess Natura” and “The Book of Nature,” in European Literature
and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990)
106–127, 319–326.
Findlen Paula, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early
Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Findlen Paula, “The Formation of a Scientific Community: Natural History in 16th-
Century Italy”, in Grafton, A. and Siraisi, N. (eds.), Natural Particulars. Nature and the
Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999) 369–400.
Fiorenza Giancarlo, “Fables, Ruins, and the ‘bell’Imperfetto’ in the Art of Dosso Dossi”,
Modern Language Notes 119,1 (2004) 271–298.
Folena Gianfranco, “Storia e Semantica di Paesaggio,” Il Linguaggio del Caos. Studi sul
Plurilinguismo Rinascimentale (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991) 275–278.
Gombrich E.H., “Renaissance Artistic Theory and the Development of Landscape
Painting”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 41 (1953) 335–360.
Goodchild Karen Hope, “‘A Hand More Practiced and Sure’: The History of Landscape
Painting in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” Artibus et Historiae 32, 64 (2011)
25–40.
Goodchild K.H. – Oettinger A. – Prosperetti L.H., et al., Green Worlds in Renaissance
Italy. Art and the Verdant Earth (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019).
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Guest Clare Lepraik, The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance

(Leiden: Brill, 2016) 21–66.
Henkel John, Poems on Trees, Ph.D. Dissertation (University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill, 2009).
Hoff Ursula, “Meditation in Solitude”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld institutes 1
(1937–38) 292–294.
Kurz Otto, “Huius Nympha Loci. A Pseudo-Classical Inscription and a Drawing by
Dürer”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, 3–4 (1953) 171–177.
Mattioli Pietro Andrea, De I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Sanese, Nelli Sei Libri.
Venezia: Felice Valgrisio, 1585.
Mattioli Pietro Andrea, Il Magno Palazzo del Cardinale di Trento, Intr. Aldo Bertoluzza
(Trento: Manfrini, 1983). 2 vols.
Mattioli Pietro Andrea, I Discorsi di P.A. Mattioli, Illuminated by Gherardo Cibo.
Excellence in Art and Science in the 16th Century (Arezzo: Aboca, 2015). 3 Vols.
Messinis Anna, Storia del Profumo a Venezia (Venezia: Lineadacqua, 2017).
Oettinger April, “Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus
and Cupid”, in Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300–
1600, ed. Alison Poe and Marice Rose (Leiden: Brill, 2015) 230–263.
Oettinger April, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Art and Play in a Renaissance
Romance”, Journal of Word and Image, 27.1 (2011) 15–30.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 10 vols. Tr. H. Rackham. Cambridge: Loeb Classical
Library, 1968.
Quondam Amadeo, “Nel Giardino dei Marcolini: Un Editore Veneziano tra Aretino e
Doni”, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 157 (1980) 75–116.
Rosand D. – Cafritz R. – Gowing L., Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape
(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988).
Spearing A.C., Medieval dream poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Summers David, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981).
Tomasi Lucia Tongiorgi, “Gherardo Cibo: Visions of Landscape and the Botanical
Sciences in a Sixteenth-Century Artist”, The Journal of Garden History 9,4 (1989):
199–216.
Tomasi Lucia Tongiorgi, Gherardo Cibo: Dilettante di Botanica e Pittore di “Paesi”. Arte,
Scienza e Illustrazione Botanica nel XVI Secolo, ed. by Giorgio Mangani and Lucia
Tongiorgi Tomasi (Ancona, Italy: Il lavoro editoriale, 2013).
Turner Richard, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1974).
Vitruvius, De Architetura Libri Deci Traducti de Latino in Vulgare, Trans. C. Cesariano
(Como, 1521).
 part 6
Global Ekphrasis

∵
 Chapter 19

Seeing ‘de flandes’

Stephanie Porras

In 1590, the first Bishop of Manila, Domingo de Salazar, wrote to Philip II about
the new Spanish outpost in the Pacific, describing the city’s inhabitants and
the state of the mission. He singled out the exceptional artistic skills of the
local Chinese population (known by the Spanish as Sangleys), writing:

… y lo que mas me a admirado es que con no haver quando yo aqui llegue

Hombre dellos que supiese Pintar cosa que algo fuese se an perfiçinado
tanto En este arte que ansy en lo de Pinzel como de bulto an sacado mara-
villosas Pieças y algunos nyños Jesús que yo e visto Yn marfil me pareçe
que no se Puede hazer cosa mas Perfecta y ansy lo afirman todos los que
los am bisto. Bense Proveyendo las yglesias de las ymagines q estos hazen
de q antes havia mucha falta y segun la avilidad que muestran en retrartar
y las ymagines q bienen de Spaña entiendo que antes de mucho no nos
haran falta las que se hazen en flandes … (What arouses my wonder most
is, that when I arrived no Sangley knew how to paint anything; but now
have so perfected themselves in this art, that they have wrought marvel-
lous works both with the chisel and with the brush. Having seen some
infant Jesus figures in ivory [Fig. 19.1], it seems to me that nothing more
perfect than these could be produced; and such is the opinion of those
who have seen them. The churches are now being provided with these
images, which they sorely lacked before; with their ability to replicate
those images that come from Spain, I understand that it should not be
long when those made in Flanders will not be missed …)1

Setting aside the astonishing geographies invoked in Salazar’s description,

I want to focus on one particular phrase: hazen de Flandes (made in Flanders).
The locative descriptor not only identifies a particular export object type – the

1 Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville. Carta de Domingo de Salazar sobre relación con
China y sangleyes. Filipinas 74, N. 38, June 24, 1590, fol. 185r–186v.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

768 Porras

Figure 19.1 Anon., Christ Child (ca. 1600–1675). Ivory with polychromy, ca. 36 cm.
Monterrey, Museo de Historia Mexicana
Image © author

so-called poupée de Malines [Fig. 19.2] but also provides a qualitative assess-
ment. In stating that the Filipino church ‘will not miss’ even those sculptures
made in Flanders, Salazar acknowledges both the desirability and presumed
high quality of Flemish statuary used on the other side of the globe.
Sculptures from Flanders played a key role in formative legends of Spanish
conquest in both the Philippine archipelago and in New Spain. In 1565 when
the Spanish first conquered the Philippines, a soldier supposedly uncovered a
sculpture of the Christ Child left by Ferdinand Magellan some forty years previ-
ous. This statue, now known as the Santo Niño de Cebu [Fig. 19.3] was described
by the chronicler Fernando Riquiel as: ‘a child Jesus like those of Flanders, in
its little pine cradle and its little loose shirt, such as come from those parts, and
a little velvet hat, like those of Flanders – and all so well preserved that only the
little cross, which is generally upon the globe that he holds in his hands, was
missing’.2 The Spanish soldiers who made this remarkable discovery had them-
selves just arrived in the Pacific via New Spain, and Mechelen poupée (small
scale figural sculptures) were familiar devotional objects in colonial Latin

2 English translation of Fernando Riquiel’s account in his 1565 Relacion from Blair E.H. –
Robertson J., The Philippine islands, 1493–1898, 55 vols. (Cleveland: 1908), vol. 2, 120–21.
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 769

Figure 19.2 Anon., Christ Child (ca. 1510). Walnut with polychromy. Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum
Image © Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam
770 Porras

Figure 19.3 Anon., Santo Niño de Cebú (ca. 1520). Wood with polychromy. Cebu City,
Basílica Minore del Santo Niño de Cebú
Image © Cofradiabsn at Wikipedia.org, Creative Commons
license (CC BY-SA 4.0)
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 771

America. Supposedly Hernán Cortés had carried with him into battle another
poupée, a statue of the Virgin and Child (the so-called Virgen Conquistadora,
Fig. 19.4). Presented to the Tlaxcala, allies of the Spanish against the Aztecs,
the statue was given to the first Franciscan monastery established in the colo-
nial city of Puebla. By the late sixteenth-century, Poblanos looking to assert
the colonial city’s venerable place in the conversion of New Spain cited this
Flemish statue as a key piece of evidence, proof of the city’s age and impor-
tance to the Spanish crown.3
These Spanish anecdotes about statues described as de flandes, suggest the
ekphrastic possibilities of this term. Ekphrasis, in its most basic sense, is the
written description of a work of visual art, the attempted verbal or written imi-
tation of a visual representation.4 In the case of de flandes, the locative phrase
recalls an object type that is presumed to be familiar to the reader, acting as
a kind of descriptive shorthand. But de flandes also functions rhetorically, as
an expression of value and skill, as well as geographic origin. In this essay,
I suggest de flandes has the potential for enargeia, a capacity for vivid descrip-
tion that speaks out to the reader.5 In what follows, I trace the descriptive and
affective qualities of this short phrase, even when found in the most prosaic
bureaucratic records of the Spanish empire (shipping documents, testaments
and inventories). Following the intertextual approach of Valerie Robillard,
I reconstruct the ways in which de flandes fulfils the depictive, attributive and
associative properties of ekphrasis, not only describing an object’s physical
appearance, but its facture and style.6 I argue that de flandes was a prismatic
ekphrastic expression, refracting allusions to materiality, aesthetic quality
and/or value, yet often freighted with a frisson of cultural difference.
To be de flandes at the end of the sixteenth century was to be geographi-
cally and linguistically removed, potentially politically contested, as well as
desired and collectable. While not bound to a specific medium or object type,
the phrase de flandes, coupled with certain material descriptors, functioned
as effective and sometimes affective description, mobilized by poets, priests

3 Remensnyder A.G., La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New
Worlds (New York, NY: 2014) 312–3.
4 See the similarities with Heffernan J.A.W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from
Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: 1993) 3; Krieger M., “The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and
Words, Space and Time – and the Literary Work”, in Robillard V. – Jongeneel E. (eds.), Pictures
into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: 1998) 4.
5 See Webb R., Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice
(Farnham – Burlington, VT: 2009).
6 On this differential typology of ekphrasis, see Robillard V., “In Pursuit of Ekphrasis: An
Intertextual Approach”, in Robillard V. – Jongeneel E. (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical
and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: 1998) 53–72.
772 Porras

Figure 19.4 Anon., Virgen Conquistadora (ca. 1520). Wood with polychromy. Puebla, San
Francisco
Image © author
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 773

and notaries. This paper recovers the ways in which de flandes was seen and
read as an ekphrastic term, used to describe and evaluate people, objects
and artworks.

1 Materia

When reading inventories, shipping records and insurance documents from

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most dominant material associ-
ated with Flanders is undoubtedly cloth, particularly linen. Olanda or olandilla
is the Spanish word for the finest bed linens and shirts; despite its name, this
material was not exclusively Dutch in origin, and was primarily purchased at
fairs in Brabant and Flanders.7 In the description of textiles, the term de
flandes was typically used to describe a particular stitching technique (puntas
de flandes) or the inclusion of lace on items of clothing (such as in Fig. 19.5). So
a 1664 list of valuable silver and clothing owned by a resident of Lima included
‘Una camisa de Ruan de Cofre con mangas de Cambray y Pecqo de Contados
el pucho quanesido Con puntas de flandes (a shirt of ruan with Cambrai
sleeves and small forms of yarn made with de flandes stitching)’ as well as ‘…
Unas naguas de chambray y consu dobladillo y dos espiqueas y su pliegue con
puntas de flandes (some chambray petticoats with de flandes stitching on the
hems and folds)’.8 Ribbons and thread are often also described as de flandes.
Household inventories and trans-Atlantic shipping records list considerable
quantities of Flemish thread, suggesting its widespread desirability and use
across the Spanish empire.9 De flandes then describes types of textiles and

7 Boyd-Bowman P., “Spanish and European Textiles in Sixteenth Century Mexico”, The
Americas 29, no. 3 (1973) 334–58; Miegroet H.J. Van – Marchi N. de, “Flemish Textile Trade
and New Imagery in Colonial Mexico (1524–1646)”, In Painting for the Kingdoms, ed. Brown J.
(Mexico City: 2010) 878–923, 883.
8 Archivo General de la Nación, Lima. Auto de bienes, 28 October 1664.
9 For example ‘una libra de ylo de flandes en seis reales … dos papeles de zintas de ylo de
flandes en veinte y ocho reales’ […]. Real Biblioteca (RB), Madrid. Inventory of the estate
of Catalina García, Valladolid, 31 May 1596; or ‘yten seis papeles y media gruesa de cintas de
flandes de colores y negras o once reales gruesa’ RB, Madrid. Inventory of the estate of Miguel
Navarro, joyería, Valladolid, 19 August 1593; or ‘Beinte libras de hilo comun de Flandes a tres
reales cada libra’[…]. Ship registry for the ‘Nuestra Señora del Buen Suceso’, under the mas-
ter Gaspar Ochoa de Zárate, which departed for Tierra Firme (South America) in 1622, AGI,
Seville, Contratación 1172, N.2. R.10, fol. 54r.
774 Porras

Figure 19.5 Anon., Cuff of linen with Flemish bobbin lace (ca. 1635–50). Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum
Image © Rijksmuseum

indicates their relative value, activating both depictive and attributive func-
tions of ekphrastic description.10
The longstanding association of the Low Countries with the produc-
tion of fine cloth, and particularly embroidery or lacework, can be related

10 Robillard V., “In Pursuit of Ekphrasis: An Intertextual Approach”, in Robillard V. –

Jongeneel E. (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis
(Amsterdam:1998) 61.
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 775

to contemporaneous descriptions of Flemish linen paintings. In surviving

Spanish inventories and documents, these works were typically designated by
the material of their support, linen canvas (lienzo), more than by their painted
subject. A 1601 inventory lists 103 Flemish lienzos of diverse histories – a seem-
ingly worthless bulk description of an astonishing number of artworks.11 Yet
the materia, tempera on canvas, was the key piece of information leading to
these objects’ attribution as made in Flanders. Whereas other lienzos in this
same inventory specify that they are painted in oil, or even by a specific art-
ist, the origin and material composition of these 103 lienzo de flandes are read
together to produce an effective yet minimal ekphrastic description of these
objects and a sense of their value.
Descriptions of textiles and paintings were often read together, as in this 1622
ship manifest for a South American-bound vessel [Fig. 19.6], which included
a box with 6 lienzos de flandes bundled alongside expensive bedclothes. The
very next container in the manifest lists 8 lienzos al temple (tempera paint-
ings on linen) with no given origin, as well as thread, tablecloths and other
fine fabrics.12 Images on fabric support and the raw material of their making
thus were shipped and seen together; and both were described as de flandes.
The association of linen painting with Flanders does not appear exclusive to
a single genre of imagery, although as we shall see, some pictorial types are
particularly associated with Flemish authors.
As a point of contrast, works painted on copper (called láminas in Spanish)
are rarely coupled with a geographic descriptor in Spanish sources, despite
the fact both lienzos and láminas were the two dominant types of Flemish art-
works aimed at an export market.13 Sandra van Ginhoven has described how
in 1633 when Flemish dealer Christomo Van Immerseel sent 38 paintings on
copper from Antwerp to his agent in Mexico City, these paintings were simply

11 “Yten ciento y tres lienços de pintura de diverssas ystorias con sus madros y listas de mol-
duras doradas que truxeron de flandes pintados al temple” Archivo Histórico Nacional
(AHN), Madrid, Inventory of the estate of Iñigo López de Mendoza de la Vega y Luna y
Fonseca, Marqués de Santillana y del Cenete, Conde del Cid y V Duque del Infantado.
Guadalajara, Spain. 3 September 1601, (copy ca. 1626–33), sección Osuna, legajo 1948, fol.
51, quoted in Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G., Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed.
Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA: 1997) 199.
12 AGI, Seville, Contratación 1172, N.2, R.11, fol. 74r. Ship registry for the ‘San Diego’, captained
by Pedro Gutiérrez, which left Seville for Tierra Firme (South America) in 1622.
13 Confusingly, lámina in archival records can refer to paintings on copper, copperplates,
and occasionally engravings. Lámina was defined by Sebastián de Covarrubias (Tesoro de
la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1611) as: ‘la plancha de algū metal
oro, plata, y los demas del nombre Latino lamina, metalli cuiusuis frustrūin latitudenim
ductū, crassius tamen quā bractea’.
776 Porras

Figure 19.6 Ship registry for the ‘San Diego’ (1622). Seville, Archivo General de Indias,
Contratación 1172, N.2, R.11, fol. 74r
Image © Archivo General de Indias
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 777

referred to as láminas in all the shipping records – with no mention of their

Flemish origin.14 That is, while not all lienzos were necessarily seen as Flemish,
they were more likely than láminas to be identified as de flandes. While van
Ginhoven has found no descriptors of Flemish origin in Spanish shipping
documents related to the exports of any artworks to the Americas after 1634,
Spanish inventorial records do occasionally refer to láminas made in Flanders.
For example, the 1665 valuation of the estate of Ana María de Peñaranda lists
‘Catorce Laminas Pequenas de flandes de diferentes cosas (fourteen small lam-
inas de flandes of different things)’.15 In this instance, we know the appraiser,
Francisco Gutiérrez, was himself a painter and there were other láminas not
described as de flandes in this collection – begging the question, how were
these paintings on copper recognized as Flemish, if not by their material?

2 ‘De mano de un flamenco’

When surveying the kinds of subjects associated with paintings described as

de flandes in early modern Spanish inventories, there is a clear dominance of
landscapes, floral and still lives, as well as battle and night-time scenes. The
Spanish association of Flemish painters with the production of superior land-
scapes was well worn by the seventeenth century, as Abigail Newman has aptly
shown.16 But here I want to focus more broadly on how de flandes produces
ekphrastic description by invoking the particulars of style and artistic facture,
rather than simply describing the artwork’s subject. In Spanish sources, I sug-
gest, there is a conflation of a painting’s lifelikeness with its Flemish origin
across various genres; de flandes then broadly signals the veristic visual depic-
tion of people, places and things.
Landscapes were undoubtedly the most dominant genre of painting
described as de flandes, to cite just a few examples: ‘six large landscapes (paises)

14 Ginhoven S. van, Connecting Art Markets. Guilliam Forchondt’s Dealership in Antwerp

(c.1632–78) and the Overseas Paintings Trade (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 61, note 55; see AGI,
Seville. Contratación 1179, no. 1, r.3, fol. 50, r. 12, fol. 56, and r.14 fol. 9; Miegroet H.J. Van –
Marchi N. de, “Flemish Textile Trade and New Imagery in Colonial Mexico (1524–1646)”.
15 Archivo Histórico de Protocolos (AHP), Madrid. Valuation of goods of Doña Ana Maria
de Peñaranda, 12 August 1665 (Prot. 8.098, unfoliated, p. 4), quoted in Burke M.B. –
Cherry P.G., Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA:
1997) 593.
16 Newman A.D., “Juan de la Corte in Madrid: ‘branding’ Flanders abroad”, Nederlands
Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 63 (2013) 276–8.
778 Porras

de flandes’,17 ‘another linen painting de Flandes with an unnamed city’,18 and

the loquacious ‘una pintura en lienço de Un pais hecho en flandes con Una
Urna Juntto a ella y Una muger dormiendo y Un perro y al otro lado Un Rio y
arboles … en la mano de peter espierneco (a painting on canvas of a landscape
made in Flandes with an urn and a woman sleeping next to it and a dog and on
the other side a river and trees … valued as by the hand of Pieter Spierincks)’.19
While the attribution of Flemish origin to these landscapes in some cases
reflects the scene depicted, the presence of a recognizably foreign city view or
of a kermesse (Flemish church festival, or in Spanish, caramesa),20 the major-
ity of those landscapes called de flandes were hunting scenes, seascapes, and
landscapes that could, at least in theory, be located anywhere. That is, there is
nothing inherently ‘Flemish’ about, for example: ‘Un pais en tabla de flandes
con Una tartana en un Rio (A landscape on panel from Flanders with a boat
in a river)’.21 The recognition of a Flemish picture then involved first decipher-
ing details of painted costume and architecture, and interpreting these details
as naturalistic, as rooted in observation after life. Stylistic naturalism then is
described as rooted in the painting’s place of facture. The picture is read as a
document of lived and meticulously captured experience that may or may not
reflect the object’s actual place of origin.22
The equation of veristic style with Flemish production ultimately dictated
a sense of the painting’s material worth. After all, inventories and shipping
manifests were used as an index of value. The notary or tax inspector is an
ekphrastic actor, communicating with other agents of the state across time
and space. The designation de flandes then produced a mental image, as well

17 See for example ‘seis paises grandes de flandes con sus marcos negros a cinco ducados
cada uno; otros seis paises de flandes’; RB, Madrid. 1656 Testamento Pedro Sarmineto de
Mendoza. Valladolid, 27 de junio de 1655.
18 ‘otro lienço de Flandes con un çiudad sin nombre’, AHP, Madrid. Inventory of Juan
Hurtado de Mendoza y Mendoza, 1624, (Prot. 2.674, fol. 1502v.), quoted in Burke M.B. –
Cherry P.G., Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA:
1997) 257.
19 Archivo de la Casa Alba, Palacio de Liria, Madrid. Inventory of estate of Gaspar de Haro
y Guzmán, 1 June 1651, caja 221–22, p. 67 no. 277, quoted in Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G.,
Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA: 1997) 478.
20 AHP, Madrid. Inventory of Joseph Salvador Sarmiento, Conde de Salvatierra y Marqués
del Sobroso, 1688, Prot. 9.864, fol. 17v., quoted in Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G., Collections of
Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA: 1997) 717.
21 Archivo de la Casa Alba, Palacio de Liria, Madrid. Inventory of estate of Gaspar de Haro
y Guzmán, 1 June 1651, caja 221–22, p. 30 no. 127, quoted in Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G.,
Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA: 1997) 471.
22 On ‘Flemish’ paintings not made in Flanders, see Newman, “Juan de la Corte in Madrid:
‘branding’ Flanders abroad” 277.
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 779

as a supplemental notion of material and aesthetic value connected to the per-

ceived naturalism of the painted surface.
The association of night time scenes with Flemish painters reveals how
the identification of heightened naturalism with Flanders transcended icono-
graphic boundaries. So Diego Felipe de Guzman, Marques de Leganes, owned
a ‘painting of night from the hand of a Fleming’ and a ‘Saint Jerome painted at
night, reading a book with the cross, from the hand of a Fleming of Antwerp
who paints at night’.23 The 1675 inventory of the Conde de Molina, Antonio
Mesía de Tovar also includes a ‘painting on a medium panel with an ebony
frame that represents a night fair of Flemings, from the hand of a Fleming,
valued at 300 ducats’.24 Whether depicting biblical history or popular custom
then, night-time scenes such as Jacob Jordaens, The Betrayal of Christ [Fig. 19.7]
were recognized as a distinctive product of the Southern Netherlands. What
unites these disparate works is that each painting required a mastery of veris-
tic surface effects.
De flandes then goes beyond a depictive function, as the term does not map
onto a single subject matter or object type, but is associated with an esteemed
and naturalistic mode of pictorial rendering. For each notary, de flandes oper-
ated as an ekphrastic supplement to its identified narrative, contributing
to its perceived value. What unites paintings of landscapes and night time
scenes described as de flandes is their shared attention to the observation and
mimetic replication of natural phenomena – attributes which are also invoked
in Spanish ekphrastic accounts of Flemish portraiture and still life painting.
The circa 1620 sonnet “Hurtas mi vulto (You capture my face)” by the poet
Luis de Góngora y Argote is addressed to a Flemish painter while he is at
work on the sitter’s portrait. The colours of the painting are praised but not
enumerated, and the portrait itself is not described. Góngora addresses the
artist: ‘honourable Belgian, continue your noble theft’,25 implying the artist

23 AHP, Madrid. Inventory of Don Diego Felipe de Guzman Marques de Leganes, 6 April 1655,
(Prot. 6265, ff.577v.–600r.). See transcription in Navio J.L., “La gran colección de pinturas
del Marqués de Leganés”, Analeeta Calasanetiana 8 (1962): 282.
24 AHP, Madrid. Inventory of the estate of Antonio Mesía de Tovar, Conde de Molina,
6 December 1674, (Prot. 12.006, fol. 427, no 85 and fol. 426, no. 69), quoted in Burke M.B. –
Cherry P.G., Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA:
1997) 666.
25 Sonnet XXI, “A un excelente Pintor estrangero que le estava retratando”: ‘Hurtas mi bulto
y, cuanto más le dene/ A tu pinzel, dos veces peregrine./ De espíritu vivaz el breve lino/
En los colores que sediento beve,/ Vanas cenizas temo al lino breve,/ […] Belga Gentil,
prosigue al hurto noble,/ Que a su materia perdonarà el fuego,/ Y el tiempo ignorará su
contextura …’ Cf. Góngora L., Todas las obras de Don Luis de Gongora en varios poemas
(Madrid: 1634) fol. 30r.
780 Porras

Figure 19.7 Jacob Jordaens, The Betrayal of Christ (ca. 1650). Oil on canvas, 225.5 ×
246.3 cm. Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art (Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.
Fund 1970.32)
Image © Cleveland Museum of Art, Creative Commons license
(CC0-1.0)

steals the sitter’s own animacy via his skilful brushstrokes. The ‘thirsty’ canvas
in Góngora’s verse drinks up pigment in order to produce a living spirit (‘el
breve lino/ en las colores que sediento bebe’). Góngora’s poem shifts attention
from the explicit ekphrastic description of his own portrait to an encomium
of praise towards the unnamed Flemish artist, the canvas a living testimony to
this painter’s skill.26 The poem suggests how Flemish origin alone could stand
in for ekphrastic detail, as Góngora connects the nationality of the artist with
his ability to grant the painting a life-like quality.

26 Mayers calls this iconic ekphrasis shift from appearance to skill of creator, Mayers K.M.,
Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing (Lanham, MD: 2012)
38–40.
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 781

Spanish records typically list portraits by the name of the sitter rather than
by their artist, unless by the hand of an esteemed painter like Titian, Peter Paul
Rubens, or Diego Velázquez. Yet there is some evidence that Flemish author-
ship of portraits was prized by Spanish collectors: the 1663 inventory of Don
Francisco de Oviedo included ‘two portraits from Flanders, copies of Albrecht
Dürer with gilded frames with lead, valued at 200 and 100 reales for each’.27
This is notable as it is not just the original invention by Dürer that produces
value, but also the Flemish origin of these copies. Crucially the Flemishness of
these copies was distinguishable, recognizable, and valued by both the notary
and witness, as stylistically self-evident. This is an example of the poietic mode
of ekphrasis, where de flandes calls attention to the facture of an object, more
than its specific appearance.28
The idea of Flemish painting’s specific claim to lifelikeness is further sug-
gested in the ekphrastic language of early modern Spanish shipping records,
inventories and testaments, where notaries often simply use the noun of the
object depicted: ‘país de Flandes (country of Flandes)’, ‘batallas (battles)’,
‘frutero (fruit bowl)’, ‘banquete (banquet)’. Some of this undoubtedly has to do
with the need for brevity, yet the persistent coupling of de flandes with these
collapsed descriptions of landscapes, city views, battle scenes and still life
paintings, leads to the linguistic entanglement of representation and its object.
So a Clara Peeters still life is rendered: ‘A collection of cheeses and breads the
same size as above, from the hand of Clara Peeters’.29 In the context of an
estate inventory, a term like frutero could be used both for an actual fruit bowl
and for a still life painting – potentially confusing matters for the reader. The
conflation of an object and its painted representation testifies to the illusory
nature of these Flemish paintings, and in turn, their perceived value.
The esteem for Flemish artworks in the Spanish world, and the frequency
with which this descriptor was utilized in Spanish documents, make clear
that the phrase de flandes acted as a guarantor of aesthetic quality. The his-
toric appreciation for Netherlandish painting by Spanish royalty and nobility
since the early fifteenth century, likely granted works made in Flanders a cer-
tain câché, particularly those by internationally fêted artists like Jan van Eyck,

27 ‘Mas dos rretratos de flandes Copias de Alverto durero Con marcos dorados y a gallenados
tassados en Ducientos rreales a çiento cada uno’. AHP, Madrid. Inventory of the estate of
Don Francisco de Oviedo, 1663, Prot. 6.303, fol 211v, quoted in Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G.,
Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los Angeles, CA: 1997) 574.
28 On the poietic mode of ekphrasis, see Vincent M., “Between Ovid and Barthes: ‘Ekphrasis,’
Orality, Textuality in Ovid’s ‘Arachne’” Arethusa 27, 3 (1994) 361–86.
29 AHP, Madrid. Inventory of Don Diego Felipe de Guzman Marques de Leganes, 6 April 1655,
(Prot. 6265, f. 600r.); Navio, “La gran colección de pinturas del Marqués de Leganés.”
782 Porras

Rogier van der Weyden and Hieronymus Bosch, all of whose works could all
be found in the Escorial Palace.30 The 1655 inventory of Don Diego Felipe de
Guzman, the Marques de Leganes is exceptional in its specificity and detail,
and allows for some reconstruction of the kind of ekphrastic work de flandes
activated in the mind of early modern Spanish readers. A ‘village kermis with
many people close to homes and with different figures, a vara and two tercias in
width and half as tall, from the hand of a flamenco antiguo on panel’ is valued
at 2000 reales,31 around the price of a medium sized Titian, but also the same
price as a large still life by Frans Snyders. A 1664 inventory of Pedro de Arce, a
significant collector of Italian art in Madrid, notes he owned a Temptation of
St Anthony by Bosch – at 2200 reales, it was appraised at more than twice the
price of a Magdalene by Jacopo Bassano.32
The 1675 inventory of Antonio Mesía de Tovar, an important Spanish collec-
tor of Flemish paintings, reveals how de flandes operated as a marker of aes-
thetic quality and commercial value. Mesía de Tovar owned works by Rubens,
Antony Van Dyck and Jan Brueghel – but even an unattributed painting ‘on a
medium panel with an ebony frame that represents a Flemish masque at night,
by the hand of a Fleming’ was valued at 60% more than two large landscapes
filled with different figures by a named Dutch artist (banderbina, for a member
of the Van der Venne family).33 Here the discrepancy in value may have a polit-
ical dimension. After 1603, all artworks imported from the Low Countries to
Spanish territories required a notarized affirmation – una carta de certificacion
para España – attesting that the work was not made in rebel territory from the

30 Heesch D. Van – Janssen R. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Netherlandish Art and Luxury Goods
in Renaissance Spain (Turnhout: 2018); Cremades F.C., Felipe II, Mecenas de las Artes
(Madrid: 1992).
31 ‘una caramesa en un village, con mucha gente arrimada a las casas, en diferentes figuras,
bara y dos tercias de ancho, y una de alto, de mano de un flamenco antiguo en tabla
en 2,000’ AHP, Madrid. Inventory of Don Diego Felipe de Guzman Marques de Leganes,
6 April 1655, (Prot. 6265, f. 600r.); Navio, “La gran colección de pinturas del Marqués de
Leganés”, 284.
32 AHP, Madrid. Inventory of Pedro de Arce, 1664, Prot. 10404, ff. 393–399, quoted in
Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G., Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los
Angeles, CA: 1997) 586–8.
33 ‘una pintura en tabla mediana Con marco de ebano que Representa Una mascara de
noche a la flamenca de mano de Un flamenco tasada en treçientos ducados’ […] ‘tres
Paisajes grandes de banderbina sin marcos bara y media de Alto y dos y media de ancho
tasados a sesenta ducados Cada uno y tieneen diferentes figuras que Unos son mayores
que otros’, AHP, Madrid. Inventory of the estate of Antonio Mesía de Tovar, Conde de
Molina, 6 December 1674, (Prot. 12.006, fol. 427, no 85 and fol. 426, no. 69), quoted in
Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G., Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M. (Los
Angeles, CA: 1997) 665–6.
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 783

Northern Netherlands. Without such documentation, artworks were hit with

an exorbitant tax of 30%.34
The existence of this tax has led Neil de Marchi and Hans van Miegroet
to suggest that certain ‘Dutch’ artistic products, such as the tonal landscapes
of Jan van Goyen and the Van de Vennes, or breakfast still life paintings from
Haarlem, would be recognized as Dutch by Spanish customs authorities and
thus taxed at a higher rate. This practice, the art historians suggest, disincen-
tivized the production of Flemish versions of these types of paintings.35 Yet
the inventory of Mesía de Tovar suggests that there was more at play here than
artists trying to avoid incurring massive export duties. In fact, Mesía de Tovar’s
inventory suggests ‘Dutch’ works like those of van de Venne were making it to
Spain, despite the heavy export tax. Once in Spain however, these paintings
were less valuable than comparable Flemish works of similar subjects. This
suggests that contrary to de Marchi and van Miegroet’s hypothesis, Flemish
painters were not financially discouraged from exporting so-called ‘Dutch’
genres or styles. De flandes signalled quality and concomitant financial value to
Spanish viewers; outweighing their potential misidentification as contraband.

3 Policing flamencos

The issue of export duties reminds us that references to objects and people de
flandes had political resonance both during and in the aftermath of the Eighty
Years’ War. In 1585, Spanish officials first placed restrictions on the sale of goods
originating from rebel Northern territories. As early as 1574, an official order to
viceregal port officials in New Spain instructed them to open shipments and
look for: ‘Books of any faculty, in Spanish, Latin or any foreign language, or
canvases from Flanders or paintings on linen, paper or panel, made from a
mold, brush or by hand’.36 Any goods found were to be delivered to the local
commissioner of the Holy Office. The geographic origin of artworks was linked

34 Stols E., De Spaanse Brabanders of de handelsbetrekkingen van de zuidelijke Nederlanden

met de Iberische Wereld, 1598–1648 (Brussels: 1971), vol. I, 32.
35 Miegroet H.J. Van – Marchi N. de, “Exploring Markets for Netherlandish Paintings in
Sprain and Nueva Espana”, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999) 93.
36 ‘[…] libros de cualquier facultad, en cualquier lengua castellana, latina o extranjera o
lienzos de Flandes o pinturas, otras en lienzo o en papel, o tabla, de molde, pincel o mano’.
Transcribed in Arroyo E., Cómo pintar a lo flamenco: el lenguaje pictórico de Martín de Vos
y su anclaje en la Nueva España, Ph.D. dissertation (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, 2015) 66, n. 131, from Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico city. Inquisición,
vol. 77, exp. 21, fols. 65–111.
784 Porras

to their potential for doctrinal irregularity or political insubordination –

even if Flanders remained within the officially sanctioned Spanish empire.
This was still the case a century later, in 1688, when the Veracruz Inquisition
reissued the port regulations using virtually the same language singling out
Flemish lienzos.37
Yet the aesthetic appreciation for objects de flandes smoothed their trans-
portation across Inquisitorial and mercantile controls. So in 1607/8, a single
container on the ship the San Francisco de Paula [Fig. 19.8] contained 6 dozen
‘pictures of Flemish mountains’ packed alongside Flemish textiles, all sent to
Tierra Firme (South America) from Seville.38 This shipment occurred despite
the fact that Inquisitorial regulations instituted in 1603 required the cap-
tains, maestre, pilot and scribes for all ships entering American ports, to be
asked whether they knew of any officials, sailors or passengers from outside
Spanish rule – particularly those from England, Flanders, Germany and France
and to list any ‘sculpted or painted images on linen or paper’ carried aboard
each ship.39
While to be flamenco was not to be Spanish, it was also not totally foreign:
flamencos were one of the nations of the Spanish empire. But the geopoliti-
cal boundaries of this nation were contested in this period, and individuals
identified as flamenco could in fact originate from across the Low Countries,
Luxembourg, as well as parts of France and Germany. Eddy Stols has sug-
gested the multilingual and liminal status of flamencos within the Spanish
empire anticipated the colonial status of New World criollos and mestizos, but
was also linked to the Spanish empire’s heretical imagination and anxieties
about Protestants.40 There were significant Netherlandish populations across

37 AGN, Mexico City. Inquisición, vol. 673, exp. 47, Edict against the entrance of forbidden
books and paintings through the port of San Juan de Ulúa, Mexico.
38 ‘seis docenas de pinturas de monte de flandes’. Archivo General de Indias, Seville. Ship
registry for the ‘San Francisco de Paula’, captained by Juan Zarco de Maya, which left
Seville in 1607. AGI, Seville, Contratación, 1151C, N.4, fol. 223v.
39 ‘Yten si en el dcho navio vienen algunas personas offes, marineros, grumetes o pasajeros
que sean estrangeros y fuera e los reynos de España en especial de Ynglaterra Flandes,
Alemania y Francia o de otras partes…. Yten que imagines traen de pulto o pinzel o
de mano o en lienço o papel y sy traen algunos titulos o letras’ […]. AGN, México City.
Inquisición, vol. 276, exp. 13. fols. 345r–v. See also Ginhoven S. van, Connecting Art Markets.
Guilliam Forchondt’s Dealership in Antwerp (c.1632–78) and the Overseas Paintings Trade
(Leiden – Boston: 2016) appendix 2.
40 Stols E., “Artesanos, mercaderes y religiosos flamencos en el México virreinal”, in Pérez
Rosales L. – Sluis A. van der (eds.), Memorias e historias compartidas: intercambios inter-
culturales, relaciones comerciales y diplomáticas entre México y los Países Bajos, siglos
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 785

Figure 19.8 Ship registry for the ‘San Francisco de Paula’ (1607/8). Seville, Archivo General
de Indias, Contratación 1151C, N.4
Image © Archivo General de Indias
786 Porras

the Spanish empire: including at Seville, the clearinghouse for Spain’s over-
seas territories, in the North Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores and the
Canaries, and in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. The centrality of
these immigrant networks to the mercantile operations of the Spanish empire,
meant it was impossible to extricate flamencos from Spain’s territories, despite
the partial loss of some of Spain’s Netherlandish territories in the ongoing wars
against the Dutch. At the same time, the political liberation of at least part of
the Low Countries from Spanish control meant that to be flamenco retained a
frisson of linguistic, religious, geopolitical distance.
The disappearance of de flandes as an ekphrastic term for artworks in
Spanish transatlantic shipping records from around 1630 does not mean these
objects stopped travelling to the Spanish Americas. As Van Ginhoven suggests
in her study of the transatlantic art trade, Flemish paintings continued to make
their way to the Americas in the cargo of Flemish dealers in textiles, who often
bundled linens and lacework, lienzos and láminas together.41 So in the end we
return to cloth, as it was dealers in luxury textiles who continued to exploit the
Spanish world’s demands both for costly fabric and artworks de flandes.
Both during and after the Eighty Years’ war, notaries and assessors used de
flandes to describe a range of objects executed in different media. I have argued
here that the term was more than just a sign of geographic origin, object type
or subject matter, but that de flandes, effectively and affectively functioned to
convey the skilful labour and material value embodied in the described object.
As ekphrasis, de flandes communicated particularities of style, specifically
illusionistic naturalism and artistic quality. Irreducible to a singular material
or iconographic feature, to recognize and envision an artwork de flandes was
to position oneself within a longstanding aesthetic, geopolitical and commer-
cial relationship between the Low Countries and the Iberian peninsula, when
describing artworks owned and used across the Spanish world, from Madrid to
Veracruz, Lima or Manila.

XVI–XX (Mexico City: 2009) 19–39; Stols E. – Werner T., “La integración de Flandes en la
Monarquía Hispánica”, in Werner T. (ed.), Encuentros en Flandes, Relaciones e intercam-
bios hispanoflamencos a inicios de la Edad Moderna (Leuven:2000); Sánchez M.H., “La
cuestión de Flandes y la Monarquía Hispánica”, in Sanz Camañes P. (ed.), La Monarquía
Hispánica en tiempos del Quijote (Madrid:2005) 501–528.
41 Ginhoven S. van, Connecting Art Markets; Miegroet H.J. Van – Marchi N. de, “Flemish
Textile Trade and New Imagery in Colonial Mexico (1524–1646)” 905.
SEEING ‘ DE FLANDES ’ 787

Bibliography

Boyd-Bowman P., “Spanish and European Textiles in Sixteenth Century Mexico”, The
Americas 29, no. 3 (1973) 334–358.
Burke M.B. – Cherry P.G., Collections of Paintings in Madrid 1601–1755, ed. Gilbert M.
(Los Angeles, CA: 1997).
Cremades F.C., Felipe II, Mecenas de las Artes (Madrid: 1992).
Ginhoven S. van, Connecting Art Markets. Guilliam Forchondt’s Dealership in Antwerp
(c.1632–78) and the Overseas Paintings Trade (Leiden – Boston: 2016).
Heesch D. Van – Janssen R. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Netherlandish Art and Luxury
Goods in Renaissance Spain (Turnhout: 2018).
Heffernan J.A.W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
(Chicago: 1993).
Krieger M., “The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and Words, Space and Time — and the
Literary Work”, in Robillard V. – Jongeneel E. (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical
and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: 1998) 3–20.
Mayers K.M., Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing
(Lanham: 2012).
Miegroet H.J. Van – Marchi N. de, “Exploring Markets for Netherlandish Paintings in
Sprain and Nueva Espana”, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999) 81–111.
Miegroet H.J. Van – Marchi N. de, “Flemish Textile Trade and New Imagery in Colonial
Mexico (1524–1646)”, in Painting for the Kingdoms, ed. Brown J. (Mexico City: 2010)
878–923.
Navio J.L., “La gran colección de pinturas del Marqués de Leganés,” Analeeta Calasane-
tiana 8 (1962) 260–330.
Newman A.D., “Juan de la Corte in Madrid: ‘branding’ Flanders abroad”, Nederlands
Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 63 (2013) 264–301.
Remensnyder A.G., La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and
New Worlds (New York: 2014).
Robillard V., “In Pursuit of Ekphrasis: An Intertextual Approach”, in Robillard V. –
Jongeneel E. (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to
Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: 1998) 53–72.
Sánchez M.H., “La cuestión de Flandes y la Monarquía Hispánica”, in Sanz Camañes P.
(ed.), La Monarquía Hispánica en tiempos del Quijote (Madrid: 2005) 501–528.
Stols E., “Artesanos, mercaderes y religiosos flamencos en el México virreinal”, in Pérez
Rosales L. – Sluis A. van der (eds.), Memorias e historias compartidas: intercambios
interculturales, relaciones comerciales y diplomáticas entre México y los Países Bajos,
siglos XVI–XX (Mexico City: 2009) 19–39.
788 Porras

Stols E., De Spaanse Brabanders of de handelsbetrekkingen van de zuidelijke Nederlanden

met de Iberische Wereld, 1598–1648 (Brussels: 1971).
Stols E. – Werner T., “La integración de Flandes en la Monarquía Hispánica”, in Werner
T. (ed.), Encuentros en Flandes, Relaciones e intercambios hispanoflamencos a inicios
de la Edad Moderna (Leuven: 2000) 1–89.
Vincent M., “Between Ovid and Barthes: ‘Ekphrasis,’ Orality, Textuality in Ovid’s
‘Arachne’” Arethusa 27, 3 (1994) 361–86.
Webb R., Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and
Practice (Farnham – Burlington: 2009).
 Chapter 20

‘Escribieron en mi memoria’: Ekphrasis in the

Pastoral Fiction of New Spain

Teresa Clifton

In Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erífile (Golden Age in the Forests of Erífile), the 1608
pastoral novel by Bernardo de Balbuena (1562–1627), the nameless, narrating
Spanish goatherd, at the climax of the novel, falls asleep in a grove and has a
dream-vision of Mexico City. Moments before this oneiric adventure, the nar-
rator observes and ekphrastically recounts a carving on a nearby poplar tree,
in which nymphs and satyrs prance around an elderly satyr who is depicted
as carving a sonnet into a tree.1 The narrator repeats for the reader the twice-
carved sonnet, and then almost compulsively exclaims not once but twice that
this work of art, in which is contained the act of composition of a carpe diem
sonnet, along with the natural setting, also ekphrastically described, ‘escribi-
eron en mi memoria’ unsettling things, ‘pintándome’ upsetting memories
of love lost.2 The narrator then wears himself out singing a sad song to the
shepherdess who spurned him, and promptly falls asleep and dreams of the
New World. What is remarkable, however, is the almost dizzying layering of
artifice, of creation and reception in this relatively typical pastoral scene. The
author writes a moment in which a goatherd describes a carving in which a
satyr carves a sonnet, which writes in the goatherd’s mind a memory, which
inspires the goatherd to compose his own poem, which the author reproduces

1 Balbuena, Bernardo de, Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erífile (Madrid: 1821 [Madrid, Alonso
Martín: 1608]) 124:
‘Estas cosas estaba yo contemplando cuando en el tronco de un álamo no sin gran curio-
sidad a vueltas de algunos sátiros vi talladas muchas ninfas, unas haciendo guirnaldas de
flores, otras bailando al son de flautas y rústicos instrumentos, y todas de mil maneras rego-
cijándose, y entre ellas un anciano sátiro, que impedido por su mucha vejez de semejantes
placeres, sentado al pie de un árbol por entonces se contentaba con escribir en su corteza
estos versos: […]’
‘I was contemplating these things, when on the trunk of a poplar tree, not without great
curiosity, around several satyrs I saw many nymphs carved, some making garlands of flowers,
others dancing to the sound of flutes and rustic instruments, and all rejoicing in a thousand
ways, and in their midst an old satyr, who, excluded from such pleasures by his great age, sit-
ting at the foot of a tree then contented himself with writing these verses on its bark: […]’
2 Ibidem 125: ‘wrote in my memory’; ‘painting for me’.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

790 T. Clifton

for the reader. Visual art, poetry, song, and the act of composition are inextri-
cably linked in this rural wilderness.
The beginning of the seventeenth century witnessed the publication of two
such pastoral novels written in New Spain. Balbuena’s is the first, written in
Mexico in 1602 and published in Madrid in 1608 [Fig. 20.1]. In it, this serrano,
or highlander, narrates the daily lives, adventures, and festivals of herdsmen
on the banks of a river in a fictional, pagan Spain, as well as his dream-journey
to Mexico City. The second novel, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado
(The Goldfinches of the Virgin without Original Sin), was written by a criollo
author, Francisco Bramón (d. 1664), and published in Mexico City in 1620, giv-
ing it tentative claim to the title of first American novel [Fig. 20.2]. In this reli-
gious novel, Anfriso, Bramón’s persona within the novel, leaves the University
of Mexico, citing an exhausting exam as justification for paying a visit to the
Mexican countryside. There, Anfriso, the tired academic, collaborates with the
shepherdess Marcilda to organize a festival for the Immaculate Conception
before returning to Mexico City.
Pastoral fiction served a unique role in social, literary, and artistic com-
mentary in the early modern world. Authors found appeal in the versiprose –
combined poetry and prose – form of the pastoral novel and in the loose plot
structure that encourages the intercalation of diverse literary forms and genres,
ekphrasis, and philosophical musing. The flexibility of the genre allowed writ-
ers to experiment with other types of literature within the widely accepted –
and marketable – form of the pastoral novel. Both of these Mexican novels
showcase the range of the authors’ talent as the shepherd characters create,
view, read, and debate a variety of popular genres, both artistic and literary,
within the scope of the plot. The resulting synthesis permits the authors to
comment on the intellectual production of the time, rendering these pasto-
ral novels treasuries of literary, artistic, and academic culture of New Spain.
Among other things, the authors fill the works with emblems, devices, and art
objects, rendered ekphrastically in prose, to probe the contemporary debates
regarding the appropriate balance of nature and artifice in literature. The pas-
toral ekphrasis serves as a point of engagement with these debates in their
effort to define a local, New World style.
In its late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century incarnations, pastoral
fiction imitates, quotes, and alludes to other works, other genres, and other
forms. Ekphrasis, one of those other forms, also imitates and adapts, and as
such creates a second work of art, this time a literary one, from the art object it
describes. Like the genre of the pastoral novel itself, ekphrasis combines mul-
tiple artistic forms to achieve a creative synthesis inherently greater than any
of its elements. Because ekphrastic passages naturally incorporate two levels
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 791

Figure 20.1 Balbuena, Bernardo de, Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erífile (Madrid, Alonso
Martín: 1608). Book, octavo. Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona. Title page
Image taken by the author with permission of the Rare Book
and Manuscript CRAI Library
792 T. Clifton

Figure 20.2 Bramón, Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, (Mexico
City, Juan de Alcázar: 1620). Book, octavo. Providence, RI, John Carter Brown
Library. Title page
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 793

of creative production, the description and the described, they offer a unique
lens in pastoral literature through which to observe the literary interests of the
novels’ authors and also the artistic endeavors of the shepherds that create the
objects analyzed ekphrastically.
Strictly defined, ekphrasis may be limited to the ‘verbal representation of
visual representation’.3 James Heffernan concedes that, in cases where the
work of art described either never existed or has since been lost, ‘language […]
not only rivals but actually displaces the work of art it ostensibly describes and
salutes’.4 Frederick A. de Armas substantiates Heffernan’s qualification of the
definition with the historical example of ancient ‘unseen works of art’ that in
the Renaissance ‘were painted using verbal descriptions’.5 ‘Indeed,’ he writes,
‘some ancient works described paintings that may have never existed and that
would come into existence for the first time in the Renaissance’.6 De Armas
adds to Heffernan’s definition the particular generative power and pedagogi-
cal merit of ekphrasis beyond its passive homage to visual art. Murray Krieger
observes that definitions and practices of ekphrasis have ranged from restric-
tions (like Heffernan’s) of ekphrasis to the straightforward, dependent imita-
tion in words of ‘an object of the plastic arts’ to literary moments in which
words more abstractly ‘emulate the spatial character’ of visual art.7
In his summary of the role of ekphrasis in Los sirgueros, Eduardo Francisco
Hopkins Rodríguez succinctly explains the difference between description
and ekphrasis: ‘el texto ecfrástico expande lo que se halla representado en el
objeto’.8 Therefore, ‘no es posible reducir los documentos [the ekphrastic texts]
a la condición descriptiva’.9 Where the object itself can rarely give a simultane-
ous visual impression, analysis, account of its provenance and creation, and a
summary of viewers’ reaction to it, ekphrasis can and often does do all of those
things in the form of a related but not subordinate work of literary art. Bramón
and other pastoral authors found particularly compelling the information that
ekphrasis adds to a work of art, as their texts both showcase their own elo-
quence and narrate and comment on the creation of art.10

3 Heffernan J.A.W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
(Chicago: 1993) 3.
4 Ibidem 14.
5 Armas F.A. de, Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (Lewisburg, PA: 2004) 9.
6 Ibidem 9.
7 Krieger M., Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: 1991) 6, 9.
8 Hopkins Rodríguez E.F., “Fiesta religioso y virtuosismo artístico en Los sirgueros de la
Virgen sin original pecado, de Francisco Bramón”, Atlanta, 1.2 (2013) 78–93, at 86: ‘the
ekphrastic text expands upon that which is found represented in the object’.
9 Ibidem 86: ‘it is not possible to reduce the documents to mere description’.
10 Ibidem 88.
794 T. Clifton

Ekphrasis is doubly important in pastoral literature by colonial authors.

De Armas observes the significance of ekphrasis in the aesthetics of imperial
Spain: ‘Spain’s political domination of regions and cities in Italy and the Low
Countries led to the dissemination of these notions [of ‘writing for the eyes’]
into the Iberian Peninsula through neoplatonic philosophies, Renaissance and
mannerist paintings, classical ekphrasis, treatises on art, the art of memory,
hieroglyphs, [and] emblem books’.11 The same sources that brought about the
popularity of the pastoral novel in Spain necessitated ekphrasis for the dissem-
ination of cultural objects throughout the Renaissance Spanish world. Along
these lines, ekphrasis gained a global use as a means of relaying objects, arti-
facts, and cultures in Spain’s transatlantic and transpacific colonies. Ekphras-
tic discourse reinforced material connections in the global Spanish empire.
Through literary experimentation with the utilitarian description of objects,
ekphrasis itself evolved into a European commodity with cultural capital.
In Los sirgueros, Anfriso, the academic outsider and protagonist, is notori-
ous for carving images and puzzles on the trees of the locus amoenus. He has
‘grabado cifras y pintado ingeniosos jeroglíficos’,12 filling the forest with his art
so that the shepherds ‘viesen y contemplaran […] altos y profundos misterios,
dirigidos de una voluntad votiva a una singular devoción, que con los hijos
de su pensamiento ofrecía a la más hermosa serrana’.13 The symbols Anfriso
produces evoke and proclaim the name of Mary, his beloved and the afore-
mentioned shepherdess, to render her famous to the shepherds of the locus
amoenus. Bramón describes a proliferation of these ‘conceptos’ (concepts),
‘cifras’ (ciphers), ‘misterios’ (mysteries), ‘jeroglíficos’ (hieroglyphs), and later
‘empresas’ (devices) that Anfriso has printed in the book of the locus amoenus
in praise of Mary Immaculate.14 To be more precise, one can divide Anfriso’s
arboreal endeavors into three categories: a sole set of initials (AM for Ave
Maria), two Marian emblems, and twenty-six Marian devices (different from
emblems only in that they lack an explanatory epigram or poem).
Bramón, a Jesuit-educated lay priest, somewhat predictably draws on the
emblematic trend as a medium through which Anfriso educates the shepherds
and the author conveys the same theological concepts to his readers. Not

11 Armas, Writing for the Eyes 7.

12 Bramón, Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, ed. T. Barrera (Madrid:
2013 [Mexico City, Juan de Alcázar: 1620]) 61: ‘engraved ciphers and painted ingenious
hieroglyphs’.
13 Ibidem: ‘might see and contemplate […] high and profound mysteries, directed by a
votive will to a singular devotion, that with the offspring of his thoughts he offered to the
most beautiful shepherdess’.
14 Ibidem 61, 81.
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 795

only was the emblem exceptionally stylish in the early seventeenth-century,

it played an important role in Jesuit education and in Jesuitical festival litera-
ture worldwide in that century.15 An order that values the application of the
senses in its Ignatian spiritual exercises – that is, the visualization and imag-
ined experience of the scene upon contemplation of a scriptural passage –
further demonstrated its affinity for the multifaceted consumption of wisdom
when it repeatedly recommended the use of emblems and other ‘enigmas’ in
the classroom.16 According to the 1586 edition of the Ratio studiorum, students
of Jesuit colleges were expected to know how to interpret, create, and properly
employ emblems and the like for instruction or in festivals.17 Perhaps as proof
of the success of their education, ‘the academies [Jesuit colleges, universities,
literary academies, and many in between] published devices together with the
verses and dissertations of their members’.18
An academy to which Bramón belonged published a book of similar ilk in
1605. The Congregation (or sodality) of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin
Mary of the Mexican Jesuit college created an anthology of Latin poetry that
boasts an impressive appendix of word puzzles, acrostics, and enigmas, all in
praise of Mary [Figs. 20.3–20.4].19 Though not strictly emblems, they employ
a Mannerist, emblematic synthesis of the visual and the poetic to form an
arcane whole whose meaning relies on the interpretation of both elements in
combination. Bramón, who was prefect of the sodality likely a few years later,
may not have had direct involvement in the production of the work,20 but
the title, Poeticarum institutionum liber, variis ethnicorum, christianorumque
exemplis illustratus, ad vsum studiosae iuuentutis (A Book of Poetic Instructions,
Illuminated with Various Examples from Pagans and Christians, for the Use of
Studious Youth), suggests that its editors intended future members of the sodal-
ity or students of the college to study it. The educational invention and inter-
pretation of Marian symbolical puzzles without doubt would have occurred to
Bramón as a natural pastime for the shepherds in his academic novel.

15 Praz M., Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome: 1964) 15, 77.

16 Arellano I. – Torres Olleta M.G., “Emblemas en fiestas jesuíticas portuguesas”, in
Arellano I. – Martínez Pereira A. (eds.), Emblemática y religión en la Península Ibérica
(Siglo de Oro) (Madrid: 2010), 27–51, at 28.
17 Ibidem 28.
18 Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery 77.
19 Congregatio Beatae Mariae Virginis Annuntiatae, Poeticarum institutionum liber, variis
ethnicorum, christianorumque exemplis illustratus, ad vsum studiosae iuuentutis (Mexico
City, Enrique Martínez: 1605) 492–509.
20 Traslosheros Hernández J.E., “Utopía inmaculada en la primavera mexicana: Los sirgueros
de la Virgen sin original pecado, primera novela novohispana, 1620”, Estudios de historia
novohispana 30 (2004) 93–116, at 94.
796 T. Clifton

Figure 20.3 Congregatio Beatae Mariae Virginis Annuntiatae, Poeticarum

institutionum liber, variis ethnicorum, christianorumque
exemplis illustratus, ad vsum studiosae iuuentutis (Mexico City,
Enrique Martínez: 1605). Book, octavo. Providence, RI, John
Carter Brown Library. Title page
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 797

Figure 20.4 Congregatio Beatae Mariae Virginis Annuntiatae, Poeticarum institutionum

liber, variis ethnicorum, christianorumque exemplis illustratus, ad vsum
studiosae iuuentutis (Mexico City, Enrique Martínez: 1605). Book, octavo.
Providence, RI, John Carter Brown Library. Pages 502– 503, Marian visual
wordplay
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

In Anfriso’s sylvan emblem book or collection of devices on trees, Bramón does

exactly as Jesuit students and authors of emblem books were expected to do.
Through Anfriso, he synthesizes wisdom in a way that shows the depth and
breadth of his academic formation as well as his wit, while also providing an
explanation that allows the devices to serve their ultimate purpose as instruc-
tional tools. As Trinidad Barrera puts it, Anfriso’s devices, like the emblem
books that they resemble, ‘encierran sincréticamente un conocimiento hondo
que se transmite por medio de la palabra que los revela’.21
Though Anfriso spends some thirty-three folios expounding the products
of his creative and intellectual efforts [Fig. 20.5], the narrator proves eager to
downplay their value as artistic objects. With some purpose beyond the trope

21 Barrera T., “La pastoril inmaculista”, in Bramón, Francisco (author) – Barrera T. (ed.), Los
sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado (Madrid: 2013) 7–35, at 25: ‘syncretically contain
a deep knowledge that is transmitted through the word that reveals them’.
798 T. Clifton

Figure 20.5 Bramón, Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, (Mexico
City, Juan de Alcázar: 1620). Book, octavo. Providence, RI, John Carter Brown
Library. Fols. 54v–55r, example of Anfriso’s devices
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

of false humility, the narration takes a peculiar turn away from Bramón’s highly
Mannerist, self-conscious themes to make an important, if convoluted, point
about Anfriso’s inventions. In the same breath with which the narrator calls
the designs on trees ‘conceptos’ (concepts), ‘cifras’ (ciphers), and ‘jeroglíficos’
(hieroglyphs), he insists that they are ‘no enigmas, no obscuras empresas, ni
pinturas como las de los egipcios, sino altos y profundos misterios’.22 While the
narrator appears to deny the emblematic nature of Anfriso’s art, he continues
to refer regularly to the devices as “empresas” (the standard term in Spanish)
and to the emblems, by their parts, as “jeroglíficos” (a common name for the
image of an emblem), each with a “mote” (motto) and a “letra” (epigram).23 He
objects then not to the specific terminology of the emblematic engravings, but
to some other concerning attribute or quality.

22 Bramón, Los sirgueros, 61: ‘not enigmas, not obscure devices, nor paintings like those of
the Egyptians, but rather high and profound mysteries’.
23 Ibidem 90, 66.
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 799

Because of the high level of education required to design emblems, they

could easily become, or be misconstrued as, Mannerist exhibitions of self-
referential, obscure erudition, intellectual virtuosity, or games of wit. Bramón
carefully distinguishes Anfriso’s artifice from academic decadence. He aligns
the latter with obfuscation and heathenism, qualifying them as obscure and
Egyptian (and by association, heathen). Anfriso’s endeavors turn obscurity
into profundity, the unsolvable enigma into a divine mystery. By refuting
their exclusive classification as esoteric puzzles, the narrator emphasizes the
emblems’ and devices’ religious subject and holy purpose. Other authors of
even profane emblem books apparently shared Bramón’s concern. Joannes
Sambucus (1531–1584), for example, actually devoted several of his emblems
to the application of just such devices, to argue that ‘books should not only
be read, wisdom is not to be found in books alone and knowledge should
be applied in real life’.24 A good emblem, according to Sambucus’s emblem
book, ‘engages not only in literary entertainment’, but also elucidates its ‘use-
fulness’.25 For Bramón, the stakes are higher because the emblems purport to
meditate on sacrosanct subjects, so evaluating them strictly in terms of literary
or intellectual merit could border on sacrilege.
Anfriso and his pastoral audience negotiate the proposed balance between
the academic and the divine with some trepidation. When he brings the highly
academic emblems and devices into the simple, rural community, he does
not receive the reaction he expected. Rather than expressing Marian piety
and a greater understanding of the theology of the Immaculate Conception,
the shepherds remark on Anfriso’s academic formation, some with thinly
veiled criticism.26 Anfriso, it turns out, shares their concerns of pompous and
overwrought artifice, which form part of the reason for his sabbatical from
academia. Having accidentally sparked a discussion on the appropriate and
necessary balance of knowledge with piety, Anfriso delivers an apologetic ser-
mon to redirect attention back to the Immaculate Conception, the subject of
his art, ‘por lo que en sí merece y no por méritos proprios míos’.27 In one of the
longest and most self-conscious sentences of the novel, Bramón negotiates
the place of the academy’s artifice with respect to the purer nature of the
locus amoenus.

24 Visser A.S.Q., Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: The Use of the Emblem in
Late-Renaissance Humanism, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 128 (Leiden – Boston,
MA: 2005) xv.
25 Ibidem.
26 Bramón, Los sirgueros 122.
27 Ibidem: ‘for what it, itself, deserves and not for my own merit’.
800 T. Clifton

There exists an additional level of artifice in Anfriso’s devices: the ekphrasis

with which he explains the hieroglyphs to the shepherds and through which
Bramón illustrates the absent images verbally for the readers. Barrera, noting
the difference between emblems and devices, suggests that ‘las “empresas” que
desplegará Anfriso […] constan de un dibujo y una explicación oral, con lo que
concurren así dos sistemas de diferente naturaleza, el icónico y el verbal’.28
Essentially, Anfriso’s explanation renders the devices true emblems, because
they consist of an image and a text (oral instead of written). Barrera’s analysis
does not, however, consider the material reality of the novel and its readers.
There is no image, only text: an icon rendered through ekphrasis and a written
explanation [Fig. 20.5]. Bramón has written a convincing emblem book, and a
sermon on it, without requiring the use of an actual image. The author’s arti-
fice is so dexterous that his primary work of art, the novel, encompasses entire
other works of hybrid and complex art forms.
The additional layer of artifice, that of ekphrasis of the abstruse emblem,
displays the verbal abilities of Anfriso and Bramón, as ekphrasis usually does.
Rather remarkably, it also can comply with Anfriso’s evangelical requirements
for his artistic and intellectual pursuits. The coherent description of Anfriso’s
devices and process – how and why he carved them – makes the visual puzzle
of the hieroglyph accessible to the uneducated shepherds and to the reader,
who cannot actually see Anfriso’s images in the unillustrated pages of Los sir-
gueros. Because the author or narrator delivers the devices with an interpretive
description, adding information to the represented object, the enigma comes
with its solution.29 Thus, it offers the viewers and readers both the wonder that
inspires admiration and the comprehension that allows them to act upon that
admiration with devotion. The ekphrastic nature of Anfriso’s empresas gives
them the desired equilibrium among the intellectual, the pleasurable, and
the useful.
Bramón returns to the ekphrasis of emblems near the end of the novel, this
time in the extraordinary example of a festival arch [Fig. 20.6]. Balanced on pil-
lars bearing the symbols of the four Evangelists rises an elaborate but ephem-
eral arch, adorned with emblems depicting the life, litany, and typology of the
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A targe inscribed with
diglossic mottoes and epigrams elucidates each emblem. The arch is embla-
zoned with suns and planets, armies, cities, and kings, and seven horticultural

28 Barrera, “La pastoril inmaculista” 25: ‘the “devices” that Anfriso will deploy […] consist of
a drawing and an oral explanation, with which two systems of different natures concur:
the iconic and the verbal’.
29 Hopkins Rodríguez ,“Fiesta religioso” 86.
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 801

Figure 20.6 Bramón, Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, (Mexico
City, Juan de Alcázar: 1620). Book, octavo. Providence, RI, John Carter Brown
Library. Fols. 104v–05r, partial description of Marcilda’s arch
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

symbols of Mary that crown the arch’s pediment.30 The monument, the lit-
eral centerpiece of Los sirgueros, leaves the simple shepherds who behold it
awestruck.31 Surprisingly, the skilled architect of the arch is not Anfriso, who
has previously incorporated some of the same iconography into his devices on
trees. Instead, Marcilda, a local shepherdess who boasts no urban academic
affiliation, has outdone Anfriso’s more conventionally pastoral artistic and
intellectual efforts.
Marcilda’s arch reaffirms the extraordinary intelligence, artifice, and erudi-
tion identified by Anfriso as one of the character’s defining qualities in the
non-academic context of pastoral festival preparations. Hers is a strictly rele-
vant artifice applied directly to the celebration of the Immaculate Conception,
to welcoming Mary Immaculate to Mexico, and is not lost in the academic dis-
cussion that fuels Anfriso’s anxious and almost compulsive designs. Marcilda’s
erudite and unsurpassed artifice, however, still requires ekphrastic explanation

30 Bramón, Los sirgueros 150–155.

31 Ibidem 155.
802 T. Clifton

to make it useful to the shepherds and therefore justify its place in the pastoral
celebration. At first presented by the narrator as an objective list of its ele-
ments, the arch confounds reader and shepherd alike, as each puzzles over
the impressive emblems displayed on the structure.32 Marcilda, however, does
not presume to explain her methods, eschewing the ‘voluntad exhibicionista’
(exhibitionist drive) Anfriso showed when he gathered the shepherds for a lec-
ture, however well-intentioned, on the creation of Marian devices.33 Instead,
she allows the local priest, Sergio, who has taken pity on the stunned but
enthusiastic shepherds, to elucidate them.34 Marcilda, the primary female art-
ist and intellectual of the novel, removes herself from the discussion and own-
ership of the arch. In doing so, she demonstrates the Mary-like humility that
Anfriso has struggled to achieve. The shepherds, perhaps having learned from
Anfriso’s difficult lecture, assure Sergio that ‘agradecidos estaban de su buen
propósito, y que recibirían sus palabras con […] amor […], y más cuando con
sus razones, casi divinas, más se endiosaba el espíritu’.35 Sergio’s intervention
can render the astounding intellectual and creative talent of Marcilda acces-
sible and enable it to carry out its primary purpose, to instruct and inspire
Marian devotion and imitation, rather than to continue to impress them with
the skill of the artist.
Sergio admits to the temptation to deliver a literary discourse worthy of the
grandeur of Marcilda’s arch – that is, to engage in ekphrasis on the subject.
Nonetheless, he concedes, ‘veréis cuán movido voy y enderezado a engrande-
cer el primer instante de María, y causaros con esto que se ofrece algún recreo
a las almas’.36 Purportedly hesitant to engage in an intellectual pursuit that
would detract from the purpose of that which he describes, Sergio still delivers
an incredibly vivid and complex ekphrastic sermon that sprawls across sixteen
folios on each element of Marcilda’s arch. Such is the glory of Mary that ‘todos
recibieron singular placer y gozo en oír’ his discourse, and all without Marcilda
falling into the trap of authorial pride.37 The arch and its corresponding ekph-
rasis, Sergio proves, serve the pious purpose of prioritizing the ‘educational
value of the visual image’.38

32 Ibidem 5.
33 Hopkins Rodríguez, “Fiesta religioso” 89.
34 Bramón, Los sirgueros 155.
35 Ibidem: ‘they were grateful for his good intention and would receive his words with […]
love […], and the more his reasoning, almost divine, the more blessed the spirit’.
36 Ibidem: ‘you will see how moved and resolved I am to praise the first moment of Mary,
and with this to cause that your souls be offered some pleasure.’
37 Ibidem 168: ‘all received unique pleasure and joy in hearing’.
38 Armas, Writing for the Eyes 12.
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 803

As with most elements of festivals, ephemeral arches are usually memorial-

ized ekphrastically in festival chronicles.39 In addition to relaying information,
visual and circumstantial, regarding the arch, they also set out to ‘registrar,
describir, narrar, amplificar, reinventar, analizar y explicar la complejidad
estructural y conceptual de los arcos triunfales, así como el acto creativo de
su constitución’.40 Bramón’s text curiously erases this last element, Marcilda’s
invention of the arch, from both the initial description of it and from Sergio’s
ekphrasis. By contrast, when Anfriso discusses his devices, he typically begins
to explain them with a phrase like ‘con nueva y debida consideración, grabé
en esta escogida corteza’.41 Sergio, on the other hand, never once mentions
Marcilda, nor how the arch came into existence. He focuses purely on the rep-
resentation and its meaning. Earlier, Anfriso’s art and accompanying ekphra-
sis distracted the shepherds with questions and concerns regarding Anfriso’s
qualifications. The academic context of his artifice has a tendency to over-
whelm the purity of his intent. Marcilda’s art, equally intellectual but less aca-
demic, through Sergio’s ekphrasis, only amplifies the shepherds’ piety.
In Balbuena’s novel, Siglo de oro, ekphrasis abounds unchecked by pasto-
ral or pious limits. It anchors a meandering plot with a gallery of objects and
scenes and the moments spent in observation of each. Idle shepherds linger
over small, tangible marvels and take the time to explain, discuss, admire, and
describe them to one another for the benefit of the reader. The characters find
the following objects and artworks, among others, worthy of ekphrasis: a crook,
a spoon, a zurrón (shepherd’s pouch), a mirror, a statue of the local god Silvano,
the aforementioned image carved on a tree of a satyr carving a poem on a tree,
a tapestry woven by nymphs, a globe, a temple and its decorative reliefs, a cup,
the reliefs on a tomb, a lion skin, a rabel, and a basin.42 Balbuena weaves these
objects into the fabric of pastoral life. Some are awarded as prizes for competi-
tions, some are bartered, some are found, and some are antiquities, relics of the
craftsmanship of mythological shepherds. Some even push the limits of the
dual visual-textual nature of ekphrasis. One of the weaving nymphs, explain-
ing her tapestry, for example swears she can hear the instrumental music of a

39 Hopkins Rodríguez, “Fiesta religioso” 86.

40 Hopkins Rodríguez, “Fiesta religioso” 86–87: ‘register, describe, narrate, amplify, reinvent,
analyse, and explain the structural and conceptual complexity of the triumphal arches, as
well as the creative act of their formation’.
41 Bramón, Los sirgueros 116: ‘with new and proper consideration, I engraved on this chosen
bark’.
42 Balbuena, Siglo de oro 41, 47, 96, 102, 123, 124, 135, 159, 185–188, 196, 204, 229–230, 233.
804 T. Clifton

figure she has woven.43,44 As he renders the described objects extra-realistic

and more affective in verbal account than they could have been in first-hand,
visual encounter, Balbuena explores the mimetic and synesthetic possibility
of ekphrasis.45
Balbuena prioritizes these overwrought moments of static, primarily quotid-
ian objects all but coming to life under microscopic, monographic re-presentation
in a pastoral setting. Krieger elucidates ekphrasis’s primary interest in works of

43 Ibidem 139.
44 Marsha S. Collins notes the ‘rich, oft-invoked master trope’ of weaving as imagery for sing-
ing and composing songs. The nymph’s skillful weaving is thus analogous to the author’s
composition of the text in which the weaving takes place, and the apparent vividness of
her art may represent the lush effect that Balbuena hopes to achieve in his ekphrastic
passages. Indeed, Collins’s book sets out to explore ‘this longstanding weaving metaphor
[…] in an examination of these imaginary green worlds as something akin to a verbal
tapestry’. See Collins M.S., Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance (New York, NY –
London: 2016) 8, 27.
45 By way of example of the texture of Balbuena’s ekphrastic passages, the following quote
is the narrator’s description of the mirror, offered to him as a prize (though he admits he
cannot remember how he earned it); see Balbuena, Siglo de oro 102–103:
‘Al fin entre los demás premios vino a mis manos un curioso espejo en negro ébano
engastado, y allí con no poca curiosidad entallado el liviano Narciso, tan hermoso y bello
que estar vivo dijérades, o que el mismo dios de amor fuese habríades juzgado, si a este
quitasen la venda o al otro pusiesen las alas. Estaba recostado al margen de una fuente
bebiendo por los ojos de sus claros hielos el fuego que le dejó abrasado; y a una parte
de la selva, entre las inquietas hojas de los árboles, tal se mostraba la parlera Eco que
aun pintado parecía responder a los últimos acentos del desasosegado niño, con que más
encendía su desvanecimiento, y no sé si a compasión si a deleite movía verlo tras esto
convertido en una hermosa flor, y en torno della las ninfas de los campos y valles comar-
canos no sembrando rosas ni flores, sino amorosas lágrimas con que la tierna florecilla
parecía cobrar nuevo verdor y frescura, que aun la muerte no trocó su crueldad y altivez:
todo con tal artificio puesto, cuanto era menester para divertir y aun engañar los más
cuidadoso ojos’.
‘Finally, amongst the other prizes a curious mirror set in black ebony came to my
hands, and there, with not little curiosity was carved a blithe Narcissus, so handsome and
beautiful that you could say he was alive, or that he could have been judged to be the god
of love himself, if the latter’s blindfold were removed, or if the former were given wings.
He was reclining at the edge of a spring, drinking through the eyes of its cold clarity the
fire that embraced him, and at one part of the forest, among the restless leaves of the
trees, there was shown the talkative Echo, who, though painted, seemed to respond to
the last sounds of the distressed boy, with which her swoon was fueled, and I don’t know
whether I was moved to compassion or delight to see him after this transformed into a
beautiful flower, and around it the nymphs of the neighboring fields and valleys sowing
neither roses nor flowers, but amorous tears with which the tender little flower seemed to
develop new verdure and freshness, which even death could not change with its cruelty
and arrogance: all done with such artifice, as much as was needed to amuse and even
deceive the most careful eyes’.
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 805

(fine) art: ‘If an author is seeking to suspend the discourse for an extended, visu-
ally appealing descriptive interlude, is he not better off – instead of describing
the moving, changing, object in nature – to describe […] the already frozen
pictorial representation?’.46 To treat mundane pastoral objects as works of art
worthy of observation at the exclusion of all other activity only further calls
attention to the artifice inherent in the pastoral ideal. The narrating serrano,
for example, gives a fellow shepherd a spoon in gratitude for the return of his
baby goat.47 The narrator finds the ‘ingenioso artífice’ (ingenious artifice) of
the wooden spoon ineffable, though not for lack of trying, and concedes that
‘en muchas palabras’ (in many words), which he has already uttered, he can-
not fully convey the ‘maravillas’ (marvels) of the object.48 He calls attention
to the tiny sheep so perfect that they will not eat grass ‘por no quitar los ojos
del que con tanto artificio las supo entallar’.49 The narrator reveals at the end
of his attempted description, that the spoon ‘no es obra de otra mano que del
famoso Páris’ of the mythological past, who has chosen this humble medium
upon which to depict his judgement.50 An invaluable work of art, steeped in
the Greek mythological roots of pastoral tradition, masquerades as rural sim-
plicity. Balbuena’s ekphrasis merely uncovers the art that gives form to pasto-
ral literature.
One object of Balbuena’s ekphrasis stands apart from the others, inextri-
cable as they are from the pastoral setting. The shepherd Melancio claims that,
on his way back to the locus amoenus from the city, he found ‘un pequeño globo
[…] de fino oro’ (a small globe […] of fine gold) the size of a plum ‘pero de mano
tan artificiosa obrado, que en él […] la tierra perfectamente está esculpida’.51
The globe, though it turns out to be made of tin, is more obviously an art object
worthy of ekphrasis, particularly since it literally stops time by perfectly cap-
turing the entire earth down to every last detail.52 The impossible globe, a
foreign object and a visual representation of the world beyond the enclosed
locus amoenus, ‘egregiously transgress[es] the natural, limpid, Platonic space
of the pastoral’ in its ‘wild imbrication and artifice’.53 Stephanie Merrim
argues that this breach of the pastoral betrays the ‘fetishiz[ation of]

46 Krieger, Ekphrasis 8.
47 Balbuena, Siglo de oro 47.
48 Ibidem 48.
49 Ibidem: ‘in order to gaze upon he who knew how to whittle them with such artifice’.
50 Ibidem: ‘is the work of the hand of none other than the famous Paris’.
51 Ibidem 159: ‘but made by such an artful hand, that in it […] the earth is perfectly sculpted’.
52 Ibidem 161.
53 Merrim S., The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin,
TX: 2010) 92.
806 T. Clifton

commodities’ in Balbuena’s cosmopolitan, post-Renaissance ‘Spectacular

City’.54 The shepherds agree when they refer to it as an ‘obra digna de no traerse
entre rústicas manos’.55
The globe belongs to an elaborate culture beyond the reach of the Spanish
pastoral setting, yet Balbuena has placed it there. In fact, the globe is a natural,
if decadent, progression of pastoral artistry. Balbuena is unapologetic in his
obsession with objects of art, as the prolific ekphrasis of Siglo de oro reveals.
He forces the reader to examine these objects one after the other, until they
find the parallels between the golden nymphs on a spoon and the minute
‘escuadrón de ninfas’ (squadron of nymphs) on a gilded globe.56 Artifice, he
argues, has always been a part of and appropriate to the pastoral. With a bar-
rage of ekphrasis, some of which is undeniably pastoral except in its quantity,
Balbuena continues to challenge the narrow worldview of the shepherds in
order to show that limiting themselves to uncultivated, isolated lives of ‘ovejas
y parrales’ (sheep and arbors) is neither necessary nor true to pastoral tradi-
tion, which is already replete with ‘ingenioso artífice’ (ingenious artifice).57
Where Bramón addresses the ekphrasis of emblems to demonstrate the appro-
priate circumstances of the infliction of such extreme artifice upon the natural
space of the locus amoenus, Balbuena uses ekphrasis to insist on the place of
artifice, both new and old, in the pastoral.

Bibliography

Arellano I. – Torres Olleta M.G., “Emblemas en fiestas jesuíticas portuguesas”, in

Arellano I. – Martínez Pereira A. (eds.), Emblemática y religión en la Península
Ibérica (Siglo de Oro) (Madrid: 2010) 27–51.
Armas F.A. de, Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (Lewisburg, PA: 2004).
Balbuena Bernardo de, Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erífile (Madrid: 1821 [Madrid, Alonso
Martín: 1608]).
Barrera T., “La pastoril inmaculista”, in Bramón, Francisco (author) – Barrera T. (ed.),
Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado (Madrid: 2013) 7–35.
Bramón Francisco, Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, ed. T. Barrera (Madrid:
2013 [Mexico City, Juan de Alcázar: 1620]).

54 Ibidem.
55 Balbuena, Siglo de oro 164: ‘work too fine to be passed among rustic hands’.
56 Ibidem 160.
57 Ibidem 48.
EKPHRASIS IN THE PASTORAL FICTION OF NEW SPAIN 807

Collins M.S., Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance (New York, NY – London:

2016).
Congregatio Beatae Mariae Virginis Annuntiatae, Poeticarum institutionum liber, variis
ethnicorum, christianorumque exemplis illustratus, ad vsum studiosae iuuentutis
(Mexico City, Enrique Martínez: 1605).
Heffernan J.A.W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
(Chicago: 1993).
Hopkins Rodríguez E.F., “Fiesta religioso y virtuosismo artístico en Los sirgueros de la
Virgen sin original pecado, de Francisco Bramón”, Atlanta, 1, 2 (2013) 78–93.
Krieger M., Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: 1991).
Merrim S., The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin,
TX: 2010).
Praz M., Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome: 1964).
Traslosheros Hernández J.E., “Utopía inmaculada en la primavera mexicana: Los sir-
gueros de la Virgen sin original pecado, primera novela novohispana, 1620”, Estudios
de historia novohispana 30 (2004) 93–116.
Visser A.S.Q., Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: The Use of the Emblem in
Late-Renaissance Humanism, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 128 (Leiden –
Boston, MA: 2005).
 Chapter 21

Ekphrasis and the Global Eighteenth Century:

A.E. van Braam Houckgeest’s Collection of
Chinese Art
Dawn Odell

In his 2010 essay “Art History as Ekphrasis”, Jaś Elsner claims that art history
‘[f]ar from being a rigorous pursuit […] is nothing other than ekphrasis, or
more precisely an extended argument built on ekphrasis’.1 For Elsner, ekphra-
sis is ‘(at its best) a parallel work of art’ that

[…] may be seen as a primary interpretative act (like an anthropologist’s

account of a different culture in which unavoidably prior viewpoints
born from scholarly training or cultural background cannot be wholly
extricated from ‘objective’ ethnography). In this case, on the bedrock
of a verbal interpretation, many further layers of analysis – each more
interpretative than the last, each more authoritative or speculative than
the last – will come to rest. But the difference from anthropology is
that, in most cases, works of art are not cultures or peoples for whom
an unrepeatable ethnography – whatever its partiality, whatever its
weaknesses – may have to stand. Rather, each of us can make our own
primary description […]2

I do not read Elsner’s distinction between the study of cultures and peoples,
on the one hand, and the study of art works, on the other, as a negation of our
discipline’s origins, which are, like those of anthropology, rooted in a desire to
differentiate one culture from another. As Martin Powers reminds us, in words
that voice the perspective of many other historiographers,

[t]here is nothing new in noting the complicity of our discipline in

the formation of nationalist narratives […] Ever since Johann Joachim
Winckelmann published History of Ancient Art in 1764, art has been

1 Elsner J., “Art History as Ekphrasis”, Art History 33 (February 2010) 10–27.
2 Ibidem 12.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/978

EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 809

treated as a clue to what are perceived as fundamental values of different

and competing civilizations […]3

But, for Elsner, although description is central to both art historical and
anthropological method and although both disciplines employ description
to articulate differences between cultures, the ethnographic subject is an ani-
mate and constantly changing one, whereas, even as each art historian’s sub-
jective experience informs and individualizes her response to a work of art, the
art historical object remains static and without agency. Here, Elsner assumes
a subject-object relationship between viewer and work of art that is neither
as fixed nor as self-evident as his reading suggests. In the discussion that fol-
lows, I consider a description of an eighteenth-century collection of Chinese
art to argue that ekphrasis ‘runs parallel’ not only to works of art but also to
the bodies who produce the work. In doing so I aim to show the ways that,
in the eighteenth century, Chinese viewers approached painting as an active
site of description, a site capable of creating vivid images of other art works
for those spectators able to read the indexical brush marks left by the artist’s
hand. In contrast, late eighteenth-century European-Americans, motivated
by an emerging discourse of racialization, employed ekphrasis to recreate
encounters with Chinese art in which the bodies of undifferentiated ‘peoples’,
representing ‘cultures’ rather than individual works of art, were evoked for
the reader. Although it is important to recognize that the values embedded
in elite art making practices in China remained opaque for many (if not all)
eighteenth-century European-Americans, this essay is not another reminder
of that “missed connection”. Instead, it is a close reading of a single descrip-
tion of a lost collection that aims to understand why this description provides
so little information about the works themselves and focuses instead upon an
affective recounting of a viewing experience.
The collection of Chinese art that is the focus of this essay was owned by a
Dutch-born emigrant to the early United States, Andreas Everardus van Braam
Houckgeest [1739–1801]. Although Van Braam lived in China at several points
during his life, his collection of art was amassed during his final residence in
Canton [Guangzhou], a period that included Van Braam’s participation in the
last Dutch East India Company [VOC] embassy to the Qing dynasty [1644–1911]
court in Beijing. Van Braam relocated to Philadelphia following the embassy’s
conclusion and published an illustrated, two-volume account of his experi-
ences during the embassy with fellow émigré Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de
Saint-Méry [1750–1819].

3 Powers M., “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke”, The Art Bulletin 95.2 (2013) 312–217.
810 Odell

This essay explores Moreau’s description of Van Braam’s art collection,

which appears in the avertissement (the acclamatory introduction) to Van
Bram’s memoir, through an examination of several terms – among these, fidel-
ity, ressemblance, and race – that coalesce around the collecting and display
practices employed by Van Braam. Moreau’s description of Van Braam’s art
collection presents us with one of the earliest positive assessments of Chinese
painting written by a European. In this essay, I frame that assessment both
textually, within a body of related descriptions, and geographically, within the
social spaces of two of the several port cities that Van Braam occupied during
his peripatetic life. My aim is to better understand why human actors become
conflated with works of art, and works of art become evocations of human
presences in the textual descriptions of Van Braam’s collection. Embodiment
is central to my understanding of the ekphrastic possibilities of some forms
of Chinese painting, in which brushwork allows the spectator to envision the
presence of the artist and, through a retracing of the artist’s mark making, to
imagine earlier works of art. In contrast with this form of pictorial ekphrasis,
embodiment is also central to my understanding of the motivations behind
Moreau’s personification of individual artworks within Van Braam’s collection
(he writes, for example, of paintings as persons), on the one hand, and his sup-
pression of the subjectivity of the Chinese artist on the other. For Moreau, the
Chinese art in Van Braam’s collection is most present and persuasive when it
is encountered as a whole, when it envelops the spectator as an environment.
The term energeia, the aspect of ekphrasis that enables the lifeless to be vivi-
fied, is useful here, for the image Moreau creates through his vivid description
is not of individual works of art but of the experience of being in China.
The brief biography of Van Braam that follows is necessary to explain both
the origins of his collection and the human actors who were a part of its dis-
play in Philadelphia. Van Braam was born in Werkhoven, in the Netherlands,
and moved to Amsterdam when he was a teen. After a short stint in the navy,
he began working for the Dutch East India Company who sent him to Canton
when he was 19 years old.4 He returned to the Netherlands five years later, break-
ing his journey, as was usual, at the Cape, where he married Catharina Cornelia

4 Much of my information on van Braam’s early life is drawn from Barnsley E.R., The First VBH:
[…] a two-volume biography about the remarkable life of an eighteenth-century Dutch citizen
and naturalized American named Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (Newton: 1993);
and van Braam Houckgeest J.P.W.A., Genealogy and History of the families van Braam and
van Braam Houckgeest (‘s-Gravenhage: 1997). See also Van Campen J., De Haagse jurist Jean
Theodore Royer (1737–1807) en zijn verzameling Chinese voorwerpen (Hilversum: 2000) 174–190;
and van Campen J., “Chinese bestellingen van Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest”,
Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 53.1 (2005) 18–40.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 811

Geertruida van Reede van Oudshoorn [1746–1799]. In marrying Catharina, who

was the daughter of the man who would become the Governor of the Cape
colony, Van Braam was “marrying up”. This was the aim of many Europeans liv-
ing in Canton, a city in which masculinity was in part defined by the merchants
shared longing to elevate their social status and return to Europe with fortunes
that would enable them to become land-owning gentlemen. For these men,
marriage was, as Lisa Hellman has argued, ‘of the utmost importance … the
wife was as crucial to create domesticity as the estate’.5 Van Braam and his wife
travelled on to Amsterdam, but Van Braam quickly returned to Canton alone,
and was not present for the birth of his eldest daughter, Everarda [1765–1816].
In 1774, Van Braam returned to the Netherlands with a fortune sufficient to pur-
chase a large house, and over the next eight years, he and his wife had two sons
and two more daughters. Prompted perhaps by financial exigency as much as
by his support for the newly formed American republic, Van Braam moved
his family to Charleston, South Carolina in 1783 where, within a two-month
period, his four youngest children died in a scarlet fever epidemic.6 Four years
later, Van Braam and his wife and their youngest daughter, who was born after
the death of her older siblings, returned to the Netherlands.7 In a sense, Van
Braam was merely “dropping off” his wife and small child and, as far as I have
been able to discover, he never saw his wife again after leaving her and return-
ing to China and VOC service in 1789. In Canton, Van Braam was appointed as
the second ranking member of the VOC embassy to the Chinese court under
the leadership of Isaac Titsingh [1745–1812].8 Following the embassy’s success-
ful conclusion, Van Braam left China for the last time, stopping again at the
Cape where his ship provided passage for his wife’s niece, Johanna Egberta

5 Hellman L., This House Is Not a Home: European Everyday Life in Canton and Macao 1730–1830
(Leiden – Boston: 2019) 31. Also see Van R.T., “The ‘Woman Pigeon’: Gendered Bonds and
Barriers in the Anglo-American Commercial Community in Canton and Macao, 1800–1849”,
Pacific Historical Review 83.4 (2014) 561–591.
6 Van Braam’s children died between Sept. 22 and Oct. 21, 1784.
7 Van Braam’s oldest daughter, Everarda, married Captain Richard Brooke Roberts in
Charleston on Jan. 10, 1785. She lived the rest of her life in the United States and the children
from her marriage are the origin of the American line of van Braam Houckgeest descendants.
8 Tonio Andrade’s forthcoming book, The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the
Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton: 2021), will offer an important
reinterpretation of the success of the VOC mission, which occurred just three years after the
more famous British mission of 1793, led by George Marcartney [1737–1806]. Other work on
the Titsingh mission includes Boxer C.R, “Isaac Titsingh’s Embassy to the Court of Ch’ien
Lung (1794–1795)”, T’ien Hsia Monthly 8. 1 (January 1939) 9–33; Boxer C.R. and Blussé L., Visible
Cities Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge: 2008);
and Duyvendak J.J.L., “The Last Dutch Embassy to the Chinese Court (1794–1795)”, T’oung pao
34. 1–2 (1938) 1–137.
812 Odell

Constantia van Schuler [1778–1822], and continued on to Philadelphia. Soon

after collecting Johanna, Van Braam appears to have begun an intimate rela-
tionship with her, he was 57 at that time they met and she was 18. The rela-
tionship was publicly acknowledged at least by the time they were resident
in Philadelphia as several visitors recounting their experiences at Van Braam’s
estate referred to Johanna as van Braam’s wife. In addition to Johanna, Van
Braam also travelled with five Chinese men; a housekeeper, Lana, described
as Malay in memoirs written by Van Braam’s grandson; and a boy, Kintsius,
who was also described as Malay, and whom Van Braam sent to Netherlands
with his grandsons to be educated.9 In Philadelphia, Van Braam encountered
financial difficulties and was incarcerated for debt in 1798. Shortly after, he
moved with Johanna to England, where his art collection was sold at Christie’s
in 1799 and their son was born in 1800. Van Braam and Joanna then travelled to
Amsterdam, where Van Braam died the following year.
Until recently, almost all of the objects sold at the Christie’s auction were
assumed to be dispersed and untraceable. But in 2007, independent scholar
Dr. William E. Strole Jr. and Bruce MacLaren, at the time Associate Curator of
Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum, rediscovered a set of 249 paintings
bound in ten volumes, which MacLaren proved were a part of Van Braam’s lost
collection. The paintings, commissioned by Van Braam from two anonymous
Guangdong artists, depict famous as well as less well-known sites in China,
including places that Van Braam himself visited during the VOC mission.10

9 Roberts L.Q.C., Autobiography, Princeton University Library, Manuscript C0199 no. 906q,
writes of ‘[…] a Malayan woman, housekeeper to my grandfather, by the name of Lana’
(28) and ‘[…] my grand-father sent with us a young Malaya by the name of “Kinties” to be
educated as a Physician’ (39). Van Braam, in his last will and testament dated 30 June 1801
(Stadsarchief Amsterdam) bequeathed two hundred guilders to ‘Master Anthony Vincent
Kintsius from Macao in China’ to enable Kintsius to return to his relatives in East Asia.
10 MacLaren B., “The Guangdong Commission – van Braam’s Albums of China, 1790–1795”,
Academia. September 14, 2020 at https://www.academia.edu/24013980/The_Guangdong
_Commission_van_Braam_s_Albums_of_China_1790_1795_荷蘭_美國人范罷覽1790
_1795年閒向廣東畫家定制的_中國風土圖冊_
MacLaren’s argument that the Peabody Essex albums were originally owned by van
Braam rests in part on the albums’ similarity to two volumes of watercolor paintings in
the collection of the British Museum (1928,0323,0.45.1–50 and 1928,0323,0.44.1–50), which
are almost identical in size, format, style, and medium to the Peabody Essex volumes and
which entered the British Museum collection in 1807. As the museum’s acquisition notes
record: ‘On a typed label, inserted into one of the albums, it says: “Album of Chinese land-
scapes in the region of Canton. Painted in 1794 for A.E. van Braam Houckgeest (with the
spelling correction made by hand), Dutch envoy to the Emperor Ch’ien Lung. Lansdowne
Collection. Purchased 1807”’. However, unlike the British Museum albums, the Peabody
Essex watercolors are accompanied by descriptive text, written by hand and in French.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 813

The Peabody Essex paintings were not the only art works from the collection
to survive. Several objects from his estate remained with Van Braam’s descen-
dants in the United States and the Netherlands. Other works that were sched-
uled to be sold at a later Christie’s auction are believed to have been lost at sea
while being transported from Philadelphia to London.
In presenting this abbreviated account of Van Braam’s biography, I have inten-
tionally drawn attention to the presence of several individuals – Christina,
Johanna, Lana, Kintsius, and the five Chinese men – who are almost entirely
excluded from the historical record except for their roles in framing Van
Braam’s persona and his art collection. In his introduction to Van Braam’s
memoir, Moreau describes not only the art displayed in Van Braam’s home but
also the human beings who made up Van Braam’s household and whose pres-
ence was necessary to validating both the “Chineseness” of Van Braam’s collec-
tion and the authenticity of his memoir.

Jamais, j’ose le dire, un étranger n’est sorti de la Chine avec un pareil tré-
sor, avec autant de témoins de sa véracité, et M. Van-Braam ne fît-il que
montrer les nombreux dessins de tout ce que cet Empire lui a présenté
de propre à figurer dans son immense collection, la Chine serait mieux
connue par cela seul, que parce que nous en savons jusqu’à ce moment.
Pour donner une idée de ce que fait éprouver la vue de tout ce que
M. Van-Braam a recueilli en tableaux qui présentent la Chine sous tous
les aspects et sous tous les rapports, je dirai qu’à l’instant où la curiosité
la plus exercée, la plus accoutumée à exiger et à attendre d’un voyageur
intelligent, est déjà satisfaite, il reste une multitude d’objects à examiner
et qui réveillent encore la surprise.
Enfin, comme s’il était de la destinée de M. Van Braam de signaler son
séjour à la Chine par des traits marquans, il a amené plusieurs Chinois
qui semblent être venus pour attester les faits que ce Voyageur a pris chez
eux, et consignés dans sa collection de dessins; collection qu’il a présen-
tée, Durant plusieurs mois à Philadelphie, à tous les Amateurs de choses
intéressantes. On se croit donc vraiment transporté à la Chine quant on

This accords with the Christie’s sales catalog description of the volumes. ‘The drawings
are enriched with numerous observations, made by Mr. Van Braam, on the different spots
they represent, the accuracy of which, and the information they convey, added to the
beauty of the several objects contained in this collection, stamp it with a superior value
to any of the kind ever brought to Europe’. A Catalogue of a Capital, and Truly Valuable
Assemblage of Chinese Drawings; Paintings, Natural and Artificial Curiosities, The Property
of A.E. Van Braam, Esq. Friday, February the 15th and Saturday, February the 16th, 1799,
Mr. Christie, at His Great Room, Pall Mall, 1.
814 Odell

est environné de ces Chinois vivans, et de ces images de leurs moeurs, de

leurs usages, de leurs monumens & de leurs arts.11

Never, I dare to say, has a foreigner come out of China with such a trea-
sure, with so many witnesses to his veracity, and Mr. Van Braam, if he
did nothing but show the numerous drawings of all that this Empire has
presented him as suitable for figuring in his immense collection, China
would be better known by that alone, than by what we have known of
it up to this moment. To give an idea of what it feels like to see all that
M. Van Braam has collected in pictures that present China in all aspects
and in all its relationships, I would say that at the moment when even
the most keen curiosity, the most accustomed to demanding and expect-
ing much from an intelligent traveler, is already satisfied, a multitude of
objects remain to be examined that still arouse surprise.
Finally, as if it were the destiny of M. Van Braam to signal his stay in
China by its most striking features, he brought several Chinese who seem
to have come to attest to the facts that this traveler took from there, and
entrusted in his collection of drawings; a collection he presented, for sev-
eral months in Philadelphia, to all lovers of interesting things. Therefore,
one believes oneself truly transported to China when one is surrounded
by these living Chinese, and these images of their customs, their man-
ners, their monuments and their arts.

In this passage, Moreau personifies the paintings as témoins (witnesses) to the

veracity of Van Braam’s account as he also objectifies the Chinese men as evi-
dence of the genuineness of Van Braam’s collection. The men, Moreau writes,
have been brought to the United States to attester les faits, to stand witness to
the facts, that are contained within Van Braam’s drawings. But these Chinese
men are also themselves a part of the collection, for when surrounded by them,
ces Chinois vivans (these living Chinese), one believes oneself transported from
Philadelphia to China, enveloped at once by China’s people and its art.
William Birch [1755–1834], who included Van Braam’s estate in his depic-
tions of Country Seats of the United States [Fig. 21.1], also provides a vivid

11 Braam Houckgeest Andreas Everardus van – Moreau de Saint-Méry Médéric Louis Elie.,
Voyage de l’ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollandaises, vers l’empereur
de la Chine, dans les années 1794 & 1795: où se trouve la description de plus parties de la Chine
inconnues aux Européens, & que cette ambassade à donné l’occasion de traverser, 2 vols.
(Philadelphia, Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry: 1797–1798) 1:xij–xiij.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 815

Figure 21.1 William Birch, China Retreat. Engraving, 24 × 30 cm, from The Country Seats of
the United States (Bristol, W. Birch: 1808–1809)

description of the ways that Van Braam employed his servants to stage his dra-
matization of China within the United States

It was about the time when that ingenious and accomplished minister
from Holland by the name of Van Braam, after spending much time with
the Chinese, came to settle on the bank of the Delaware near the mouth
of the Neshaminy Creek within sight of Burlington. [His] active mind
was busily engaged in pursuit of building him[self] an elegant house
upon a splendid situation. It was often that our sight was enriched from
the beautiful green bank on which our house was seated close upon the
transparent flood over a clean, gravelly bottom. We [would] see him for
a mile before, coming up with a rapid tide in his long boat, [with] his
eight Chinese [servants] in white, trimming their oars to the water til he
reached our bank giving me his first salute, then attending his orders in
the city.12

12 Cooperman E.T. – Sherk L.C., William Birch: Picturing the American Scene (Philadelphia:
2011) 202. Van Braam’s grandson also noted the presence of these Chinese men, ‘[m]y
grandfather had brought with him from Canton several servants, among whom were two
or three Chinese, I believe the first ever brought to this county. This was quite a novelty,
816 Odell

Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz [1757–1841] echoes Moreau in conflating human

beings and art objects when describing his experience of Van Braam’s home,
‘[i]n truth everything was so much in porcelain that I thought for a moment
that his wife [Johanna] was made of the same material, she was so pale and
still’.13 To Niemcewicz, Van Braam’s household is a space of ‘Asiatic luxury’ that
transcends geographic and cultural norms of his adopted country.

If he brought us great riches and great curiosities from the country [China],
it seems that in return he has left there all his good sense and all his pru-
dence. Instead of conforming to the simplicity of the country he has
sought in his building and all his enterprises to flaunt an Asiatic luxury.14

Van Braam himself was, in Niemcewicz’s eyes, ‘[a]t once a Dutch baron and a
Chinese mandarin’, for to be in Van Braam’s presence was to be brought into a
conflation of the elite domestic environments of China and the Netherlands.15
These descriptions make clear that to experience Van Braam’s collection was
to encounter people as well as art work. Van Braam’s own person was a part of
the collection, or rather Van Braam’s persona was formed by and performed
within the collection, as the collection became the vehicle for Van Braam to
embody both “Dutchness” and “Chineseness” in his role as the paternal head
of household. But these descriptions also present evidence that Van Braam’s
crafting of “Chinese”-inflected domesticity owed as much to the specific social,
commercial, and built environments of mercantile port cities in Indonesia,
South Africa, and his adopted home of the newly formed United States, as it
did to the vast and diverse country of China. Van Braam himself was aware that
when he resided in Canton, he was not in the “real” China, and his experience of
the empire was both constricted by and reduced to the norms of its most com-
mercial city. His desire to see the country that lay beyond the walls of Canton
was a part of his motivation in hiring the two anonymous Guangdong artists
to create the sets of landscape paintings that formed the heart of his art col-
lection, and which are exemplified in a view of Jiao Shan (焦山) [Fig. 21.2] now
in the Peabody Essex Museum. Niemcewicz describes these paintings as ‘the
most interesting’ aspect of the collection, through which China is represented

and a matter of great curiosity to the citizens of Philadelphia, who crowded around his
coach whenever he or any of the family rode out, for the reader must understand that one
of them was the coachman and the other the footman’. Roberts, Autobiography 29.
13 Niemcewicz J.U., Under Their Vine and Fig Tree; Travels Through America in 1797–1799, 1805,
with Some Further Account of Life in New Jersey, trans. M.J.E. Budka (Elizabeth: 1965) 63.
14 Ibidem 62.
15 Ibidem.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 817

Figure 21.2 Artists in Guangzhou, China, Jiao Shan (焦山), No. 4, 1790–1796,
commissioned by Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest. Watercolor and
ink on paper, 31.5 × 45 cm. Salem: Peabody Essex Museum. Museum Purchase
1943 (AE86344-29)

with ‘the greatest accuracy’.16 Moreau, in his introduction, also focuses upon
the paintings’ importance and expresses his frustration in not being able to
capture, in the limited space of his introduction, the pleasure aroused by see-
ing the paintings.

C’est encore dans le même esprit que l’Editeur a cru devoit offrir une notice
de la riche et précieuse collection des dessins réunis par M. Van-Braam,
qui a employé constamment, Durant cing années, deux dessinateurs
Chinois à former cette curieuse et nombreuse reunion d’objets de tous les
genres. Mais combien l’Editeur regrette [check] de ne pouvoir pas faire
partager au Lecteur, par cette courte énonciation, le Plaisir que cause la
vue même des dessins, Plaisir qui s’àccroît d’autant plus, que l’examen
des details est plus réfléchi et fait avec ds yeux plus accountumés à trou-
ver des beautés qui échappent en quelque sorte aux premiers regards.17

16 Ibidem.
17 Braam Houckgeest, Voyage de l’ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollanda-
ises 1:xiv.
818 Odell

It is in the same spirit [of pleasing the public] that the publisher believes
he should offer a notice of the rich and precious collection of drawings
assembled by Mr. Van Braam, who consistently employed, for five years,
two Chinese draftsmen to form this curious and numerous assemblage
of objects of all kinds. But how much the editor regrets not being able to
share with the reader, by this short enunciation, the pleasure caused by
the very sight of the drawings, pleasure which increases all the more, as
the examination of the details is more considered and made with eyes
more accustomed to find beauties that somehow escape the first glance.

The Christie’s catalog documenting the sale of Van Braam’s collection also
focuses on the paintings, describing them as ‘executed with peculiar delicacy’
and with great fidelity, explaining that

[t]his invaluable collection of views in the several provinces of China,

were executed by an ingenious native artist, who travelled for this express
purpose, through the interior of the empire, by the directions, and at the
expence of Mr. Van Braam, who afterwards in his travels to Pekin, (upon
the occasion of the Embassy) and on his return, had frequent opportuni-
ties of witnessing the fidelity of the artist in representing many of these
spots, which lay upon his road. – This naturally induced a belief in Mr.
Van Braam, that an equal attention had been paid to truth, with regard to
the places which he had no opportunity of seeing.18

In arguing for the truth of these paintings, the catalog appears to be primarily
drawing not upon an assessment of the works’ appearance but upon a story
told by Van Braam in his memoir, which recounts his delight in standing before
the city of Fo-chan and realizing that the painting of Fo-chan in his collection
so faithfully mirrored the “real” view before his eyes that he could not but trust
the accuracy of all of the paintings in his collection.

Qu’on juge de ma joie en remarquant que le dessin de Fo-chan, que j’ai

dans ma collection, est d’une extreme fidélité; puisque j’en puis naturel-
lement conclure que les autres ont le même exactitude!19

18 A Catalogue of a Capital, and Truly Valuable Assemblage of Chinese Drawings; Paintings,

Natural and Artificial Curiosities, The Property of A.E. Van Braam, Esq., will be sold by
Mr. Christie, on Friday, February 15th, 1799, 8.
19 Braam Houckgeest, Voyage de l’ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollanda-
ises, 2:203.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 819

One can understand my joy in noticing that the drawing of Fo-chan,

which I have in my collection, is of an extreme fidelity, since I can natu-
rally conclude that the others have the same accuracy!

Moreau, Niemcewicz, and the Christie’s catalog all attempt to share an emo-
tional experience with their readers, to elicit feelings of pleasure and joy, by
praising the ‘precious’ paintings’ richness, delicacy, detail, and, above all, their
fidelity and accuracy. In doing so, however, the texts give us little sense of the
paintings’ physical appearance or of their content; instead, our focus is drawn
to general aesthetic qualities, ‘beautiful’ and ‘highly finished’, rather than to a
recreation of subject, medium or form.20 These descriptions bring a viewing
experience to life, but one that is unable to allow the reader to picture indi-
vidual works. The descriptions tell us not what we will see but how we will feel
when we see it. They are ekphrastic in their ability to communicate an affect,
but not in their ability to convey an image.
This is in contrast to descriptions of other objects from Van Braam’s col-
lection, in which Moreau is more precise in creating for the reader images in
which content is conjoined to form. In his description of a surtout de table, for
example, his words recreate bodily sensations (‘brilliance strikes the eye’) that
one experiences when precious materials imitate the natural world.

Le troisième est un surtout de table execute à la Chine, d’après les idées

de M. Van Braam: il est compose de dix-sept pieces detaches.
Celle du milieu, de trente-six pouces de haut, avec une base à huit pans
de vingt-huit pouces de long sure vingt-deux pouces de large, est travail-
lée à la Chinoise; c’est-à-dire, qu’elle représente de rocs parmi lesquels
sont des pagodes, des figures humaines, des ponts, des arbres, des fruits,
des fleurs, des quadrupeds, des oiseaux, des insects, etc. La majeure par-
tie de ces objets sont d’argent diversement coloré & en filigrane, tandis
que les fleurs & les fruits sont de corail, d’ambre our d’autres substances
également rares, ou même de pierres précieuses. A cet ensemble, tout à la
fois pittoresque, noble & élégant, sont mêlés des bassins ou des ruisseaux
où l’on voit des poissons ou des crustacées d’une soule d’espèces don’t
l’éclat frappe les regards.21

20 A Catalogue of a Capital, and Truly Valuable Assemblage of Chinese Drawings; Paintings,

Natural and Artificial Curiosities, The Property of A.E. Van Braam, Esq. The drawings are
described as ‘beautiful’ on page 1 and ‘highly finished’ on page 8.
21 Ibidem xlij. A Catalogue of a Capital, and Truly Valuable Assemblage of Chinese Drawings;
Paintings, Natural and Artificial Curiosities, The Property of A.E. Van Braam, Esq. also
820 Odell

The third is a table-top made in China, according to the ideas of

M. Van Braam: it is composed of seventeen individual parts.
The middle one, thirty-six inches high, with an eight-sided base twenty-
eight inches long by twenty-two inches wide, is worked in a Chinese
style; that is, it represents rocks among which are pagodas, human fig-
ures, bridges, trees, fruits, flowers, quadrupeds, birds, insects, etc. Most
of these objects are made of silver, variously colored & filigreed, while
the flowers & fruits are of coral, amber or other equally rare substances,
or even precious stones. In this ensemble, at the same time picturesque,
noble and elegant, are mixed ponds or streams where we see fish or crus-
taceans of a variety of species whose brilliance strikes the eye.

The disjunction between the sketch-like descriptions of the paintings, even as

they are considered by all who write about them as the ‘most important part’
of the collection, and the specificity of descriptions of works such as the sur-
tout de table lies in how Moreau links style to fidelity.

Peut-être cette portion intéressante du recueil de M. Van Braam n’a-t-elle

pas toujours dans la correction du dessin & dans le coloris, ce que des
yeux européns sont accoutumees à désirrer; mais en réfléchissant que
c’est la China qu’on a voulu peindre, que ce sont des Chinois qui l’ont
peinte, on est très-dispose à croire que ce genre a lui-même, dans beau-
coup de circonstances, une forte d’avantage, & que la resemblance y a
gagné tout ce qu’aurait pu lui faire perdre une main plus gracieuse, mais
europénne.22

Perhaps this interesting portion [referring to the landscape paintings] of

M. Van Braam’s collection does not have in the correctness of its drawing
and its colors that which European eyes are accustomed to desire, but
in reflecting that it is China that one wanted to paint, and that it is the
Chinese who painted it, one is very disposed to believe this genre has,
in many circumstances, a strong advantage and that resemblance gains
[in these landscapes] all that a more graceful, but European hand, could
have caused it to lose.

describes the surtout de table and explains that it will be auctioned later, as it is part of a
second shipment of Van Braam materials on page 10.
22 Braam Houckgeest, Voyage de l’ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollanda-
ises 1:xxj–xxij.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 821

For Moreau, Van Braam’s landscapes are faithful representations of China

because they are painted by the Chinese, and although the style of the works
‘does not have in the correctness of its drawing and its colors’ a conformity
with European conventions, it is precisely its lack of adherence to European
norms that gives it ‘resemblance’. The Encyclopédie of 1765 defines the term
this way:

Ressemblance, (Peinture.) conformité entre l’imitation de l’objet & l’objet

imité. On dit attraper la ressemblance d’une personne. C’est un talent
qui semble être indépendant de l’étude; on voit de fort mauvais peintres
l’avoir jusqu’à un certain point ; & de beaucoup plus habiles à tous autres
égards à celui-là leur être inférieurs.23

Likeness (Painting) conformity between the imitation of the object and

the object imitated. One says ‘to catch the resemblance of a person’. It is a
talent that seems to be independent of study, one sees very bad painters
have it up to a certain point; and those who are much more skillful in all
other ways are, in this regard, inferior to them.

Ressemblance, then, is not a quality that can be captured through skill or

intellect – ‘very bad painters’ do it well – but arises instead from acts of imi-
tation, through which the artist ‘catches’ a likeness and forges a conformity
between the object and its representation. The term appears to refer to a qual-
ity of being rather than to an expertise that can be learned, for a person pos-
sesses this talent ‘independent of study’. Moreau’s description conjures the
presence of an artist whose value is equated with his identity. For Moreau, to
be a specifically “Chinese” painter is to have a relationship with the object,
China, that results in representations which are faithful because they demon-
strate a “Chinese style” and refer back to artist’s culture or “race”, to employ the
term that Moreau spent much of his life attempting to reify.
Van Braam too appears to value the paintings in his collection as much for
their status as Chinese-made objects as for their ability to record eye-witness
encounters. For example, when Van Braam travels past a singularly compel-
ling view of the city he calls Tchin-ming-tchau during the VOC embassy, he
sketches the view. But rather than relying on his own drawing to capture the

23 Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Diderot
Denis – Rond d’Alembert Jean le (Paris, André le Breton: 1765) 14.186, in Morrissey R. –
Roe G. (eds.), University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition) at
http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.
822 Odell

subject for later audiences, Van Braam brings his sketch back to ‘his painter’ in
Canton in order to have the image drawn again by the Chinese artist.

Cette vue m’a parue si singulière, que j’en ai fait une esquisse afin de la
faire dessiner par mon peintre à Canton. Les Chinois nomment ce lieu
remarquable Tchin-ming-tchau.24

This view seemed so unique to me that I made a sketch of it in order to

have it drawn by my painter in Canton. The Chinese call this remarkable
place Tchin-ming-tchau.

This brief account suggests that Van Braam, like Moreau, understands the fidel-
ity of his paintings not only in terms of the works’ ability to accurately record
specific land- and cityscapes, but also for their ability to make China known
through the identity of their maker, and a style that is distinctly “Chinese”.
Moreau’s enthusiasm for the “Chinese style” of Van Braam’s paintings is in
sharp contrast to almost all previous European descriptions of Chinese art. To
cite just one example from among many early modern writers, Johan Nieuhof
[1618–1672], whose account of a previous VOC embassy to the Qing court was
well-known to Van Braam and Moreau, disparages the lifeless quality of Chinese
representation in contrast to the vivacity of European art. Chinese paintings,
Nieuhof explains, ‘appear more like dead bodies than like living figures’.25
Nieuhof’s account is typical of seventeenth-century European assessments
of Chinese art. As Thijs Weststeijn has argued, only one seventeenth-century
Dutch author, Isaac Vosssius [1618–1689], wrote about Chinese painting with
admiration, claiming that ‘[t]hose who say that Chinese paintings do not rep-
resent shadows, criticize what they actually should have praised … The better
the paintings, the less shadow they have; and in this respect are far superior
to the painters from our part of the world …’26 For Vossius the ultimate goal
of painting, whether Chinese or European, is conformity between the object

24 Braam Houckgeest, Voyage de l’ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollanda-

ises 2:22.
25 Nieuhof Joan, Het gezantschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den
grooten Tartarischen Cham, den tegenwoordigen keizer van China (Amsterdam, Jacob van
Meurs: 1665) 504. The full line is: ‘Dit is d’oorzaak waarom hunne Schilderyen zeer doo ten
bleek zich vertoonen, en veel meer na dode lijken dan levendige beelden zwemen’.
26 Quoted in Weststeijn T., “The Middle Kingdom in the Low Countries Sinology in the
Seventeenth-Century Netherlands”, in Bod R. – Maat J. – Weststeijn T. (eds.), The Making
of the Humanities Volume II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines (Amsterdam 2012)
226.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 823

and its representation, ‘[w]hen someone obeys this rule of painting [to paint
without shadow, to paint with line], his art will emulate nature, and the more
outstanding parts will appear to come forward even without conspicuous
shadow’, he writes.27
In prioritizing emulation or, in Moreau’s text, ressemblance, both Vossius and
Moreau praise Chinese art for qualities that do not appear to have been the pri-
mary aim of the Guangdong painters themselves, who were less interested in
capturing objective views of the natural world than in responding to conven-
tions of landscape representation circulating in eighteenth-century Canton.
The viewing pleasures that Moreau strives to convey to readers of Van Braam’s
memoir arise from the satisfactions and comforts of fidelity, which he reads
as naively and unconsciously embedded in Van Braam’s paintings through the
‘ingenious native artist’.28 To allow for a more complicated, self-conscious, or
expressive artistic presence in Van Braam’s works, or in Chinese art generally,
would have undermined Moreau’s larger efforts, made evident in texts he pub-
lished at the same time he was crafting the introduction to Van Braam’s mem-
oir, to codify racial differences through description and to meld racial identity
with artistic practices.
Consider, for example, one of the rare passages in which Moreau attempts
to describe with some specificity the actual appearance, the subject and form,
of one of Van Braam’s landscape paintings, and the effort Moreau puts into
naturalizing the ‘bizarre’ appearance of the terrain even while acknowledging
that the forms are alien to his experience of European landscape.

D’abord on y prend une idée exacte de l’aspect qu’offre la Chine en géné-

ral, de ses plaines, de ses montagnes qui ont un caractère qui semble leur
être propre, & plus encore de ses rochers dont la forme est assez générale-
ment singulière & bizarre, si on les compare à ceux d’Europe. Ces rochers

27 Ibidem. The original text reads: ‘Cum vero inquiunt umbris fere carere Serum picturas,
carpunt quod laudare debuerant. Parce admodum sunt illi in exprimendis umbris, & qui-
dem quanto meliores sunt picturae, tanto minus umbrantur; in quo longe peritiores sunt
nostri orbis pictoribus, qui non nisi additis densis umbris partes magis exstantes norunt
repraesentare. Qua quidem in re nec naturae, nec optices observant leges; illae nempe
docent, si quod corpus aequale fere lumine aspergatur, ita ut nullae conspicuae sint
umbrae, partes magis vicinas aut exstantes distinctioribus lineamentis, recedentes vero &
remotiores minus distincte esse exhibendas. Hanc si quis in pingendo observet rationem,
erit pictura naturae aemula, & etiam absque umbris conspicuis magis extantes appar-
ebunt partes’, See Vossius I., “De artibus et scientiis Sinarum”, in Isaaci Vossii variarum
observationum liber (London, Robertum Scott: 1685) 79.
28 A Catalogue of a Capital, and Truly Valuable Assemblage of Chinese Drawings; Paintings,
Natural and Artificial Curiosities, The Property of A.E. Van Braam, Esq. 9.
824 Odell

sont souvent composés de portions plus ou moins considérables dont la

régularité rhomboïdale est frappante. Il est très -commun d’en voir qui
sont arqués & qui laissent, entre les espèces de piliers ou de masses par
lesquels ils sont supportés, de grands espaces dont la hardiesse étonne,
surtout quand ces ourvertures surmontent des courans d’eau au-dessus
desquels on croirait que la nature a voulu jeter des ponts.29

First, we get an exact idea of the appearance that China offers in general,
of its plains, of its mountains, which have a character that seems to be
their own, and even more of its rocks, whose shape is rather generally
singular and bizarre if we compare them to those in Europe. These rocks
are often composed of more or less sizeable portions, of which the rhom-
boidal regularity is striking. It is very common to see [rock forms] that are
arched and which leave, between the kinds of pillars or masses by which
they are supported, large spaces whose boldness astonishes, especially
when these openings surmount currents of water over which one would
think that nature wanted to build bridges.

The striking ‘rhomboid regularity’ that Moreau describes here likely refers to
the kinds of shapes one sees in the Van Braam painting of Jiao Shan [Fig. 21.2].
But rather than reading the rocks at the left edge of the island’s shore [Fig. 21.3]
as Moreau does, as an accurate portrayal of ‘singular and bizarre’ aspects of
Chinese landscapes, I understand the ‘rhomboid’ shapes to follow a tradition
of representation more indebted to past histories of art making than to a single
artist’s view of a “real” Chinese landscape.
Wang Hui’s [1632–1717] The Colors of Mount Taihang [Fig. 21.4], for example,
depicts rocky outcroppings [Fig. 21.5] in a manner similar to the one employed
in the Van Braam representation of Jiao Shan. In both works, the artists create
concentric layers of rocky projection through a combination of line, wash, and
textured brushwork that “quote” from the landscapes of earlier artists rather
than respond objectively to a view before them. As Chen Chongben [active
ca. 1775–after 1815], an eighteenth-century viewer of Wang’s work, explains in
his inscription,

余所藏范中立 《雪山行旅》 大幅久入 《石渠寶笈》。其筆法與此卷

絕相類，始知耕煙胸中深具古人丘壑，故尓下筆如此沈厚。前有西廬
老人題字，其為心賞可知。崇本識。

29 Braam Houckgeest, Voyage de l’ambassade de la Compagnie des Indes orientales hollanda-

ises 1:xviii–xix.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 825

Figure 21.3 Detail of Figure 21.2

Figure 21.4 Wang, Hui, The Colors of Mount Taihang, 1669. Handscroll, ink and color
on silk, handscroll with mounting 29.8 × 883.9 cm. New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Detail

Fan Zhongli’s [Fan Kuan, ca. 990–1030] large hanging scroll, Traveling in
Snowy Mountains, which I once owned, has long since entered the impe-
rial collection. Its brushwork and that of this scroll are extremely similar.
One may thus know that in his breast Gengyan [Wang Hui] had deeply
attained the hills and valleys of the ancients. Therefore, when he put his
brush [to silk, the result was] like this, extremely full. At the beginning
826 Odell

Figure 21.5 Detail of Figure 21.4

EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 827

is a title by Xilu Laoren [Wang Shimin], from which one may gather his
delight in it. [Chen] Chongben recorded.30

In this text, Chen compares the painting he sees before him with his mem-
ory of a landscape painted almost 800 years earlier, Fan Kuan’s Traveling in
Snowy Mountains, and praises the artist for translating the earlier landscape
through his body, attaining it ‘in his breast’, before emulating it in his brush-
work. Wang Hui’s own inscription on the painting also speaks to his reception
of past works of art, in this case a painting by Guan Tong [active ca 907–23], a
tenth-century artist of “northern style” landscapes, whose work ‘pierced’ Wang
Hui’s heart and ‘dazzled’ his eyes, and whose artistic ‘method’ is the model for
Wang Hui’s own.

余從廣陵貴戚家見關仝尺幅，雲巒奔會，神氣鬱密，真足洞心駭目。
予今猶復記憶其一二，遂倣其法作太行山色，似有北地沈雄之氣，不
以姿致取妍也。己酉中秋後三日虞山王翬並識。

Once in the home of a noble family in Guangling [Yangzhou], I saw a

small scroll by Guan Tong. [In it] clouds and peaks race together with a
luxuriant and dense air. Truly, it pierced my heart and dazzled my eyes.
Even today, I remember a few things from it. Accordingly, I have followed
its method to create this painting, Colors of Mount Taihang. I hope it cap-
tures the deep and heroic atmosphere of the north country, rather than
merely postures with pretty details. Three days after the Mid-autumn
Festival in the jiyou year [September 12, 1669] Wang Hui of Yushan
[made] and inscribed [this painting].31

Both inscriptions present Wang Hui’s painting as an evocation of earlier land-

scapes, a pictorial ekphrasis, a visual representation of a visual representation,
that employs archaic brushwork to summon the image of an ancient master-
piece. In Wang Hui’s Mount Taihang, the viewer simultaneously encounters
the present painting and past work of art, as each is made visible through the
artist’s self-conscious mark making. Although the inscriptions that accompany

30 Translation after Whitfield R. – Fong W., In Pursuit of Antiquity: Chinese Paintings of the
Ming and Qing Dynasties from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Earl Morse, exh. cat., Princeton
University Art Museum (Princeton: 1969), cat. no. 14, p. 108. The Romanization has been
changed from the Wade-Giles to the pinyin system.
31 Ibidem.
828 Odell

the painting “document” these viewing experiences, spectators inculcated in

the norms of creating and receiving paintings similar to this one would have
understood the ekphrastic mechanisms embedded within the work, with or
without textual accompaniment.
Although Van Braam’s painting of Jiao Shan does not approach the erudi-
tion and bravura technique present in Wang Hui’s landscape, the artist of the
Jiao Shan image does appear to understand the aesthetic values embedded in
works like Wang Hui’s and to quote from them in passages, such as the rocky
outcropping, that have little of the objectivity and fidelity Moreau wants to
find in the paintings. By claiming that brushwork can be read as an indexi-
cal mode of signification, and that Moreau fails to perceive this quality, I do
not mean to argue that the landscapes in Van Braam’s collection echo only a
single tradition of Chinese picture making or that “Chinese art” as a whole can
be reduced the aesthetic values of elite court and scholarly traditions as they
are represented in works such as Wang Hui’s.32 The paintings in Van Braam’s
collection are complicated images, commissioned by a European merchant
from Chinese artists working in a cosmopolitan port city and intended to cir-
culate far beyond the restricted communities that traditionally comprise the
makers and viewers of elite art. The landscapes and many of the other extant
objects from Van Braam’s collection make clear that the artists working in the
eighteenth-century Canton trade imitated, appropriated, and replicated imag-
ery from a variety of European and Chinese models both within and outside
of elite traditions, and that they did so in ways that self-consciously problema-
tized concepts of originality, authenticity, and authorship.33 But in this essay,
I focus on the echoes of elite painting in Van Braam’s landscapes, and on brush-
work that ‘allows its spectator to empathize with the artist as an embodied
being’, in order to better understand, by comparison, the very different kind
of embodiment Moreau evokes in his description of van Braam’s collection.34

32 For more on the reduction of the history of Chinese art to a single tradition, see Clarke D.,
Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World: Negotiating Alterity in Art and Its Historical
Interpretation (Hong Kong: 2011) 115–132.
33 Cao M., “Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass”, in ten-Doesschate
Chu P. – Milam J. (eds.), Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchange between China and the
West during the Late Qing Dynasty (1796–1911), East and West: Culture, Diplomacy and
Interaction 4 (Leiden – Boston, 2018) 72–92. Cao argues that an object in van Braam’s
collection – a reverse painting on glass portrait of Van Braam’s wife Catharina – pro-
vides internal evidence that Chinese artists, even when (or especially when) they were
reproducing European “originals”, ‘were not simply engaged in a rote manual exercise […]
Export painters refashioned Western artworks and, in that process, redefined copying as
a form of reverse reconstruction oriented toward originality’, 91.
34 Clarke, Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World 117. The full quotation reads: ‘Only
because Chinese literati brushwork allows its spectators to empathize with the artist as an
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 829

For Moreau, the “Chineseness” of Chinese art depends upon the erasure
of subjectivity on the part of the Chinese maker. In order to achieve ressem-
blance, a ‘conformity between the imitation of the object and the object imi-
tated’, the Chinese artist must be a passive conduit, a mirror, to capture the
likeness of China. Moreau’s image of the non-European body as a medium for
purely objective representation is indebted to concepts that he expresses more
concretely in two texts that were written during the same period in which he
produced van Braam’s memoir of the VOC embassy. In these works, “Danse”
and Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la par-
tie francaise de l’isle Saint-Domingue, Moreau employs vivid description to con-
vince the reader not only of limits of the non-European body as an authorial
presence, but also of the body itself as a site of representation.35 In “Danse”,
Moreau describes dance performances he witnessed on the island of Saint
Domingue as a means of distinguishing between “civilized” and “primitive”
forms of the art.36 As Moreau explains,

La danse chez les peuples civilisés est assujettie, comme presque toutes
les autres parties de leurs moeurs, aux caprices de la mode, tandis que
les peuples simples our sauvages, pur me servier de l’épithète qu l’orgueil
employe à leur égard, conservent une danse, en quelque sorte invari-
able. Une plus grande somme d’idées offrant plus de combinaisons, la
variété en tout genre ne peut guère être l’attribut que d’un people plus
perfectionné: & peut-être la danse des divers peuples pourrait–elle servir,
comme d’échelle graduelle, pour connaitre leur degré de civilisation.37

embodied being can those spectators feel that the temporal and spatial barriers between
viewer and maker are abolished […] as if looking over the shoulder of the artist as the
brushwork is produced, recapturing the artist’s movement from the traces they have left’.
35 Moreau de Saint-Méry Médéric Louis Élie, “Danse. Article Extrait d’un Ouvrage Ayant put
titre: Reepertoire des Notions Colonials. Par order Alphabetique” (Philadelphia, Médéric
Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry: 1796); and Moreau de Saint-Méry Médéric Louis Élie,
Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie francaise de
l’isle Saint-Domingue.: Avec des observations générales sur la population, sur le caractère &
les moeurs de ses divers habitans; sue son climat, sa culture, ses productions, son administra-
tion, &c. &c. Accompagnées des details les plus propres à faire connâitre l’état de cette col-
onie à l’époque du 18 octobre 1789; et d’une nouvelle carte de la totalité de l’isle. (Philadelphia,
Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry: 1797).
36 Moreau was born in Fort Royale, Martinique. He travelled to Paris to study law and
returned to the Caribbean to practice in Saint-Domingue in the late 1770s. It was during
this period that he made many of the observations that inform “Danse”.
37 Moreau, “Danse” 8–9.
830 Odell

Dance among civilized peoples is subject, as are almost all other parts of
their customs, to the whims of fashion, while simple or savage peoples, to
use the epithet which pride must employ in their regard, retain a dance
as something invariable. A greater sum of ideas offering more combina-
tions and variety of all kinds can hardly be [other than] the attribute of
a more sophisticated people: and perhaps the dance of various peoples
could serve as a gradual scale to know their degree of civilization.

Moreau struggles, as he does with van Braam’s paintings, to find words to

describe the effect of the performances in the eyes of the viewer,

Je ne tenterai pas d’exprimer quelle peut être l’impression produite par la

vue d’un Chica danse avec toute la précision dont il est susceptible. Il n’est
point de regards qu’il n’anime, point de sensibilité qu’il n’emeuve, point
d’imagination qu’il n’allume; il donnerait du sentiment à la caducité.38

I will not attempt to express the impression that may be produced by the
sight of a Chica danced with all the precision of which the performers
are capable. There is no glance which [the dance] does not animate, no
sensitivity which it does not stir, no imagination which it does not kindle;
it would give feeling to a nullity.

But even as Moreau, later in the essay, find ways to express these impressions
by presenting detailed descriptions of bodies moving in space, the coherence
of “Danse” as an extended argument rests upon description put to a different
kind of use, to the creation of racial categories. For although Moreau believes
that climate (especially temperature) plays a role in molding an individual’s
or a people’s artistry, at root race, evoked by terms such as nègres, créoles, and
blancs, dominates Moreau’s text as the clearest signpost of the presence or lack
of cultural sophistication. For example, in the following paragraph, in which
Moreau summarizes all Africans, and their relationship to dance, under the
category of ‘negro’.

Amenés de toutes les parties d’Afrique dans nos colonies, dont le climat
est analgoue au leur, les nègres y apportent & y conservent leur penchant
pour la danse, penchat si puissant, que le nègre le plus fatigué par le

38 Ibidem 53.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 831

travail, trouve toujours des forces pour danser & même pour aller à plus-
iers lieues satisfaire ce désir.39

Brought from all parts of Africa to our colonies, whose climate is analo-
gous to theirs, the negroes bring and maintain here their penchant for
dancing, a penchant so powerful that even the negro most tired by work
always finds strength to dance and even to travel several leagues to satisfy
this desire.

Moreau’s concept of race informs and structures “Danse” but it is in his

Description topographique, a notorious ‘milestone in Enlightenment racial the-
ory […], a systematic classification of human variety in the colonies, unprec-
edented in its scope and detail,’ that ‘the “science” of skin color received one
of its earliest formulations’.40 Moreau’s taxonomy of 144 racial classifications
and the ‘nuances of skin’ he describes in his attempt to organize human beings
through variations in skin tone had wide-ranging impacts that unfortunately
fall beyond the scope of this essay. What I wish to focus on here are the ways
that Moreau’s taxonomy resonates with van Braam’s own history as a slaveo-
wner in Charleston, South Carolina and informs the presentation and recep-
tion of his art collection in Philadelphia. Van Braam entered slaveholding
society in the southern United States at a time when, following the conclu-
sion of the Revolutionary War, the ideology of slave ownership was shifting
from a structure that emphasized the enslaved as servants of the crown, in
which plantations were seen as mini states (a monarchial model) to one that
emphasized a paternal relationship between master and enslaved (a model
of familial domesticity).41 It was also a period in which enslaved individuals,
who had recently been able to envision the possibility of freedom during the
British occupation of the city, made more frequent attempts at escape. The
Charleston newspapers are full of offers of rewards for the return of escaped
slaves, including at least five that were placed by van Braam, and which
resulted in a more constricted binding of these individuals to the plantation

39 Ibidem 43.
40 Garraway D., “Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s
Description […] de la Partie Française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue”, Eighteenth-Century Studies
38.2 (2005) 227; and Remember Haiti, The John Carter Brown Library at https://www.brown.
edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/exhibitions/remember_haiti/race_moreau-
de-saint-mery.php.
41 Olwell R., Masters, Slaves & Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low
Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca: 1998).
832 Odell

by white slave owners.42 As Sharon Block has argued in her analysis of over
4,000 advertisements for escaped slaves that were placed in American news-
papers between 1750 and 1775, the purpose of these advertisements was to
‘conjure a visual image of the body of each advertised fugitive in the minds
of the townspeople’.43 At the very moment, then, when van Braam was con-
figuring himself as an American, he was introduced to landownership in the
context of plantation life, just as plantations were being reconceived in pater-
nalistic and familial terms. Here I plant the seeds of a model of domesticity,
and a space of display, that van Braam absorbed in Charleston and attempted
to redeploy outside of Philadelphia, and which was deeply infused with a
‘racial optics’ that defined through description whose ‘corporeality was ranked,
destroyed, enslaved, or uplifted’.44 This is the setting Moreau affirms and recre-
ates in his description of van Braam’s estate, a space in which ‘living Chinese’
became objects of display and Chinese paintings become ‘witnesses’ to a trav-
eler’s veracity.
In conclusion, I return to Jaś Elsner’s argument, with which I opened this
essay, to suggest that Moreau’s textual evocation of van Braam’s art collection
is a deliberately unsuccessful ekphrasis. For while Moreau’s text prevents the
reader from visualizing the content, form, or style of any single van Braam
painting, it also vividly describes a deeply felt experience of the collection as
a whole, and it uses this affective description tendentiously, to make an argu-
ment. Moreau’s ekphrasis conjures corporeal presences of ‘indigenous artists’
from the paintings in order to envelope the reader/viewer in a transfigured
world, no longer Pennsylvania but “China”. Fixed in a racialized hierarchy of

42 Following is an example of one of those advertisements:

‘RUNAWAY
From the Subscriber the third inst. A Negro Wench named Sylvia, formerly the prop-
erty of Arthur Graham, late Waggon Conductor of the Southern: She is about five feet
eight inches high, of the Guinea country, and has the marks on both cheeks, also a deep
hollow in the left one; she is of a very dark complexion, and had on when she went away a
white woolen wrapper, green coat, and a check handkerchief round her head. – As she has
lately been seen a few miles out of town, it is supposed she will attempt to conceal herself
in the country, therefore all persons are hereby cautioned of harbouring or employing the
said Negro, under the penalty of being prosecuted as the law directs. A reward of Three
Guineas will be paid to whoever takes up and delivers the said Wench to me at 51 Tradd
Street.
A.E. van Braam Houckgeest, Charleston, March 20’.
South-Carolina Gazette and General Advertiser, March 20 to March 23, 1784, 1.
43 Block S., Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadel-
phia: 2018) 137. Block is quoting the historian Thelma Foote.
44 Ibidem 141.
EKPHRASIS AND THE GLOBAL 18TH CENTURY: A.E. BRAAM HOUCKGEEST 833

peoples and cultures that is reliant on descriptions of physical appearance

to configure identity, the bodies Moreau conjures are not only visible in the
paintings but move throughout the collection as a whole. The Chinese servants
who stand as evidence, ‘bearing witness’ to the fidelity of the images, and the
‘pale and still’ wife are all a part of the collection. In this, one of the earliest
“positive” representations of Chinese art written by a European about one of
the richest displays of Chinese art in America, Moreau’s text binds art to eth-
nography in ways that will continue to haunt European-American receptions
of Asian art for decades.

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Index Nominum

Acquaviva, Claudio, S.J. 392 Barrefelt, Hendrik Jansen van (Hiël) 632
Aertsen, Pieter 88–90 Bassano, Jacopo 377, 439, 782
Agucchi, Giovanni Battista 162, 172, 485 Bellini, Gentile 690, 695, 700
Albenas, Jean Poldo d’ 509 Bellini, Giovanni 690, 700
Albertini, Francesco 495, 496, 506 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 1, 6, 59, 159–194,
Alberti, Leon Battista 15, 49, 98, 104, 130, 405 196, 375, 380, 400
Albricus (Albericus, Third Vatican Bembo, Pietro 747
Mythographer, Mythographus tertius) Bernardino di Capua 204
210, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220, 222, 225 Bidloo, Lambert 644
Alciato, Andrea 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, Bie, Cornelis de 641
32, 33, 35, 94, 116, 297, 298, 300 Biondo, Flavio 235, 490, 498
Alessi, Galezzo 486 Birch, William 814, 815
Ambrose, Saint 410, 472, 473, 475 Bles, Herri met de 11, 377
Ana María de Peñaranda 777 Bloemaert, Abraham 10, 626, 627, 628, 629,
Ancona, Ciriaco d’ 496, 508, 758 639
Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques 259, 263, Bloemaert, Cornelis II 123, 124
487, 488, 492, 493, 509, 511 Boccaccio, Giovanni 201, 217, 218, 219, 220,
Aneau, Barthélemy 135, 137, 138, 297, 298, 225, 227, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236
299, 300 Bocchi, Achille 111
Antonio Mesía de Tovar 779, 782 Bol, Hans 47, 48, 49, 52, 598
Antony Van Dyck 782 Bolswert, Boëtius à 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99,
Apelles 15, 16, 49, 86, 88, 116, 168, 169, 287, 100, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113,
617 114, 115, 116, 117
Apollinaris, Sidonius 125 Bonaventure, Saint 350, 356, 359
Aquila, Pietro 160, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, Borcht, Pieter van der 631, 632, 634, 635,
187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194 636, 637
Aratus 201 Bordone, Paris 690
Aresi, Paolo, S. J. 93, 99 Borghini, Raffaello 692, 694, 695, 699
Aretino, Pietro 405, 690, 747 Borromeo, Carlo, S.J., Saint 99
Ariosto, Ludovico 46, 247, 265, 747 Borromeo, Frederico 98, 111
Aristotle 2, 132, 143, 321, 392, 396, 400, 404, Borromini, Francesco 11
444, 530, 652, 653 Borso d’Este (Duke of Este) 205, 235
Arnauld, Antoine 70, 471 Boschini, Marco 692, 695, 696, 699
Augustine of Hippo (Saint) 8, 71, 242, 383, Botzheim, Johann von (Abstemius) 80, 81,
388, 410, 436, 437, 456, 457, 471, 483, 82, 83, 85
491, 492, 626, 668, 669, 761, 779 Bourbon, Henri de (Prince de Condé) 128,
472
Bade, Josse 73 Bouts, Dirck 71, 72, 363
Baechem, Nicolaas (Egmondanus) 86, 88 Braam Houckgeest, Andreas Everardus van
Baillet, Adrien 149, 151 62, 808–833
Balbuena, Bernardo de 62, 789, 791, 803, Bramante, Donato 256, 257, 492, 493, 495,
804, 805, 806 498
Barbara, Saint 337, 338, 351, 352, 353, 354, Bramón, Francisco 62, 790, 792, 793, 794,
355, 357, 746 797, 798, 801
838 Index NOMINUM

Brebiette, Pierre 123, 124 Christomo Van Immerseel 775

Brisson, Barnabé 727, 724 Chrysoloras, Manuel 2
Broecke, Crispijn van den 638 Cibo, Gherardo 747, 758, 759, 761
Bruegel, Pieter 11, 294, 597, 606, 607, 608, Cicero Marcus Tullius 12, 14, 37, 235, 292,
609, 610 392, 530, 531, 653, 724
Bry, Johan Israel de 483, 485 Clara Peeters 781
Bry, Johan Theodore de 483, 485 Claudian 201
Bry, Theodor de 483, 485 Clement VII, Pope (Giulio de’Medici) 378
Bulwer, John 622, 626, 641 Clesio, Bernardo (Bernardo III von
Buondelmonti, Cristoforo 431 Cles) 746, 747, 751
Buono da Malamocco 696 Cock, Hieronymus 12, 16, 23, 34, 35, 258,
Busleyden, Hieronymus 286 448, 453, 610
Bynneman, Henry 278 Colet, John 70, 78, 79, 80
Collaert, Hans 638
Calzolari, Francesco 741, 761 Collatinus, the husband of Lucretia 657,
Campano, Giannantonio 204 670
Campin, Robert 60, 335–365 Colonna, Francesco 258, 259, 753, 755, 756
Canterus, Gulielmus 522, 524, 528, 541, 559, Colonna, Giovanni 266
575 Condren, Charles 420, 421
Canter, Willem see Canterus, Gulielmus Conrart, Valentin 416, 417
Caron, Antoine 126 Coornhert, Dirk Volkertsz 289
Carpaccio, Vittore 700 Corner, Giovanni 638
Carracci, Annibale 160, 162, 165, 166, 168, Cort, Cornelis 12, 13, 16, 23, 30, 35, 378, 379,
171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 179, 181, 182, 183, 608, 610, 611, 612, 613
184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 398, Corvinus Georgius (Georg Rab) 538, 539,
399 540, 541, 569, 570, 571, 572
Carron, Antoine 259 Cousin, Jean (The Younger) 259, 260, 263,
Castelein, Matthijs de 46, 529, 530, 531, 532, 416, 499, 622, 653
533, 534, 535, 614 Cristoforo da Montone 4
Castiglione, Baldassare 265, 495, 754 Cronaca, Il: see Pollaiuolo, Simone del
Catullus, Gaius Valerius 233
Cebes 93, 112, 113, 114, 115 d’Angennes, Julie 416
Cellini, Benvenuto 08 Danti, Ignazio 504
Cesi, Carlo 160, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, Daret, Jacques 342, 343, 349, 362
180, 181, 184, 186, 193 Dati, Carlo 162
Céspedes, Pablo de 380 David, Charles 2, 123, 160, 351, 385, 386, 410,
Chatelain, Zachariah 151, 152, 153, 154, 155 581, 639, 746
Chen, Chongben 824, 827 David, Jan S.J. 2, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 93, 101,
Christ (Jesus) 8, 10, 52, 54–56, 58, 70, 72–73, 107, 109, 111, 385, 386, 387, 639
78–86, 89–90, 96–97, 99–101, 104–107, Day, John 278
109–110, 114–115, 117, 295, 327, 345, 347, De’ Barbari, Jacopo 700
352, 355–364, 370, 372, 375, 378, 380– De Granada Luis 465, 466
386, 388–391, 394–396, 398–399, 401, De Malherbe, François 413, 414, 420
406–408, 410, 422, 438, 444, 448–449, Descartes 144, 149
452–455, 459, 463, 469, 472, 614, 624, De Scudéry Georges 434
626–627, 631–632, 635, 638, 643–644, De Thomassin d’Eynac, Louis 421
647, 656–658, 702, 767–769, 779–780 De Weert, Adriaan 279, 289
Index NOMINUM 839

Diego Felipe de Guzman 779, 781, 782 Ferrante of Aragon (King of Naples) 205,
Diepenbeeck, Abraham van 121, 122, 123, 206
124, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 146, Feyerabent, Sigismund 135, 136, 536, 537,
147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155 538, 539, 540
Dion Chrisostomos 292 Finson, Louis 133, 135
Domenichino (Zampieri, Domenico) 172, Flavio, Biondo 235, 490, 498
188, 192, 380 Floris, Frans 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24,
Domingo de Salazar 767 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 677
Doni, Anton Francesco 747 Francisco de Oviedo 781
Dossi, Battista (Battista de Luteri) 746, 752, Francis I (King of France) 258
757 Francis of Assisi, Saint 355, 356
Dossi, Dosso (Giovanni di Niccolò de Franco, Battista 508
Luteri) 746, 752, 757 Frans Snyders 782
Du Bellay, Jean (Cardinal) 239, 254 Fréart de Chantelou, Paul 374, 375
Du Bellay, Joachim 60, 239–275, 296, 297, Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange 624,
301 653
Du Cerceau, Jacques Androuet 259, 263, Frederick III (Holy Roman Emperor) 204,
487, 488, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 496, 240
498, 509, 511 Frey, Jean Cécile 142, 144
Duns Scotus, John 351 Froben, Johann 73, 87, 88, 114
Dupérac, Étienne 259 Fulgentius, Fabius 210, 211, 212, 213, 218, 219,
Dürer Albrecht 61, 70, 86, 130, 131, 251, 252, 220, 222, 236
627, 630, 661, 663, 665, 707–739, 758, Fulvio, Andrea 498
781
Galen 219
Electors of Saxony 665 Galle, Theodoor 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 107,
Elijah (Prophet) 380 109, 385, 387, 639
Empedocles 142 Gallus, Johann 286, 287
Epicurus 143, 144, 145 Gallus, Wigandus (Weigand Han) 538, 539,
Erasmus, Desiderius of Rotterdam 59, 540, 541, 569, 570, 571, 572
69–90, 114, 286, 445, 530 Gassendi, Pierre 144, 145, 146
Este, Isabella d’ (Marchioness) 388 Gaston d’Orléans 472, 474
Estius, Fraco 535, 555, 561 Gauricus, Pomponius 399
Euclid 100 Gaywood, Richard 149, 150
Eyck, Jan and Hubert van 11, 44, 286, 287, Gheeraerts, Marcus I. 280, 295, 296, 297,
288, 362, 579, 781 298, 300
Gheyn, Jacques de 547
Falier, Vitale (Doge) 692 Ghiberti, Buonaccorso 491
Fan, Kuan 825, 827 Gillis, Peter 86, 547
Farnese, Pierluigi 504 Giocondo, Giovanni (Fra) 492
Favereau, Jacques 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, Glockendon, Jörg 735
151, 459 Godeau, Antoine, bishop 60, 410–475
Federico da Montefeltro (Duke of Urbino) Goeree, Willem 151
209, 213, 235 Goltzius, Hendrick 61, 112, 135, 137, 290,
Félibien André 434 520–617
Ferdinand Magellan 768 Gonzaga, Federico II (Duke) 754
Fernández, Juan, S.J. 375, 389, 390, 396, 397 Goossenius, Gerardus 280
Fernando Riquiel 768 Graf, Urs 635
840 Index NOMINUM

Greco, Micchele see Lucchese, Michele John the Baptist, Saint 336, 337, 338, 351,
Gregory the Great, Pope (Gregorius 362, 410, 421, 450, 451, 452, 465, 499,
Anicius) 499 610, 612
Grotius, Hugo 141, 625, 627, 648 Jonas, Justus 79
Grove, Robert 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 329, Judas 9, 10, 55, 56, 58, 61, 285, 410, 431, 438,
330 442, 622, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 629,
Guan, Tong 827 631, 632, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639, 640,
641, 642, 647, 648, 654, 655
Haechtanus, Laurentius 116 Julius II, Pope (Giuliano della Rovere) 496
Haecht, Willem van 301 Junius Franciscus 653
Harvey, William 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 329, Justus (Saint) 380, 391
330
Hearne, Thomas 512 Kintsius, Anthony Vincent 812
Heemskerck, Maarten van 254, 255, 256, Kirstein, Michael 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320,
257, 258, 259, 263, 502, 506, 639 321, 323, 325, 329, 330
Heere, Lucas de 280, 286, 287, 288, 291, 293, Koninck, Salomon 640, 641
365
Hernán Cortés 771 Labacco, Antonio 504, 512
Hesiod 124, 125, 141, 153, 235 Laelius, Gaius 220, 232
Hieronymus Bosch 11, 782 Laertius, Diogenes 145
Hinloopen, Michiel 512 Lafreri, Antonio 259, 505, 509, 510, 511
Hippocrates 219 LaFrery, Antoine see Lafreri, Antonio
Hirschvogel, Augustin 635 Lafréry, Antoine see Lafreri, Antonio
Holbein, Ambrosius 86, 87, 114 Lampsonius, Domenicus 34, 35, 286, 287
Homer 4, 5, 21, 22, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, Landi, Agostino (Count) 502
124, 125, 143, 162, 220, 235, 253, 442, L’Angelier, Abel 126, 434
588, 771 Langlois, Nicolas 123
Hoogstraten Samuel van 642, 653, 660, 678 Lapide, Cornelius a, S.J. 369, 381, 382, 383,
Horace 125, 147, 148, 149, 235, 242, 316, 677 384, 390
Houbraken, Arnold 1, 6 Lasne, Michael 123
Huygens, Constantijn 9, 10, 623, 624, 625, Lastman, Pieter 639
626, 642, 648, 653 Laurinus, Marcus 70, 80, 82, 83
Lavardin, Hildebert of 499
Ignatius of Loyola (Saint) 99, 101, 107, 111, Lazzarelli, Ludovico 201–236
352, 370, 372, 374, 393, 394, 410, 483, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques 73
626, 779 Le Moyen Pierre 459
Le Moyne, Pierre, S.J. 74, 403, 404, 405, 406
Jacob Jordaens 779, 780 Leonardo da Vinci 403, 723
James (Apostle) 380, 381, 391 Leo X, Pope (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’
Jan Brueghel 782 Medici) 495, 499
Jan van Goyen 783 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 399
Jarric, Pierre du, S.J. 374 Leto, Pomponio 236
Jode, Gerard de 499 Lievens, Jan 624, 627, 633, 634, 635, 639, 653
Jode, Pieter de 547 Ligorio, Pirro 497, 504
John (Apostle) 7, 58, 71, 72, 73, 89, 90, 286, Lipsius, Justus 71
294, 295, 297, 301, 351, 374, 380, 381, Lypsius, Martinus 71
389, 391, 395, 410, 448, 459, 625 Livy 61, 268, 650, 651, 657, 670, 671, 675, 680
Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 389
Index NOMINUM 841

Lopes, Duarte see Lopez, Odoardo Meleghino, Jacopo 504

Lopez, Odoardo 483, 495 Melville, Hermann 121, 123, 327
Louis II de Bourbon, the prince of Condé Merleberghe, Jan van (Iohannes Merliberch
472 Diest) 70, 71, 73
Louvain, Françoise de 126, 128 Merula, Giorgio 204
Lucan 11, 125, 329 Mombrizio, Bonino 235
Lucchese, Michele 510 Montano, Giovanni Battista 496, 512, 513,
Lucena, João de, S.J. 374 514
Lucretia 61, 650, 651, 652, 655, 657, 659, 660, Mor, Anthonis 286, 287
661, 662, 663, 664, 665, 666, 667, 668, Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis
669, 670, 671, 672, 673, 674, 675, 676, Élie 62, 809, 814, 829, 831
677, 678, 680 Moses 351, 356, 380, 383, 441
Lucretius 142, 143, 145 Muller, Jan 547
Luis de Góngora y Argote 779 Musi, Agostino de’ see Veneziano, Agostino
Luther, Martin 80, 88, 626, 716, 717, 720, Mussem, Jan van 529, 530, 531, 534
732, 736 Muziano, Girolamo 607, 608, 610, 612, 613

Manilius, Marcus 83, 201, 286 Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn 816

Mansueti, Giovanni 690 Nieuhof, Johan 822
Mantegna, Andrea 60, 202, 203, 205, 207, Nigrus, Stephanus 17, 22
208, 221, 226, 230 Nikolaos of Myra 291
Maratti, Carlo 165, 166, 167, 168, 181, 183, 184 Nonnus 125
Marcolini da Forlì, Francesco 747 Noot, Jan van der 60, 278–302
Marie Louise, Queen of Poland 123
Marino, Giambattista 405 Origen 393
Marliano, Bartolomeo 502, 506 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 38, 48, 59, 61,
Marolles, Michel de 59, 120–155, 459 74, 123, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137,
Marot, Clement 296, 297, 301 140, 141, 146, 153, 155, 169, 205, 235, 326,
Martini, Francesco di Giorgio 492, 510, 511 327, 520, 522, 524, 525, 526, 527, 528,
Martin, Jean 258, 732 535, 538, 539, 541, 547, 556, 557, 559,
Marvell, Andrew 3 561, 563, 565, 566, 567, 568, 569, 571,
Mary, Blessed Virgin 11, 62, 70, 71, 73, 89, 90, 572, 573, 574, 575, 577, 578, 587, 588, 591,
106, 286, 351, 362, 364, 365, 386, 398, 593, 594, 595, 651, 657, 670, 671, 672,
469, 472, 678, 771, 800 674, 675, 680, 781
Mary Magdalene (Saint) 71, 370, 410, 432,
468, 469 Paleotti, Gabriele (Cardinal) 395
Massys, Quentin 69, 86 Palladio, Andrea 497, 511, 512
Master Gregory 490, 499 Pallavacino, Pietro Sforza, S.J. (Cardinal)
Master (Monogrammist) GA with the 395, 401, 403, 496
Caltrop 225, 227, 485, 501, 506 Palma Il Vecchio (Giacomo Palma il Vecchio;
Master of Story of Cadmus 499, 501 Jacopo D’Antonio Negreti Palma Il
Master PS 505 Vecchio) 50, 690
Matham, Jacob 547 Panofsky, Erwin 74, 76, 219, 336, 358, 364,
Matham, Theodoor 123 715, 716, 724, 727, 736, 737, 738
Matteo di Capua 204 Pastor (Saint) 380, 391
Mattioli, Pietro Andrea 741–761 Paul III, Pope (Alessandro Farnese) 502,
Medici, Giulio de’ (Cardinal) 378, 496, 504, 505
746 Paulli, Simon 315
842 Index NOMINUM

Paul (Saint) 143, 352, 375, 418, 502, 505 Quevedo, Francisco de 266
Pedro de Arce 782 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 12,
Penni, Luca 15, 16 104, 292, 392, 393, 394, 401, 530
Perenyi, Peter 635
Perugino, Pietro 223, 224, 227, 229 Ramelli, Agostino 511
Peruzzi, Baldassare 492, 493, 496, 502, 504, Rangone, Tommaso (Rangon, Thomaso;
505, 508, 512 Rangone, Tomaso) 687, 689, 691, 694
Peruzzi, Giovanni Sallustio 512 Raphael 6, 7, 8, 9, 60, 160, 161, 165, 167, 168,
Peter (Apostle) 81, 89, 90, 372, 374, 380, 381, 169, 171, 172, 174, 180, 184, 194, 195, 196,
391, 400, 402, 410, 411, 429, 440, 442, 370, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 388,
444, 448, 449, 452, 453, 454, 459, 483, 389, 391, 392, 395, 396, 398, 400, 402,
488, 491, 504, 627, 628, 632, 635, 639, 406, 495, 496, 497, 499, 502, 582, 645,
674, 778 661, 662, 668
Peter de Witte (Peter Candid) 285 Reede van Oudshoorn, Catharina Cornelia
Peter Paul Rubens 627, 781, 782 Geertruida van 811
Petersom, Jan van 644 Rembrandt 3, 9, 10, 56, 61, 125, 579, 622–680,
Petit, Jean 73, 215, 418 736
Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch) 220, 222, Reni, Guido 405
223, 225, 227, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, Reusner, Nikolaus von 535, 536, 537, 538,
265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 295, 296, 542
297, 301, 747, 754 Revius Jacobus 651, 675
Philopator, Prolemy IV 86 Ricci, Bartolomeo, S.J. 381, 382, 383, 384,
Philostratus (Lucius Flavius) 17, 18, 19, 21, 385, 393, 394, 400, 401
22, 24, 59, 76, 125, 126, 127, 128, 162, 172, Ricci, Matteo, S.J. 100
180, 424, 425, 436, 753 Richeome, Louis 374, 435, 436, 437, 438,
Philostratus the Younger 126 440, 450, 455, 456, 457, 465, 467
Picart, Bernard 151, 152, 640, 642 Ridolfi, Carlo 692, 695, 696, 697, 699, 701,
Piccolomini, Ennea Silvio 233, 234, 246 702
Pico, Pandolfo 388 Rijckius, G. 555, 561
Pigafetta, Filippo 483, 484, 485, 497 Ripa, Cesare 427, 638
Pirckheimer, Willibald 717, 721, 724, 725, Rodríguez, Alfonso, S.J. 382
728, 734 Romano, Giulio 501
Pisano, Antonio di Puccio (Pisanello) 2, Rosselli, Francesco 494
10, 697 Rossi, Bartolomeo 512
Pizzicolli, Ciriaco de’ see Ancona, Ciriaco d’ Rovere, Giuliano della (Cardinal) see Julius II,
Plantin, Christophe 23, 47, 52, 53, 54, 632 Pope
Plato 113, 115, 143, 144, 146, 172, 579, 724, 725 Ruffo, Antonio 645
Pliny the Elder (Gaius Secundus) 83, 116, Rustico da Torcello 696
162, 757 Ruusbroec, Jan van 60, 335–365
Poilly, François 123
Pollaiuolo, Simone del 492 Sabaeus, Faustus, Brixianus 535, 538, 541,
Porta, Giambattista della 149 542, 543, 544, 545, 546
Posthius, Johannes 538, 539, 541, 569, 570, Saenredam, Jan 547
571, 572 Salamanca, Antonio 506, 509, 510, 511
Poussin, Nicolas 60, 161, 370–406 Sambucus, Joannes 799
Priscianus Caesariensis (Priscian) 2 Sandys, George 626
Propertius, Sextus 125, 233 Sangallo, Giuliano da 496, 506, 508
Pseudo-Cicero 12, 14, 530
Index NOMINUM 843

Sangallo the Younger, Antonio 496, 502, Theon 291

504 Thiry, Léonard 259, 260, 261, 262, 263
Sanmichele, Michele 638 Thomas (Apostle) 141, 239, 245, 286, 374,
Sannazzaro, Jacopo 585, 589, 590, 591, 614, 391, 395, 400, 402, 448, 449, 459, 512,
748, 749, 753 639, 691
Sansovino, Jacopo 700 Thomas of Aquinas, O.P. (Saint) 111, 350,
Santi Bartoli, Pietro 168, 169, 170, 188, 191 352, 381, 410, 483, 626, 627, 628
Sanzio, Raphael: See Raphael Tibullus, Albius 125, 233
Sarayna, Torello 509 Tintoretto, Domenico (Domenico
Sauli, Francesco Maria 646 Robusti) 698, 699
Sauval, Henri 375, 400 Tintoretto, Jacopo (Jacopo Robusti) 607,
Schalken, Godfried 641 608, 685, 686–703
Schonaeus, Cornelis 535, 555, 556 Titian, Vecelli 606, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611,
Schrevelius, Theodorus 555 685, 690, 697, 698, 781, 782
Schuler, Johanna Egberta Constantia van Titsingh, Isaac 811
812 Tolomei, Claudio 502, 503, 505, 511
Scriverius, Petrus 627, 677 Torsellini, Orazio, S.J. 374, 375, 386, 396,
Sébillet, Thomas 239 407
Seneca 125, 316, 317, 653, 660, 754 Tramezzino, Michele 506
Serlio, Sebastiano 90, 258, 262, 498, 504, Turner, John Mallord William 123
505, 512
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 3, 4, 61, 625, 650 Valgrisi, Vicenzo 747
Simonides of Ceos 404 Valla, Lorenzo 235
Soarez, Cyprian, S.J. 12, 392, 529, 530, 531, Van der Noot, Jan see Noot, Jan van der
534 Van der Venne, Adriaen 641
Socrates 111, 112, 113, 115, 579 Van Eyck, Jan and Hubert see Eyck, Jan van
Solis, Virgil 133, 135, 136, 137, 260, 261, 262, Hubert van
263, 537, 538, 539, 542, 543, 544, 545, Van Haecht, Willem see Haecht, Willem van
546, 547, 556, 565, 567, 569, 570, 571, van Halen, Arnoud 644, 645, 646
572, 575 Van Heemskerck, Maarten 253, 254, 255,
Soria, Giovanni Battista 512, 513 256, 257, 258, 259, 263, 502, 506, 639
Spreng, Johan 133, 135, 136, 538, 539 Van Mander, Karel 1, 6, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43,
Stella, Jacques 370, 372, 375 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 439, 521,
Strada, Jacopo 511 522, 528, 547, 555, 556, 579, 580, 581,
Strada the Younger, Ottavio 511 582, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590,
Stringa, Giovanni 703 591, 595, 596, 598, 599, 600, 601, 602,
Suavius see Zutman, Lambert 603, 604, 605, 606, 608, 610, 611, 614,
Sublet de Noyer, François 374 615, 616, 617, 653, 655, 678
Sucquet, Antoine S.J. 59, 93–117 Van Swanenburg, Willem Isaacsz 627, 639
Symeoni, Gabriello 137, 139 Van Raphelingen, Frans 631, 632, 634, 635
Syphax (King of Western Numidia) 220, 224 Van Vliet, Jan 639
Varchi, Benedetto 13
Tasso, Torquato 174, 396, 747 Vasari, Giorgio 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 49, 98, 162,
Thausing, Moritz von 709, 710, 712, 736, 264, 378, 380, 388, 635, 638, 692, 693,
737, 738 694, 695, 699, 701, 757
Theocritus 77, 125 Veneziano, Agostino 505, 506, 507, 508,
Theodoret of Cyrus 473 510, 747
Theodosius I, Emperor 410, 433, 472, 475 Venant, Francois 641
844 Index NOMINUM

Vervoort, Frans 635, 636, 637 Weert, Adriaan van 279, 289
Vigenère, Blaise de 26, 127, 128, 425, 426, Werl, Heinrich von 336, 337, 338, 350, 351,
428, 433 352, 354, 355, 362
Vignola, Jacopo (Giacomo) Barozzi da 503, Weyden, Rogier van der 10, 349, 350, 782
504, 505, 698 Wierix, Johannes 34, 35, 134
Villacastin, Thomas de, S.J. 383 Willem III, Prince of Orange 676
Virdung, Hans 716, 717, 718 Wolfgank, Abraham 149
Virgilius Maro, Publius (Virgil) 39, 42, 47,
49, 83, 124, 125, 133, 135, 136, 201, 214, Xavier, Francis, S.J. (Saint) 60, 242, 352, 370,
216, 220, 235, 260, 261, 320, 329, 522, 371, 372, 374, 375, 377, 389, 395, 396,
538 397, 401, 403, 404, 406, 407, 410, 483,
Vitalis, Janus 265, 266, 267, 268 626, 627, 628, 685
Vossius, Isaac 822
Vouet, Simon 370, 373 Zeno 403
Zeno, Apostolo 743
Wang, Hui 824, 825, 827, 828 Zeuxis 98, 168, 169
Waterloos, Hendrick Frederick 643, 644 Zutman, Lambert 499