Speaking With the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History 9781474471619

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Speaking with the Dead

Speaking with the Dead Explorations in Literature and History

Jurgen Pieters

Edinburgh University Press

© Jurgen Pieters, 2005 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Sabon by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1588 1 (hardback) The right of Jurgen Pieters to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

1 Among Ancient Men: Petrarch, Machiavelli, Sidney andHuygens

12

2 The Gaze of Medusa and the Practice of the Historian: Rubens and Huygens

54

3 The Historical Shiver: Flaubert, Michelet and Keats

85

4 ‘Now Let us Go into this Blind World’: Dante, Virgil, Homer and T. S. Eliot

104

5 The Sounds of Silence: Roland Barthes

121

Epilogue

136

Bibliography

141

Index

151

Acknowledgements

Even books about conversations with the dead depend to a large extent on dialogues with the living. I have been fortunate in a number of friends and colleagues with whom I discussed the project of this book at every stage of its development. I am truly grateful for their support and help. Some of them read drafts of one or several of the chapters that follow, while others offered valuable pieces of advice on particular aspects of the argument that I develop in this work. I would like to thank especially Mieke Musschoot, Ann Rigney, Peter Venmans, Katrien De Troyer, M ark Insingel, Werner Waterschoot, Alexander Roose, Danny Praet, Benjamin Biebuyck, Marysa Demoor, Willy Roggeman, Kris Pint and Patrick Everard. I have also profited from discussions with students in Ghent, Utrecht and Groningen to whom I presented parts of this book in seminars and lectures. Diana Barnes, Ann Vinnicombe and David Chan went through the manuscript with care and precision: I’m grateful to them for the truly wonderful job they did. For their support and encouragement throughout this project, I’d like to thank Jackie Jones and James Dale at Edinburgh University Press. I’d like to dedicate this book to Lukas and Nancy. I hope that when they read it, each in his or her time, they will enjoy it as much as I did writing it.

Introduction

This book began with the persistent echo of a justly famous opening sentence. The sentence is Stephen Greenblatt’s. It opens Shakespearean Negotiations and it has been quoted ever since the book was first published in 1988. The sentence returned in almost every review and was highlighted in just about every survey piece on Greenblatt’s New Historicism. Consequently, critics began to assume that it should be taken as one of the movement’s prime axioms. This is the sentence I am talking about: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead.’1 Ten simple words, joined together in a rhythm that has the fluency of Shakespearean verse, but the meter of a classical French alexandrin. It’s the sort of sentence that is hard to forget. Even as you read it for the first time, you feel sure that you have seen it before. Still, it is not at all a conspicuous sentence. While this in itself may already indicate its unusual force, there must be more to account for its attraction. It is a sentence that we all would like to come up with, not simply because it has a degree of lucidity and clarity that is quite rare in academic writing today, but also because it expresses an idea that seems to be as true as it is general. It has the ring of a catchphrase, and with it the power that distinguishes it from a mere critical cliche. It voices a feeling that most of us share, and it does so in a way that makes us feel included in the message that it conveys. I too began with the desire to speak with the dead, but I ended up wanting, above all, to understand where that desire comes from, what it means exactly and how it serves as shorthand for what we do as literary and cultural historians when we read texts, paintings, buildings, pieces of furniture, items of clothing or other historical objects, trying our best to piece together the elusive meanings produced by these things that have come down to us from a distant past. In my attempt to answer these questions, I soon discovered that Greenblatt was not the first to describe our reading of the past in terms of an attempt to reach for the impossible

2

Speaking with the Dead

and strike up a conversation with the dead. Rapidly, it became clear that the notion of such a conversation is related to other ideas and beliefs central to our conception of history and literature and of the complex relationships that have been forged between them over the last five centuries or so. Indeed, as the manuscript for this book developed, I learned that, in one way or another, the notion has been at the heart of our critical discourse on literature and history ever since Aristotle set up the famous contra­ distinction between historical and poetical writing in Chapter 9 of his Poetics. Following upon its rediscovery in the West in late fifteenthcentury Italy, Aristotle’s treatise had an influence on literary theory that can hardly be underestimated.2 While its initial impact was mainly felt in the field of genre-theory - the central impetus being Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy - it also decisively shaped our belief that poetical texts can function as critical doubles of historical texts. Given the fact that Aristotle’s distinction between the writing of history and the writing of literature is related to a time and a culture whose notions of both history and literature differ greatly from ours, its appropriation in the early-modern and the modern ages, as our concepts of both history and literature began to take their contemporary form,3 was remarkably easy. While for Aristotle and his contemporaries the function of literary texts differed categorically from that of historical texts, it is striking to see how the argument that he developed for their contradistinction is used from the early-modern period onwards to highlight the particular historical function of literary texts. The logic of that appropriation, I will argue, underlies the metaphor of the conversation with the dead: literary texts are considered to be superior historical sources that manage to conjure up the past in ways that transcend the working of straightforward historical texts. Literary texts give a voice to the past; they enable us to listen to its absent representatives and, more extraordinarily, to converse them. In the course of this book, I will show how Greenblatt’s conversation with the dead is related to others’ use of the concept - Machiavelli and Michelet being his most probable direct sources. In their writings, the conversation with the dead opens up a chain of questions and concepts that underpins Greenblatt’s own approach to the problem of literary history. It will become clear later on that both the questions I have in mind and the concepts related to them are diverse and heterogeneous. Here, I will limit myself to singling out one specific strand, which I want to introduce under the rubric of ‘poetic knowledge’. The following questions touch the very heart of our enquiries into the historical nature of literary texts. How can these texts provide us with (a certain degree of) knowledge of the past, whether it be the past from which they originated

Introduction

3

or the past that they represent and bring into being? What sort of knowledge are we talking about here? Is it the same kind of knowledge that we derive from texts that are not labelled ‘literary’ or is it of a different, special type? If it is the same sort of knowledge, why then do we read literary texts in terms of their historicity? Where is the value in doing so if not in amplifying, deepening or correcting our knowledge of the past? If, on the other hand, this ‘poetic knowledge’ differs categorically from what, for lack of a better word, I will call ‘historical’ knowledge, does this mean then that the distinction between literary and non-literary texts that is usually made on the basis of stylistic and formal criteria (the deployment of language in an unusual way, as most formalist theories of literature have it) also involves a difference in cognitive functioning and, possibly, in the sort of cognition that it produces? Connected to this is yet another question: which textual strategies produce this ‘poetic knowl­ edge’ of the past? Also, which texts offer us this knowledge to the fullest? This last question already suggests that the problem of ‘poetic knowledge’ is linked to another field of questions that revolve around the idea of canonicity, an issue that is also part of the critical field opened up by the notion of the conversation with the dead. Who are the dead whose powers of conversation will benefit us most? And which texts should we read in order to gain the special kind of knowledge the dead have in store for us?

The Historicity of Fiction I recently participated in a workshop for Ph.D. students in which all of these interlocking questions cropped up at once, causing the central point of discussion to disappear entirely. The point of departure of the work­ shop was the writing of a Dutch colleague, Marita Mathijsen, whose field of expertise is nineteenth-century literature. In this age, the critical and artistic aims of historians and novelists began conspicuously to converge towards a common goal: the depiction of the real wie es gewesen, to borrow the famous phrase of the German historian Leopold von Ranke. The central issue of the workshop was the question of whether or not novels - historical ones and non-historical ones, a division that blurred as the afternoon advanced - could be read as historical sources documenting either the cultural moment in which they were produced or that which they took as their subject. It was my colleague’s genuine belief that novels provide a supreme type of source for the historian. Throughout the workshop, my colleague rehearsed the logic that she develops in a number of recent publications, in which she expresses a heartfelt plea for the

4

Speaking with the Dead

specific historical value of literary texts. Taking her cue from Dominck LaCapra’s assertion that ‘[literature becomes redundant when it tells us what can be gleaned from other documentary sources’,4 she tries to demonstrate that literary works make felt the world which they represent in ways that set them apart them from ‘ordinary’, non-literary texts. Firmly convinced that literary texts provide insight into ‘a society’s basic conflicts and obsessions’,5 my colleague claims that historians who want to gain a deeper knowledge of how people thought in a certain age and what their fascinations were need to turn to literature. The writer’s literary ‘truth’ is the means par excellence to make an advance in our descriptions of historical processes. Ordinary historical sources can give us the facts, but if we want to find out how these facts relate to one another, literature can be quite helpful. After the historian has drawn up statistics on the basis of government documents, chronicles, newspapers, registers, notary acts, figures and objects of everyday use, literary texts provide us with a helpful instrument for the analysis of these statistics. Not in order to give an outline of everyday life, but to lay bare changing mentalities.6

Novels, she concludes, are important to historians in two different ways: not only do they confirm, modify or deepen the knowledge derived from other, non-literary historical sources, they also ‘translate’ this knowledge into a shape that is often more appealing and even touching, in the sense that the feeling of authenticity surrounding the subject is heightened. The idea of the literary text’s larger appeal is an interesting one, to which I will return throughout this book: it concerns the question of the textual voice that addresses the reader and that functions, obviously, as one of the grounding conditions for the conversation with the dead. While the dead cannot literally speak, they make themselves heard in the textual traces they have left behind - in letters written with one or more specific readers in mind; alternatively, in notes and in diaries whose sole intended reader is the author him- or herself; or in speeches that directly address a larger audience. In all of these texts, the dead speak to us by means of traces that are the direct product of the very voice that first gave them shape. But the dead also make themselves heard in texts that contain their voices only indirectly: in literary texts, the writing and reading of which is sustained by the agreement that the voice in which the text speaks to us is distinctly not the author’s. Literary texts are not, by definition, messages from their authors: authors do not speak in their novels, their poems or their plays, at least not in their own names. The voices that we hear in novels, poems and plays do not, in any way, exist prior to the text’s production. On the contrary, they are its product, an effect of the writing that gives the text its form and shape. They are part of the imagined

Introduction

5

reality that the text builds up, maybe even its most central part - they are what turns fiction into fiction. As the work of Marita Mathijsen makes abundantly clear, it has become somewhat of a critical truism, among literary historians, that literary texts provide us with a deeper experience and, hence, a more direct awareness of the past. To borrow yet another phrase from Greenblatt, literary texts give us a ‘touch of the real’ in ways that non-literary texts often do not.7 The prime purpose of this book is not so much to lay bare the critical paradoxes inherent to this idea,8 but to reveal and to identify its conceptual implications. As I indicated before, this idea derives from Aristotle, and nearly two thousand years later it was famously rehearsed by Sir Philip Sidney in his renowned Defence o f Poesy. I will return to Sidney in more detail in a later chapter. Here, I will make a number of general remarks about Aristotle’s treatment of the issue that can serve as a prelude to this book’s central trajectory from the earlymodern period (with Petrarch, Machiavelli, Sidney, the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens and Rubens in Chapters 1 and 2), to the Romantic age (with Michelet, Flaubert and Keats in Chapter 3) and back to the late Middle Ages and the literature of Antiquity (with Dante, Virgil, Homer and T. S. Eliot in Chapter 4). My last interlocutor is Roland Barthes, whose work is central to Chapter 5 but anticipated in preceding chapters. In more ways than one, Barthes is the central force of inspiration behind what follows. What I had in mind when I began to conceive this book was not a systematic and fully fledged analysis of the topic of the conversation with the dead. That would have called for the erudition and the wisdom of giants like Erich Auerbach, Hans Blumenberg, Ernst Robert Curtius, Mario Praz and George Steiner. Rather, I wanted to follow the ‘procedure de la topique’ that Barthes describes in the first lecture of the course that he gave on Le Neutre at the College de France in 1978.9 In that lecture, he suggests that we should conceive of ‘topical’ enquiries (the investigation of a topos, in the rhetorical sense of the word) as a walk through a library of dead authors. The idea is a very appealing one, all the more so if the topos is that of the conversation with the dead. Barthes takes the ‘procedure de la topique’ as a highly individual approach - it is his library and his walk - even though he is the first to admit that his investigation is largely determined by the works he picks up from his bookcase during his walk and by the authors he takes the trouble to talk to. It seems a rather peculiar condition that the authors in question need to be dead, but the idea is fundamental to Barthes. Much like his great example, Michelet, Barthes needs the detour of the dead in order to be able to see what his position in his own age is. ‘I allow the dead to speak inside of me,’ he writes: ‘the living surround me, they impress me,

6

Speaking with the Dead

they draw me into a system of echos that are more or less conscious. But only the dead are real objects of creation.’10 Put differently, the dead enable him to create something worthwhile for his own age.

Aristotle on Literature and History Aristotle develops his ideas about the distinction between literary and historical texts in Chapter 9 of his Poetics. Having set out, earlier in his treatise, the key notion of mimesis, ‘the production of images’, or mimemata as they are called in classical Greek, he contrasts the task of the poet to that of the historian. While the latter is limited to the exposition of what has really been and what has truly happened (ta genomena), Aristotle argues, the former can, and indeed must, rise above the particular limitations of the real and portray things that could have happened. Aristotle’s opening passage is important enough for our purposes to be quoted in full. ‘From what has been said it is clear too,’ Aristotle writes, that the poet’s job is not to tell what has happened but the kind of things that can happen, i.e., the kind of events that are possible according to probability or necessity. For the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their presenting accounts that are versified or not versified, since it would be possible for Herodotus’ work to be put into verses and it would be no less of a kind of history with verse than it is without verses; rather the difference is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history; for poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particulars. ‘Universal’ means what kinds of thing a certain kind of person will say or do in accordance with probability or necessity, which is what poetic composition aims at, tacking on names afterward; while ‘particular’ is what Alcibiades did or had done to him.11

Whereas the opening words of this passage seem to signal a rather general continuation of the issues raised by Aristotle in the early chapters of his treatise - the definition of mimesis, the typology of the diverse mimetic arts and a brief introductory treatment of the comic and the tragic - it also contains a more specific reference to the central topic of the chapter that immediately precedes the cited passage. There, Aristotle develops his idea that the stories (muthoi) told by poets need to have a distinct unity, which does not derive, he claims, from the presence of a single, unifying hero, but from the poet’s conscious construction of his text. The point is a familiar one in the criticism of the age and, indeed, in the development of

Introduction

7

classicist theories of literature in later ages. What makes it interesting for our purposes is the way it leads to the contradistinction between historical and literary or poetical texts. ‘[M]any things, in fact an infinite number, happen to an individual,’ Aristotle writes in the opening lines of Chapter 8 of Poetics, ‘some of which do not contribute to any unity, and in the same way there are many actions of a single individual out of which no single action emerges.’12 The unity about which Aristotle is talking here is not, as Gerald F. Else stresses in his impressive commentary on Aristotle’s text, ‘biographical unity, the sum of everything that happens to a man during his life’.13 That would be the stuff of historians who chronicle each and every event without any consideration of the unification of their materials and the effect this unification could have on their readership. Read in conjunction, the passages from Chapters 8 and 9 of the Poetics raise an interesting question about the interrelationship between Aris­ totle’s stress on textual unity and the demand that the poet should deal with universals rather than particulars. What he seems to be suggesting is that elements that belong to a unified plot cease to be particular and become universal once they are given their place in a larger design. His definition of the universal in terms of ‘what kinds of thing a certain kind of person will say or do in accordance with probability or necessity’ heightens this impression: the unity of the story is in a way guaranteed by the universality of its interacting elements and vice versa. What gives these elements the air of universality is the fact that they are situated in a unified story. Historians chronicle the real as it is: chaotic, infinite, unorganised. Poets talk about the world as it could be: unified, harmonious and organised on the basis of the principles of ‘probability’ and ‘necessity’ that govern the teleological view the Greek adopted of nature and the human world.14 This is what makes poetry more philosophical than history, so Aristotle claims, in what many take to be a subtle rejoinder to Plato’s rejection of the poetic production of his age in favour of philo­ sophy. But it may also be what makes the work of the poet more mimetic. Given the fact that Aristotle himself is not explicit about the exact relationship between this specific passage and his definition of mimesis in Chapter 4, one could be led to conclude that for him historians do not produce mimesis at all, or at least, not to the same extent and with the same effect as poets.15 Much depends, of course, on the exact definition we give to Aristotle’s key notion. Some have taken it to include the production of any sort of representation of a given reality (fictional or not), while others consider mimesis as a more restricted activity, which takes as its focus not so much the sort of images that are produced but the effect which the making of these images has on the audience receiving

8

Speaking with the Dead

them. The conceptual implications of Aristotle’s notion have been de­ bated quite vigorously among classical scholars and I do not intend to rehearse the discussions involved here. One of the things we have to take into account when we read Aristotle’s text, Stephen Halliwell writes in his most recent contribution to the exegesis of the Poetics, is that the meaning of concepts is subject to historical change: the original idea of imitatio, the standard Latin account of mimesis that lies at the beginning of Aristotle’s introduction in the West, calls up a number of associations that distinguish it from what the notion of imitation means today.16 In another important contribution to the analysis of Aristotle’s concept, Paul Woodruff corroborates Halliwell’s point. To Woodruff, ‘[m]imesis is the art of arranging for one thing to have an effect that properly belongs to another: M is a mimema o f O just in case M has an effect that is proper to O ’.17 The advantage of Woodruff’s formula is that it emphasises the pragmatics of mimesis: the noun refers to an action, not a product, and it includes the affective result that the outcome of the practice has on the audience confronted with the mimemata in question. Woodruff describes mimesis as ‘a functional deception’: it is a sort of make-believe, in the sense that it wants us to believe in the veracity of what it portrays and it aims to convince us that it can have the same effects as its real counterpart. If we limit ourselves to the mimesis of written texts (whether or not to be performed on stage), this idea of make-believe can be profitably related to Aristotle’s concern with the power of language to visualise and, as it were, make present before the eye of the beholder that which is represented in words. The idea runs through the Poetics in the passages that are concerned with what Aristotle calls the opsis of tragic spectacles, but it has an even more obvious bearing on the famous passage concerned with the energetic power of metaphorical language in the third book of the Rhetoric. There, Aristotle defines the energeia of language as the power of ‘actualization, vividness, representing things inanimate as animate’. In Aristotle’s work, the idea of linguistic energy points to the power of words and images to give (the illusion) of life to lifeless things and people, a power that poets are well versed to explore. By means of this potent language, Aristotle argues, ‘things are set before the eyes by words that signify actuality’.18 Put differently, this sort of language enlivens the words on the page, or, better still, it has the power to make them disappear altogether and generate the illusion that the objects to which they refer and the people whose voices they represent become present in the moment of the text’s performance. Here, performance may be silent (as in the individual act of reading) or it may involve the actual voice of a mediating performer (as in the theatrical rendering of the text, before a larger audience).

Introduction

9

Aristotle’s stress on the energetic, ‘life-giving power’ of language brings us back to the starting point of this introduction: Greenblatt’s desire to speak with the dead. How can we possibly imagine that the living, once they have moved on or have otherwise been taken away from us, continue to speak, from the other side as it were, in and through the texts they have left behind? Whatever further inferences we draw from any answer we might give to this question, its starting point will necessarily be the power of language - their language - that turns the absence of the dead into a mediated, ‘translated’ presence. In the opening chapter of Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt introduces another concept closely related to his desire to converse with the dead: that of social energy. While he is vague about what this social energy amounts to exactly, the concept’s expla­ natory function is twofold. ‘Social energy’ is what all cultural phenomena present at a certain point in time have in common (it is the cultural cement that binds the diverse manifestations of a given historical age). It also enables some of these manifestations - those possessing a large amount of social energy, it would seem - to survive the ultimate decline of their original culture. Shakespeare’s texts, to borrow Greenblatt’s example, continue to appeal to us on account of the social energy that inheres in them and which links them to their context of production. ‘The ‘‘life’’ that literary works seem to possess long after both the death of the author and the death of the culture for which the author wrote,’ he claims, ‘is the historical consequence, however transformed and refashioned, of the social energy initially encoded in those works.’19 The paragraphs in which the notion of social energy is discussed raise more questions than Greenblatt is able to answer in the introduction to his book. What makes them interesting for our purposes is his stress on the rhetorical nature of concept. Linking it directly to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to Renaissance theories of poetics that strove to explain the ‘compel­ ling force’ exerted by works of art on their audiences, his initial sugges­ tion is self-evident: it is their language that makes the dead speak. The implications of this suggestion for our ‘historical’ understanding of literary texts are less self-evident, however, leading as it does to the conclusion that if the dead can be heard better and more intensely in literary texts than in non-literary ones, this may be due to the fact that they are more self-consciously concerned with their language in these texts. The questions that this suggestion provokes are the subject of the chapters to follow.

10

Speaking with the Dead

Notes 1. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation o f Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 1. 2. See, for instance, Joel E. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York: Harbinger Books, 1963 [1899]), passim; Bernard Weinberg, A History o f Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Daniel Javitch, ‘The Assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics in Sixteenth-century Italy’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History o f Literary Criticism. Volume 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 53-65; Umberto Eco, ‘La Poetique et nous’, in Umberto Eco, De la litterature (Paris: Grasset, 2002), pp. 299-322. 3. See the articles on ‘history’ and ‘literature’ in Raymond Williams, Key­ words: A Vocabulary o f Culture and Society, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 146-8 and 183-8. See also Peter Widdowson, Lit­ erature (London: Routledge, 1999). 4. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 126. 5. Marita Mathijsen, De mythe terug: Negentiende-eeuwse literatuur als travestie van maatschappelijke conflicten (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers AUP, 2000), p. 12; my translation. 6. Mathijsen, De mythe terug, p. 12; my translation. In her most recent book, entitled De gemaskerde eeuw (The masked century), she puts it as follows: ‘Literary texts show us how man struggles with contradictions’ (p. 16) and also: ‘In [this book] I am trying to get a grip on the mentality of the Dutch in the nineteenth century. [. . .] Literary texts provide me with a footing. They are an act of transvestism, as it were, of social conflict and collective obsessions. The literature of an age shows us what went on in people’s minds, what their fascinations and their mental wrangles were and how they believed that they had to deal with these.’ Marita Mathijsen, De gemaskerde eeuw (Amsterdam: Querido, 2002), p. 17; my translation. 7. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Touch of the Real’, in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 20-48. 8. I have done so with specific reference to Greenblatt in Jurgen Pieters, Moments o f Negotiation: The New Historicism o f Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001). 9. Roland Barthes, Le Neutre, Cours au College de France (1977-8) (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2002), pp. 33-4. 10. Barthes, Le Neutre, pp. 34-5 my translation. 11. I made use of Gerald Else’s edition of the text: Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957), pp. 301-2 (51a36-b12). 12. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 296 (51a17-19). 13. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 297. 14. Paul Woodruff, ‘Aristotle on Mimesis’, in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 92.

Introduction

11

15. Jonathan Barnes, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 275. 16. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics o f Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 6, 14. 17. Woodruff, ‘Aristotle on Mimesis', p. 91. 18. Aristotle, The ‘Art’ o f Rhetoric, translation by John Henry Freese (London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 475. 19. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 6.

Chapter 1

Among Ancient Men: Petrarch, M achiavelli, Sidney and Huygens

Sometimes they sing for me; Some tell me of the mysteries of nature; Some give me counsel for my life and death; Some tell of high emprise, bringing to mind Ages long past; some with jesting words Dispel my sadness, and I smile again; Some teach me to endure, to have no longing, To know myself. Masters are they of peace, Of war, of tillage, and of eloquence, And travel o’er the sea.1 Petrarch

It has been over two decades now since the field of American literary studies took the decisive ‘historical turn’ that to a large extent still determines its outlook today. Following the long hegemony of formalist criticism that lasted for nearly half a century, the early 1980s witnessed what a significant number of commentators considered to be the longawaited paradigm-shift from the autonomous study of literary texts that had dominated the profession since the 1940s. From that moment on, everybody seemed to be questioning the ‘intrinsic’ study of literature, ‘the natural and sensible starting point for work in literary scholarship’ as Rene Wellek and Austin Warren called it in Theory o f Literature, the book that functioned as the ‘Bible’ of the formalist method for several decades.2 The formalist hegemony began to take shape in the decade leading up to the Second World War, as the work of American critics like Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren steadily rose to prominence. The heydays of formalism soon followed. From the 1950s onwards, the theoretical contributions of these ‘New Critics’ resulted in a distinct pedagogical reading method that was practised and institutionalised at the most important universities in Britain and the US. Strangely enough,

Among Ancient Men

13

the New Critical paradigm persisted even after the demise of its method, when the deconstructionist approach that was based upon the writings of such diverse critics as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller became the new critical vogue in the American academe from the beginning of the 1970s.3 Although a critic like Paul de Man explicitly defined his own reading practice against the formalist ideology of New Criticism,4 many of his followers had difficulties in moving beyond its boundaries. Whether or not the ‘historical’ rupture to the formalist doctrine that occurred in the 1980s was as complete as many had hoped is a question that lies beyond the scope of this book. What matters here is that this hope rested upon the genuine conviction that the advent of a number of new, historical reading practices had something radically novel in store, not only for the specific domain of the historical scholarship of literary texts, but for the entire field of literary criticism. Indeed, as Stephen Greenblatt, who was considered the most prominent representative of the historical turn at the time, stressed, the new historical approaches of the 1980s meant doing things differently. Supposedly, this involved a de­ parture from anything that went before: deconstruction, New Criticism and traditional historical scholarship. ‘[S]et apart from both the domi­ nant historical scholarship of the past and the formalist criticism that partially displaced it after World War Two,’ Greenblatt wrote in 1982, his own practice and that of a number of like-minded critics would not only change the outlook of the profession, but also the questions that it asked and the stakes it raised.5 There were many signs of the swift rise of several new cultural and contextual approaches in the course of the 1980s, as a growing number of important young critics began to publish books and articles that took a distinctly historical perspective. Apart from Greenblatt, they included scholars who by the end of the twentieth century would be counted among the leading voices in the profession: Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Jerome McGann, Edward Said, to name but a few. One of the most telling of these signs was J. Hillis Miller’s presidential address to the members of the Modern Language Association in 1986. Describing the state of affairs in the field, Miller unambiguously proclaimed that ‘literary studies in the past few years ha[d] undergone a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such and ha[d] made a corresponding turn toward history, culture, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base in the sense of institutionalisation, conditions of production, technology, distribution, and consumption of ‘‘cultural’’ products, among other products’.6

14

Speaking with the Dead

The list of topics singled out by Miller already bears witness to the diversity of the different reading practices identifiable in the works of the critics just mentioned. Still, the ‘paradigm shift’ that resulted from the socalled historical turn was largely due to the rapid institutionalisation of one specific practice among the different reading methods that together made up this change: the one that became known as the ‘New Historicism’ in the United States and that found its most exemplary shape in the writings of Greenblatt. Eventually, the course of the movement’s success embodied, above all, in Greenblatt’s rapid canonisation as the most important Shakespearean scholar of the past twenty years, of the entire century, some would even say - resulted in the prominence of other approaches that shared Greenblatt’s historical perspective, but not ne­ cessarily the theoretical and aesthetic conceptual foundations upon which his work rests. The history of the general development of the historical turn in literary studies, and of New Historicism’s position within it, has been described sufficiently elsewhere and there is no point in reiterating it here.7 Still, in order to get a clear idea of how the conversation with the dead functions in the larger conceptual framework of historicist theories that try to lay bare the shifting interactions between history and literature, we will need a clearer view of New Historicism’s intervention within the field of literary history and of the changes it brought in our idea of a reading practice that is both historically grounded and critically relevant. Even though it is far from obvious how one could make a clear-cut distinction between the New Historicism and the ‘Old’ Historicism that its practi­ tioners aimed to supplant, there are a number of methodological axioms associated with Greenblatt’s work that render the difference more sig­ nificant. The most straightforward of these is Greenblatt’s fundamental critique of Old Historicism as an essentially ‘monological’ practice, the implication being that his own work and that of his fellow New Historicists will be dialogical in contrast. Greenblatt’s description of his own work as stemming from a desire to converse with the past, as we will shortly see, is related to this critique. Traditional historicism, Greenblatt claims, is monological in at least two respects. First, it involves an absolute reduction of the fundamental heterogeneity of the past. This reduction is often politically or ideologi­ cally motivated, but there are many cases in which it is the product of either carelessness or megalomania on behalf of the historian. Trying to squeeze entire cultures and periods into a monolithic and transparently compact framework, traditional historicists often came up with inter­ pretations of literary texts which perpetuated cultural generalities and other elements of homogeneity. While they were by no means inimical to

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the detailed and erudite scrutiny of their materials, according to Greenblatt they often limited themselves to the detection of ‘a single political vision, usually identical to that said to be held by the entire literate class or indeed the entire population’.8 The monological reduction of the past to such a comfortably identifiable set of ideas - of a perfectly delineated Zeitgeist, to borrow a notion from the German tradition of the history of ideas - entails, in turn, a second form of monologism, one that is not so much related to the simple reduction of the historical real, but to a problematic understanding of the relationship between historians and their subject-matter. After all, Greenblatt writes, the monolithic vision of a single culture that traditional historicism detects in all the cultural products of a given period, ‘most often presumed to be internally coherent and consistent, though occasionally analyzed as the fusion of two or more elements’, is on the whole given ‘the status of an historical fact’. As he further explains, [i]t is not thought to be the product of the historian’s interpretation, nor even of the particular interest of a given social group in conflict with other groups. Protected then from interpretation and conflict, this vision can serve as a stable point of reference, beyond contingency, to which literary interpretation can securely refer. Literature is conceived to mirror the period’s beliefs, but to mirror them, as it were, from a safe distance.9

This brief passage (one of Greenblatt’s rare excursions into the domain of methodological reflection) makes perfectly clear that the two elements that inform his objection to monologism can be rephrased in terms of a critique of Old Historicism’s treatment of historical texts as mere ‘docu­ ments’ - as unproblematic sources, that is, that are not only taken to contain a clear and generally acceptable message with respect to a given period in the past, but that also provide the reader with a transparent window upon the historical real they are taken to capture. This reality, so traditional historicists seem to have believed, offers a stable and unam­ bivalent frame of reference to which the meaning(s) of the texts could be attached, on the basis of a logic that conceives of the relationship between an empirical ‘real’ and its textual representation as a simple and straight­ forward one. Documents and sources, so the logic runs, give us the past wie es gewesen.10 Greenblatt’s critique of Old Historicism’s ‘documentary approach’ is completely in line with Dominick LaCapra’s axiom that ‘documents are texts that supplement or rework ‘‘reality’’ and not mere sources that divulge facts about ‘‘reality’’ ’.11 He also shares LaCapra’s view that nowadays historians need to oppose such a documentary approach in favour of a fully dialogical one that not only takes into account the fact

16

Speaking with the Dead

that texts are rhetorical reworkings of the real, but also that in the act of writing history, as LaCapra puts it, ‘the historian enters into a “ con­ versational” exhange with the past and with other inquirers seeking an understanding of it’.12 ‘Historians generally recognize,’ LaCapra writes, that they begin not with a ‘virgin’ historical record but with a record processed by the accounts of other historians. But they often tend to reduce their role of the ‘revision’ of standard accounts on the basis of new facts unearthed from the record. This restricted view obscures the strangeness of a dialogue with the dead who are reconstructed through their ‘textualized’ remainders, and it resists any broader reconceptualization of the nature of historical understand­ ing in terms of the interaction between ‘documentary’ knowledge and ‘rheto­ rical’ exchange.13

LaCapra’s description of the processes and mechanisms of historical understanding indicates quite clearly that Greenblatt’s critique of tradi­ tional monologism can be rephrased in terms of his claim that his work grew from his explicit desire ‘to speak with the dead’. Still, this suggestion is less self-evident than it might look. After all, every form of historicism, whether or not it presents itself as ‘traditional’, mainstream or ‘new’, stems from a desire to arrive at some form of historical experience of a past that is no longer there, whether it be in the shape of an empathic re­ enactment of the past, or a distant and objective reconstruction of it, or a conversation with its original inhabitants or the conjuring up of a touch of the historical real, to borrow another of Greenblatt’s favourite metaphors.14 What distinguishes Greenblatt’s New Historicism in this respect is the way in which and the degree to which this desire is explicitly thematised as a critical problem in the act of interpretation. Old Historicists, one could say, while often being aware of this desire (and of the impossibility of entirely coming to terms with it), tried to ignore its steering presence. In so doing, they often gave the impression that as historians they were somehow situated at an Archimedean point outside history, from which they and their readers were given a complete and fully neutral view of the contingent reality they were studying. At the same time, they were safely detached from the processes they tried to describe. Evidently, this is not the sort of position Greenblatt and his fellow New Historicists would want to adopt, even if they could. After all, in their view the core of the historical business lies in the interesting tension between the historicity of the historians’ practice (situated, by definition, in the present in which history is made as it is being written down) and that of its object (situated in a moment that precedes its ‘making’). In their view, what is needed is a careful balancing act that allows the tension between these two historicities to become productive,

Among Ancient Men

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without the one dominating the other. While in practice it is difficult to devise an analytical method that achieves this balance, in theory it is clear that the tension in question can only become productive if it neither results in a presentist projection of contemporary concerns into the past, nor in an antiquarian obsession with the past per se. What is needed, one could say, is the sort of historiography that Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, called a ‘history of the present’. Such a history would refuse to construe a teleological or even dialectical relationship between past and present, while being based upon the assuring presupposition that the very act of historical enquiry relates them to one another on a necessary basis. By definition, its concern for the past is located in the present.15

The Machiavellian Moment The discussion, then, is about the modality of this relationship and about the search for a critical model that best accommodates its dual function and the historian’s obligations that follow from it, namely, its function vis-a-vis the past and its function vis-a-vis the present. Ob­ viously, to Greenblatt, the model should be that of a dialogue with the dead, of a conversation that strives for the impossible and manages to bridge the wide cultural and historical gap that sets its participants ages apart from one another. In what follows, I will try to make clear the specific nature of this conversation, by confronting Greenblatt’s reflec­ tions upon it with those of a number of others who famously made use of the concept before him. Given that his own treatment of the topic is limited to some brief remarks, this confrontation may enable us to understand better the wider implications of the conversational method and its critical potential. While clearly indebted to the writings of the author of Discipline and Punish and The History o f Sexuality, the approach of most New Historicists is not entirely Foucauldian.16 The concept of the historical conversation with the dead, for one, is a metaphor that presumably Foucault would have been unwilling to use, if only because of his conviction that the analysis of cultural mechanisms and effects of sig­ nification should proceed from the conceptual model of ‘war and battle’, not from that of ‘language and signs’. ‘The history which bears and determines us has the form of war rather than that of language,’ Foucault asserts. The driving forces behind that history are ‘relations of power, not relations of meaning’.17 Still, the image of a conversation with the dead is perfectly compatible with what I just called a history of the present, a history that starts from present concerns and confronts these concerns -

18

Speaking with the Dead

historicises them - with issues and problems that have come down from the past and given shape, in one way or another, to the present. In the few paragraphs that he devotes to the topic of the ‘conversation with the dead’ Greenblatt shows himself to be fully conscious of the central problems and paradoxes involved. As a New Historicist he is aware of his own historical position in the present and of the distance that separates him from the actual people living in the past to whom he might prefer to talk directly if only he could. The historical desire to converse with the subjects of his enquiry impels him to set up a meeting place that is neither here nor there and that will allow him to transfer himself to a location where the dead cannot only be met but where they can also be made to speak. Greenblatt knows full well that it is first and foremost his own voice that he hears in the conversation that he aims to strike up, but this does not drive away his desire to communicate. On the contrary, it increases his desire, if only because it increases the awareness of the historicity of his own voice. After all, in the course of and because of this conversation, the voice in which he speaks and the language that he uses turn out to be a conglomerate of fragments that have travelled down from the past into the present. That language turns out to be not only the medium of communication, but also its very location. ‘If I never believed that the dead could hear me,’ Greenblatt writes, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make them­ selves heard in the voices of the living. Many of the traces have little resonance, though every one, even the most trivial or tedious, contains some fragment of lost life; others seem uncannily full of the will to be heard.18

Greenblatt is evidently not the first to make use of this rich topos. The cultural resonance of the idea that the past continues to live on in its textual remains - and even more intensely in its literary remains - is manifest in different Renaissance sources, whether they be translations from classical texts by Ovid or Horace that deal with the ‘literary’ resurrection of the past, or the work of Renaissance authors like Petrarch, Spenser and Sidney, whose letters and poems contain plenty of references to the idea. The epigraph that features at the beginning of this chapter is but one example from Petrarch’s work in which the topic occurs. The passage is taken from one of his letters in verse, the so-called epystole metrice. Petrarch addressed these words to his friend and patron Gia­

Among Ancient Men

19

como Colonna, who had asked him to write something about his personal history. The letter was written in the course of 1338, during a period in his life when Petrarch spent much of his time in the Vaucluse.19 There, Petrarch wrote many of his important works, in the sort of seclusion that many writers dream of. As he puts it, the only living company that he has to bear is that of his dog and a servant. Apart from them, he is surrounded by the Muses and by a modest library of books and manuscripts. With the writers of these texts, and with the authors of an occasional letter that he receives, he carries on a continued conversation that brings him not only joy and happiness. His living correspondents take up more of his time than he is willing to give, and they complain over and over that he locks himself up and avoids their company. The conversations that he has with the dead are completely different: they don’t mind at all that Petrarch divides his time and attention. They are patient, always willing to lend him their ears at the time that suits him best. The most famous example of an early-modern text that presents the ‘dialogue with the dead’ as a model for the careful reading of the past is the letter that Machiavelli wrote to his good friend Francesco Vettori on 10 December 1513. At the time, Vettori was serving as an ambassador to the Medici family at the court of Pope Leo X, the successor of Julius II, who had died on 20 February that year. Before his rise to international prominence, the new pope was more commonly known as cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici. The second son of Lorenzo Il Magnifico, he was one of the three members of the famous family to rule the city of Florence after the infamous revolution of September 1512, which drastically changed the course of Machiavelli’s life. The revolution brought an end to the republican government of gonfaloniere Piero Soderini and enabled the Medici family to resume power, eighteen years after the end of the glorious reigns of Lorenzo Il Magnifico and his successor and first son Piero, Giovanni’s brother.20 In March 1513, Machiavelli was banished to his farmhouse in Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, in the vicinity of San Casciano, a small village some seven miles south of Florence. As first secretary and an occasional ambassador to Soderini’s republican government, he was one of the first victims of the new Medici reign. In November 1512 Machiavelli had already been removed from the office of secretary to the rulers of the city, the so-called Ten of Liberty and Peace. This was an office that he had held ever since he began his official career. But worse still, soon after the fall of the republic a conspiracy was discovered against Giuliano de’ Medici and his brother cardinal Giovanni. Machiavelli was one of the main prime suspects: his name featured on a list of twenty possible conspirators and he was sought like a common crook. In a desperate attempt to convince

20

Speaking with the Dead

the Medici rulers of his innocence, he turned himself in. He was arrested on 12 February 1513, severely tortured and sentenced to death, some time later that year. Luckily for him - and for us - the moment of execution never materialised. On account of cardinal Giovanni’s election as the new pope, all Florentine prisoners were granted mercy. On 11 March 1513, Machiavelli was finally able to tell his friend Vettori the good news he had been anticipating for some days: ‘I have been released from prison.’ The famous letter to Vettori is the immediate subject of our discussion here. Written some nine months after his return to freedom, it makes clear that for some time after his release Machiavelli did everything he possibly could in order to gain the favours of the new Florentine leaders. In the course of his brief imprisonment, he had already composed three sonnets that he dedicated and addressed to Giuliano de’ Medici. The poems make their author’s ambition clear: they are direct professions of his innocence in the conspiracy against the Medici and contain unmistakable calls for sympathy. Machiavelli’s career can be summarised with mathematical irony: fourteen years of active duty in the service of the Florentine republic were followed by fourteen years of banishment. In the great amount of spare time that his newfound freedom held in store, he continued his efforts to find favour with the leading members of the Medici family. During this period he wrote the political and historical works that made him famous. The first of his endeavours was a small treatise on the ideals of political leadership that is known today under the title of II Principe, although originally entitled De Principatibus. Initially, he wanted to address it to Giuliano de’ Medici, but its ultimate dedicatee is another member of the glorious family, Giuliano’s cousin Lorenzo, son to Piero. The new ruler seems to have stirred up in Machiavelli’s mind memories of his glorious namesake, Lorenzo Il Magnifico. To Machiavelli, the young Lorenzo would soon prove to be as vigorous and resolute as his legendary grandfather. Still, his efforts did not achieve the response that he desired and he remained cut off from the political milieux that he was able to describe and analyse more sharply than any of his con­ temporaries. In the famous letter of December 1513, Machiavelli also talks about the little treatise he has been writing. Referring to it as De Principatibus, he describes it as ‘uno opusculo’, a small work, ‘where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject, debating what a principality is, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost’.21 But of greater interest to us is the passage in which he gives Vettori an endearing account of the life he has been leading in Sant’ Andrea in Percussina ever since his release from prison. What occupies

Among Ancient Men

21

him on an average working day is no longer the political turmoil that drove him all those years, but another type of business altogether. He rises early in the morning in order to help the workmen in the forests that surround his house, where birds need to be caught - thrushes mainly (‘pigliavo el meno dua, el pm sei’, he boasts to his friend: ‘I caught at least two of them, and possibly six’) - and wood needs to be chopped. The latter task he prefers to leave to his servants (‘Io mi lievo la mattina con el sole et vommene in un mio boscho che io fo tagliare’: ‘I get up in the morning with the sun and go to a wood of mine that I am having cut down’). Early in the afternoon, he takes some time to rest, near a small spring, where he likes to retreat to one of his aviaries, always with a book in hand - ‘Dante, or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking.’ Late afternoons are spent playing at cards and other games of chance (‘cricca’, ‘triche-tach’), with the local butcher, the miller and the owner of the inn where he has his lunch.22 Yet, the best part of the day is dusk, when he enters his study (‘nel mio scrittoio’) and embarks upon a conversation with ‘gli antiqui uomini’, the ancient men that he meets in the old books that he has sat down to read. When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on that food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason of their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.23

It is quite tempting to relate Machiavelli’s description of the reading process in the last sentence from this passage to the mechanism of transference as it is later developed in psychoanalytical treatments of the concept. This is how Dominick LaCapra translates the sentence in his analysis of this passage from the letter to Vettori: ‘I am completely transferred into them.’24 What such a reading highlights is the proble­ matic ‘carrying over’ of one identity into another and the mutual alienation that results from it. While I will come back to the psycho­ analytical rendering of the idea of transference at a later stage, it is safer for the moment to link Machiavelli’s reference to the idea with a tradition that is closer to him: that of imitation through translation. This idea of translation, with which Machiavelli would have been familiar from his

22

Speaking with the Dead

readings of humanists like Petrarch, is probably the process of transfer­ ence to which he alludes here: the words (trans-ferre - trans-latus) are etymologically related, after all. The background of the humanist tradition of imitatio may also explain why in Machiavelli’s description of the process, the conversa­ tion with the dead looks far less problematic than it does to Greenblatt, or to us, for that matter. The ritual preparation that precedes the actual reading of the texts (the selection of the right type of clothes, befitting the courts and palaces that Machiavelli is about to visit in the books he intends to read) seems to determine the success of what is about to follow. The only thing Machiavelli needs to do is to be open to what ‘gli antiqui uomini’ have to say. The real basis of the successful dialogue (and the most straightforward explanation for the obvious ease with which it is carried on) is to be found in the suggestion that, despite the blatant differences between his time and the times he reads about, there is a distinct line that connects the glorious past with Machiavelli’s present. The conversation is successful because both parties belong to the same group of people, to a community: the ‘ancient men’ answer all his questions because they share a language, that of civilised humanity (‘per loro humanita mi rispondono’). For Machiavelli, then, the task of the historian is not to judge or to measure the past against criteria of his own making or of that of the present time. The historian should remain silent, in order to be open to what the dead have to say; in short, to listen closely. Insight, under­ standing, compassion and self-knowledge, the things that make the conversation worthwhile, follow from his silence and close attention. The conversation that Machiavelli talks about is not so much a con­ versation with the dead, but a conversation among the dead. They are the ones who speak, continuously and uninterruptedly, giving answers to questions the historian needn’t even bother to ask. After all, strictly speaking, the lessons that he draws from what the ‘ancient men’ have to say do not need any queries in advance, since the issues that the dead discuss among themselves are in and of themselves sufficiently important to the historian and to the present from which he operates, without him having to frame them in a structure of modern-day concerns. These issues are, quite simply, universal and their instructiveness is due to the straightforward fact that binds the historian and ‘gli antiqui uomini’ together: their joint belonging to the community of civilised humanity. Machiavelli’s belief in the common truths that bind together (re-ligare) this civilised humanity betrays the aristocratic ideals from which his reading practice derives its solid, unbreakable foundation. The histories that interest him are those of kings, popes and princes - with butchers,

Among Ancient Men

23

bakers and farmers he plays cards or quarrels over money. This brings us to the first important difference between Greenblatt’s reflections on the dialogue with the dead and Machiavelli’s. Greenblatt’s historical pre­ dilections are much less biased: to him, history is the playing ground of the unique individuals that kings, princes and popes often turn out to be, but his interest does not stop there. His concern, much like that of Foucault, or Walter Benjamin, is also with the smaller people and with those who turned out less successful and victorious in the course of history. But there is still another, more important difference. What makes Machiavelli’s nightly conversations with ‘gli antiqui uomini’ so special is that they teach him something essential about the present and about how it relates to the past from which the dead manage to address him almost directly. True, for Greenblatt the confrontation between past and present is also framed in terms of pedagogy and instruction. Yet, he conceives of the interrelationships between them in much less straightforwardly af­ firmative terms than Machiavelli does. For Greenblatt, the practice of historiography does not lead to the confirmation and recognition of the way things have always been and will always be, but to an alienation, of the past and of the present, both being captured in a moment of mutual illumination that sheds new light on each of them. In Greenblatt’s historical accounts, the past is revealed in ways that we have never seen before, and it is this revelation that opens up new possibilities of exploration and, indeed, of action in the present. For Machiavelli, the purpose of historiography may also be revelatory, but in his view the historian will never lay bare new and revolutionary insights that might show him that things needn’t be as they are. If, for Machiavelli, things need to change, they can only do so by becoming what they have to be, acording to the logic of necessity that underpins his aristocratic theory of history: ‘[A]ll men [. . .] are born and live and die in the same way, and therefore resemble each other,’ Machiavelli writes in the first book of the Discorsi, his personal dialogue with the dead Roman historian Titus Livius.25 And in book three of the Discorsi he asserts even more emphatically that: Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have been, and ever will be animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily must have the same results.26

Even the most superficial comparison between this assertion and the reflection with which Greenblatt concludes his brief analysis of the conversation with the dead lays bare the crucial differences between

24

Speaking with the Dead

his approach and that of Machiavelli. ‘I had dreamed of speaking with the dead,’ Greenbatt writes, and even now I do not abandon this dream. But the mistake was to imagine that I would hear a single voice, the voice of the other. If I wanted to hear one, I had to hear the many voices of the dead. And if I wanted to hear the voice of the other, I had to hear my own voice. The speech of the dead, like my own speech, is not private property.27

In Defence of an Apology The issue that Greenblatt addresses in the second half of the passage in which he introduces the conversation with the dead is important for the development of a thoroughly historical reading practice of literary texts. ‘It is paradoxical,’ he writes, to seek the living will of the dead in fictions, in places where there was no bodily being to begin with. But those who love literature tend to find more intensity in simulations - in the formal, self-conscious miming of life - than in any of the other textual traces left by the dead, for simulations are undertaken in full awareness of the absence of the life they contrive to represent, and hence they may skillfully anticipate and compensate for the vanishing of the actual life that has empowered them.28

This passage raises two connected questions. First, whether or not literary texts have a role to play in the study of a given historical period; and second, granted that this is indeed the case, how we can best conceive of this role in order to determine the specific functions literary texts can lay claim to as historical sources. Greenblatt’s answer is at the same time relativistic and decided. It is relativistic because he suggests that his reasons for privileging literary texts in the historical practice he has been developing are simply the result of disciplinary issues (‘I prefer to study literary texts because I am a professional historian of literature; that’s just what I do and what I get paid for’). But there is more to his answer, since in the remainder of this passage he does imply (quite firmly) that by definition literary texts are better suited than non-literary sources to evoke and make ‘present’ an absent past. This is due, Greenblatt suggests, to the fictional character of literary texts. As ‘simulations’ of a given real, fictional texts relate indirectly to the historical reality that non-literary texts aim to represent in a direct, unambiguous and more strictly referential way: they ‘swerve’ from the cultural circumstances that first made them possible, and in doing so they ‘negotiate’ the cultural matrix to which they belong. The ideas that Greenblatt invokes here are closely

Among Ancient Men

25

related to the argument that Raymond Williams developed in The Long Revolution and in his 1980 essay on Goldmann. Works of art, Williams asserted, function as ‘barometers’ of the development and rise of parti­ cular ‘structures of feeling’ that govern certain cultural moments. In Williams’ own words, literary texts involve a ‘simultaneous realization of and response to [the] underlying and formative structures’ that shape and determine a given culture. As such, they involve ‘the dramatization of a process, the making of a fiction, in which the constituting elements, of real social life and beliefs, [are] simultaneously actualized and in an important way differently experienced, the difference residing in the imaginative act, the imaginative method, the specific and genuinely unprecedented ima­ ginative organization’.29 This indirect relationship to its culture - put differently, the enabling lack of direct referential indices - allows literary texts to live on once the concrete historical circumstances have disap­ peared which made those works possible in the first place. It is but a small step from this idea to the Aristotelian dictum that works of art - literary texts in this particular case - absorb the real more fully and more authentically than non-literary texts. On more than one occasion, Greenblatt has described the magical powers of a fictional text both to evoke and survive the circumstances of its making as a form of historical ‘conjuring’.30 In the introduction to one of his more recent books, Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt argues in the same metaphorical vein, when he describes Shakespeare as a magician, who possesses the power ‘to call forth or make contact through language with those things voices, faces, bodies, and spirits - that are absent’.31 To some extent, the metaphor of the conjurer already indicates that Greenblatt is aware of the problematic assumption underlying it. Starting from the idea that the promise of a ‘reality effect’ that certain literary texts manage to procure is indeed nothing more than the textual mechanism that Roland Barthes famously analysed - a referential promise that does not really need to be held - he calls on historians of literature to honour their profession and become the worthy assistants of the authors they are meant to to serve. After all, the argument goes, critics too will need to don the magician’s cloak if they want to represent the past as if it were real. Its rhetorical force notwithstanding, the argument that the image of the conjurer is meant to sustain is problematic in at least one respect, begging as it does the question that has been occupying us since the beginning of this book: why is it so important for us to think that a play by Shakespeare or Marlowe will provide us with a sharper and more authentic understanding of the Elizabethan and the Jacobean ages than, say, Sir Walter Ralegh’s History o f the World. For Machiavelli, retreating to his study in the early sixteenth century to listen to voices that called him

26

Speaking with the Dead

from beyond the grave only to find out what, in fact, he already knew on account of his staunch belief in the principles of universal truth, the question would have been less problematic than it is to us. In Machiavelli’s time, the domains of literature and history were defined differently, the distinction between them being less fundamental than it is nowadays. To us, history provides knowledge about how things were, at a specific moment in time. Their specificity resides in their very historical nature, in the fact that, as Leopold von Ranke believed, things are fundamentally different in every historical period; literature, to us, is not primarily about knowledge, but about the aesthetic pleasure that products of the imagi­ nation are supposed to procure. Whatever cognitive effects this pleasure may have, we do tend to define our ‘poetic knowledge’ in contradistinc­ tion to the factual knowledge that we gain from non-fictional phenom­ ena. For Machiavelli, again, the distinction seems to be irrelevant: for him, texts by Dante or Petrarch conjure up the historical real in the same way as a text by the Roman historian Livy. In the course of the sixteenth century, though, the line that divides poetical texts from historical ones becomes an important issue once again with respect to the historical value of products of the imagination. As I already indicated in the introduction, the recovery of Aristotle’s Poetics played an important part in this debate. In order to get a better view of this devel­ opment, I will start from the opposition that the sixteenth-century theore­ tician of literature Julius Caesar Scaliger (one of Aristotle’s numerous commentators) construed in his poetical treatise Poetices libri septem between the sort of writers that he calls poetae and those he calls versificatores, producers of verse32 - that is, between the inspired author, who in his writings ‘unveils the deeper meaning of what happened, thus producing poetry of a universal value’ and the dutiful chronicler, who keeps to the superficial description of a superficial reality, ‘recounting events in the shape of verse’.33 One of the most famous instantiations of this typological distinction is the passage in the Defence o f Poesy in which Sir Philip Sidney, poet and courtier extraordinaire, asserts that the essence of poetry (its ‘cause’) is not to be found in the ornamental function of verse. After all, many outstanding and prominentpoets have never made use of the technical possibilities of the medium. Also, he adds, most of the writers producing verse in his day will never be counted among the true poets. What turns poetry into poetry, Sidney writes, is not the technical form in which it is cast, but the powers of imagination that enable the author producing it to uplift his audience both morally and aesthetically. In Sidney’s own words: it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet - no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who though he pleaded in armour, should be an

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Advocate and no souldier. But it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by.34

The Defence was published posthumously in 1595, nine years after Sidney’s sudden death in the Dutch town of Arnhem, on 17 October 1586, where he succumbed from a mortal leg injury that had been inflicted upon him three weeks earlier in battle against the Spanish troops in Zutphen. Sidney had been sent to the Netherlands as Queen Elizabeth I’s governor of the Dutch town of Flushing towards the end of 1585. His mission was one of the results of Elizabeth’s decision to play a more active role in the struggle of the Dutch against the Spanish. The organisation of a strong Protestant league had been a political dream of Sidney’s for years, but at first the Queen had been more than reluctant to make it happen. Elizabeth did not consider it wise to meddle in the political and religious turmoils that divided the Continent.35 After long and difficult negotia­ tions, her political advisers managed to convince her that the Spanish domination of Europe could eventually endanger the stability of England, both internally and abroad. The publication, in 1585, of a pamphlet entitled Declaration o f the causes mooving the queene to give aide to the lowe countries was an important signal of the Queen’s new Continental policy. Moreover, it allowed Sidney to resume his role on the stage of international politics.36 Some five years earlier, in the winter of 1579 to be precise, there had been a formal break between the Queen and her favourite courtier. The cause of the events is well known and it is highlighted in every published account of Sidney’s life. Sir Philip had written a letter to Elizabeth in which he had explicitly spoken against the Queen’s plans to marry the French duc d’Alenfon. The idea that a woman who, in his view, was the perfect embodiment of the ideals of Protestantism was to embark on a political and personal alliance with a ‘papist’ was repulsive to Sidney. It reminded him of the terrors that he had witnessed (and scarcely escaped) during his stay in France seven years earlier, on Saint Bartholomew’s night.37 Sidney’s letter was not really instrumental in the failure of Elizabeth’s marriage to the French duke to take place, but it did cause the Queen to demand its author’s withdrawal from official life at court. During the brief period of ‘banishment’ that followed the Alen^on affair, Sidney wrote the Defence o f Poesy and finished the first version of his pastoral epic, Arcadia. Together, Arcadia and his ‘Apology for poetry’ (the second, alternative title under which the famous treatise became known) secured him his position in the literary canon of the age. The immediate occasion of Sidney’s Defence was the publication, in

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1579, of The School o f Abuse, the infamous pamphlet in which Stephen Gosson aimed to expose what he considered to be repellent instances of contemporary theatrical and poetical practice.38 Gosson, who may have written his text at the command of the puritan leaders of the city of London, had dedicated his pamphlet to Sidney without having asked his permission. While there were many issues in the text with which Sidney fully agreed, he did find it useful to reply to Gosson. What he wanted to prevent at all costs was that Gosson’s diatribe would blind readers to what he considered to be the fundamental, morally uplifting nature of good poetry. There may indeed have been something distasteful about the practice of some contemporary poets, Sidney felt, but there was no need whatsoever to discount the entire enterprise. On the contrary, he believed it was immoral to do so.39 The distinction that Sidney makes, in the passage cited above, between ‘poets’ and ‘rhymers’, marks the beginning of another famous passage that most commentators believe to be central to the Defence. For a proper understanding of Greenblatt’s concept of the ‘dialogue with the dead’, I argue, it is as crucial as Machiavelli’s reflections upon his conversation with ‘the ancient men’. The passage contains the lengthy argument that Sidney develops in order to convince his audience that as a source of knowledge (both of the self and of the world that surrounds us) poetry can lay claim to being what the Greek called architectonike, the ‘mistressknowledge’, whose ultimate goals all other sciences (technai) were to share and sustain.40 For Sidney, the true goal of every science, both the material ones and the spiritual ones, is ‘virtuous action’, the strength to live a life of justice. The implication is that in order to live justly, one needs to know oneself to the full and act upon that knowledge. What should drive us, Sidney believes, is ‘the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well­ knowing only’.41 In order to realise this goal (to become aware of it and to make it real) ‘those skills, that most serve to bring forth that, have a most just title to be princes over all the rest’.42 The remainder of the argument is self-evident: poets, Sidney suggests, are better guides in this matter than the representatives of two other ‘skills’, who, in the past, often claimed to be superior to poets - moral philosophers and historians. In order to substantiate his conclusion, Sidney begins by drawing a sharp caricature of poetry’s ‘principal challengers’. The picture that he paints of the ‘moral philosopher’ - ‘whom, me thinketh, I see coming towards me with a sullen gravity, as though they could not abide vice by daylight’43 - is of a person doing the exact reverse of what he tells others to do. ‘[S]ophistically speaking against subtlety, and angry with any man in whom they see the foul fault of anger’, they dress badly, Sidney writes,

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simply to make clear to people that one’s outward appearance is of no importance whatsoever.44 (While he may have agreed in theory, the pictures that we have of Sidney make clear that he disagreed in practice.) Also, moral philosophers warn their readers not to fall prey to the trappings of an exaggerated feeling of honour, while they themselves do not refrain from putting their own names on the covers of the books they write. Sidney’s portrait of the historian is even less flattering. Historians, he says, run around with piles of paper that mice have been eating from for centuries and they owe their authority to ‘the notable foundation of hearsay’.45 ‘[C]urious for antiquities and inquisitive of novelties’, histor­ ians pride themselves on being the more active guides in the teaching of virtue when compared to philosophers; after all, the latter reason by means of abstract precept whereas historians teach by means of concrete examples. While in all modesty they claim to be ‘testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuncia vetustatis’,46 Sidney concludes that they are of little practical use in contemporary life. After all, they are much better acquainted with what happened thousands of years ago than with their own time. Sidney’s caricatures of the moral philosopher and the historian are very witty displays of his rhetorical inventiveness and exceptional polemical talents. Still, these passages should not cause us to forget that the ultimate goal of both the moral philosopher and the historian is by and large identical to that of the poet. As his denunciation of the practice of historians already makes clear, this is an important element in Sidney’s argument because it allows him to arrive at the final conclusion that the poet combines all the good that makes the other two into representatives of a noble skill that can only be a scientia ancilla. Philosophy is inferior to poetry because it deals exclusively with abstract issues and problems and therefore lacks any practical use in real life. Furthermore, history is inferior because it is too much involved with concrete issues, failing to draw general conclusions from them. In brief, ‘the one giveth the precept, and the other the example’.47 For readers familiar with the ninth chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics, the conclusion of Sidney’s argument comes as no surprise. In the work of the poets, he infers, the achievements of philosophy and history are joined in a model that offers the best of all possible worlds. ‘Now doth the peerless poet perform both.’48 The general life-lessons that philosophers give us in abstracto are painted by the poets with the precise accuracy that we expect of historians. Whereas the latter’s possibilities are limited by the demand of a representation of ‘how things really were’ (‘his example draweth no necessary consequence’),49 the poet can use his imagination

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to show us how things could and should be. Much like Aristotle in the ninth chapter of his Poetics, Sidney substantiates his point with examples that clarify once and for all the differentia specifica that distinguishes poetry from history. If we want an exact idea of the outwardly visible real, he argues, we should probably read historical sources. ‘For indeed,’ Sidney writes, ‘if the question were whether it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is to be chosen, no more than whether you had rather have Vespasian’s picture right as he was, or, at the painter’s pleasure, nothing resembling.’50 If we want to draw lessons from the past and take these lessons to heart, then we are much better off with the work of the poets. In that case, Virgil’s account of the adventures of Aeneas is superior (‘more doctrinable’)51 to an eye-witness report of the ‘real’ Aeneas by the historian of the Trojan war, Dares Phrygius.

Visual Memory Sidney’s plea for the superior value of literature is not comparable to Greenblatt’s in all respects, even though there is a clear genealogical relationship between their apologies. Let’s have a look at the difference first. In Sidney’s text, poetry owes its prominent position to the fact that it enables humankind to rise to a status of moral superiority and to live a life of ‘virtuous action’. Following the advice that Horace gave to a young poet in his Ars Poetica, Sidney seems to believe that the art of poetry weds what is pleasant to what is useful, and this is exactly what accounts for its moral efficiency. It is hardly surprising, of course, to see that Sidney subscribes to the basis of most classicist theories of art: what is pleasant to us pleases us because it is useful. Put differently, what is beautiful is also good (kalokagathon) and it is beautiful because it is good: ‘Virtue is nothing but inward beauty; beauty nothing but outward virtue,’ as Sir Francis Bacon once put it.52 Greenblatt’s high valuation of literary texts is based on a somewhat different conceptual framework, one that is not entirely compatible with a classicist aesthetics, if only because it hinges on the ideas of aesthetic estrangement and moral disinterestedness rather than on its classicist counterparts: aesthetic recognition and moral identification. Unlike Sidney, Greenblatt seems to be hardly interested in a definition of literature that takes as its aim the exposition of its essential qualities. What matters to him are the distinct mechanisms by means of which a given society decides what belongs to the domain of artistic practices and what does not. However, there is an important point upon which Greenblatt and Sidney’s ideas converge. For both, literature’s

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attractiveness has to do with its power to invoke, fully and vividly, the reality it represents or from which it stems. Much like Sidney, Greenblatt founds his argument on the rhetorical phenomenon that in the Rhetoric Aristotle termed energeia, the power of language to render (by definition lifeless) images of people and things as if they were alive. By means of this power, Aristotle suggests, words conjure up and make ‘present’ before our eyes the things that they represent.53 In Greenblatt’s use of the term, the social character of the phenomenon is highlighted: he talks of a ‘social energy’, which is responsible for the fact that certain cultural objects (not only the ones that we label artistic) provoke similar thoughts, emotions and experiences in a given group of people.54 The energy of these objects founds communities; it draws people around them. At the same time, Greenblatt invokes the concept to explain the continued aesthetic and historical effects of works of art long after the culture from which they originated has disappeared. It is, he believes, the social energy inherent in these works that is responsible for the fact that we can reconstruct the living circumstances in which these works originally functioned - ‘the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered’.55 As I pointed out before, the argument is related to an idea developed by Raymond Williams. Greenblatt elaborates upon Williams’ point by linking it to the Aristotelian notion of energeia. Both in its synchronic and in its diachronic function, the concept of ‘social energy’ is related, he argues, to the working of language, the social medium par excellence, which in the tradition of Renaissance poetics was given the literal power to cause in the reader, or in the audience, what one con­ temporary critic described as a ‘stirre to the mynde’. The reference is to George Puttenham’s Arte o f English Poesie, but Greenblatt admits that he could equally well have taken an example from Sidney’s Defence.56 After all, as Forrest Robinson has stressed in his excellent analysis of Sidney’s text, it is the Aristotelian notion of linguistic energeia that underpins Sidney’s belief that poetry derives its moral force from the fact that the good poet has both the talent and the technical abilities to produce what he calls ‘speaking pictures’. Due to their concreteness and their idiosyncratic power to address us, speaking pictures are more easily remembered and therefore better understood: after all, the specific language of the poet makes the message both living and direct. These poetic pictures speak to us immediately (in the sense that we get an immediate grasp of what they are trying to say) and they address us directly (not only are we the ones they address, their entire being is subsumed by the fact that they are there to talk to us).57 ‘Poesy,’ Sidney writes, ‘is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis - that is to say, a representation, counterfeiting, or figuring forth - to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture - with this

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end, to teach and delight.’58 In his further elaboration of the nature and the effects of these ‘speaking pictures’, Sidney gives no direct reference to Aristotle’s theory of energeia, but his argument runs along lines that are clearly contained by the notion. After all, the poetic language of ‘speaking pictures’ renders itself invisible so that it can confront the reader of the picture with the ‘direct’ (and directly visible) presence of what it says rather than with the rhetorical means used in order to do so. Of course, this direct presence remains an illusion even in the language of poets. Greenblatt talks about the same sort of illusion when he mentions the conjuring powers of literary texts: it is a rhetorical construction that is meant to provoke an effet de reel and to give the impression that there is no artifice involved. Sidney tries to make all of this clear in a further distinction between the language of the poet and that of the philosopher. The latter has the tendency, he complains, to use language whose sheer verbosity draws attention to itself rather than to the message that it is meant to convey. Such language does not succeed in vividly representing what it talks about; on the contrary, it smothers its object of representation under its own hefty weight. If only for that, the language of philosophers fails to attain the goal that poetic images (speaking pictures) arrive at in the most natural of ways. The language of the poet, Sidney writes, is an ideal language, thanks to the technical versatility of the author, which allows things to speak to us directly, without the meddling interference of the medium. This language offers us a perfect picture, for [the poet] yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description: which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth. For as in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shapes, colour, bigness, and particular marks; or of a gorgeous palace, the architecture, with declaring the full beauties might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceit with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge; but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or the house well in model, should straightways grow, without need of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them: so no doubt the philosopher with his learned definitions - be it of virtue, vices, matters of public policy or private government - replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy.59

At the beginning of this passage, Sidney makes an important suggestion which should not be overlooked: the speaking pictures that the poet

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fabricates do not address themselves primarily to the regular senses but to what the seventeenth-century scientist and mystic Robert Fludd called the oculus imaginationis, ‘the sight of the soul’ as Sidney labels it. Even though the idea of an ‘eye of the imagination’ or an ‘inward eye’ is not wholly unrelated to the ‘visual epistemology’ of Aristotle,60 it is more appropriate to link it with the writings of his teacher, Plato. The notion crops up in a crucial passage in the Phaedo, in which Socrates tries to explain to his companions why death does not frighten him. His friends, knowing full well they may be talking to him for the very last time - the dialogue is set on the day when Socrates will be asked to drink the famous cup of poison - are dumbfounded. All the same, Socrates manages to convince them of the powerful truth of his words: death is a moment of salvation, he argues, in which the soul can free itself from the body’s prison and finally embark on its journey towards absolute wisdom. ‘[I]f we are ever to know anything absolutely,’ Socrates suggests, ‘we must be free from the body and must behold the actual realities with the eye of the soul alone.’61 Socrates’ death wish needs of course to be aligned with the Platonic doctrine of the two worlds. Plato distinguishes between a reality that can be experienced with the human senses and the realm of Ideas, which we can only reach as purely rational beings. Since during our earthly existence we are bound to the body and its senses, the knowledge of the world of Ideas is only accessible to us after death or before we are born. That is, of course, why we value the conversation with the dead so highly: since they are dead, they possess true knowledge, the knowledge that we, as living creatures, lack. ‘[I]f pure knowledge is impossible while the body is with us,’ Socrates goes on to claim, ‘one of two thing [sic] must follow, either it cannot be acquired at all or only when we are dead.’62 To Socrates, therefore, all earthly knowledge is essentially a form of memory (anamnesis) in which we are reminded of the fixed, immutable Ideas that we perceive during our lives in the concrete, material shapes that they have in the physical real. The only earthly knowledge that can be of importance to us is the recognition (or recollection, if we adopt Socrates’ logic) in, through and beyond the particular shape of a material phenomenon that we perceive the universal Idea of which this shape is a concrete manifestation. As Ernst Gombrich, among others, has empha­ sised, Plato’s doctrine of the two worlds goes hand in hand with a doctrine of two types of knowledge.63 Much as our physical, earthly reality amounts to very little when compared to the metaphysical realm of Ideas, so the knowledge that limits itself to the material forms cannot compete with the absolute knowledge of the essence of Ideas. The first type of knowledge is coloured and filtered by the senses and it is given

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shape in the discursive language that human beings have become used to adopting in the course of history. Knowledge of metaphysical truths, on the other hand, is purely spiritual: it is the knowledge produced by pure vision, rational intuitus. Refusing to be fully incorporated in linguistic or other representational moulds, this type of knowledge is a matter of presence rather than representation. According to Sidney, there can be no doubt that the language of poetry is the only possible medium to make this presence felt and instill the superior type of knowledge that it entails. This conviction places him squarely in a poetical tradition that will again become prominent in the age of Romanticism and that has its roots in Antiquity, in Plato’s discussion of rhapsodic literature in the Io for instance. In the same metaphorical vein, Romantic representatives of this tradition suggest that poetry has this force because it is a form of language that can stop being language and become music. Put differently: poetic language is non­ discursive in the sense that it organically coincides with the referents from which discursive language always remains distanced. The language of poetry is the things that it talks about, whereas discursive language is only about these things. In ‘Brot und Wein’, the famous poem by Holderlin, for instance, the language of the poet becomes the flowers that it evokes.64 Furthermore, with an image that lays bare the attraction of this idea for a Christian mind like Sidney’s, the poetic word reveals the truths that the discursive word cannot but keep hidden. Indeed, Sidney makes use of exactly this sort of logic. He labels the artistic practice that for poets like Coleridge, Holderlin and Keats will be at the heart of the Romantic enterprise ‘mimetic’. In view of his apology of artistic mimesis it may seem surprising at first that he appeals both to Plato and Aristotle in defence of his argument. After all, Plato did famously revile the mimetic aspirations of poets in the tenth book of The Republic (595a and following) as images of images of ideas. These images only offer a most subjective rendering of visible reality, where subjective should be understood in the pejorative sense of the word: coloured by a personal and sensuous vision, a vision that is blinded by the outward appearance of things perceived. As Plato himself puts it: ‘But, I take it, if [man] had genuine knowledge of the things he imitates he would far rather devote himself to real things than to the imitation of them, and would endeavour to leave after him many noble deeds and works as memorials of himself, and would be more eager to be the theme of praise than the praiser.’65 This final suggestion offers an interesting link with the argument that Sidney develops in his exposition of poetry’s ‘speaking pictures’: in these pictures, it is not the excess of the descriptive word that is made

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prominent, but that which is said: the message, not the medium, and this idea is easily reconcilable with Plato’s point. Also related to this idea is the passage in the Phaedrus where Socrates invokes the myth of the Egyptian god Theuth, warning us of the dangerous consequences that the invention of writing had on the development of human knowledge. What has been written down, the story of Theuth suggests, will incite people to exercise their faculty of memory less often. Instead, they will rely more and more upon the external truth of the written word, and not upon the inner truth, which is the real truth.66 Still, these are not the passages to which Sidney refers when he cites Plato in the Defence as the most reverend and poetic of all philosophers.67 What he retains from The Republic - and this reminds us of the fault that he found with Gosson - is the fact that Plato’s critique of poetry was directed against its actual abuse in Athens at the time of his writing, not against its essence.68 He also refers to the passge in the Io where Plato praises poetry as a form of divine inspiration. It would be wrong to conclude, on the basis of these few references, that Sidney misunderstood or offers a selective and biased reading of the dialogues; it is more interesting to ask ourselves what happened with Plato in the centuries that divided Sidney from him. The question is of course a very large one, much too large for the limited bounds of a study like this. Moreover, the reception of Plato’s work is a very complex matter: his relationship to his neo-Platonic followers alone has been the subject of a small library of books and articles.69 What is important to us is the fact that the (relatively easy) incorporation of Plato’s philosophy into the Christian tradition has been of major importance to the central development that the notion of mimesis underwent in Renaissance poetics. The aesthetics of Ficino’s Platonic Theology is probably the best possible witness of the results of this development.70 As Ficino suggested, art, on account of its connection to the metaphysical real, was able to complement and correct imperfect (i.e. mutable) reality.71 In the poetical terms that were used at the height of humanism, this development was from an artform that takes imitatio as its ultimate goal to one that strives for aemulatio: art offers not simply a representation of the visible real, but an improved version of it. The mimetic faculty applauded by Aristotle (and criticised by Plato) enables artists to imitate the creative and productive powers of divine nature, rather than simply imitating the forms that nature assumes. In the thirteenth book of his Platonic Theology, Ficino states it thus: [W]hat is marvelous is that human arts make on their own whatever nature itself makes: it is as if we were not her slaves but her rivals. Zeuxis so painted grapes that the birds flew up to them. Apelles so painted a mare and a dog that

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horses passing by whinnied and other dogs barked. Praxiteles sculpted a marble statue of Venus in a temple of the Indians that was so alluring that it could scarcely be kept safe and unspotted from the lustful gazes of the passersby [. . .] In sum, man imitates all the works of divine nature, and perfects all the works of lower nature, correcting and emending them.72

The Living and Breathing Word Ficino’s suggestion that the arts could offer a correction and an improve­ ment of real-life phenomena was interesting to Sidney for still another reason. As R. W. Maslen puts it in his excellent introduction to The Defence, poetry is to Sidney ‘the art of the fallen world’.73 Firmly convinced that, as Maslen states, ‘humanity has suffered at some point in its past an appalling calamity which left it flawed, damaged, unhinged capable, at best, of recalling mentally the state of perfection from which it has been precipitated, but unable to reproduce more than an occasional dim shadow of that perfection in its daily activities’,74 - Sidney felt that it was the task of the poet to lead humankind back to the state of perfection (linguistic and other) from which it had lapsed. In order to truly excel in the powers of creation the artists need the sort of gift that only God could give them. In this respect, Plato seems to have provided Sidney with a further source of inspiration. Not only in the Io, the dialogue that, as we saw, Sidney cited with much approval, but also in the Phaedrus there is a passage that would later give rise to all sorts of reflections upon the special insights of poets, to the extent that, as Joel Spingarn puts it, ‘[Plato’s] praise of the philosopher was transferred to the poet’.75 In the remainder of the famous passage in which Socrates describes the dangers inherent to the written word, he seems to be willing to make an exception for the word that is sent by a higher source of inspiration, ‘the living and breathing word of him who knows, of which the written word may justly be called the image’.76 Even though Socrates is mainly thinking here of the philosophic word, it is clear that in the Phaedrus his original reservations against the poet have been modified. He no longer conceives of the poet and the philosopher in terms of a strict opposition, as he did in earlier dialogues like The Republic.77 As a result, early-modern authors like Ficino could quite easily ignore Plato’s earlier critique of the poet and appropriate other passages from his later dialogues in defence of their own reflections on the furor of the imagina­ tion that enabled the poetae vates to reach unkown heights of inspira-

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Socrates’ story about the myth of writing seems to have taken us on quite a detour in our analysis of the implications and the productivity of the necromantic image that underlies the metaphor of the ‘dialogue with the dead’. Still, this famous passage in the Phaedrus has put us on the track of what may well turn out to be the central assumption on which the metaphor rests. In his plea for a sort of writing that spurs the human ability to commemorate, Socrates makes a distinction between two forms of memory, the one positive, the other much less so: he terms these mneme and hypomnesis respectively. While the former succeeds in bringing back or making present what it is that we remember, the latter has the unfortunate effect of, as it were, burying the past under layers of dust. The knowledge that we derive from the faculty of hypomnesis is barren and mute. Socrates’ distinction calls to mind Greenblatt’s suggestion that the conversation with the dead appeals to the positive faculty of memory that Plato seems to limit to the spoken word and that is valued by Machiavelli (‘mi rispondono’: they talk back to me) and Sidney (‘speaking pictures’) in similar ways. The mnemonic faculty, Plato suggests, is by definition activated by works of art that address their audiences directly - that speak to them rendering invisible the artifice in which they are clad. The circular logic of the classicist axiom that poems can be seen as paintings that speak begs for a corollary question: do paintings, then, need to become like poems and address us in the way that these ‘speaking pictures’ do? Sidney’s emphasis upon the artistic production of ‘speaking pictures’ renders the question more concrete: does the painting need to speak to us in order to be valuable in activating our mnemonic faculty, or, is it possible that, to use the famous Plutarchan motto, it has poetic qualities despite its ‘muteness’ ? Also, if a poem speaks, what then does it tell us? In order to try to answer these questions I will call in the help of a third ‘ancient man’: the Dutch poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens, who, like Machiavelli and Sidney, was a man of both politics and letters.

Shades Who Have no Tongue While there is much that separates the authors whom I have discussed so far, there is one thing upon which they agree: it is of the utmost importance that the dead continue to speak, even after they have lost the physical power to do so by themselves. On more than one occasion, Huygens has reflected upon the great value of the conversation with the ‘schimmen zonder tong’ (‘shades who have no tongue’).79 He did so, for instance, in Cluys-werck (‘Work from the hermitage’), the poem that

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deals with his old age. The poem is addressed to a friend, to whom he explains how he spends his days. Early in the morning, he prays and meditates, and then he receives people who have come to ask his advice or he listens to his servants. Huygens hardly ever seems to speak - ‘swijgen’, he writes, ‘is mij een lust en Balsam voor mijn’ Ooren’80 (‘I take pleasure in being silent; it is a balm to my ears’) - except when, during the afternoon, he spends some time with his friends. While he is truly happy with them, the poem does suggest quite explicitly that his living compa­ nions can in no way offer him what his dead friends hold in store, the authors of the hundreds and thousands of books that he keeps in his library, in the cemetery of his study as he puts it. They are the ones who stay with him during the evening, sometimes keeping him from sleep way past midnight: ‘t Zijn doode Menschen, dien ick ‘t wijten magh; niet eenen, Maer thienen, vijftighen, ja vele honderden, En, dat een botten Boer wel meest verwonderden, ‘t Zijn menschen sonder ziel en lijf, die met mij spreken, Als mij het hooren lust, ‘tzijn Wijsen die mij preken, ‘t Zijn Sotten die mij vreugd aendoen en vrolickheit, ‘t Zijn oude hoofden die mij ‘taller naest bescheid Van d’oudste eewen af ordentelijck verthoonen, ‘t Zijn Konstenaers die ‘k niet en hoeve te verschoonen. Ick vraeghe met gebied, sy doen mij rekenschap Van ‘tinnerlijcke mergh van all’ haer wetenschap. Die Lijcken houd ick staen gesloten in een Kerckhof. [. . .] Ontrent die dooden dan (ghij weet, ick meen mijn’ Boecken) Ben ick gedurigh of te vinden, of te soecken, En voelder mij nu eerst soo yverigh aen vast. Als hadd icker mijn lang, lang leven na gevast.81 Those who are to blame [for keeping him awake] are dead people; not one, but ten, fifty, hundreds and hundreds of them. Rude peasants will no doubt be greatly amazed by this: the people who talk to me have neither soul nor body. When I feel like listening, those who preach to me are wise; those who make me happy and cause me to laugh are fools; those who spell out to me all that went on in centuries long gone are old heads. They are artists whom I don’t need to excuse. I command them to speak to me and they explain what is essential to their knowledge. These corpses I keep entombed in a cemetery. [. . .] I can be found and sought incessantly among these dead (I am talking about my books, as you will know). And only now I cling to them with so much fervour as though I had been fasting for them throughout my long, long life.

The awareness that the dead can only speak in the voice of the living does not moderate the compulsion of the necromantic desire. In the third of the

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twenty-three ‘meditations’ that make up the bulk of his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623-4), John Donne voices this desire in a way that may seem somewhat morbid to us, but that is nevertheless completely in compliance with the outlook of the early-modern believer. Donne made the first notes for his Devotions during a heavy bout of fever that threatened his life for about a week towards the end of November 1623. While he was recovering, Donne turned his notes into a text that was meant to be a direct report of the different phases of his illness.82 The passage that matters to us is part of the initial phase of the fever, a time when he not only physically felt the presence of death but even seemed to welcome it. Starting from the metaphorical reflection that the sickbed is somewhat like a human grave, the poet concludes that in some respects the grave is even better than the bed. After all, lying in bed man amounts to nothing; he is only a shadow of his true self, not only scaring his friends but no longer able to serve them as an example. In the grave, on the other hand, man can address his friends with the confidence and the assurance that guarantee the continuation between life and death. ‘In the grave I may speak thorough the stones,’ Donne writes, in the voice of my friends, and in the accents of those wordes, which their love may afford my memory; Here I am mine owne Ghost, and rather affright my beholders, than instruct them; they conceive the worst of me now, and yet feare worse; they give me for dead now, and yet wonder how I doe, when they wake at midnight, and aske how I doe, to morrow. Miserable, and, (though common to all) inhuman posture, where I must practise my lying in the grave, by lying still, and not practise my Resurrection, by rising any more.83

Huygens knew the work of Donne quite well. In his autobiography he praises him as an example of the ‘most perfect eloquence’ he ever had the pleasure of witnessing.84 It is not certain that he was familiar with Donne’s Devotions,85 but it is likely that he would have sensed in these writings the essential qualities of Donne’s sermons: naturalness, lack of artificiality, liveliness - the very qualities that relate the written word to the spoken. As a preacher, Huygens felt that Donne was only equalled by the great Johannes Uyttenbogaert, the Remonstrant theologian who preached at the court of Prince Maurits and and whose rhetorical gifts were founded upon the same qualities as Donne’s. Standing on the pulpit, Huygens writes, these two great men managed to use language in such a way that their words penetrated into my soul, which they drew towards them by means of a mysterious power of attraction. They won people over in a very natural way, which is the main thing; they disdained the lures of artifice, which was of great benefit for their style. The further they refrained from artificiality, the stronger the effect of their powers of persuasion.86

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Readers familiar with Huygens’ work will not be surprised by his praise of the natural powers of Donne’s performance. The plea against artifici­ ality and in favour of naturalness - voiced, in this passage, in terms that echo Aristotle’s analysis of linguistic energy - is the central theme in much of Huygens’ oeuvre. This is true of the early satirical verses of Voorhout (1621) and Costelick Mai (1622), in which he writes about the fashion­ able foppery of his superficial contemporaries,87 but also of his more dogmatic poems on the Lord’s Supper, the Avondmael poems, in which the ‘papish’ doctrine of transubstantiation is exposed as a theatrical farce.88 Even the treatise, written during the winter of 1639/40, in which he takes a much more moderate stand in the discussion on the use of organs in the Protestant service can be read along these lines.89 His repeated reflections on the work of contemporary painters rest on a similar logic, in which outward appearance and inner truth are opposed in a relationship that is as polarised as that which distinguishes a mere copy from an original, art from nature, pretence from essence.90 In what follows, I will limit myself to a brief analysis of some of Huygens’ writings on painting, because they connect the different threads of this chapter. It is not that surprising that Huygens’ reflections on the art of portraiture offer a link between the poetical or aesthetic production of ‘speaking pictures’ and the historical practice of a conversation with the dead. Assuming that the dead do indeed address us, it seems obvious that they do so by means of the most direct traces that we have of them: in Donne’s case their graves, in that of Huygens’ their portraits. Huygens devotes many pages in his first Latin autobiography (1631) to the painters that were highly respected among his fellow countrymen. The more famous names that crop up are those of De Gheyn, Goltzius, Rubens, Lievens and Rembrandt, but he also writes quite elaborately about the curious Torrentius, whom Huygens describes as an ‘intelligent dissembler’91 and about lesser-known portraitists as Jan Anthonisz. van Ravesteijn and Michiel van Mierevelt. The latter two he considers to be among those who many would feel that they only ‘labour to study the human features and who, for that reason probably, deserve less of our admiration because they devote all their attention and powers to an outward part of our body’.92 Huygens’ words need to be understood in the context of the generic hierarchy that framed discussions of painting in the early seventeenth century: first among all the genres was history painting, the genre that coupled the pleasant and the useful in the most natural of ways. Of primary importance was the given that the ‘history’ that was painted obeyed the (double) classicist demand that art should represent an action in time and that this action should also reveal a virtue or a moral message. History paintings, it was believed, were better suited

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to do so than portraits because the latter, much like the still lifes that would soon begin to swamp the art-market, brought time to a stop and therefore could not by definition depict a living action. Huygens’ defence of the art of portraiture is intrinsically linked to this type of argument.93 The idea that portraitists only occupied themselves with the outward appearance of human beings he believes to be a cardinal mistake. What they do, or should aspire to do, is to give an image of the inner essential being of the subject of the portrait by means of the outward appearance. The logic that he invokes in order to substantiate his argument comes close to later developments in physiognomy, which in themselves origi­ nated in moral theories with which Huygens is sure to have been familiar. But he also relies on everyday experience. ‘After all,’ he writes, ‘the expression on our face offers a highly reliable indication of the status of our soul - in case someone would want to argue against this, I have learned this not so much by the lessons given to me by others, but through personal experience and great attention to the matter.’94 The personal experience that Huygens talks about may well be a reference to a portrait that the young painter Jan Lievens (who at the time was only twenty years old) painted of Huygens in 1627.95 The painting, described by Huygens as one his ‘dearest belongings’,96 is mentioned by Huygens in his autobiography in order to corroborate his earlier assertion that Lievens, more than the great Rembrandt himself, was a master in ‘rendering the features of the human’, ‘that part of the body that, so to speak, is the miraculous synthesis of our entire being, I mean, of the body and the spirit’.97 Huygens’ ruminations on the painting are not only telling with respect to the sitter’s vanity, they also indicate that he feels the painter has indeed managed to touch and represent the sitter’s soul. In spite of what others may have to say about the painting, he says, Lievens has painted him as he was at that time. ‘Still, some deem it necessary to point out,’ Huygens writes that my pensive stare overshadows the natural cheer of my mind. To them, I’d like to say that I have myself to blame for this, because at the time I was seriously involved in very grave family matters, and, as things are wont to go, the concern that I tried to hide inside was not completely left without its trace in the expression on my face.98

The Inward Eye Nevertheless, in the remainder of his laudatory exposition of Lievens’ exceptional talents, Huygens does present himself as a stern Maecenas.

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He does not fail to point out the young artist’s shortcomings as well. Interestingly, Huygens presents these shortcomings as the outcome of the painter’s natural talents. Lievens, he believes, is the sort of painter who, as his abilities blossom and he improves, will no doubt be swept along by the ‘grand and untamable drift of his talents’. His artistic imagination, Huygens writes, will only be satisfied once it has managed ‘to capture nature in its entirety’. " This is exactly why he warns Lievens to continue painting portraits: a genre that not only moderates the imagination, but which apparently generates caution and modesty in itself. Huygens’ apology for the artistic genius of Van Mierevelt can be understood along similar lines. He places the court painter of the Duke of Orange above celebrities like Holbein and Pourbus, because he manages to capture the beauty and simplicity of reality better than they do and he does so without feeling the urge to foreground his own creative powers.100 It is especially that, Huygens believes, which distinguishes him from less talented contemporaries: M ost artists who, as things are wont to go, excessively strain their own limited talents, thereby overtaxing the truth, fall prey to artificiality and put a mask on simple nature which they themselves believe to imitate; they add to it, giving the eyes fierce vivacity, the nose a tight protuberance, to the mouth an artificial finesse, the neck and the chest some or other misapplied twist. Consequently, the person who views it has to look himself in the face and conclude that the tale is about him, but the name has been changed. After all, likeness always falls short o f reality, as M . Seneca quite rightly claimed with respect to every form of imitation.101

The phrase from Seneca that Huygens quotes above is descriptive in origin: it deals with the essence of a representation (‘always’, ‘every imitation’), not with this or another specific instance of it. In Huygens’ appropriation, however, the idea functions as part of a prescription, since it is used in an argument that distinguishes good painters from lesser ones. In the famous passage in his poem Ooghen-troost (‘Consolation for the eyes’) in which he writes about the blindness of painters, he invokes the same argument, but this time he takes it not from Seneca but from Seneca’s presumed source, the famous passage from Book Ten of The Republic in which Plato discounts the mimetic arts on the grounds discussed above.102 In his poem, Huygens tries to comfort the addressee for the loss of her sight, by saying that painters are truly mistaken if they believe they can compare their own creations to those of God. Their ‘counterfeitings’ - the seventeenth-century Dutch word for painting is ‘konterfeitsel’ - amount to nothing when compared to those of the ‘First Creator’:

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De Schilders heet ick blind, en, soo m’er wel op lett, ‘t Zijn Scheppers meestendeel: sij sien maer door ‘t palett, En bouwen een’ Natuer, die vriendlick is van wesen, En soet en aengenaem: maer meent ghy daer te lesen Hoe Groote-Moer Natuer haer eigen wesen staet? ‘t Is verre van den wegh. Een’ steegh is oock een’ straet, Een’ hutt is oock een huys, en struycken zijn oock boomen, Maer steegh en hutt en struyck zijn schaduwen en droomen By straet en huys en boom: daer hoort veel goedheids toe Om Gods en Menschen werck te keuren met gemoe Voor even en gelijck. Wat wilm’ ons meenen leeren? Twee droppen zijn niet eens, twee eyeren, twee peeren, Twee aengesichten min. de trotste mogentheid Van d’eerste Schepper blijckt in ‘t eewigh onderscheit Van all dat was en is en werden sal naer desen; [•••] Sie hoe verr’ t soete volck in dese blindheit dwaelen: Gaet met haer wandelen door boom en bergh en daelen, Dat’s, seggens’, een gesicht dat Schilderachtigh staet. ‘k Kan ‘t niet onschuldigen, ‘t is derteltjes gepraett: My dunckt sy seggen, God maeckt kunstige Copijen Van ons oorspronckelick, en magh sich wel verblijen In ‘t meesterlick patroon, al waer ‘t van onse hand, ‘t En kon niet schooner zijn, in Zee en Locht en Land.103 Painters, I call them blind. Upon close inspection, they seem to be creators for the most part. They look by means of their pallettes and build a nature that is friendly and sweet and pleasant. But do you think that in their work you can read how things really are in grandmother Nature? Far from it. An alley can be called a street, a hut a house and a plant a tree. But alleys, huts and plants are shadows and dreams compared to streets, houses and trees. It takes a great amount of kindness and magnanimity to equate the works of man and God. What do they mean to teach us? Two drops are not one, nor two eggs, two pears or two faces. The proud power of the First Creator shows itself in the eternal distinction of what was, is and will be hereafter. [. . .] See how the sweet people err in this blindness. Go with them through forests, over mountains and valleys. There, they say, now that’s a quite picturesque view! I cannot but consider this sort of talk frivolous. What they say, I think, is that God makes artful copies of our original work, and that he can pride himself on the masterful lines he has drawn, as if he has the sort of steady hand that we have. Nothing could be better at sea, in the air and on earth.

The Platonic background of Huygens’ logic is obvious: painters only occupy themselves with the outward appearance of reality, with ‘shadows and dreams’, not with the inner truth of nature. According to Huygens, their bias (which seems to prefigure Oscar Wilde’s quip that it is reality that imitates art rather than the other way round) becomes clear if one looks at the excessive production of landscape paintings in those days and

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at the bulk of portraits produced by these so-called artists. That is why he gives the following advice to the first reader of his text: Gaet met die Scheppers t’huijs, en leent se ‘t strackste wesen, ‘t Langhmoedighste geduld, om door en door te lesen Hoe God uw aensicht schiep. Als ‘t langh gemartelt is, Daer staet ghij in ‘t paneel: maer, in een woord, ‘t is mis. Sy Scheppen u een Yet, een’ Bloed-verwant, een’ Broeder: Maer ghy en staet ’er niet. de Dochter is maer Moeder, De Vader is maer Soon.104 Go home with these creators and give them your most serious look, your most indulgent patience to allow them to read, through and through, how God created your face. After quite some time, you will be there on the panel, but, to put things bluntly, it is wrong. They create something for you: a relative, a brother, but it is not you. The daughter is but a mother; the father but a son.

It is quite tempting to read the critique of the art of portraiture that Huygens voices in these lines in the absolute terms in which it is framed. It is important, nevertheless, to take into account the circumstances of the production of the text in which this critique occurs. Huygens dedicated his Ooghen-troost to his dear friend, Lucretia van Trello, who in old age had become blind in one eye. The poem’s genre is that of the consolatio: it is a poem that aims to bring comfort to its addressee and to alleviate the pain she has suffered on account of the partial loss of her sight.105 The arguments Huygens develops need to be analysed first and foremost within the poem’s rhetorical framework: they are meant primarily to comfort this particular reader, and so do not contain absolute judgements about the issues they address. In a series of thirty-four satirical vignettes, in which the poet deals with one specific group of people at a time painters and poets, but also lawyers, lovers, layabouts and misers Huygens tries to convince Lucretia that the larger part of humankind is actually blinder than she is. What singles her out is crystal-clear to Huygens: her ‘illness’ and the bad fortune that she thinks it has caused her enable her to move away from the outward show of things and to make use of her ‘blind’ eye to look within (‘[o]m binnewaerts te sien’).106 Even though Huygens makes no explicit reference to the concept, it is clear that the ‘blind eye’ that raises Lucretia above the rest of humankind is in some way related to the ‘mind’s eye’ that Sidney considers to be responsible for the poetic production of ‘speaking pictures’. The mediat­ ing link between Huygens and Sidney may well be Philippe de M ornay’s Traite de I’Eglise, a text that Sidney once translated into English and that was present in Huygens’ library.107 In de M ornay’s work, Huygens could have found, like Sidney before him, the idea that the mind’s eye is the

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perfect organ for the knowledge and recognition of ‘grandmother Nature’ (‘Groote-Moer Natuer’), the one and only reality that represents God’s immeasurable wisdom and creative force.108 As I outlined above, the faculty of insight is not limited in Ooghentroost to artistic genius. Still, at other moments in his oeuvre, Huygens does make the association that is central in Sidney’s Defence: the artist paints reality as it presents itself to the mind’s eye. Here is for instance a poem that he wrote on 5 April 1632. Its subject, and its occasion, is the painting by Lievens to which I referred earlier:109 IN E F F I G I E M M E A M , M A N U I. L IV IJ

Picturae nec lingua deest, ne fallere, nec vox; Hugenij facies haec meditantis erat. Si quaeras animam, spirantem quisque videbis, Qui attuleris qualem Liuius intuitum. O N M Y IM A G E , W R O U G H T B Y T H E H A N D O F J . L IE V E N S

Do not mistake: this painting lacks neither language nor voice; Such was the face of Huygens as he meditated. Should you try to find its soul, you will see that it breathes Provided that you look at it with the same eyes as Lievens.

While Sidney did not originally devise his concept of the ‘speaking picture’ with the representation of concrete images in mind,110 it doesn’t seem farfetched at all to consider Huygens’ eulogy of the art of portraiture as a literalisation of Sidney’s poetical metaphor. The poem on Lievens’ painting suggests as much: if the portrait is painted the way it should - on the basis of the demands set by the artistic oculus imaginations - it will manage to give the person who sat for it a lasting voice and to keep him or her alive beyond the grave. In his autobiography, Huygens develops a similar argument when he talks about the art of portraiture, in terms that almost seem to echo Machiavelli’s discussion of the topos of the con­ versation with ‘the ancient men’. Trying to refute the reproach that portraitists are only concerned with the outward appearance of people, Huygens writes the following: And still they do noble work, work that is of the greatest necessity for our human desires, because on account of their actions we are kept as it were from dying and as direct descendants can talk with our forebears. This pleasure is so dear to me that I cannot think of anything more enjoyable than to be able, when I read or hear a story of a person’s life or character - whether he was a good person or a bad one - to look closely at his portrait.111

As it were, Huygens writes; even though he makes use of the same metaphor, the conversation with the dead seems to be less obvious to him

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than it is to Machiavelli. This becomes even clearer in a later poem that Huygens wrote on 13 February 1656, the closing line of which takes as its theme the fundamental absence of the past. The poem’s title - Dienstighe Schilderij (‘A painting that serves’) - is completely in line with the central idea behind Huygens’ poetics. A work of art is there to serve; it should not try to present itself as a replacement of God’s work. On the contrary, it must have an awareness of the fact that it is only a copy of the First Creation. Despite its critical beginning, which seems to rely on a Platonic devaluation of human mimesis similar to that which we found in the Ooghen-troost, the poem ends with a defence of the art of portraiture. The genre is applauded above all on account of the fact that it stops the passage of time and enables us to talk with relatives who passed away a long time ago. The artist conjures up our forebears and allows us to give them a voice. While Machiavelli finds that voice reassuring in its enduring presence, Huygens seems to be less confident. Gods werck, dat ick begaen, besien, besitten kan, Daer hoef ick geen’ Copij uijt Menschen handen van. Een deeltje vande kunst kan mij te recht verblyden: Dat deeltje, dat de hand op ‘t rad leght vande tijden, En stelt mij Grootevaer syn overgroote Vaer Voor ooghen, of het volck van he’en of gist’ren waer, En sal myn’ kinderen kinds kinderen doen erven Mijn aensicht, dat met mij gaet sterven en bederven. Is niet die wetenschap meer meesters dan de tijd? ‘T Is, het verderffelick in d’Olij geconfijtt.112 God’s work, which I can walk through, look at and sit upon, I don’t need to have a copy of it made by human hands. There is something in art that can really make me happy: that part that lays its hand on the treadmill of time and that puts my grandfather’s greatgrandfather in front of my eyes, as though he were a person from today or yesterday. This art will pass on my face, which will die and decay with me, to the children of my children’s children. Is not art more masterful than time itself? It is, a counterfeit in oil of what has to decay.

Notes 1. Extract from a letter to Giacomo Colonna. Quoted in E. H. Wilkins, Life o f Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 20. 2. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory o f Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), p. 139. 3. For a brief survey of the general development of twentieth-century Amer­ ican criticism see Murray Krieger, The Institution o f Theory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

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4. See, for instance, ‘Form and Intent in the American New Criticism’, in Paul de M an, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric o f Contemporary Criticism, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 20-35. On de M an’s highly nuanced view of New Criticism see Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique o f Aesthetic Ideology (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 173-6. 5. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’ to Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Forms o f Power and the Power o f Forms in the Renaissance, special issue of Genre, 15, 1 and 2, 1982, p. 5. Greenblatt’s appropriation of deconstructionist thought is a more complex matter. I have dealt with it summarily in my Moments o f Negotiation: The New Historicism o f Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001), pp. 18-20. 6. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base’, in PMLA, M ay 1987, 102, 3, p. 283. 7. See, for instance, Jean Howard, ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’, in Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (eds), New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Longman, 1992), pp. 19­ 32; Louis A. Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15-36; John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (Houndmills and London: M acM il­ lan 1998). 8. Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’ to The Forms o f Power and the Power o f Forms in the Renaissance, p. 5. 9. Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’ to The Forms o f Power and the Power o f Forms in the Renaissance, p. 5. 10. New Historicism’s tense relationship to traditional theories of history like that of Ranke are the subject of Frank Ankersmit, ‘An Appeal from the New to the Old Historicists’, History and Theory, 42, M ay 2003, pp. 253-70. 11. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 11. 12. LaCapra, History and Criticism, p. 36. 13. LaCapra, History and Criticism, p. 36. 14. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Touch of the Real’, in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 20-48. 15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 31. 16. I have dealt extensively with Greenblatt’s complex relationship to Fou­ cault’s work in Chapter 9 of my Moments o f Negotiation, pp. 223-63. 17. Quoted in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings by Michel Foucault (1972-1977) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 114-15. 18. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 1. 19. Emilio Bigi (ed.), Opere di Francesco Petrarca (Milan: Ugo M ursia, 1964), p. 420-2. 20. A recent and excellent biography is Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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21. Machiavelli, De Principatibus/Le Prince, ed. Jean-Louis Fournel and JeanClaude Zancarini (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 531. This edition of II Principe contains the entire letter in appendix. (For the English translation, see note 23 below.) 22. The correspondence between Machiavelli and Vettori is the subject of John M . Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses o f Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters o f 1513-1515 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). For the life of Vettori see Rosemary Devonshire Jones, Francesco Vettori: Florentine Citizen and Medici Servant (London: The Athlone Press, 1972). 23. I made use of David Harley’s translation at http://www.nd.edu/~dharley/ Histldeas/Vettori-toMachiav.html. The passage is given, in another trans­ lation, in LaCapra, History and Criticism, p. 15. 24. LaCapra, History and Criticism, p. 15. 25. Machiavelli, Discourses, ed. M ax Lerner (New York: Random House, 1950), Bk 1, ch. 11, p. 149. 26. Machiavelli, Discourses, Bk 1, ch. 63, p. 530. 27. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 20. 28. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 1. 29. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso Editions and New Left Books, 1980), pp. 24-5. For a further analysis of Williams’ point, see my Moments o f Negotiation, pp. 182-3. 30. He did so, for instance, in his essay ‘The Touch of the Real’, in Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, pp. 20-48. 31. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 3. 32. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem/Sieben Bucher tiber die Dichtkunst, ed. Luc Deitz, vol. 1 (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Fromann Verlag, 1994), p. 50. The opposition also crops up in contemporary discussions on the use of rhyme in English; see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Selfhood as Otherness: Constructing English Identity in the Elizabethan Age’, in Carlo Ginzburg, N o Island is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 28ff. 33. I have translated from A. Van Strien, ‘Anti-idealistische poetica bij Huy­ gens?’, De Zeventiende Eeuw, 3, 2, 1987, p. 65. 34. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence o f Poesy), ed. R.W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 87. 35. Malcolm William Wallace, The Life o f Sir Philip Sidney (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), pp. 316ff.; Roger Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight (London: Hutchinson, 1968), pp. 229ff. On Sidney’s literary contacts during his stay in the Netherlands see J. A. van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). 36. Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, p. 78. 37. Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974), p. 256. 38. Gosson’s text, like Sidney’s Defence, is available in e-text on Renascence Editions: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/gosson1.html. 39. Howell, The Shepherd Knight, pp. 172ff.

Among Ancient Men 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

49

Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 88. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 88. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 88. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 88. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 88. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 89. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 89. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 89. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 90. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 90. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 92. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 92. Quoted in Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 9. Aristotle, The ‘Art’ o f Rhetoric, with an English translation by John Henry Freese (Loeb Classic), (London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 405. See also Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems o f Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox­ ford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 27-8. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 6. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 4. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 6. Forrest G. Robinson, The Shape o f Things Known: Sidney’s Apology in its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 128ff. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 86. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 90. The concept is derived from Robinson, The Shape o f Things Known. Plato, Phaedo, with an English translation by Harold North Fowler (Loeb Classics) (London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 231 (66d). The man who wants to possess true knowledge of the real, Socrates claims, is ‘he who prepares himself most carefully to understand the true essence of each thing that he examines’; ‘Would not that man do this most perfectly who approaches each thing, so far as possible, with the reason alone, not introducing sight into his reasoning nor dragging in any of the other senses along with his thinking, but who employs pure, absolute reason in his attempt to search out the pure, absolute essence of things, and who removes himself, so far as possible, from eyes and ears, and, in a word, from his whole body, because he feels that its companionship disturbs the soul and hinders it from attaining truth and wisdom?’ Plato, Phaedo, p. 229 (65e-66a). Plato, Phaedo, p. 231 (66e). E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art o f the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1975 [1972]), p. 147. This poetical conviction is the subject of famous analyses by Heidegger and by Paul de Man. For a deconstruction of Heidegger’s reading see Paul de M an, ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’, in Paul de M an, The Rhetoric o f Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 1-17.

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65. Plato, The Republic, with an English translation by Paul Shorey, Vol. 2 (Loeb Classic) (London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 435 (599b). 66. ‘Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.’ Plato, Phaedrus, with an English translation by Harold North Fowler (Loeb Classics) (London and Cam­ bridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, I960), pp. 563-5 (275a-b). The passage is the occasion of Derrida’s famous analysis of Plato’s text in Jacques Derrida, ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, in Jacques Derrida, La dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 77-214. 67. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 106. 68. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 107. 69. See, for instance, D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972) and E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall o f the Neoplatonic Interpretation o f Plato: An Outline and Some Observations (Helsinki: Societas Scientarum Fennica, 1974). 70. See, among others, Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism ofM arsilio Ficino: A Study o f his Phaedrus Commentary, its Sources and Genesis (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1984) and, obviously, the classic monographs by Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy o f Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) and Andre Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’Art (Geneva: Droz, 1954). 71. A. J. Close, ‘Commonplace Theories of Art and Nature in Classical Antiquity and in the Renaissance’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, 30, 1969, pp. 467-86. 72. Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, ed. J. Hankins, trans. M. J. B. Allen, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 169-71. 73. R. W. Maslen, ‘Introduction’ to Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 38. 74. R. W. Maslen, ‘Introduction’ to Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 38. 75. ‘Beauty being the subject-matter of art, Plato’s praise of beauty was transferred by the Renaissance to poetry, and his praise of the philosopher was transferred to the poet.’ Joel Spingarn, A History o f Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 98. 76. ‘The word which is written with intelligence in the mind of the learner, which is able to defend itself and knows to whom it should speak, and before whom to be silent.’ Plato, Phaedrus, p. 567 (276a). 77. Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘ ‘‘This story isn’t true’’: Madness, Reason, and Recantation in the Phaedrus’, in Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility o f Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 200-33, esp. pp. 223-7. 78. See Allen, The Platonism o f Marsilio Ficino, p. 44. 79. The phrase is taken from the Latin autobiography that he wrote at the end

Among Ancient Men

80.

81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90. 91. 92.

51

of his life, when he was 82. Constantijn Huygens, Mijn leven verteld aan mijn kinderen, introduced, edited, translated and annotated by Frans R. E. Blom (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2003), p. 187; my translation into English. Constantijn Huygens, Cluys-werck, in De gedichten van Constantijn Huy­ gens, m ar zijn handschrift uitgegeven, ed. J.A. Worp (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1898), vol. 8 (1671-87), pp. 308-22, line 174; my translation, here and elsewhere. Huygens, Cluys-werck, lines 370-88. R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 450ff. John Donne, Selected Prose, ed. Neil Rhodes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 104. The passage is also quoted in Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 40. A. H. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens door hemzelf beschreven, 2nd edn. (Rotterdam: A. H. Donker, 1971), p. 59; my translation, here and elsewhere. Huygens writes about Donne in his later autobiography as well: Huygens, Mijn leven verteld aan mijn kinderen, p. 127. Much has been written about Donne and Huygens. For the bio­ graphical circumstances of their encounter see Chapter 4 of Rosemarie Collie, ‘Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine’: A Study o f English Influence upon the Early Works o f Constantijn Huygens (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), pp. 52-71. See also Theodoor Jorissen, Historische en Literarische Studien (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1891), pp. 341-65; H. J. Eymael, ‘John Donne’s invloed op C. Huygens’, De Gids, 1891, pp. 344-66; Franz De Backer, ‘De zoogezegde invloed van John Donne op Constantijn Huygens’, in Album opgedragen aan prof. Dr. J. Vercoullie, vol. I (Brussels: Paginae, 1927), pp. 93-105; Koos Daley, The Triple Fool: A Critical Evaluation o f Constantijn Huygens’ Translations o f John Donne (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1990); N. F. Streekstra, ‘Huygens als Donnevertaler. Linguistisch-stilistische aspecten van een vertaalstrategie’, in N. F. Streekstra and P. E. L. Verkuyl (eds), Huygens in Noorderlicht. Lezingen van het Groningse Huygens-symposium (Groningen: Universiteitsdrukkerij, 1987), pp. 25-44. Huygens had a copy of Donne’s Sermons in his library, but there is no trace of the Devotions. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 59. For a comparative analysis see Jacob Smit, Driemaal Huygens: Vergelijkende karakteristieken van Constantijn Huygens’ Batava Tempe, ’t Costelick M al, en De Uytlandighe Herder (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1966). Constantijn Huygens, Avondmaalsgedichten en Heilige Dagen, ed. F. L. Zwaan (Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1968). Constantijn Huygens, Gebruyck o f ongebruyck van ‘t orgel in de kerken der Vereenighde Nederlanden ed. F. L. Zwaan (Amsterdam/London: Noord-Hollandse Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1974). For a representative survey see H. J. Eymael, ‘Constantijn Huygens en de schilderkunst’, Oud-Holland, 14, 1896, pp. 185-98. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 84. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 75. Van Ravesteijn is given the wrong first name of Paulus. Van Mierevelt was court painter to the Oranjes and made two portraits of Huygens; see Kan (ed.), De jeugd van

52

93.

94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108.

Speaking with the Dead Constantijn Huygens, p. 160 n. 205. Van Mierevelt’s portrait of Huygens’ mother is reproduced as illustration 4 in H. E. Van Gelder (ed.), Ikonografie van Constantijn Huygens en de zijnen (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957). For a precedent (Armenini’s De veri precetti della pittura (1586)) see Moshe Barasch, Theories o f Art: from Plato to Winckelmann (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 236-41, esp. p. 240. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 75. Clotilde Briere-Misme, ‘Un portrait retrouve de Constantin Huygens’, Oud-Holland, 53, 1936, pp. 193-201. The portrait is reproduced on the frontispiece of L. Strengholt, Constanter. Het leven van Constantijn Huygens (Amsterdam: Querido, 1987). The portrait used to hang in the museum of Douai, but it can now be seen in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, pp. 81-2. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, pp. 80-1. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 82. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 80. ‘With Van Mierevelt, the entire art lies in nature and the entire nature in his art. And the reason for this is not at all hidden; he does something which, if everybody were to do it, would cause less confusion, less groping in the dark. He follows reality and since, as I said earlier, its view is simple, he also succeeds in capturing it, because he allows its beauty to live in its own costume, without adding anything to it.’ Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Con­ stantijn Huygens, p. 76. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 76. The first quote (both quotes are in italics) is from the first of Horace’s Satires. See F. L. Zwaan (ed.), Constantijn Huygens’ Ooghen-troost (Groningen: Wolters Noordhoff/Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1984), p. 74; also C. W. de Kruyter, Constantijn Huygens’ Oogen-troost. Een interpretatieve studie (Meppel: Boom, 1971), p. 131. Zwaan (ed.), Ooghen-troost, lines 455-80; my translation, here and else­ where. Zwaan (ed.), Ooghen-troost, lines 481-7. The position of Huygens’ poem in this tradition is dealt with in de Kruyter, Oogentroost, pp. 5ff. The poem’s relationship to Erycius Puteanus’ Consolatio Caecitatis (1609), is the subject of Jeanine de Landtsheer, ‘Erycius Puteanus’ Caecitatis Consolatio (1609) and Constantijn Huygens’ Ooghentroost (1647)’, Humanistica Lovaniensia. Journal o f Neo-Latin Studies, 159, 2000, pp. 209-29. Zwaan (ed.), Ooghen-troost, p. 15, line 67. See the Catalogus der bibliotheek van Constantijn Huygens, verkocht op de groote zaal van het hof te ’s-Gravenhage 1688 (’s-Gravenhage: W.P. Van Stockum and Zoon, 1903), p. 7 (number 40 of the ‘Libri Theologici in Octavo’). Huygens was familiar with Sidney’s work and with Theodore Rodenburgh’s adaptation of the Defence: A.G.H. Bachrach, Sir Constan­ tine Huygens and Britain, 1596-1687: A Pattern o f Cultural Exchange. Volume one: 1596-1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 106-8. See Robinson, The Shape o f Things Known, p. 102.

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109. It can be found in J. A. Worp (ed.), De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, vol. 2 (Groningen: Wolters, 1893), pp. 235-6. The poem is also cited in Briere-Misme, ‘Un portrait retrouve’, p. 196. 110. See, The Shape o f Things Known, p. 99: ‘It is much more likely that by ‘picture’ Sidney means an abstraction, a concept made visible to the reader’s mind.’ 111. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 75. 112. Worp (ed.), De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, vol. 6, p. 19; my translation.

Chapter 2

The G a z e of Medusa and the Practice of the Historian: Rubens and Huygens

Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied out, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.1 Plato, Phaedrus

How, exactly, does Huygens manage to speak to us, through a painting that is nearly four hundred years old? And why is it that we have no problem in giving a voice to a face made of lifeless paint and assuming together with and behind that voice - the presence of a living being, indirect though this presence may be? While the question may seem rhetorical, it does nevertheless deserve an answer. In the case of this particular painting, part of the answer will inevitably involve the pictural talents of the person who made this portrait, Jan (or Joan as Huygens spells it) Lievens. In strict compliance with the artistic rules that Leonardo da Vinci decreed for the painter of portraits one and a half centuries earlier, Lievens not only succeeded in representing Huygens as a physical person. He also managed to capture the restless passion of the poet’s inner self.2 Convinced as we are that the voice of this inner self is what we hear as we read the poet’s texts, it will be hard for us not to be impressed by how this painting seems to speak. Part of the answer to my questions lies in the fact that Lievens’ painting succeeds in addressing us because it resonates with a number of other traces that Huygens has left, both as a poet and as a diplomat, traces

The G aze of Medusa and the Practice of the Historian

Fig. 2.1 Portrait o f Constantijn Huygens by Jan Lievens (1627), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Speaking with the Dead

which he not only created but also distributed in the best tradition of early-modern self-fashioning. Our recollection of the existence of these textual traces, and, indeed, our more profound knowledge of some of them, will deepen our conviction that we understand the special light that radiates from Huygens’ eyes in this particular painting for what it really is: not simply dots of white paint, but the light of a unique life that was lived by a person who is no longer with us. The portrait by Lievens not only sets before our eyes the face of the man who wrote the immortal lines for which we remember him so well. It also shows us the very hands that composed these poems and that wrote the thousands of letters that make up his extant conversations with famous contemporaries. Like Huygens, they are now long dead, but we believe that they continue to speak to us, from a distance, through the poet’s six-volume correspondence with Descartes, Andre Rivet, Caspar Barlaeus, the Princess Amalia, to name but a few.3 As we saw in the previous chapter of this book, on more than one occasion Huygens reflects on the power of paintings to immortalise the people they represent. Texts seem to possess a similar quality, he believes, in that they allow their authors to survive the moment of their physical death. As a result, we can continue to talk with them, even after they have long gone. As we saw before, the idea is a classical one, which returns in so many early-modern writings. Huygens alludes to it several times in his work, but his most extensive reflection upon the topic is to be found in his poem Zee-straet (Sea-street), which he composed in celebration of the 1667 opening of a paved road that led from his native town of The Hague to the neighbouring seaside town of Scheveningen. Like so much of what he wrote, Huygens’ poem involves some degree of self-glorification. In 1653, Huygens himself had drawn up the first plans for the construction of the road, but, as he puts it in Zee-straet, the minds of the people just were not ready for it at the time. Fourteen years later, he is happy to see that his fellow citizens have grown wiser. In the passage that interests me here, Huygens’ use of the idea of the conversation with the dead is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori. The dialogue with the dead, he writes, is always effortless and always productive. We can ask them question after question, he writes, ‘they never get angry or tired’ (‘sy werden quaed noch moe’). And that is why, he goes on to say, people shouldn’t be amazed that ‘the papers of the dead please [him] the most’: they are, after all, ‘papers full of fruit’ (‘Is ’t vreemd dat my doo Li’n haer blad’ren best behagen? ’t Zijn bladeren voll fruyt’).4 The passage follows a series of sixty-four lines (lines 121-85) in which Huygens focuses upon a number of inventions that in his view heralded a

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new era. Each of these he considers to be icons of the modern world, a world that, as a result of the exploration of new continents and of the economic and religious wars that both accompanied and made this largescale discovery possible, began to grow larger and ever more complex. The inventions that Huygens singles out - the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the telescope, the pendulum clock - are all instruments that enable humankind to decipher the changes to reality. It is hardly surpris­ ing to see that Huygens includes the pendulum clock in his brief catalogue: after all, it was his son Christiaan, the famous physicist, who invented it (‘Hy diese heeft versint / Is mijn afsettelingh’: ‘He who made it up / Is my descendant’). But the most amazing realisation of his times, he believes, is the production of paper, which makes it possible for the people who write their names on it to live forever. Dat hebbense voor uyt, Papieren; langer leven Als die haer ’tleven gaf, sijn’ kind’ren, sijn’ naneven En ’tuijterste geslacht; wanneer die langh verby En rott zijn in haer Graf, soo gaen Papieren vrij. Danck hebben de goe li’en die s’eerst te voorschijn brachten, Die Gall, dat Coperoot, dat Linnen en die Schachten, Daer door de sterf’lickheit haer selven overleeft, En van ’tonsterffelick wat voorsmaecks heeft en geeft. O dooden die soo leeft, en, na dit halve sterven, De gansche Wereld roept om van uw goet te erven, [. . .] O dooden die noch zijt, o Boecken die ick eere, En soo gemackelick en soo geerne me verkeere, Hoe komt ghij mij te stae, dien’t ydele gerucht Van dagelyx geklapp noch vreught en geeft noch vrucht? Waer ick mij henen wend’, ick vind mijn’ arme ooren Soo veel onlydelix gedwongen aen te hooren, Dat ick het schouw en vlucht, en bergh mij onder u.5 This is the advantage that paper has; it lives longer than those who gave it life, longer than their children and their nephews, longer than the most distant progeny. When these are long gone, having decayed in their graves, even then paper is still free. Thanks are due to the good people who first produced it and who made the ink, the leaves and the pens that enable mortality to survive and give us a foretaste of what it is to be immortal. O, dead ones, who live like this and who, after this half death, call upon the entire world to inherit from the goods that you give [. . .] O, dead ones who are still here, O books that I honour so, and with whom I have such an easygoing and pleasant relationship. How do you relate to me, who am neither pleased nor helped by the idle chatter of everyday gossip. Wherever I turn, my poor ears are forced to listen to so much that is unbearable, that I fear it and flee from it and hide among you.

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Speaking with the Dead

A Reality Effect Together with this and with the other portraits that we have of Huygens, the numerous traces that the author left us collaborate in the realisation of the necromantic dream of which the historian’s practice is taken to be the outcome. In line with the logic of the dream, the traces that really manage to capture our attention should not only give us a representative human being - preferably situated against an equally representative background that both feeds and serves to explain his or her actions and thoughts - but also a living human being, who speaks to us not in spite of the distance that separates us from him or her, but as a result of this distance.6 The conversation with the dead offers an apt instance of this logic: it is a dialogue of the special sort that thrives upon the separation of its participants, on the physical absence of one or both parties and on the structural impossibility of real-life interaction that follows from the dead’s particular modus vivendi. Their elusive ‘presence’ does not impede the dynamics of the conversation, let alone prevent it from taking place; on the contrary, it accommodates the very ease with which the dialogue is conducted. ‘O, dooden die noch zijt, o Boecken die ick eere,/En soo gemackelick en soo geerne me verkeere’ (‘O, dead who are still here, o books that I honour so, and with whom I have such an easygoing and pleasant relationship’): Huygens’ emphasis is similar to that of Machiavelli and Petrarch. Contrary to so many conversations among the living, the dialogue with the dead is one that speaks for itself. If we are convinced that Huygens continues to speak to us after all those years, we are no doubt giving in to an inclination that has defined our conception of Western culture for the past few centuries. This is the drive to what Roland Barthes has called, in two complementary essays, ‘the reality effect’: the belief, that is, that what representations (at least the ones we value for this reason) show us has really happened.7 According to Barthes, this belief is the product of a long and complex process of secularisation that marked the beginning of Western modernity. As a consequence of this process, Barthes writes, some of our most highly valued cultural objects and phenomena were turned into worldly relics, as they became enveloped by the aura of what he describes as ‘that sacred quality attached to the enigma of what has been, is no more, and yet offers itself as present sign of a dead thing’.8 Barthes’ analysis of ‘the reality effect’ gives an interesting perspective on Huygens’ reflections on the art of portraiture. Works of art that aim for an effet de reel, Barthes writes, are characterised by the merging of two seemingly opposite imperatives which nevertheless com­ plement and feed each other: a realistic one and an aesthetic or rhetorical

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one. In the specific case of the art of portraiture, the presence of the realistic imperative is obvious and logical. After all, the genre is founded upon the presupposition that the person who is sitting for the portrait looked at the time of the sitting more or less as he or she looks in the painting. Much like photographs, to borrow Barthes’ own example, portraits convey a rather straightforward semiotic message: ‘ca a ete’ - it was there and like that. Still, the other imperative, the rhetorical one, is as important if the portrait is to have the sort of impact both its creator and those who commissioned it generally strive for. This imperative shows itself in the aesthetic principle that was central to my previous chapter and that became known in the rhetorics of Antiquity under different labels: energeia, hypotyposis, evidentia. All of these refer to the idea that representations (visual or linguistic) conjure up and render living before the eyes of their audiences (ante oculos ponere) that which they give shape to, by means of an entire repertory of artistic techniques and strategies. In the opening paragraphs of his text on the reality effect, Barthes elaborates upon one of these techniques, the predominance of which gradually became more and more manifest in both the historiography and the novelistic literature of the nineteenth century. What strikes Barthes above all in the growing convergence of these two textual genres is the conspicuous presence of concrete and often trivial details whose immedi­ ate function within the global signifying structure of the text in which they occur is not immediately clear. Their presence, meaningfully described by Barthes as a ‘resistance’ against signification,10 can only be explained, he claims, on the basis of the promise of the reality effect. These details do not expect an immediate interpretive gesture from the reader that func­ tionally links them to the remainder of the text. Rather, they exude the comfortable awareness that what they represent did really happen. They show us the real wie es gewesen, to borrow Ranke’s famous phrase. Interestingly, this analysis of the semiotics of ‘useless’ details finds a productive analogue in the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s brief reflections on the mechanism of what he called the ‘historical sensation’. Writing some fifty years before Barthes, Huizinga coined the term for the special experience historians have when, on the basis of evidence they have uncovered, they believe themselves, if only for the most fleeting of moments, to be in direct contact with the past.11 The experience is a central one in many accounts of the practice of historiography, but Huizinga’s analysis of it may well be the most interesting. As Huizinga puts it in his famous definition: This contact with the past, which is accompanied by the absolute conviction of complete authenticity and truth, can be sparked off by a line from a chronicle,

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by an engraving, a few sounds from an old song. It is not something that an author, writing in the past, deliberately put down in his work. It is ‘behind’ and not so much ‘inside’ the book that the past has sent down to us. The contemporary reader brings it along to his encounter with the author from the past; it is his response to the author’s call.12

Many critics have pointed to the mystical overtones in Huizinga’s definition, and this passage seems to confirm their findings. What is interesting to us, however, is the fact that the passage also makes clear that Huizinga’s notion of the historical sensation can be related to a conception of historical practice as an encounter or even a dialogue with the dead. Huizinga was no doubt familiar with the metaphor from his reading of the ‘resurrectionist’ historiography of Michelet, to whom he refers later in his text. Another of his references is to Hyppolite Taine’s assertion that ‘[l]’histoire c’est a peu pres voir les hommes d’autrefois’: ‘in writing history, we more or less see the people of yore’.13 Although Huizinga could not agree more, he does modify Taine’s pronouncement somewhat, adding to the French historian’s visual metaphorics an element of auditory perception. The writing of history is not simply a matter of seeing ‘the ancient men’, as Machiavelli called them, but of hearing them as well, of listening to what they have to say. ‘It is a resurrection that comes about in a dreamlike state,’ Huizinga writes, ‘we see figures we can hardly touch, we hear words we can only hear from afar.’14 As Frank Ankersmit has argued in his analysis of the concept of the ‘historical sensation’, it is interesting to see that Huizinga, in contrast to Taine, also makes use of an auditory image: historians not only see the past, they also hear the voices of the dead, and they hear them from afar. More than its visual counterpart, historians’ stress on auditory perception highlights the insurmountable distance that separates them from the object of their desire.15 In my comparison of Huizinga’s ‘historical sensation’ with Barthes’ analysis of superfluous details in texts and other representations, I have ignored the theoretical and philosophical differences between the frame­ works in which they conceive of the practices of reading and writing. I have done so for the sake of brevity. What interests me here is the most central point upon which they agree. In Huizinga’s view, the historical sensation is brought about by objects and phenomena which, on account of their sheer material presence, seem to resist our urge to give meaning to the things that we see, feel, hear and, in sum, experience. At least, they do so at the very moment that we are struck by the sensation. On the basis of this resistance - and this mechanism marks Barthes’ reading of ‘super­ fluous details’ as well - they activate the dynamics of signification that is central to the human condition. They call upon us, Huizinga suggests, to

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respond to their presence. We do not know precisely the exact meaning of the thing that caused us to have this sensation of historical authenticity, but the strange and wonderful object that provoked it both drives us to look for this meaning and warns us against the impulse of our wildest intuitions. It cannot mean whatever we want it to mean. It is significant in more than one respect that Huizinga characterised the historical sensation as an aesthetic experience.16 In line with a conception of art that is fully determined by the idea of alienation (art urges us to see things anew, i.e. the way they really are), the historical sensation can be expected to function as an experience of strangeness or alterity, embody­ ing as it does a feeling that forces us to question our habitual frames of reference. In doing so, it confronts us with the historical limits of our capacity to understand and think and with our tendency to reason along presentist lines. The historical sensation, then, urges us to put into perspective the so-called self-evidence of our own time; it urges us to historicise the present and to become aware of the fact that there are other ways of world-making. In this sense, the sensation is a dissociative one. In his earliest reflection on the concept, Huizinga described the historical sensation as ‘an (do not laugh at me) almost ecstatic experience in which I am no longer who I am. I am overflowing, flowing into the world outside, touching the essence of things, experiencing Truth by means of history’.17 Once more, Huizinga seems to border on the verge of mysticism. How­ ever, as Frank Ankersmit argues, this should not blind us to the fact that what he writes here relates essentially ‘to what happens between the historian and the past, to what happens on the ‘‘interface’’ between the two of them’.18 Ankersmit’s metaphor points to the essentially dialogic nature of the historical experience, which is neither a function of ‘the dark and hidden recesses of the past itself’ nor of ‘the historian’s cognitive machinery’.19 It is located in-between. It is a liminal experience, which can be quite easily integrated in the conceptual framework of the con­ versation with the dead. When we are talking to the dead, we seem to be talking first and foremost with and within ourselves, until we realise that the words that we use are not ours at all. The conversation with the dead broadens our lives and deepens our souls. This is how Greenblatt conceives of it as well: it turns us into someone we were not before someone of whose existence we may have had no idea at all.

Huygens on Rubens Historians claim to derive their historical sensations from material remainders of the past, from objects that have come down to us either

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entirely or in fragments, and that, on the basis of their sheer materiality, make present (a meaningful part of) the past from which they have travelled. The practice of literary historians makes clear that texts may well provoke similar sensations. The passage cited from Huizinga sug­ gests this. Texts cause these sensations not only on account of their physical, material appearance (such as disintegrating paper, ink that can hardly be deciphered, brown stains that suggest an ancient existence, and so on . . .) but also on account of their contents, of the linguistic signs that they contain and that evoke a world that goes beyond the texts’ materials and outlook. What is important is that these texts provoke in us the same sort of disinterested curiosity as historians feel when uncovering new evidence. It is as if our curiosity is actually part of the object that caused this sensation, Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel write in their stimulat­ ing analysis of Huizinga’s concept.20 What is important, in other words, is that these textual remains resist being grasped in an immediate and unambiguous manner: they demand our patience and our full attention. They resist delivering the world that they contain and the manifold secrets that this world holds in store for us. They want us to read and listen very closely. In what follows I would like to look at a text that caused me to have the sort of sensation about which I have been talking. It is a fragment from the Latin autobiography Huygens wrote when he was in his thirties. The fragment is taken from the section in which he recalls his encounters with the work of a number of painters from his time. In particular, he focuses upon the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, to whom Huygens - against the ‘ongunst der tijden’ (‘the misfortune of the times’) as he puts it wanted to be closer.21 Even though he praises Rubens’ work as a whole, describing him without any reservation whatsoever as the ‘Apelles of our age’,22 there is one painting in particular to which he devotes a great deal of attention, as it does not cease to haunt his memory. The painting in question is a mythological study dating from 1617 to 1618, which represents the head of Medusa, just after it has been cut off. The blood is not yet dry and, judging by the colour of the woman’s face, there is some life in her still. Her mouth shows surprise and horror at what she has just witnessed. Her eyes are wide open; they add to the story of her experience. Her hair is a nest of crawling insects and vipers, probably painted by Frans Snyders, Rubens’ collaborator who specialised in still life with animals. Rubens’ painting belongs to a long narrative tradition of which early traces can be found in Homer. The fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (lines 765-804) contains its most familiar version: the heroic story of Perseus who manages to kill the monstrous Medusa, whose gaze turned

Fig. 2.2

The Head o f Medusa by Peter Paul Rubens (and Frans Snyders) (c. 1617), Kunsthistorishe Museum, Vienna.

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anyone who dared look her in the eyes to stone. In Ovid’s version, Perseus famously captures the monster’s gaze in his bronze shield. Seeing her reflection, Medusa is literally petrified by her own lethal eyes and Perseus manages to cut off her head without any hindrance whatsoever. In all its details and variations, the story of Perseus and Medusa has been a favourite with artists throughout the ages. It is interesting both in terms of its narrative structure (the story contains many scenes that lend themselves perfectly to dramatic representation) and as an allegorical device (it is a story about art itself, about the power of representation, the reflection of the real and the impact of images). Like a number of other early-modern masters (Leonardo da Vinci, Cellini, Caravaggio, to name but a few), Rubens chose for his subject the final outcome of Perseus’ ruse. As in Cellini’s famous statue, the head of the slain Medusa is displayed in front of the viewer’s eyes as a sort of trophy. Unlike Cellini’s M edusa, however, Rubens’ portrait is so gruesomely realistic that the monster’s eyes almost seem to have retained the lethal power with which we have come to associate them. Whoever dares to look this woman in the eyes will no doubt feel a chill to the bone. Today, Rubens’ painting can be seen in the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna. The first impressive catalogue raisonne of the artist’s collected works suggests that it has retained the impact that it had on Huygens and his contemporaries.23 ‘I have the impression,’ Huygens writes in the autobiography of his youth that he wrote between 1629 and 1631, that of his many paintings, one in particular, keeps coming back to me: the piece that my friend Nic. [Nicolaas] Sohier once showed me in his splendid collection. It represents the head of Medusa, cut off and surrounded by snakes that come crawling out of her hair. In this work, the painter has composed with the most unspeakable powers of design the expression of a wonderfully beautiful woman. The woman is still attractive, yet she also fills us with horror, because death has just set in and sinister snakes move around her temples. This causes the spectator to be suddenly struck with fear - the painting is usually covered by a curtain - but at the same time to enjoy the representation, which, despite its hideousness, is vivid and beautiful. Still, I’d rather see it in the house of one of my friends than in my own home. In fact, the painting reminds me of the pleasant story of the ambassador of the Teutons. As he was crossing the Forum in Rome, he was shown a very valuable painting of an old shepherd leaning on a stick. Upon being asked how high he valued the painting, the man answered in all honesty, like his people are wont to, that he wouldn’t want a living man like that as a present. Listen ye all, who measure things in terms of the fear that they cause you. Suppose that someone were to sing to me with the same euphonious voice that he uses to talk about murder and manslaughter, I would surely ask him to please me both by his subject and by his delivery. What is beautiful may well be represented in a more or less

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pleasing manner; but that which is truly ugly will never please, no matter how it is portrayed.24

The curiosity that this passage provokes is quite diverse. First of all, it makes us wonder what the painting Huygens talks about actually looks like? H as it survived at all, and if it has, is it possible that we would still consider it as hideous as Huygens claims, or have we become more used to pictures that strike the spectator with fear and trembling? The latter question confronts our historical curiosity with a further query. What are we to make of the terms in which Huygens voices the visual sensation that he experienced when he first saw the painting? To us, these terms seem to be so conflicting and contradictory as to make us almost dizzy. The portrait is described as a vivid composition, but it’s the portrait of a dead woman, a remarkably beautiful woman, whose powers of attraction are not at all diminished by the horror that her expression provokes. Some­ thing about this representation of death makes us feel cold, even though the vividness of its representation provokes our appreciation of its beauty. Still, it is not clear how fear and aesthetic pleasure are joined together in Huygens’ experience: are they mutually dependent, relatively autono­ mous or coupled on the basis of an accidental coalition? No wonder, then, that Huygens preferred to see the painting in the house of his friend than in his own home. The second part of the passage from Huygens’ autobiography quoted above does not really answer these questions. Still, the anecdote of the Teutonic ambassador does allow us to rephrase more sharply the problem with which the description of Huygens’ aesthetic experience confronts us. No matter how horrifying the painting of the severed head, the feeling that it provokes in the spectator does belong to the category of the beautiful. After all, if it didn’t, it would not have given the poet of the Ooghen-troost the specific sort of pleasure that his words are meant to convey. But what is this pleasure exactly? Is it an aesthetic pleasure, of the sort that we experience when we see something that is beautiful and that pleases us because of its beauty? Or is it a moral type of pleasure, which makes us conceive of what is beautiful and pleasing in terms of something that confirms our worldview and the moral standards that go with it? Or is it, rather, an intellectual type of pleasure that can be defined in quite similar terms of comfort and reassurance? The painting pleases because it teaches us something that makes us feel better. Any attempt to translate Huygens’ anecdote on the Teutonic ambas­ sador in terms of the seventeenth-century aesthetics to which it relates inevitably leads us to the classicist notion of decorum. According to the conceptual laws of this central idea, a work of art’s form and content are

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mutually imbricated in the sense that a sublime subject somehow auto­ matically demands a stylistic apparel that befits its grandeur.25 In Huy­ gens’ example, in order to portray a scene in which a murder is narrated, the artist needs to use a different style than that applied to a scene that aims for comic effect. It is the subject that dictates the style, and above all the style needs to be fitting. What Huygens makes clear in the closing sentence of the passage that I just quoted is that the ideal of decorum, strictly moral though it would appear to be at first sight, leads to an important aesthetic restriction. If we define what is beautiful in terms of what is appropriate, and if we only represent those things that we consider worthy of representation, then anything that is ugly (and, hence, inappropriate) will either be cast aside or interpreted and given a shape that makes it appropriate and hence beautiful.26 What is ugly, Huygens seems to suggest, cannot simply please. And if it does, then we must be dealing with a successful artistic representation (‘weergeven’), the product of a painter who has managed to turn something ugly into something beautiful. As stated in one of the most prototypical texts of the classicist poetics, Boileau’s Art poetique: II n’est point de Serpent, ni de Monstre odieux, Qui par l’art imite ne puisse plaire aux yeux. D ’un pinceau delicat l’artifice agreable Du plus affreux objet fait un objet aimable.27

Hideous Beauty In the opening pages of La parole et la beaute, his impressive survey of the classical notion of beauty, the French critic Alain Michel briefly touches upon the figure of Medusa. His analysis is of use, I believe, in clarifying the passage from Huygens’ autobiography that is central to this chapter. For quite some time, Michel writes, we have been taking for granted that the Medusa managed to petrify those who tried to see her because of her ugliness. But then we realised that things that were ugly, much like things we considered pleasant, could be seen as simple variations of the trans­ cendent ideal of the true and the beautiful (to kalokagathon) that expressed itself in the most diverse and possibly also contradictory phenomena of the real - ‘dans la merveille de l’horrible comme dans la mortelle douceur d’un visage humain’, as Michel puts it, ‘in the wonders of horror as well as in the soft mortality of a human face’.28 Michel does not explicitly mention when this rupture occurs. For our purposes the issue is of minor importance, if only because it would seem

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that Huygens’ description of Rubens’ painting belongs to a moment in the history of Western aesthetics after the rupture Michel identifies. There­ after, the relationship between the categories of the beautiful and the ugly is seen in yet another way: they are no longer considered as mere manifestations of a transcendent ideal of truth-beauty but as visually distinct varieties of a reality that can be explored and expressed in wholly different ways. If we look at Rubens’ painting from a contemporary perspective, we cannot but conclude that for Huygens to find it simply beautiful he must have had a very broad definition of beauty. If we compare Rubens’ work to Caravaggio’s Medusa, painted some twenty years earlier, but far more charming and pleasing to our twenty-first-century eyes, his definition appears to be even broader. The comparison cannot but make us wonder whether Huygens believed that the painting was beautiful simply because it comforted both the eyes and the mind. Or, that it was beautiful because it pleased and comforted him. Or, conversely, since it pleased it somehow had to be beautiful. Even though such an answer may be convincing to a certain extent, nevertheless the questions that arose in my initial reading of his description of Rubens’ painting remain pertinent. The answer is only valid if we take his experience of Rubens’ Medusa as an easily recognisable, and hence typical, variety of the classicist aesthetics that can only seize the authenticity of something ugly as something that is morally beautiful underneath. The passage from Huygens’ autobiography is related to such an aesthetics, but it cannot be completely reduced to it. There is more at stake here - more, possibly, than Huygens himself could fathom. In what follows, I would like to find out where that ‘more’ leads us. The story that lies at the beginning of M edusa’s severed head will have cropped up more than once in the course of the classical education Huygens received. He may have been familiar with it from the passage in the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses mentioned earlier or from one of the other sources in which Perseus tells the history of the trick he devised in order to conquer the mythical monster.29 In the off chance that Huygens did not read Ovid in the original version, he will surely have been familiar with Carel Van M ander’s allegorical reading of the story of Perseus and Medusa in his Wtlegghing op den Metamorphosis Pub. Ouidij Nasonis (‘Explanation of Pub. Ouidij Nasonis Metamorphoses’). The struggle between the hero and the monstrous woman, Van Mander explains, symbolises the conflict between the human powers of rationality (powers that are related to the higher regions of the platonic soul) and the lower passions which human beings share with the inhabitants of the animal world. The fact that Perseus manages to defeat Medusa by means

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of his rational prowess is a detail that will have stuck to Huygens’ imagination too, much like the fact that the woman is ultimately the victim of her own pride, and of the transient beauty that is the main object of this pride.30 Van Mander’s allegorical reading of the Medusa story leaves little to desire in terms of transparency. Still, in our search for clear answers to the many questions that Huygens’ description of Rubens’ painting provokes, it only serves as a first step. After all, what Van Mander has to say about the history of Perseus and Medusa can be said about every version of the story, whether it be that of the graceful heads of smiling women in the sketches that Rubens drew in preparation for a number of jewels that he wanted to adorn with Medusa-heads,31 or that of the more threatening but still graciously elegant features that Caravaggio gave the mythical woman in his famous shieldlike portrait.32 Put differently, Van Mander’s moralising reading of the story does not explain why Rubens painted his Medusa as he did: so ugly and so real. Put in different terms still: why the woman’s very ugliness explains both the vivid realism of the painting and the fear and horror of the spectator, who cannot be sure that what he or she is looking at is only a painting.

The Sister Arts If we want a convincing answer to these questions, we will need to tackle the complex issues that dominated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussions of the imitative powers of representative art in general and of literature and painting in particular. Quite a lot has been written about the relationship between the sister arts and there is little use in repeating it here.33 What is important to our story is the fact that the discussion revolved around two different conceptions of the idea of imitatio. To the extent that these two conceptions were not mutually exclusive, they were at least in serious tension with each other. In the terminology of the American art historian Rensselaer Lee, who published a classic study of the notion of ‘ut pictura poesis’ in the 1960s, one concept can be termed an ‘ideal’ imitatio and the other an ‘exact’.34 In the case of the former, the task of the artist is to represent the real as it should be, by and large in line with the advice that Aristotle gave to the poet in his Poetics. With Aristotle and his early-modern followers, the poet’s focus upon an idealised real resulted in the creation of a fictional universe consisting of fleshed-out idea(l)s that were often at a serious remove from the concrete, banal, hard and ugly reality that every mortal being could witness every day. The fragment from Boileau quoted above offers a

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perfect example of this theory, which was no less common among the advocates of the visual arts than it was among poets and literary critics. ‘Il faut imiter la nature,’ the seventeenth-century architect and art critic Andre Felibien wrote, ‘mais jusqu’a un certain degre seulement, car il faut savoir - c’est la la science du savant peintre - savoir choisir, accompagner et regler l’imitation par le savoir ou l’idee de la beaute: imiter la nature, mais a partir du dessein.’35 (‘One needs to imitate nature, but only to a certain degree, because one needs to know - that is the art of the expert painter - to know how to choose, how to accompany and regulate the imitation by means of the knowledge or the idea of beauty: to imitate nature, yes, but on the basis of the design.’) What the human eye can see, in other words, must be controlled on the basis of a system of norms and regulations derived from the mind’s eye, the oculus imaginations. In the second variety of the artistic imitatio - the ‘exact’ one, as Lee terms it - the precise and concrete representation of the visible real is as predominant as it would be centuries later in the art of nineteenth-century realists and naturalists. Artists who strive for exact imitations operate on the basis of a much more extensive artistic domain. The nature that is their subject amounts to the entire visible nature, not only to the part of it that fitted the ideal-typical vision of the Aristotelian neo-classicists. The difference is also one of method: the artistic creation is no longer solely measured in terms of its connection with an idea or a feeling, of disegno or jugement, but with what the artist and the spectator can see on a day-to­ day basis in the outside world. According to Louis Marin, the work of Caravaggio offers the best possible example of this development, to the extent that his work can even be taken as the result of a self-conscious attempt to destroy mimetic art once and for all. ‘Il s’est rendu esclave de la nature et non pas imitateur de belles choses,’ Marin writes of Caravaggio. ‘Il n’a represente que ce qui lui a paru devant les yeux et s’y est conduit avec si peu de jugement qu’il n’a ni choisi le beau, ni fui ce qu’il a vu de laid. Il a peint egalement l’un et l’autre.’36 (‘He turned himself into a slave of nature, not into an imitator of beautiful things. He only represented that which he saw before his eyes and he has done so with so little judgement that he has neither chosen what was beautiful nor fled from what was ugly. He painted both in equal measure.’) In and of itself, Rensselaer Lee’s study makes sufficiently clear how dangerous it is to draw general conclusions from the paragone between the arts of literature and painting in the early-modern period. Even though the debate was carried out on the basis of a rather limited set of arguments, it did result in a jumble of texts and apologies that is not easily surveyable. The growing fascination with the artist’s power to produce exact imitations of the real, however, is more the outcome of

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pictural discussions than of poetic ones. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a number of apologists for the art of painting - the central inspiration for their attempts being Leonardo’s Trattato - began to invoke the technical possibilities of their medium to represent the visual real as solidly as possible, more thoroughly than the literary medium.37 According to Henry Sussman, the art of portraiture of early-modern masters like Durer and Holbein results from this development. While many of their contemporaries were still primarily led by the implicit system of norms and regulations that underlie the practice of former generations of painters (decorum and disegno), Durer and Holbein’s first loyalty seems to be to what the eye shows them: ‘their primary loyalty is to the individuality and discreteness of their subject matter, not to the implicit operating system of perfect proportionality,’ Sussman writes.38

Wonderfully Beautiful How, then, does the painting by Rubens that is central to our story relate to the development that Sussman describes in his evaluation of the work of Durer and Holbein? It is striking to see that the same terms and images keep returning. These portraits speak to us, or so we believe. They radiate a special energy that seems to render them alive - ‘their subjects glower at us in a breathtakingly vivid, particular, modern way’,39 Sussman writes. This causes us to wonder, if only for a moment, whether we are looking at something that is more than just a painting. If only for a moment we imagine ourselves to be in the presence of something real, something more than just paint, oil, wood or canvas. Furthermore, this ‘real presence’ reduces us to silence. This is what Huygens experienced when he saw Rubens’ Medusa painting in the house of his friend Nicolaas Sohier, and he experienced it time and again. Does calling Huygens’ experience ‘aesthetic’ help us to understand it? And if it does, what exactly do we mean by that? While to us, the aesthetic experience is associated with a form of ‘disinterested pleasure’ (Kant), it is clear that for Huygens something else is at stake, something he considered to be more concrete and ‘real’. For him, the experience does not involve the contemplation of beauty for beauty’s sake, but a feeling that has a very real and forceful cognitive impact in the business of everyday life. We may have overestimated the fear that we thought Rubens’ painting caused Huygens to a certain extent. But then, we should not underestimate it either. After all, the fear is related both to that which the painting represents and to the way in which it does so. According to a number of art historians, the Medusas by Caravaggio

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and Rubens were inspired by another famous painting, one which unfortunately has not survived. Luckily, we still have a vivid description of it that enables us to feel, to some extent at least, the impact it must have had upon those who first saw it. In the chapter of his Vite de’ piii eccelenti pittori, scultori e architettori that is devoted to Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari tells the elaborate story of a work that was commissioned from the young painter through his father, ser Piero da Vinci. Ser Piero had been asked by one of the peasants on his farm whether he could find an artist in Florence who could paint a round shield that he himself, rather clumsily, had cut from a fig tree. In an attempt to do his peasant a favour, Piero gave the shield to his son, who first prepared it so that it was fit to be painted. After that, he decided that the image with which he would adorn the shield had to ‘terrify anyone who saw it and produce the same effect as the head of M edusa’.40 To do what he wanted Leonardo carried into a room of his own, which no one ever entered except himself, a number of green and other kinds of lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, bats, and various strange creatures of this nature; from all these he took and assembled different parts to create a fearsome and horrible monster which emitted a poisonous breath and turned the air to fire. He depicted the creature emerging from the dark cleft of a rock, belching forth venom from its open throat, fire from its eyes and smoke from its nostrils in so macabre a fashion that the effect was altogether monstrous and horrible. Leonardo took so long over the work that the stench of the dead animals in his room became unbearable, although he himself failed to notice because of his great love of painting.41

Leonardo took so long that neither his father nor the man who had commissioned the work considered it expedient to bother him any further. As soon as the shield was finally ready, Leonardo invited ser Piero to come over and view his work. So one morning Piero went along to the room in order to get the buckler, knocked at the door, and was told by Leonardo to wait for a moment. Leonardo went back into the room, put the buckler on an easel in the light, and shaded the window; then he asked Piero to come in and see it. When his eyes fell on it Piero was completely taken by surprise and gave a sudden start, not realizing that he was looking at the buckler and that the form he saw was, in fact, painted on it. As he backed away, Leonardo checked him and said: ‘This work certainly serves its purpose. It has produced the right reaction, so now you can take it away.’ Piero thought the painting was indescribably marvellous and he was loud in praise of Leonardo’s ingenuity. And then on the quiet he bought from a pedlar another buckler, decorated with a heart pierced by a dart, and he gave this to the peasant, who remained grateful to him for the rest of his days. Later on Piero secretly sold Leonardo’s buckler to some merchants in Florence for a

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hundred ducats; and not long afterwards it came into the hands of the duke of Milan, who paid those merchants three hundred ducats for it.42

What is important for the remainder of our story, more than the description of the painting or the idea that Leonardo seems to have taken a rather functional approach to works of art - the shield is a piece of art because it works the way that it does - is the fact that ser Piero labels his son’s work ‘indescribably marvellous’. ‘Che miracolosa’: it is so beautiful that words fail to express its beauty. But at the same it it is so hideous that it will frighten anyone who looks at it. The paradoxal fusion of these two components reminds us of Huygens’ analysis of Rubens’ painting: there is the admiration for what is beautiful and the will to express that admiration on the one hand, and the literally numbing feeling of fear on the other. In the case of ser Piero, this feeling is coupled, moreover, with the conviction that the work is real; it is not just a representation of something, but the very thing that it represents. The response of Leonardo’s father is reminiscent of the experience of wonder, as we can find it described in many early-modern sources. In the often-quoted words of Descartes, the feeling is ‘the first of all passions’, the result of ‘a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary’.43 Interestingly, Descartes emphasises that the feeling ‘occurs before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not’; in itself, then, at the very moment of the experience, it has a degree of disinter­ estedness that we have come to associate with the aesthetic experience. It is not a feeling of either beauty or disgust, though, since ‘it has no opposite’: ‘if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion’.44 We experience wonder physically in the presence of something that is fundamentally strange. It results in ‘a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual, that the heart suffers a systole’, as Albertus Magnus wrote three centuries before Descartes.45 There have been numerous publications on the subject over the course of the past decade which make clear that there is no single experience of ‘wonder’.46 Despite their diversity, these experiences of wonder bear witness to a common feeling that joins the experience ser Piero da Vinci had when he saw the shield that his son had painted to the experience of Huygens when he first saw the Medusa head by Rubens. In both cases, there is the feeling that words cannot express exactly what the viewer feels. It is a feeling of stupefaction in the face of something that we are somehow afraid to be fully absorbed by. At the same time it involves a great deal of admiration

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because what we see is overwhelming. The feeling is one of alienation, one could say, in the aesthetic sense of the word as well as in the psycho­ analytical one: there is the sense that we see things anew, the way they really are, and this feeling confronts us with the limits of both our perception and our ‘natural’ identity. The crux of the experience in both cases seems to have been the moment when Huygens and Leonardo’s father found out what they may have known all along but which the sudden sight of the object at which they were looking somehow caused them to forget: that this was a painting, hand-made, an artifice that in and of itself could not really do them any harm. The moment that they understood this - the moment when they decide, in the words of Descartes, whether what they are looking at ‘is suitable’ to them or not - the feeling of wonder has gone and the rational mind seems to have taken over.

Towards the Sublime Some three hundred years after da Vinci and some hundred and fifty years after Huygens, in the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin o f our Ideas o f the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke describes a feeling that is similar to Descartes’ notion of wonder. He labels it ‘astonishment’ (a word that Descartes uses as well) and describes it as ‘that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’.47 Burke’s heavy emphasis on the presence of the latter feeling of ‘the horror’ causes us to wonder whether or not the impact that Rubens’ painting had on Huygens is comparable to the sort of experiences that are labelled sublime in the Philosophical Enquiry. Let me rephrase the question: is it possible to see Huygens’ visual experience as an intermediate step in the gradual development from the sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century aesthetics of wonder to late seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century aesthetics of the sublime? In Burke’s view - much as in that of other theoreticians of the sublime who followed him, most notably Moses Mendelssohn and Kant - the sublime as an aesthetic concept must be categorically distinguished from the beautiful. The beautiful is fitting, in every respect; it is pleasant and it fully fulfills our expectations. It does not tell us something new. On the contrary, it simply confirms what we already know. The sublime is wholly different: it strikes us with horror and astonishment; it results in doubt, fear and alienation. In order to be able to answer fully the question as I rephrased it, we need to take into account the conceptual development of the idea of the sublime in the centuries before Burke appropriated it. Boileau, for one,

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the apologist of classicism with whose ideas I coupled Huygens before, was very much interested in the notion. Not only did he translate the text by the pseudo-Longinus that serves as the foundation of all theories of the sublime since it first appeared in the first century, he also wrote an extensive commentary on it.48 Neither of these texts seem to relate the sublime to the feelings of unease and discomfort that Burke and Kant associated with it, feelings that they primarily related to experiences of human insignificance in the face of the overwhelming phenomena of natural grandeur. To Burke and Kant, the sublime is first and foremost a property of nature, deserts, mountaintops, ravines and swirling rivers rather, it is an experience that results from the confrontation with these phenomena. For Boileau the sublime is a property of texts, a rhetorical phenomenon that has a significant impact on the person reading or listening to a text. It is not so much an experience of disorder, doubt or momentary self-loss. Quite to the contrary, from the very beginning the force of the sublime is uplifting: the spectator or audience is overwhelmed by something inside the text; ‘un je ne sais quoi’ as Boileau famously describes it, ‘qui fait qu’un ouvrage enleve, ravit, transporte’.49 As the conceptual history of the sublime is much too complex to be treated within the confines of a single chapter, I cannot but remain sketchy here. That being said, it would be wrong to consider Rubens and Huygens as forerunners of the eighteenth-century sublime or, for that matter, as simple representatives of the aesthetics with which Boileau associated the notion. The danger of the former demarche is especially obvious: it threatens to project the results of a later development onto the past and see similarities where differences prevail. Ironically, the earlymodern iconography of the figure of Medusa would seem to moderate this theoretical reservation considerably. Our fascination with the M e­ dusa is a fascination with the themes that begin to play an increasingly larger role in theories of the sublime over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a fascination with that which transcends our daily experience, with that which permanently escapes us, with that which we are better off to know only in the shape of a representation. As I said before, Rubens and Huygens would have been familiar with Vasari’s story about Leonardo’s Medusa and it is possible that they were also familiar with Caravaggio’s painting of the monster woman. Later, when the eighteenth-century sublime of Burke and Kant was fully developed, the image of Medusa continued to haunt the minds of artists and philosophers. In what follows I will limit myself to two examples of a long series that was recently documented in Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers’ Medusa Reader:50 the poem that Shelley wrote in 1819 ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’ (in reality, the

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painting dated from the beginning of the seventeenth century and was the work of an anonymous Flemish master) and the text in which Julia Kristeva relates the figure of Medusa to her theory of the ‘abject’, a theory that has different points of similarity with the Burkean and (especially) the Kantian sublime.51 My point is not simply that Huygens’ analysis of Rubens’ painting has been unjustly ignored by Garber and Vickers, even though it does deserve a place in their impressive catalogue. The question is, rather, which place. Should we see it as part of an iconographic tradition that already existed in the Greek and Roman ages and dealt with questions of beauty in terms of goodness and truth (causing the ugly either to be untrue or a seemingly ugly representation of a higher good)? Or should we take it as an early representative of a development in which these issues became dissociated and matters of beauty (much like the experiences that they provoked) were related to a domain that was relatively autonomous of issues of goodness and truth. In the first case, Huygens and Rubens could be said to belong to a tradition which not only contains Ovid’s Metamorphoses but writings by Dante (Canto 9 of the Divina Commedia) and Petrarch (the 197th of the Canzoniere) and in which the artistic incarnations of Medusa serve a primarily moral goal. Carel Van Mander’s allegorical reading of the Medusa story, to which I referred above, offers an unambiguous example of this tradition: here, the mythical monster is an emblem of the lower passions that link the human world to the animal world. In the second case, the figure of Medusa is related to a theory of art that does not revolve around the confirmation of general truths, but that problematises the social, political, religious and philosophical sensus communis. They key notion in this aesthetics is the idea of alienation, for which the Medusa can serve as an icon in more than one respect. It does so, in Garber and Vickers’ reader, in literary texts by Shelley, Goethe and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, but also in writings by a number of thinkers (Freud, Barthes and so on) who aligned their work with the idea of alienation, whether it be the alienation of man and women from their inner selves or from their social and cultural environment. It is not at all simple to decide once and for all to which tradition Huygens and Rubens belong. Huygens’ passage on Rubens’ painting from his autobiography does not allow that sort of reading. I have already pointed out the irreconcilable tensions within his text, and its ambiva­ lence only seems to increase once we confront it with Rubens’ painting. While to Van Mander the Medusa story was above all transparent, Rubens’ portrait leaves us with a number of unanswered questions, not the least of which being whether she is really dead and conquered after all. Maybe her sumptuous hair will one day spawn new monsters, according

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to the logic of multiplication that rules in the legend of the invincible seven-headed dragon to which Medusa can be easily allied.

The Sublime and the Abject As suggested earlier, some of the questions with which I confronted Huygens’ comments on Rubens’ painting are coloured by developments with which neither of them were familiar. To some extent, this is unavoidable. We cannot look at this painting exactly as Huygens did, nor can we read his text as he may have wanted us to. Our gaze is different. We even tend to think that it is much broader, due to the three centuries of critical theory that set us apart from him. This idea is both overconfident and presumptuous. After all, we could equally well ‘broad­ en’ our mind by invoking materials with which Huygens was probably much better acquainted than we are. I would like to take a quick look at a text that indirectly deals with the Medusa: the fourth chapter of the Poetics, in which Aristotle gives his famous definition of artistic mimesis. Man, Aristotle writes, has the natural habit - from the earliest stages of his cultural existence, that is - to produce images, or representations, as some translate mimemata. Moreover, we find pleasure in doing so. ‘An indication of the latter,’ he writes, ‘is what happens in our experience. There are things we find painful to look at themselves, but of which we view the most accurate reproductions with pleasure: for example, replicas of the most unprepossessing animals, or of cadavers.’52 Aristotle’s examples - hideous beasts and corpses - not only call to mind the painting by Rubens, but also the opening pages of Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de I’horreur (Powers o f Horror), in which she defines the abject. Like the sublime, the abject causes a rupture in the day-to-day patterns of thought that enable us to give meaning to our surroundings and that offer us a stable identity. Our mimetic (or semiotic, as Kristeva would say) nature allows us to define a position for ourselves in the world that separates our identity from that of others and from that of the phenomena surrounding us; it allows us to be a subject among objects and other subjects. Abjection is when that distinction falls away. The perfect example for Kristeva is when we are confronted with a dead body. The feeling of abjection is neither uplifting nor morally comforting. It does not result in the sublimated awareness of mortality that memento mori paintings are meant to stimulate, but in physical revulsion for what death actually is: it is inside us, even as we live, in the continuous process of decay and disappearance that our life involves. ‘[A]s in true theater, without makeup or masks,’ Kristeva writes, ‘refuse and corpse show me

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what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.’53 In the experience of the abject the possibility of displacement stops: that which we won’t allow ourselves to see forces itself into our reality. Is Huygens experiencing abjection, then? Obviously not, but the association does tell us something we should not overlook. In his definition of mimesis in the fourth chapter of Poetics, Aristotle puts a heavy emphasis on the distinction between the artist’s representation of the thing and the thing itself. The distinction is not only a matter of aesthetics to him, at least not according to the meaning that we have attributed to the term since the eighteenth century. The pleasure that we derive from an image (and from the confrontation between the image and that which it represents) is to Aristotle intellectual and/or cognitive. The image teaches us something as images typically do, in the sense that the thing that is represented would not have given us the same pleasure. Such a view threatens to moralise art and overlook what art is ‘really’ about; this reproach has been voiced against classicist theories of art more than once. But the critique only tells half the story. In Aristotle’s view, art reaches its goal precisely because it gives a shape to its objects in a specific, artistic way. It is in giving shape that art is mimetic and gives pleasure. Huygens seems to allude to this idea at the end of his passage on Rubens: ‘that which is truly ugly will never please, no matter how it is portrayed.’ Huygens’ point is not so much that what is ugly should be represented in an ugly (and hence realistic) way but that it only becomes interesting artistically if it has the effect that it needs to have according to classicist theories: pleasure and knowledge, the good and the beautiful. In this respect, the important phrase in Huygens’ text is his remark that the painting is ‘composed with the most unspeakable powers of design’. That is where the difference from Kristeva’s notion of the abject seems to lie. What makes the abject abject (and - mutatis mutandis - the sublime sublime) is precisely the ‘formlessness’ of the object that causes the feeling of abjection in us - ‘l’informe’, as it is called in Bataille, one of Kristeva’s immediate sources of inspiration.54 In the absence of form lies the secret of the experience: just as in the experience of the sublime our rational powers seek an image of the object that confronts us, but the attempt is unsuccessful. This failure gives us the sinking feeling that the experience of the sublime finally manages to overcome. In Kristeva’s fascination for the myth of Medusa the productivity of the ‘informe’ is obvious: the head of the monstrous woman, she argues in ‘Qui est Meduse?’ (‘Who is M edusa?’), is ‘viscose’, ‘slimy, swollen and full of puss’.55 And because it lacks a concrete shape - like a jellyfish, ‘une meduse’ in French - it does not cease to provoke and frustrate our imagination.

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Epilogue: the Blood that gives us Life In conclusion, let us have a final look at Shelley’s 1819 poem on the Medusa painting that he saw in the Uffizi in Florence which he believed to be by Leonardo (‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’). In the opening chapter of The Romantic Agony, Mario Praz considers the poem as ‘a manifesto of the conception of Beauty peculiar to the Romantics’,56 because in his text Shelley captures the ambiguity of this aesthetic experience like no other before him. ‘In [the poem’s] lines’, Praz writes, pleasure and pain are combined in one single impression. The very objects which should induce a shudder - the livid face of the severed head, the squirming mass of vipers, the rigidity of death, the sinister light, the repulsive animals, the lizard, the bat - all these give rise to a new sense of beauty, a beauty imperilled and contaminated, a new thrill.57

If we confront Praz’ description of the poem with the starting point of our story, the novelty of this experience must surely be qualified. Praz’s words read like a description of Rubens’ painting and, indeed, Shelley wrote the poem after having seen a similar work, made by a Flemish master some ten years after Rubens’ M edusa.58 While this does not necessarily mean that he experienced this painting as Huygens did when he looked upon the painting by Rubens, his words do evoke the very questions that we derived from the latter’s description of Rubens’ Head o f Medusa. How can fear and pleasure coexist in one and the same experience? How is it possible that the portrait of a dead woman makes such a vivid impres­ sion? How can we allow ourselves to be charmed by the horrible look in this woman’s eyes? How is it possible that this charm renders us mute and petrified at the same time? And how does this muteness and the petrifica­ tion from which it results make us aware of the fact that while there is death in life the reverse is true as well? Shelley’s poem has come down to us in a rather fragmentary state, but it is worthwhile citing what we have in full: It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death.

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The G aze of Medusa and the Practice of the Historian Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone; Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; ’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, As [—] grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions shew Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. ’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [—] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there A woman’s countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

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Florence, 1819

In view of my earlier reflections on Huygens and Rubens, it is the second stanza that strikes home. ‘[I]t is less the horror than the grace which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone’: whoever dares to look this Medusa in the eyes will inevitably undergo the dire fate of which the original exegetes of the Greek myth warned us. We will be turned into stone and eternally silenced if we dare to confront ‘the tempestuous loveliness of terror’ of which Medusa is the perfect embodiment. And yet Shelley did look her in the eyes and he recognised that the Medusa does not simply want to convey the series of nouns that seem central to his verse: ‘horror’,

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‘shadow’, ‘anguish’, ‘death’, ‘darkness’ and ‘pain’. They are there, ob­ viously, but they are complemented by their opposites: ‘beauty’, ‘love­ liness’, ‘the melodious hue’ and ‘grace’. More so than with Huygens, Shelley’s emphasis is on the insuperable coexistence of this series of antonyms. Whereas Huygens could still be seen to reduce one to the other - as a consequence of which the spectator’s initial horror was neutralised into a transcendent feeling of beauty and grace - Shelley leaves no room for such a move. To him, the one (horror) is the other (beauty); it resides within it, and it is the very foundation upon which it rests. In a very productive analysis of Shelley’s text, Jerome McGann pointed out the existence of a lesser-known stanza that was omitted from earlier editions of the poem.59 Much like the more famous ‘Ode to the West Wind’, McGann believes that the stanza gives voice to the poet’s concern with the infinite creativity of humankind and nature: It is a woman’s countenance divine With everlasting beauty breathing there Which from a stormy mountain’s peak, supine Gazes into the [—] night’s trembling air. It is a trunkless head, but there is life in death, The blood is frozen - but unconquered Nature Seems struggling to the last - without a breath The fragment of an uncreated creature.

The woman’s head is no longer attached to its trunk, Shelley writes, but still there is life in death. In his analysis of the stanza, McGann points out an obscurer detail surrounding the Medusa myth, which is important to our story. After her death, the divine physician Aesculapius wanted to collect her blood. He very soon found out that she had two separate blood-systems: the right one produced blood that had the capacity to kill people, whereas the left system produced blood with which the dead could be revived.60 There is no telling whether Huygens and Shelley were aware of this mythological detail, but it is clear that they were both sensible to the larger implications of the anecdote. Huygens took it be a good thing that his friend from Amsterdam put a curtain over Rubens’ painting, but this did not stop him from looking at the Medusa repeatedly and studying the lines of her face. Shelley would have appreciated the story about the curtain simply because it accentuates rather than di­ minishes the painting’s power. Shelley considered it to be his task as a writer to bear witness to this power, if only because the Medusa made his testimony possible: it gave him the necessary energy. To be sure, whoever looked her in the eyes could not but remain silent for some time. But he who drank her blood could give the dead a voice.

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Notes 1. Plato, Phaedrus, with an English translation by Harold North Fowler (Loeb Classics) (London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, I960), pp. 565-7 (275d-e). 2. ‘Fundamentally, the good painter has two things to depict: the man and his state of mind. The first is easy, the second difficult, because it has to be done though the gestures and the movements of the parts of the body.’ Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Art and the Artist, ed. Andre Chastel (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), p. 140. 3. J. A. Worp (ed.), De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens (1608-1687), 6 vols (’s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1911-17). 4. Constantijn Huygens, De nieuwe zee-straet van ’s Gravenhage op Schevening, ed. L. Simoens (Antwerpen: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1952), pp. 12-13, lines 273-6; my translation here and elsewhere. 5. Huygens, De nieuwe zee-straet van ’s Gravenhage op Schevening, p. 11, lines 225-42. 6. In the words of Michel de Certeau: ‘Dans l’experience historique, quelque chose de fascinant et aussi d’inquietant arrive. Des hommes du passe; sortent de leur nuit, sans qu’il soit vraiment possible de les designer. [. . .] Ces hommes opaques se cachent au fur et a mesure que je les cherche. [. . .] Je ‘‘fais de l’histoire’’ en ce sens que non seulement je produis des textes historiographiques, mais j’accede par mon travail a la conscience que quelque chose s’est passee, aujourd’hui mort, inaccessible comme vivant.’ Michel de Certeau, ‘Histoire et structure’, in Michel de Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 191-2. 7. The essays are ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ (1967) and ‘L ’effet de reel’ (1968). They can be found in Roland Barthes, Huuvres completes, vol. 2, (Paris: Seuil, 2002), pp. 1250-62 and vol. 3, pp. 25-32 respectively. English translations by Richard Howard are included in Roland Barthes, The Rustle o f Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 127-40 and 141-8. 8. Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’, in The Rustle o f Language, pp. 139-40. 9. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle o f Language, p. 146. 10. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle o f Language, p. 146. 11. For an interesting analysis of Huizinga’s concept see Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, De Vreugden van Houssaye. Apologie van de historische interesse (Amsterdam: De Wereldbibliotheek, 1992), pp. 17ff. Huizinga refers to the concept twice in his work: in the essay ‘Het historisch museum’ (The museum of history) (1920), in Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken, vol. 2 (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1948), p. 566, and in the longer, pro­ grammatic text on ‘De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis’ (The task of cultural history) in Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken, vol. 7 (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1950), pp. 71-2. In the first of these texts, Huizinga makes the association between the historical sensation and the ‘historical detail[s]’ by which it is caused. 12. Huizinga, ‘De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis’, pp. 71-2, my translation, here and elsewhere.

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13. Huizinga, ‘De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis’, p. 72. 14. Huizinga, ‘De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis’, p. 72. 15. Frank Ankersmit, De historische ervaring (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1993), p. 49. 16. It is ‘a sensation that goes as deeply as the purest artistic pleasure’. Huizinga, ‘Het historisch museum’, p. 566; also quoted in Tollebeek and Verschaffel, De Vreugden van Houssaye, p. 18. 17. Huizinga, ‘Het historisch museum’, p. 566. 18. In the third chapter (‘Huizinga on historical experience’) of his forthcoming book Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); my italics. 19. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, ch. 3, forthcoming. 20. Tollebeek and Verschaffel, De Vreugden van Houssaye, p. 25. 21. A. H. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens door hemzelf beschreven (Rotterdam and Antwerpen: Ad. Donker, 1971), p. 74. Huygens wrote a second autobiography towards the end of his life. On the contacts and the correspondence between Rubens and Huygens see Lieven Rens, ‘Rubens en de literatuur van zijn tijd’, Dietsche Warande en Belfort, 122, 1977, pp. 328-53, esp. pp. 341-3. 22. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, p. 73, my translation here and elsewhere. 23. M ax Rooses, L ’&uvre de P. P. Rubens: Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins (Antwerp: Jos. Maes, 1886-892), 5 vols. ‘L’expression de la tete de Meduse est d’un dramatique saisissant, d’une facture energetique’, Rooses writes in vol. 3, p. 116. The same metaphor returns in the description given in vol. 5, p. 338: ‘L ’effet de la lumiere qui frappe la face est saisissant.’ One century later, Rubens’ painting still seems to have the same gripping effect: ‘beangstigend unmittelbar in Augenhohe des Betrachters dargestellt’ it is referred to in the catalogue of an exhibition on mannerist art in which Rubens’ painting was shown. Werner Hoffmann, Zauber der Medusa. Europaische Manierismen (Vienna: Locker Verlag, 1987), p. 152. See also Simon Schama, De ogen van Rembrandt (Amsterdam/Antwerp, 1999), pp. 419-20. 24. Kan (ed.), De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, pp. 74-5. 25. Rene Bray, La formation de la doctrine classique en Prance (Paris: Nizet, 1961) is still one of the best surveys of this aesthetics. See also Annie Becq, Genese de l’esthetique frangaise moderne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994). 26. ‘ [P]our le xviie sieecle le beau seul est l’objet de l’art.’ Bray, La formation de la doctrine classique, p. 156. 27. A. Adam et F. Escal (eds),